tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/scientific-discovery-10843/articlesScientific discovery – The Conversation2022-01-17T17:47:24Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1742762022-01-17T17:47:24Z2022-01-17T17:47:24Z3 ways for businesses to fuel innovation and drive performance<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440351/original/file-20220111-13-vvuw28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2958%2C1999&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Successfully innovating requires business executives to create an innovation-focused company culture, to engage strategically beneficial innovation practices and to avoid those that only work for certain industries.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the past two years, businesses have experienced <a href="https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2021/10/12/world-economic-outlook-october-2021">unprecedented operational disruptions and market uncertainties</a> due to the COVID-19 pandemic.</p>
<p>Accordingly, many business executives are <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ulrikjuulchristensen/2021/12/03/greater-competitiveness-tops-the-goals-for-2022-how-thinking-can-help/?sh=538044d85424">prioritizing innovation to enhance competitiveness and performance in 2022</a>. This is easier said than done, as the list of supposedly essential innovative practices is extensive and growing. </p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apmrv.2021.06.005">recent research</a> shows that innovative companies, compared to their non-innovative counterparts, engage in many highly touted best practices. While these practices can enhance competitiveness, some are more important than others, and <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/06/you-need-an-innovation-strategy">implementing them in the absence of a strategy is highly problematic</a>. </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.uregina.ca/business/faculty-staff/faculty/wilson-grant.html">marketing and innovation management researcher</a>, I found these complexities led me to two research questions. First, what kind of organizational culture best supports implementing these innovative practices? And second, which of these practices universally enhance firm performance? </p>
<p><a href="https://www.edwards.usask.ca/faculty/C.%20Brooke%20Dobni/index.aspx">C. Brooke Dobni</a> and I investigated these issues in our forthcoming article in <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/urtm20/current"><em>Research-Technology Management</em></a>, an <a href="https://abdc.edu.au/research/abdc-journal-quality-list/">innovation management journal</a>. </p>
<h2>Global innovation study</h2>
<p>In co-operation with national conference boards in the <a href="https://www.conference-board.org/us/">United States</a>, <a href="https://www.conference-board.org/eu/">Europe</a> <a href="https://www.conference-board.org/asia/">and Asia</a> (non-profit organizations that support research aimed at helping leaders address societal challenges), we collected data from 437 companies, across 11 industries, in 27 countries.</p>
<p>Our findings showed that an innovation-focused culture was required to successfully implement crowd-sourcing, <a href="https://cloudcoach.com/blog/the-stage-gate-process-a-project-management-guide/">stage-gate systems</a>, design thinking, open innovation, big data analytics, innovation management software, scientific discovery and prototyping. However, only some of the these practices enhanced company performance. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-businesses-can-determine-if-design-thinking-is-right-for-them-110477">How businesses can determine if design thinking is right for them</a>
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<p>Companies with strong innovation cultures have <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/JBS-11-2019-0209">leaders that support innovating, dedicate resources to experimentation, pursue knowledge generation and dissemination and have processes to test and launch ideas</a>. High innovators are able to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2009.12.002">execute strategy, create competitive advantages and achieve performance objectives</a>. </p>
<p>We found that highly innovative people were better at implementing all of the innovation practices. We also found that across industries, companies with strong innovation cultures outperformed their counterparts without a similar culture. Given its performance benefits, how does one create an innovation-focused culture? </p>
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<img alt="A woman stands at the head of a table in a meeting room with white walls and a window behind her talking to her team." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440327/original/file-20220111-20924-12dmbeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440327/original/file-20220111-20924-12dmbeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440327/original/file-20220111-20924-12dmbeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440327/original/file-20220111-20924-12dmbeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440327/original/file-20220111-20924-12dmbeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440327/original/file-20220111-20924-12dmbeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440327/original/file-20220111-20924-12dmbeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Companies with strong innovation cultures do better than competitors that don’t foster innovation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Piqsels)</span></span>
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<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.24840/2183-0606_003.001_0009">Previous insight from Fortune 1000 companies</a> suggests that executives need to set innovation goals, encourage all employees to innovate in their roles, prioritize individual and organizational learning, remove negative consequences related to failed experimentation and support activities with incentives.</p>
<p>Based on the results of our study, we argue that an innovation-focused culture is the necessary first step. Only after companies have created a supporting environment can they attempt to implement any innovative practices.</p>
<h2>Performance-enhancing innovation</h2>
<p>Companies in all industries experienced the performance-enhancing benefits from crowd-sourcing, open innovation, innovation management software, scientific discovery and prototyping:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Crowd-sourcing is the process of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/JBS-11-2019-0209">taking internal tasks and outsourcing them</a>. Naturally, it creates new ideas and perspectives that can create value for companies.</p></li>
<li><p>Open innovation is <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/06/why-now-is-the-time-for-open-innovation">the process of sharing innovations freely among players in the value chain</a>, also allowing more value-creating opportunities for companies. </p></li>
<li><p>Innovation management software is designed to measure innovation progress. Because “<a href="https://hbr.org/2010/10/what-cant-be-measured">what gets measured, gets managed</a>,” innovation progress that is effectively measured generates results. </p></li>
<li><p>Scientific discovery — <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08956308.2004.11671607">people collaborating across space and time to deepen knowledge</a> — has been recognized as <a href="https://doi.org/10.5437/08956308X5801236">a trait of top-performing companies</a>. </p></li>
<li><p>Prototyping, <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/prototype">creating early and test versions of products</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1243/PIME_PROC_1989_203_056_02">reduces risk and increases a product’s market performance</a>.</p></li>
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<p>We recommend companies explore implementing these innovative practices since they have universal performance benefits. But it’s important to reiterate that engagement in such practices needs to be guided by the organization’s strategy, and an innovation-focused culture is the necessary first step.</p>
<h2>Less successful innovative practices</h2>
<p>Although there’s a lot of hype about stage-gate systems, design thinking and big data analytics, our research shows that only companies in specific industries benefit from these practices.</p>
<p>Stage-gate systems are a <a href="https://www.stage-gate.com/discovery-to-launch-process/">linear process involving a series of sequential steps aimed at launching new products</a>. We argue that the innovation process is anything but linear, and such a rigid process is not conducive for most industries. </p>
<p>Our data confirms that stage-gate systems are most effective in manufacturing, IT and health-care settings but not in any others. </p>
<p>Design thinking, an <a href="https://hbr.org/2008/06/design-thinking">approach that uses a designer’s sensibility and methods to match consumer needs with what is technologically feasible</a>, is nebulous and even vague among those who practise it. </p>
