Research Grants Us All Favors

The record $78 million in research grants and contracts brought home by UC Irvine scientists in the last year is a hefty sum. With it, researchers are studying everything from quarks and gluons to the behavior of aged rats to carbon compounds distributed in the troposphere.

Some might question the value of such esoteric inquiries in the face of myriad budget crises threatening Orange County schools and programs for the indigent, sick and homeless. UCI physics professor emeritus Frederick Reines doesn’t even wait to be asked.

“What’s in it for us? I submit that basic research is the linchpin on which all of modern society is built,” said the 72-year-old professor, whose co-discovery of neutrinos in the 1950s is frequently mentioned by fellow scientists as deserving of a Nobel prize.

“Every time we make use of technology, where did it come from? It came from fundamental research,” Reines said.

And for vote-counting politicians who would waffle on the need for megabucks research on super colliders or peering into distant galaxies, he recalls Michael Faraday’s remark to a government minister who asked the practical use of the British scientist’s latest discovery: “Oh that? Why, someday you may tax it.”

Spending dollars at home instead of on pie-in-the-sky research is a perennial argument that gains steam in tough times.

Friends of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have produced public service announcements to counter such notions. The television spots remind the public that the nation’s multibillion-dollar space program has led to beneficial offshoots such as miniature computers, heat-resistant materials, even the MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat) being uh, enjoyed, by the U.S. soldiers now hunkered in the Saudi Arabian dunes.

For Paul Sypherd, UCI’s vice chancellor for research, basic research is a “pool of knowledge” about the human species and the universe around it. And it is from that pool that information is taken and developed into technologies that have transformed society.

“Take Newton’s laws of thermodynamics, also called Newton’s law of gravity,” Sypherd said. “These are very basic physical observations about how the universe works and the relationships between bodies in that universe.

“There was no application of these thoughts in Newton’s time; it was basic research,” he said. “But just imagine trying to put together the American space program without Newton’s law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction--which is the basis of jet propulsion and rocketry.”

The most important biological discovery of the century has been cracking the mystery of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, the genetic code within living things.

“Virtually all of modern biology is founded on that discovery,” Sypherd said. Everything from understanding how the (AIDS) virus produces AIDS to the development of better drugs, the treatment of diabetes, even understanding Alzheimer’s disease.”

All of it sprang from the most fundamental research by British biophysicist Francis H.C. Crick and American biologist James Watson at Cambridge University’s Strangeways Research Laboratory in the early 1950s.

“These people were doing it because it was their job as natural scientists,” Sypherd said.

Another example is the laser, for which Albert Einstein wrote the first equation early this century. It would be decades before practical uses emerged.

“You can hardly turn two degrees today without seeing lasers and their applications,” Reines said. “Now, it’s a several-billion-dollar-a-year industry.”

Basic research, as far as Reines is concerned, is “one of the best investments society can make. . . .”

“It gives us choices which are beyond our wildest expectations. It does not necessarily make problems simpler. But it gives one a range of possibilities. . . . It’s the sure way to expand the horizon of the country and the world. It’s what’s for tomorrow.”

Beyond it all, there is a deep drive within human beings when they look up at the stars to want to understand their universe, the physicist said.

“That’s what makes life worth living.”