The Payoff of the Unexpected

California universities are preparing to spend nearly $1 billion on campuses dedicated to biotechnology research that, they hope, will help develop drugs, agricultural chemicals and other profitable products.

The state’s future scientific leaders could do no better than to seek inspiration from the three veteran California scientists who won Nobel prizes last week in physics, chemistry and medicine. Working with out-of-state colleagues, all three produced highly marketable inventions, but not by crafting narrow solutions to immediate problems. On the contrary, seeking to understand nature’s most complex “quantum” phenomena, they ranged widely. They questioned scientific dogma and ignored the walls that isolate academic disciplines from one another.

For instance: biologists thought that cells change only when a molecule fits snugly into cell receptors, like a plug in an electrical socket. But UCLA’s Louis Ignarro won the Nobel Prize in medicine for showing that cells also change when penetrated by an evanescent gas. And although chemists usually examine solids and liquids with beakers and test tubes, UC Santa Barbara’s Walter Kohn won the chemistry prize for describing chemicals from the perspective of an electron moving through them. Physics had held that particles gain energy in neat, whole-numbered units; the physics prize was awarded to Stanford’s Robert B. Laughlin for his determination that they gain power instead in complex, less mathematically convenient fractions.

Clearly, nature rejects neat and simplistic rules, and a lesson of these Nobel prizes is that if scientists are ever to fully understand nature, they too must accept the unexpected.