<p>We argue that design thinking’s ambiguity is the reason why only companies in the arts and entertainment, retail and marketing industries experienced its benefits. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-designers-have-arrived-in-corporate-boardrooms-106437">Why designers have arrived in corporate boardrooms</a>
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<p>Surprisingly, big data analytics — collection, interpretation, and decision-making based on large datasets — only benefited companies in some industries. Upon closer examination, we found that only companies in industries that have conventionally managed and interpreted large amounts of data (like finance, health care and IT) realized such value. We think this speaks more to some companies’ inability to manage big data as opposed to its value. </p>
<h2>Managerial tips</h2>
<p>We offer three ways managers can fuel and foster innovation based on our research:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>All executives should seek to create an innovation-focused culture. </p></li>
<li><p>After an innovation culture is established, companies should engage strategically in some of the universally beneficial practices. </p></li>
<li><p>Some practices should be avoided all together, as their benefits are limited to specific industries.</p></li>
</ol><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/174276/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Grant Alexander Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Innovative companies engage in many highly touted best practices. While they can enhance competitiveness, some are more important than others and need a strategy for effective implementation.Grant Alexander Wilson, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Business Administration, University of ReginaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1491642020-12-10T17:20:15Z2020-12-10T17:20:15ZMeet the Canadian writers and researchers who deserve to win the Nobel Prize<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374232/original/file-20201210-19-1pq1r1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=39%2C15%2C5248%2C3504&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Margaret Atwood gives a talk at a Walrus magazine event in Toronto on June 14, 2016. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year, Nobel Prizes continued to celebrate women’s achievements: the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02765-9">Nobel Prize in chemistry</a> <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2020/summary">was awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna</a> for developing a tool for genomic editing called CRISPR-Cas9.</p>
<p>This builds on the 2018 chemistry prize which went to <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2018/arnold/facts/">Frances Arnold</a> for her application of genetic engineering to create new proteins to benefit humanity. And in physics, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/ghez/facts/">Andrea Ghez</a> received the award for the discovery of a black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. Canada’s own <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2018/summary/">Donna Strickland</a> received the Nobel in 2018.</p>
<p>With the Nobel in literature going to Canada’s <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2013/munro/facts/">Alice Munro</a> in 2013 and this year’s award to American <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/summary/">Louise Gluck</a>, Canadians eagerly await even further recognition for <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/booker-prize/news/margaret-atwood-and-bernardine-evaristo-winners-2019-booker-prize-announced">Margaret Atwood</a>, a double winner of the Booker prize. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372026/original/file-20201130-23-1iuvkxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The author Alice Munro reads from her book while sitting next to a large replica of the $5 coin celebrating her achievements." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372026/original/file-20201130-23-1iuvkxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372026/original/file-20201130-23-1iuvkxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372026/original/file-20201130-23-1iuvkxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372026/original/file-20201130-23-1iuvkxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372026/original/file-20201130-23-1iuvkxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372026/original/file-20201130-23-1iuvkxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372026/original/file-20201130-23-1iuvkxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author Alice Munro reads from her book ‘The View From Castle Rock’ at a ceremony held by the Royal Canadian Mint to celebrate her win at the Great Victoria Public Library in Victoria, B.C., on March 24, 2014.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito)</span></span>
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<p>Several women in Canada have made <a href="https://www.healthing.ca/science/o-canada-a-look-at-canadian-health-innovation">Nobel-worthy discoveries in the area of life sciences</a>. None may be more deserving than McGill University’s Brenda Milner for her discoveries on long-term memory. </p>
<p>It is not only women in Canada whose contributions should be recognized with more Nobel Prizes, there is a strong case for men as well. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-memory-pill-cognitive-neurosciences-contributions-to-the-study-of-memory-109707">A memory pill? Cognitive neuroscience's contributions to the study of memory</a>
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<h2>Canadian pride</h2>
<p>This year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to the University of Alberta’s <a href="https://www.ualberta.ca/michael-houghton-nobel-prize-2020.html">Michael Houghton</a> for his discovery of hepatitis C. In 2015, the Nobel Prize in physics went to Arthur McDonald at Queen’s University, for his <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2015/mcdonald/facts/">discovery that neutrinos have mass</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-an-alberta-researchers-discovery-of-hepatitis-c-led-to-the-nobel-prize-and-saved-lives-147553">How an Alberta researcher’s discovery of hepatitis C led to the Nobel Prize and saved lives</a>
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<p>Canada aspires to even further recognition for the discovery of bacterial adaptive immunity by <a href="https://www.moineau.bcm.ulaval.ca/index.php?id=2&L=3">Sylvain Moineau</a> at Laval University that was the foundation for this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry. </p>
<p>Together with <a href="https://cals.ncsu.edu/food-bioprocessing-and-nutrition-sciences/people/rbarran/">Rodolphe Barrangou</a> at North Carolina State University and <a href="https://www.dupontnutritionandbiosciences.com/news/dupont-scientist-philippe-horvath-receives-franklin-institute-science-prize-2018-bower-award-for-groundbreaking-research-on-crispr-cas.html">Philippe Horvath</a> at Dupont Nutrition and Health in France, they demonstrated that CRISPR-Cas9 is the adaptive immune system of bacteria. </p>
<p><a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1042/EBC20160017">Adaptive immunity</a> has been long understood in vertebrates as the acquisition of memory of past infections from a pathogen. Any subsequent infection leads to destruction of the pathogen. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-cant-canada-win-another-nobel-prize-in-medicine-87910">Why can't Canada win another Nobel Prize in medicine?</a>
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<p>Barrangou, Horvath and Moineau’s interest was in yogurt, and specifically why <a href="https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2859-10-S1-S20">bacteria used to make yogurt died from viral infections</a>. Moineau is an expert on bacterial viruses known as bacteriophages. Barrangou and Horvath are food scientists. Together, they discovered that bacteria could resist viral infections by an adaptive immune system that had <a href="http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1138140">a memory of past bacteriophage infections</a> and a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09523">mechanism to destroy any subsequent infections</a>. These discoveries extended the concept of adaptive immunity from vertebrates to bacteria.</p>
<p>They discovered the memory of past viral infections in bacteria is CRISPR. They also discovered that any subsequent infection would be destroyed by the bacterial enzyme Cas9. It is <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3659">these discoveries</a> that enabled Charpentier and Douda to create the tool kit of CRISPR-Cas9 to edit genes in any organism. </p>
<p>By 2010, more than 10 Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine had been given for <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/uncategorized/nobel-prizes-and-the-immune-system/">discoveries of immune systems</a> with <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2011/summary/">three more in 2011</a>. Recognizing Barrangou, Horvath and Moineau with a Nobel Prize for their demonstration of adaptive immunity in bacteria is more than a hope.</p>
