A Week for ‘Impractical’ Science
The 1999 Nobel prizes for medicine and chemistry recognize two researchers who have greatly enhanced scientists’ ability to see and manipulate down to the level of the atom.
On Monday, the Swedish Academy awarded the medicine prize to Guenter Blobel of New York City’s Rockefeller University for discovering how yeast, plant and animal cells send molecules to “the right address” by reading a kind of ZIP code in a stretch of protein. On Tuesday the academy honored Caltech’s Ahmed H. Zewail for inventing a camera-like device that’s so fast it can record the movement of individual atoms on a scale of “femto- seconds,” which is to a second as a second is to 32 million years.
Both developments are already speeding the pace of biotechnology, a burgeoning field in which four Southern California universities--USC, UCLA, Cal State Northridge and the Claremont Colleges--have recently invested several hundred million dollars.
Blobel and Zewail downplayed the huge practical benefits of their research. As the Rockefeller University professor told some young scientists on Monday, his research often went in directions that made it difficult to get funding. Similarly, Zewail, when asked about the practical applications of his work, quipped “there aren’t any.” He conducts his research not to resolve everyday problems but to understand nature, the Caltech scientist explained. “The real excitement of science,” Zewail said, lies “in the fundamental discovery itself, the ability to observe and study the behavior of atoms.”
There is a lesson here for Southern California universities. Their new biotechnology campuses could well cash in on the biotechnology boom, but only if they protect their scientists from its economic pressures.
