Never mind the basics

These days science has a cancer. It is political, but not necessarily lethal – just resulting in some needless overspending. Buzz-words/newspeak drives the funding today, and thus forces the research in the same direction (nano-anything, multi-platform-anything, global-warming, CO2, food safety etc.) It is a bit like helping the third world countries: catastrophe = money = satisfied voters = base of problems remain unchanged.

At a recent lecture on pathology a researcher put this in crystal clear perspective in an example of salmon farming. We are intensely investigating vaccines for fish, but nobody has looked at even grossly describing the intestine. How absurd is that? This kind of research is probably sound by method, but I would claim it also contain a fair amount of guessing and assumptions. Are we falling over our own legs and getting ahead of ourselves because we have to be cutting-edge to get funding? I know in my own field the general feeling these days are that it is not real science if it is not molecular biology (where I started).

If we dared looking backwards a little we would discover that many of our clever inventions are copying older knowledge as David Edgerton described in his book The Shock of the Old.

Here is an example. I am the lucky to be in possession of a replica of one of the seven surviving imperial seals from the Ming dynasty. This bronze mirror looks like the common mirrors of this age, but was so intelligently crafted that the atomic structure was altered in the bronze at the cooling process, that it would reflect an detailed image of the blank mirror onto a wall when exposed to strong light. It was not until last century a smith discovered the key to replicate this amazing craft. Still I have seen no applications of this amazing knowledge, though I could imagine quite a few.

The mirror is a nice metaphor (for me) of science today. We are studying the applications of atomic structures, but the possibilities of metal working elude us on more basic levels.