<p><em>John Bergeron gratefully acknowledges Kathleen Dickson as co-author.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149164/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Bergeron does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Canada has produced Nobel Prize winners in the arts and sciences. With several recent awards, Canadian talent still has the potential for future achievements.John Bergeron, Emeritus Robert Reford Professor and Professor of Medicine, McGill UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1383552020-05-12T15:03:57Z2020-05-12T15:03:57ZLockdowns and research: what we lost and what we stand to gain<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334049/original/file-20200511-49569-zzmlmf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">GettyImages</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The COVID-19 pandemic – and the resulting lockdowns – have had a major impact on research at institutions across the world, and universities in particular.</p>
<p>Research is one of the pillars of academia. Important discoveries are made, careers are built and the opportunities to train students are virtually unlimited. Research is a way of life for many, their findings being fundamental to progress in all scientific fields which supports a vast range of industries and communities.</p>
<p>One of the consequences of lockdowns brought on by the pandemic is that much research activity has been halted. Researchers have been forced to abandon ongoing projects that, for example, require hands-on laboratory work. This could mean terminating or delaying projects, many of which may have been running for some time. The long term cell culture experiments in which bone formation is studied and the assessment of a particular diet in mice prone to obesity, are just two examples.</p>
<p>Particularly difficult is the termination of animal experiments and the maintenance of animal colonies until a return to work is authorised. Rodents are often used to assess the potential anti-tumour activity of a novel therapeutic agent and likewise, novel anti-retrovirals require extensive preclinical testing before they can be assessed in clinical trials. These and other experiments require time and continuous assessment to determine outcomes. </p>
<p>Experimental programmes like this highlight what may happen in the medical research field, in which solutions to urgent challenges around human health and disease are being sought.</p>
<p>Equally problematic are interruptions in research programmes where data can only be gathered at the time of a particular event. These include field programmes based on seasonal changes, where a year may be lost in having missed one season. </p>
<p>For example, some <a href="https://www.sanap.ac.za/">South African National Antarctic Programme</a> projects have lost this year’s research data as the Agulhas research vessel has been unable to transport researchers and support marine research. Some of that research would have generated key data points in long term (multi-year) projects, and decades-long projects on global climate change, conservation, and environmental impact. </p>
<p>The same is true of numerous agriculture and plant production projects, with substantial impact on food production industries and future food security.</p>
<p>Researchers who use computational techniques to analyse data that is already in existence, such as bioinformatic analysis of genomic data, are able to continue working. But that data had to be produced initially, in laboratories or research stations. And there is always a need to generate new data, as we seek to validate answers and generate new research questions.</p>
<p>To restart these experimental programmes and begin generating new data will take time, considerable expense, and a coordinated effort for researchers, students, suppliers and funders.</p>
<h2>Knock-on effects</h2>
<p>The stoppages and delays will also affect students whose degrees require research projects to be completed in short time periods. A delay of several months, or perhaps a year, could mean the loss of a year of study, or possibly not completing the degree at all, putting future careers in jeopardy.</p>
<p>Research funders have specific requirements that need to be met to comply with timelines and objectives. This is often a requirement for continued funding. With delays of months or even years, deadlines will not be met and objectives not achieved. Funding agencies generally seem willing to take this into account. But investigator and research assistant salary cuts may be necessary to fund extensions in order to see projects through to completion.</p>
<p>There has been a rapid redirection of resources towards COVID-19-related research, quite understandably. In the long term, this resource reallocation is likely to result in budget cuts in all research areas.</p>
<p>Taking all this into account, we are possibly looking at a ten year legacy of a one year crisis.</p>
<h2>Opportunities</h2>
<p>The pandemic has stimulated a storm of questions as the world seeks to understand COVID-19 and its causative agent, the SARS-CoV-2 virus. There has been an unprecedented move towards stronger cooperation and collaboration between scientists across the world such, as for example, the <a href="https://www.covid19hg.org/">COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative</a>. The drive to collect, analyse and publish data is fierce, as is the need to fast-track clinical trials and vaccine development.</p>
<p>This accentuated trend towards cooperation is not limited to understanding COVID-19. A spirit of compassion and collective gain pervades many research initiatives, often through multi- or trans-disciplinary collaborations.</p>
<p>There has been an <a href="https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/05/07/scientific-research-on-the-coronavirus-is-being-released-in-a-torrent">explosion in the quantity of research</a> being conducted on this topic. Close to 10,000 scientific articles have been published on COVID-19 in three months.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-how-coronavirus-is-changing-science-137641">What you need to know about how coronavirus is changing science</a>
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<p>Several important changes in the way research is done and reported have occurred. Approvals from ethics committees and other regulatory authorities are being expedited. Now, it’s not necessary to wait for extensive periods – as has been the case before. The time for articles to be accepted and published in journals has been reduced significantly.</p>
<p>This, of course, has to be seen against the backdrop of needing to maintain research standards to ensure that quality is not compromised. The time-honoured system of <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6490/476">peer review</a> is still very important.</p>
<h2>Opening up</h2>
<p>Any unnecessary delay in getting going again needs to be avoided. Milestones need to be met, students need to graduate, and the pipeline leading to the development of new products and services needs to be filled. In order to do this, however, safety needs to be ensured and protocols developed to ensure that returning to work does not put people at risk.</p>
<p>All of this is possible with a well thought through strategy. Researchers, students and administrators can use the lessons learned to work smarter and more efficiently, to refocus and prioritise, and to offer new insights into complex global challenges.</p>
<p>We can also use this momentous experience to improve on ways of communicating new information and truths to the global public, thereby generating mutual trust.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138355/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephanie G Burton receives funding from the University of Pretoria and has received funding from the South African National Research Foundation. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Sean Pepper receives funding from the South African Medical Research Council and the University of Pretoria (through the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Medicine).</span></em></p>There has been a rapid redirection of resources towards COVID-19-related research. In the long term, this resource reallocation is likely to result in budget cuts in all research areas.Stephanie G Burton, Professor in Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology, and Professor at Future Africa, University of Pretoria, University of PretoriaMichael Sean Pepper, Director, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Medicine & SAMRC Extramural Unit for Stem Cell Research & Therapy, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1250592019-11-19T20:13:59Z2019-11-19T20:13:59ZIn science, it’s better to be curious than correct<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302538/original/file-20191119-111645-1tke0aw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C15%2C5104%2C2858&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Scientists can make mistakes, but it's important to keep an open mind and curious approach when conducting research.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I’m a geneticist. I study the connection between information and biology — essentially what makes a fly a fly and a human a human. <a href="https://droso4schools.wordpress.com">Interestingly, we’re not that different</a>. I’ve been a professional geneticist since the early 1990s. I’m reasonably good at this, and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1534/g3.117.043836">my research group has</a> <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1534%2Fgenetics.111.133231">done some really good work</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1534/g3.114.012484">over the years</a>. </p>
<p>But one of the challenges of the job is coming to grips with the idea that much of what we think we <em>know</em> is in fact wrong. Sometimes, we’re just off a little and we try to get a little closer to the answer. At some point, though, it’s likely that we’re just flat out wrong in some aspect. </p>
<p>We can’t know when we’re wrong, but it’s important to remain open-minded and adaptable so we can learn from our mistakes. Especially because sometimes the stakes can be incredibly high with lives on the line (more on this later). </p>
<h2>Infected tissues</h2>
<p>In the late 1980s, cattle started wasting away. In the late stages of what was slowly recognized as a disease, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/02/health/mad-cow-disease-fast-facts/index.html">cattle began acting in such bizarre manner</a> that their condition — bovine spongiform encephalopathy — became known as mad cow disease. Strikingly, the brains of the cattle were full of holes (hence spongiform) that were caked with plaques of proteins clumped together; these were proteins that were found in the brains of healthy cattle, but now they had an unnatural shape. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302523/original/file-20191119-111630-14ems4p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=48%2C0%2C6442%2C2647&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302523/original/file-20191119-111630-14ems4p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=246&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302523/original/file-20191119-111630-14ems4p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=246&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302523/original/file-20191119-111630-14ems4p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=246&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302523/original/file-20191119-111630-14ems4p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=309&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302523/original/file-20191119-111630-14ems4p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=309&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302523/original/file-20191119-111630-14ems4p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=309&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Most of the scientists working to explain mad cow disease made assumptions about its cause.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Proteins are long chains, but they fold into specific complex shapes. But the proteins in the cattles’ brains were misfolded. Some time after, people started dying from the same symptoms, and a connection was made between eating infected cattle and contracting the disease. Researchers determined that the culprit was consumption of brain and spinal tissue, the only tissue that showed the physical effects of infection. </p>
<p>One of the challenges to explaining mad cow disease was the length of time from infection to disease to death. Diseases, we knew, were transmitted by viruses and bacteria, but no scientist could isolate one that would explain this disease. Further, no one knew of other viruses or bacteria whose infection would take this long to lead to death. Science leaned toward assuming a viral cause, and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2559.1992.tb00909.x">careers and reputations were built on finding the slow virus</a>.</p>
<h2>Misfolded proteins</h2>
<p>In the late 1980s, a pair of British researchers suggested that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/214764a0">perhaps the misfolded proteins in the plaques was key</a>. This proposal was soon championed by Stanley Prusiner, a young American researcher early in his career. The idea was simple: the misfolded protein was both the result and cause of the infection. </p>
<p>The misfolded protein plaques killed brain tissue and caused correctly folded versions of the proteins to misfold. Prusiner’s hypothesis was straightforward, but it didn’t fit the way scientists understood diseases to work. Diseases are transmitted as DNA (and in rare cases, RNA) by viruses or bacteria. But they are not transmitted in protein folding.</p>
<p>For holding this protein-based view of infection, Prusiner was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/may/25/stanley-prusiner-neurologist-nobel-doesnt-wipe-scepticism-away">literally and metaphorically shouted out of the room</a>. Then he showed, experimentally and elegantly, that the misfolded proteins, which he called prions, were the cause of these diseases. For this accomplishment, he was awarded <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1997/summary/">the 1997 Nobel Prize in medicine</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299550/original/file-20191030-17893-kz6hlv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299550/original/file-20191030-17893-kz6hlv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299550/original/file-20191030-17893-kz6hlv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299550/original/file-20191030-17893-kz6hlv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299550/original/file-20191030-17893-kz6hlv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299550/original/file-20191030-17893-kz6hlv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299550/original/file-20191030-17893-kz6hlv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299550/original/file-20191030-17893-kz6hlv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An artist’s rendering of a folded protein chain.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>We now know that prions are responsible for a series of diseases in humans and other animals, <a href="https://www.ofah.org/issues/cwd/">including chronic wasting disease, a disease whose spread poses a serious threat to deer and elk in Ontario</a>.</p>
<p>Some believe that over-cooking prion-infected meat will cause prions to lose their unnatural shape and therefore be safe to eat. That’s not true. And wildlife like elk and deer get prion-based diseases too, which means hunters need to be vigilant with their game and never consume meat from animals that could be infected. In North America, <a href="https://mbio.asm.org/content/10/4/e01091-19">as many as 15,000 infected animals may be consumed each year, posing an incredible health risk</a>. The <a href="http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cwd">Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota</a> has valuable information on chronic wasting diseases in the wild.</p>
<p>So in this case, the information necessary for disease transmission is the shape of the protein, not in the genetic code of an infecting virus or bacteria. This fact is why this case specifically speaks to me as a geneticist. All my career, I’ve been trained to look for answers in DNA sequences. Prions remind me that sometimes really interesting answers are not where we expect them to be.</p>
<h2>The price of denial</h2>
<p>Where does this leave us? To me, the take-home message is that we need to remain skeptical but curious. Examine the world around us with open eyes and be ready to challenge and question our assumptions. Also, we shouldn’t ignore what is in front of us simply because it doesn’t fit our understanding of the world around us. </p>
<p>Climate change, for example, is real. It’s another example of why it’s important to be open to being wrong and the need to try to get it right. Medical science only started controlling mad cow disease after we understood the role of prions, and the years of denial cost an untold number of lives. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302292/original/file-20191118-66921-4wazy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302292/original/file-20191118-66921-4wazy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302292/original/file-20191118-66921-4wazy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302292/original/file-20191118-66921-4wazy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302292/original/file-20191118-66921-4wazy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302292/original/file-20191118-66921-4wazy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302292/original/file-20191118-66921-4wazy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302292/original/file-20191118-66921-4wazy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Taking action on climate change means recognizing our role in causing it.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Similarly, our global refusal to accept the massive climate change around us, and our obvious role in it, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/dec/21/deadly-weather-the-human-cost-of-2018s-climate-disasters-visual-guide">is leading us into one weather-based disaster after another, and all the loss of life associated with these disasters</a>.</p>
<p>I’ve spent a lot of time in my career putting together models of how the biological world works, but I know that pieces of these models are wrong. I can almost guarantee you that I have something as fundamentally wrong as those prion-deniers, I just don’t know what it is. Yet.</p>
<p>But the important thing isn’t to be right. Instead, it is to be open to seeing when you are wrong.</p>
<p><em>This is a corrected version of a story originally published Nov. 19, 2019. The earlier story wrongly stated that heating prion-infected meat sufficiently causes prions to lose their unnatural shape, making the meat safe to eat.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125059/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thomas Merritt receives funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs Program.</span></em></p>Mistakes can be made during scientific research with devastating effects. Keeping an open mind to the possibility of error and correcting immediately can make the difference between life and death.Thomas Merritt, Professor and Canada Research Chair, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Laurentian UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/954972018-04-25T22:44:48Z2018-04-25T22:44:48ZCould this be the year for a Canadian Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences?<p>In 2013, Kyoto University’s Shinya Yamanaka was <a href="https://breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/2/L36">awarded one of the first Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences for his discovery of “induced” stem cells</a> that enabled researchers to convert adult cells back into stem cells. </p>
<p>The Breakthrough Prize is not to be sneezed at. Founded in 2013, the prize “honours transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life.” It’s also the most financially attractive award in science, valued at US$3 million. And the winner is able to use the money as they wish. </p>
<p>That same year, Hans Clevers from the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht was separately awarded a Breakthrough Prize for his <a href="https://breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/2/L29">discovery of tissue stem cells and cancer</a>. </p>
<p>It was actually three talented Canadian scientists, however — Charles Leblond, Ernest McCulloch and James Till — who first discovered stem cells.</p>
<p>Indeed, several talented Canadian researchers are deserving of this lucrative prize. Yet in the six years of its life so far, no Canadian has received it in the life sciences. </p>
<p>As the April 30 deadline for this year’s Breakthrough Prize nominations approaches, we have to ask why.</p>
<h2>Who discovered stem cells?</h2>
<p>Clevers readily acknowledges that his discovery in 2007 of the stem cell in the small intestine confirmed the prior seminal discovery of the same cell — by McGill University’s Leblond decades earlier. </p>
<p>Leblond may be the scientist who first discovered stem cells as based on his breakthrough paper on the “<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nrm3706">stem cell renewal theory</a>.”</p>
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<p>The breakthrough was first published in 1953 and considered by many to be <a href="https://www.ascb.org/ascb-post/the-stem-cell-renewal-theory-the-other-big-paper-of-1953/">as important a discovery as that published by Watson and Crick for the double helix the same year</a>.</p>
<p>The link between stem cells and cancer is also a Canadian discovery. University of Toronto researcher <a href="https://www.nature.com/stemcells/2009/0903/090326/full/stemcells.2009.47.html">John Dick discovered the cancer stem cell in 1994</a>. Dick’s breakthrough was based on his use of a stem cell assay to study leukemia. </p>
<p>The stem cell assay he used was <a href="http://www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/show/stem-cells-and-their-dual-properties-self-renewal-and-differentiation/">in turn based on a prior breakthrough by Till and McCulloch</a>. They have been widely acknowledged for their groundbreaking 1963 discovery of the stem cell in the bone marrow responsible for the formation of red blood cells, platelets and white blood cells.</p>
<h2>Elegant techniques</h2>
<p>The pioneering breakthroughs of Leblond, Till and McCulloch are due to the elegance and craftsmanship of their experimentation. </p>
<p>In 1953, Leblond and his student Yves Clermont <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aja.1000930308">deduced the primordial cell they called a stem cell</a>. This cell gave rise to over 45 different recognizable cells whose lineage they could precisely map during the process known as “spermatogenesis.” </p>
<p>They devised an elegant chemical staining technique to distinguish cells as they became more adult, one that remains in use today. And their conclusions remain monumental:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<em>Thus, the main feature of the present hypothesis, which may be described as Stem Cell Renewal Theory, is the periodic appearance of a ‘stem cell’ which segregates itself from the spermatogonia dividing to produce spermatocytes, but which later divides to give rise to a new generation of spermatogonia and spermatocytes as well as to the ‘stem cell’ for the subsequent generation.</em>”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The term “spermatogonia” is for an early cell in maturation whereas “spermatocyte” is a cell that is on its way to adulthood. </p>
<p>The key feature is that a stem cell would divide to make two cells — one being an identical stem cell, the other destined to become an adult cell. This is the fundamental basis of what a stem cell is defined as today.</p>
<h2>Understanding bone marrow transplants</h2>
<p>For Till and McCulloch in 1963, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/197452a0">it was their experimental design that was key to their breakthrough</a>. </p>
<p>They were testing the hypothesis that the success of bone marrow transplants was a consequence of a stem cell in the donor bone marrow that would give rise continuously to red blood cells, platelets and white blood cells.</p>
<p>If a host animal is irradiated severely, then the animal dies from being unable to make blood cells. Bone marrow transplantation cures the animal. After the transplant, colonies representing sites of formation of the blood cells can be readily seen in the spleen of the host animals. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216034/original/file-20180423-94132-m6rld2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216034/original/file-20180423-94132-m6rld2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216034/original/file-20180423-94132-m6rld2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216034/original/file-20180423-94132-m6rld2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216034/original/file-20180423-94132-m6rld2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216034/original/file-20180423-94132-m6rld2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216034/original/file-20180423-94132-m6rld2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">3-D rendering of stem cells in the bone marrow.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>To test their hypothesis, Till and McCulloch used donor bone marrow cells that they could easily follow after transplantation. They generated these cells from mice given lower doses of radiation. This created a chromosomal abnormality in the cells that could be easily visualized by microscopy as the cells divided. </p>
<p>They transplanted these bone marrow cells into mice that had been severely radiated. Colonies making red blood cells, platelets and white blood cells were observed in the spleen of the recipient mice. Astonishingly in these colonies, blood cells were being formed, all with chromosomal abnormalities. </p>
<p>They were able to demonstrate that each colony arose from a single cell that today we call the stem cell. In the paper that reported their discovery, Till and McCulloch concluded: “The spleen colony procedure, may, therefore be regarded as an in vivo single cell technique….” They added “…it can be concluded that all the cells in these marked colonies were derived from a single cell in which a chromosome aberration was induced by radiation.”</p>
<h2>How cancer can persist</h2>
<p>Dick’s <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/367645a0">discovery of the cancer stem cell</a> was based directly on the discovery of Till and McCulloch and followed a similar experimental strategy of using a mouse to test for the cancer stem cell. The challenge was enormous as he was studying leukemia in human beings. </p>
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<p>Dick reasoned that if he could take bone marrow cells from patients with leukemia, he could test by transplantation into a mouse whether a human cancer stem cell could be deduced. </p>
<p>The strategy used a recipient mouse that was mutant and unable to make white blood cells, even normal ones. Dick then injected the leukemic cells he obtained from the bone marrow of patients into these mice. This led to an identical leukemia to that of humans in the mice.</p>
<p>The characteristics of the normal stem cell first discovered by Till and McCulloch were by now well understood. Dick then purified, from the human leukemia, the cells with the characteristics of what should have been the normal stem cell. This cell by itself when injected into the host mutant mice again recapitulated human leukemia in the mouse. </p>
<p>The breakthrough was based on the use of transplantation experiments similar to those of Till and McCulloch and based on their prior discovery. </p>
<p>Several different labs have reproduced this discovery of the cancer stem cell. This breakthrough provides an explanation as to why cancer can persist even after surgery or radiation treatment since the stem cell may not be located near the site of treatment.</p>
<h2>On the shoulders of giants</h2>
<p>Scientists are motivated by certainty that a genuine discovery will become part of our foundation of knowledge, enabling our understanding of life processes and helping to improve health and prevent disease. It is the legacy of a discovery that lives on. </p>
<p>Recognition for the creativity and beauty behind the scientific process that lead to genuine breakthroughs is sometimes overlooked. </p>
<p>Canada has made several such discoveries that are breakthroughs, especially the discovery of stem cells and the cancer stem cell. As stated by Newton: “If I have seen further it is by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants">standing on ye sholders of Giants</a>”. </p>
<p>The global giants in stem cell research are Canada’s Charles Leblond, Ernest McCulloch and James Till.</p>
<p>It is humans that choose to credit discoveries with awards such as the $3 million US Breakthrough Prize. Although several Canadian life scientists have made breakthroughs that are already rewarded by the legacy of their discoveries, a bonus of the actual Breakthrough Award may be worthy of consideration. </p>
<p>Could this year be any different? </p>
<p><em>John Bergeron gratefully acknowledges Kathleen Dickson as co-author.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95497/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Bergeron does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The nomination deadline for science’s most lucrative prize – the Breakthrough Prize – is looming. Why has no Canadian ever received this prize, despite groundbreaking discoveries?John Bergeron, Emeritus Robert Reford Professor and Professor of Medicine at McGill, McGill UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/955362018-04-24T16:15:06Z2018-04-24T16:15:06ZRosalind Franklin still doesn’t get the recognition she deserves for her DNA discovery<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216185/original/file-20180424-57598-utjjlz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Life over the microscope.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rosalind_Franklin.jpg">Jenifer Glyn/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Visiting the Institut Curie in Paris recently got me thinking about the distinct lack of famous female Nobel Prize winners in science (Marie Curie excepted). The world rightly celebrated the incredible <a href="https://theconversation.com/stephen-hawking-martin-rees-looks-back-on-colleagues-spectacular-success-against-all-odds-93379">life and achievements</a> of Stephen Hawking when he died last month. Yet the recent 60th anniversary of another brilliant scientist who also didn’t win a Nobel Prize but who happened to be a woman passed pretty much unnoticed.</p>
<p>Rosalind Franklin died on April 16th 1958 at the tender age of 37, but packed at least two lifetime’s worth of high quality science into her career. In the years since her death, she has won recognition among scientists for her research on the molecular structure of coal, viruses and, most notably, DNA. But wider fame has remained elusive.</p>
<p>Her X-ray diffraction images of DNA enabled the University of Cambridge’s Francis Crick and James Watson to identify the molecule’s double helix structure, which they wrote about <a href="https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBBYW.pdf">in a paper</a> published 65 years ago on April 25th 1953. Yet only Crick, Watson and Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for the discovery.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216190/original/file-20180424-57578-qfizq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216190/original/file-20180424-57578-qfizq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216190/original/file-20180424-57578-qfizq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216190/original/file-20180424-57578-qfizq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216190/original/file-20180424-57578-qfizq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216190/original/file-20180424-57578-qfizq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216190/original/file-20180424-57578-qfizq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A rigorous and careful experimentalist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin#/media/File:Rosalind_Franklin.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hawking never received a Nobel Prize primarily because his seminal discovery in 1974 that <a href="https://theconversation.com/black-holes-arent-totally-black-and-other-insights-from-stephen-hawkings-groundbreaking-work-93458">black holes can emit radiation</a> was entirely theoretical, and the Nobel Committee tends to favour experimentalists over theorists. In contrast, Franklin’s work could never be accused of lacking experimental rigour. Indeed, her insistence on robust and carefully collected data at the expense of building scientific models perhaps undermined her chances of receiving the title of discoverer of “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/25/newsid_2932000/2932793.stm">the secret of life</a>”. However, the Nobel Committee chose to honour Crick and Watson for their theoretical model.</p>
<p>What ultimately disqualified her from receiving the Nobel was her death four years earlier, as Nobels can only go to people who are alive to collect them. But I believe that even if Franklin had lived, the Nobel Committee would still have given the prize to Crick, Watson and Wilkins.</p>
<h2>Overlooked</h2>
<p>For a start, history was against her. The last woman scientist to receive a Nobel before this point had been Gerty Cori in 1947 and she was <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/women.html">only the third</a>, following Curie and her daughter Irene. Though more women scientists did win the prize later on in the 1960s, the prevailing mood of the day still discriminated against women. Even in 1974, the Northern Irish scientist who discovered radio pulsars, <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11941453/Female-physicist-overlooked-for-Nobel-Prize-finally-receives-recognition-as-Woman-of-the-Year.html">Jocelyn Bell Burnell</a>, was overlooked for the Nobel Prize for Physics in favour of her male supervisor.</p>
<p>Franklin experienced the sexism of science firsthand. She graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1941 when women were <a href="http://www.newn.cam.ac.uk/about/history/history-of-newnham/">still not recognised</a> as full members of the university or entitled to a degree award. She also <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/326851.Rosalind_Franklin">had to protest</a> against lower pay compared to her male colleagues and her lack of promotion even when she was publishing work in the top scientific journals.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216191/original/file-20180424-57581-1jkoe8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216191/original/file-20180424-57581-1jkoe8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216191/original/file-20180424-57581-1jkoe8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216191/original/file-20180424-57581-1jkoe8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216191/original/file-20180424-57581-1jkoe8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216191/original/file-20180424-57581-1jkoe8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216191/original/file-20180424-57581-1jkoe8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Photograph 51.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51#/media/File:Photo_51_x-ray_diffraction_image.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The power politics of professional rivalries and alliances were also in play. The key image that revealed the double helix structure of DNA, known as “Photograph 51”, was taken by Franklin and her PhD student Raymond Gosling at King’s College London in May 1952. Her King’s colleague Maurice Wilkins then showed this iconic image to Watson at Cambridge <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/23/sexism-in-science-did-watson-and-crick-really-steal-rosalind-franklins-data">without Franklin’s knowledge or consent</a>. Watson and Crick also gained access to a King’s report that Franklin had helped prepare, which contained extra experimental information that Crick crucially recognised as the final piece of the puzzle. The fact that Franklin moved from King’s to the less well regarded Birkbeck College in 1953 probably didn’t help her cause either.</p>
<p>Despite all this, I have no doubt that if Franklin had lived she would eventually have become the second British woman to win a Nobel Prize in 1982 for her research on viruses and protein-nucleic crystal structures. In her absence, the prize for chemistry went to Aaron Klug, her mentee who <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/248787a0">did so much</a> to restore her reputation in the years after her death.</p>
<p>Aside from her work on DNA, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/175379a0">Franklin demonstrated</a> that the related molecule RNA was shaped in a single strand rather than a double helix. She also proved through her elegant X-ray crystallography that the proteins of the tobacco mosaic virus formed a spiral hollow tube with RNA wrapped around it. Ironically, this confirmed the spiral tube hypothesis that James Watson had <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13140277">put forward</a> in the early 1950s. This elegant work was a forerunner to research on the polio virus, which Klug completed after her death and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13756988">published in her memory</a>.</p>
<p>Franklin herself seemed to see this work as her real success. <a href="http://himetop.wikidot.com/rosalind-franklin-tomb">The inscription</a> she composed for her gravestone in Willesden Cemetery in London says: “Her Research and Discoveries on Viruses Remain of Lasting Benefit to Mankind.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95536/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Lawler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s 65 years since the structure of DNA was first published, but the woman who made that possible remains unknown to many people.Mark Lawler, Chair in Translational Cancer Genomics, Queen's University BelfastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/860042017-10-25T18:31:46Z2017-10-25T18:31:46ZMeet the giant dinosaur that roamed southern Africa 200 million years ago<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191793/original/file-20171025-25544-htfgc5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Kayentapus ambrokholohali footprints belong to an animal of about 26 feet long, dwarfing all the life around it.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Theropod image adapted by Lara Sciscio, with permission, from an illustration by Scott Hartman</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Globally at around 200 million years ago, in what’s known as the Early Jurassic, small and agile two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs called <a href="http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/saurischia/theropoda.html">theropods</a> roamed the ancient landscapes. In southern Africa, we know of their existence from their rare body fossils but also, importantly, from their fossil footprints.</p>
<p>Now our team’s new discovery, <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185941">published in <em>PLOS ONE</em></a>, unexpectedly reveals that very large carnivorous dinosaurs with an estimated body length of between 8 to 9 meters (or 26 feet) – that’s a <a href="https://www.convertunits.com/from/feet/to/story">two-story building</a> or two adult rhinos nose to tail – lived in southern Africa too. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191351/original/file-20171023-1689-2ow4d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191351/original/file-20171023-1689-2ow4d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191351/original/file-20171023-1689-2ow4d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191351/original/file-20171023-1689-2ow4d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191351/original/file-20171023-1689-2ow4d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191351/original/file-20171023-1689-2ow4d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191351/original/file-20171023-1689-2ow4d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191351/original/file-20171023-1689-2ow4d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Miengah Abrahams, a PhD student from the University of Cape Town, lying next to the dinosaur’s tracks. She is 1.6m tall.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lara Sciscio</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Evidence for this massive beast comes from a set of three-toed, 57cm long and 50cm wide footprints recently found in western Lesotho. This is a first for Africa. It places a huge carnivorous dinosaur in what was then the southern part of the <a href="https://www.livescience.com/37285-gondwana.html">supercontinent Gondwana</a> during Early Jurassic times.</p>
<p>Until this discovery, theropod dinosaurs were thought to be considerably smaller, at three to five metres in body length, during the Early Jurassic. </p>
<p>There has only been one other report of large carnivorous dinosaurs occurring as early as 200 million years ago. This also came from fossil footprint evidence in Poland’s <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/244483002_Slady_wielkich_teropodow_z_wczesnojurajskich_osadow_Gor_Swietokrzyskich_in_Polish_with_English_abstract">Holy Cross Mountains</a>. Such giants are rare. The iconic and enormous (about 12 metres long) <em>Tyrannosaurus</em>, for instance, only emerged around 128 million years later during the <a href="https://animals.howstuffworks.com/dinosaurs/late-cretaceous-period.htm">Late Cretaceous</a>. </p>
<p>The dimensions of the trackmaker with the 57cm long feet, although slightly smaller, come close to those of the well-known and younger Late Cretaceous theropod dinosaurs such as <em>Tyrannosaurus rex</em> or the similarly huge North African <em>Spinosaurus</em>.</p>
<p>The unanticipated footprint size of this Lesotho giant considerably expands the body size range of theropods in the Early Jurassic. Now the hunt is on to track down more theropod footprints – and perhaps even their body fossils.</p>
<h2>Lesotho’s giant carnivore</h2>
<p>Our <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185941">team of scientists</a> from South Africa’s University of Cape Town, the University of Manchester in the UK, <a href="http://www.fundaciondinopolis.org/">Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis</a> in Spain, and Brazil’s Universidade de São Paulo discovered the 200 million year old megatheropod trackway during recent fieldwork in Lesotho. </p>
<p>The footprints were found on a small dirt road approximately 2km from the National University of Lesotho at Roma (Maseru District) in the western part of the country. They are on a palaeosurface, an ancient land surface that has been preserved in time.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191391/original/file-20171023-1717-heeaf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191391/original/file-20171023-1717-heeaf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191391/original/file-20171023-1717-heeaf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191391/original/file-20171023-1717-heeaf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191391/original/file-20171023-1717-heeaf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191391/original/file-20171023-1717-heeaf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191391/original/file-20171023-1717-heeaf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191391/original/file-20171023-1717-heeaf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Once the dinosaur’s tracks had been identified and cleaned of rock debris, the team photographed and took silicon rubber impressions of them.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lara Sciscio</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The ancient surface is also covered in the footprints of other theropod dinosaurs. Even their footprint impressions are relatively large (30-40cm long) for the time period. </p>
<p>The 57 cm long Lesotho footprints have been named <em>Kayentapus ambrokholohali</em>. The trackmaker falls into an informal grouping of very large dinosaurs, called “megatheropods”, with footprints exceeding 50 cm in length and calculated hip heights greater than 2 m. </p>
<p>The new species name <em>ambrokholohali</em> was given to identify this particular footprint. It was derived in honour of Emeritus Professor David Ambrose, a now retired professor and Head Research Fellow at National University of Lesotho, for his detailed recording of the trace fossil heritage within Roma. </p>
<p>We were following in Ambrose’s footsteps, trying to relocate one of his documented sites, when we discovered the freshly exposed megatheropod footprints.</p>
<p>The latter part of the name, <em>kholohali</em>, is derived from two Sesotho words: “kholo”, meaning big, large or great and “hali”, meaning much or very. This was to describe its unexpectedly large size. </p>
<h2>Size matters</h2>
<p>The main bipedal predators during the Mesozoic (the “Dinosaur Era”) were large theropod dinosaurs. They included the <em>Allosaurus</em> (from the late Jurassic) and <em>Tyrannosaurus</em> (Upper Cretaceous). But early in the Mesozoic, theropod dinosaurs were usually relatively small (3–5 m body length). Truly large forms of theropods only started making their appearance around 100 million years later, within the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous.</p>
<p>In light of this, the new discovery of these impressively large tracks expands the range of body size for theropods in the Early Jurassic at the very onset of their diversification. But, why were these theropods so much larger than anything else around at the time? An answer could lie in the timing of their evolution. </p>
<p>The megatheropod tracks appear after the end-Triassic <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/end-Triassic-extinction">mass extinction event</a>. This mass extinction event was the result of a biotic crisis that significantly affected animals both on land and sea. The biotic crisis allowed for the main competitors of theropod dinosaurs to be completely eradicated. Killing off the competition, coupled with changes in ecosystem composition, probably gave theropod dinosaurs “free reign” to dominate the Early Jurassic landscape and resources. </p>
<p>Another possible driver for larger theropod body size was the increased size of the herbivorous dinosaurs – like the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/10/south-african-scientists-new-dinosaur-species-fossils-sauropod-highland-giant-karoo">Highland Giant sauropodomorph</a> – within the same ancient landscape. </p>
<p>It’s most likely that both factors lead to theropods in southern Africa being able to evolve into numerous forms and increase in abundance. But these are questions we can’t answer conclusively.</p>
<h2>Giant footprints, but still no fossils</h2>
<p>The body fossil evidence for theropod dinosaurs in southern Africa is slim. Luckily the footprints they left behind are not. By studying these and other tracks as well as the bone fossil record, scientists are able to tentatively link footprints to potential trackmakers. </p>
<p>To date, we have no body fossil material to match the <em>K. ambrokholohali</em>‘s footprints. Hopefully we’ll soon discover more unusual footprints and, from there, body fossils that will help add to our understanding of the complex ancient world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86004/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lara Sciscio and her colleagues received funding for this work from the National Research Foundation of South Africa
Competitive Programme for Rated Researches (NRF Grant number 93544 Bordy) and the Department of Science and Technology-National Research Foundation Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences. The work was also supported by the ARAID (<a href="https://www.araid.es/">https://www.araid.es/</a>)</span></em></p>Until this discovery, theropod dinosaurs were thought to be considerably smaller, at three to five metres in body length, during the Early Jurassic.Lara Sciscio, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Geological Sciences, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/817122017-08-04T00:22:41Z2017-08-04T00:22:41ZNo new Einsteins to emerge if science funding snubs curiosity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180058/original/file-20170727-8516-tj9pbq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The manuscript of 'Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton' shows the words 'does this apple fall?' Newton's curiosity about the falling piece of fruit helped him develop the theory of gravity.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Lucy Young)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>All of the great scientific findings of the past emanated from the initiative of individuals spurred by unimpeded curiosity and determination.</p>
<p>Their research was financially supported by themselves or benefactors, and required only the availability of time for contemplation and conjecture.</p>
<p>For several years starting in 1958, when I began my research as an instructor in pharmacology, I had relatively free rein to follow my instincts, ideas and impulses. As a result, I delved into studies in many different areas: neuropharmacology, mechanisms of general anaesthesia, digitalis drugs, receptor pharmacology, endocrinology and aging, to mention a few.</p>
<p>What I consider some of my most significant research findings were the result of curiosity-based screening of chemical compounds <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1476-5381.1979.tb08686.x/pdf">in receptor-binding assays</a> — or the type of work often denigrated by grant application reviewers who earmark research dollars as “fishing expeditions.”</p>
<p>Another fishing expedition embarked upon with my colleague, the late Carl Pinsky, also led to the development of a patented electronic sensor, which, in turn, led to the formation of a venture-capital funded company.</p>
<h2>‘The more papers, the better’</h2>
<p>But over the years, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dr-no-money/">a formidable bureaucracy</a> has taken hold at universities as research “productivity” became an obsession. The aforementioned fishing expeditions were no longer an option. Grant success became dependent on publication — the more papers, the better. </p>
<p>Therefore, academics and researchers had to focus on well-designed research proposals that could generate steady, reliable data output. Any diversions that might stimulate curiosity, generate enthusiasm or uncover new avenues of potentially ground-breaking exploration, but not directly related to funded projects, would only diminish productivity.</p>
<p>Commonly, two- or three-year funding for research is awarded by government granting agencies, or by one of many relevant foundations. Grant renewal relies on a satisfactory evaluation of the research achievement for that period. </p>
<p>This bureaucratic regimen unfortunately reveals a demoralizing ignorance of the efforts required to establish and maintain an efficiently functioning research facility. Furthermore, it subjects the researcher to repetitive, lengthy and enervating periods of grant application red tape.</p>
<p>Dissatisfaction with the ever-burgeoning research bureaucracy is global. </p>
<h2>Scientists complain</h2>
<p>A few years ago, Nobel Laureate Dr. Harold Varmus became head of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. Upon his arrival, he was told by hordes of dissatisfied applicants for biomedical research grants that innovative proposals beyond the mainstream were uniformly rejected, year after year.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/111/16/5773.full">Varmus addressed this apparent deficiency</a> with one fell swoop — he mandated that innovation was to be one of the primary criteria by which research proposals were evaluated. </p>
<p>And in 2014, more than 30 leading scientists, including four Nobel Laureates, also wrote to Great Britain’s <em>The Telegraph</em> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10870995/Nobel-winners-say-scientific-discovery-virtually-impossible-due-to-funding-bureaucracy.html">to deplore the current system of granting funding</a> for scientific research: “Sustained open-ended enquiries in controversial or unfashionable fields are virtually forbidden today and science is in serious danger of stagnating.” </p>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/10870609/The-damaging-bureaucracy-of-academic-peer-preview.html">They added</a> that the “major scientific discoveries of the 20th century would not have happened under today’s funding rules.”</p>
<h2>Newton was an alchemist</h2>
<p>Isaac Newton (1643-1727) is a perfect example. His contributions include the optics of colour, a brilliant neuro-anatomical concept of binocular vision, the laws of motion, universal gravitation, the general binomial theorem and the differential and the integral calculus. Furthermore, it’s now well-documented that Newton’s reading list of <a href="https://www.wired.com/2014/05/newton-papers-q-and-a/">theological works</a> was awe-inspiring. </p>
<p>Newton also spent endless hours dabbling in <a href="http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jul-aug/05-isaac-newton-worlds-most-famous-alchemist">experimental alchemy.</a> </p>
<p>Alchemists were considered misfits for a long time by the scientific establishment of the day. But Newton was obviously ahead of his time as he explored <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead-can-be-turned-into-gold/">transmutation,</a> the transformation of one element to another. It actually does occur naturally and can be effected artificially in nuclear reactors and particle accelerators.</p>
<p>Newton also wrote the monumental tome, <a href="https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-ADV-B-00039-00001/1">Principia Mathematica</a>, but the number of his publications annually was well below average compared to our current crop of funded researchers, and most papers were not published in top-tier journals. There was even a period of 11 years during which Newton published nothing at all. </p>
<p>In today’s world, Newton probably would have been accused by funding agencies of spreading himself too thin. Furthermore, his ideas were so beyond the mainstream that they would have neither been understood nor sanctioned by his peer critics at today’s journal and grant agency panels.</p>
<h2>Focus is on collaboration</h2>
<p>The primary function of these review bodies is to ensure that only focused, comprehensively detailed experimental protocols and steadily productive projects are funded, and only statistically validated data that is easily reproduced is published. </p>
<p>What that means, sadly, is that any proposal must be understood and approved by even the least knowledgeable panel member.</p>
<p>“Multidisciplinary” is a relatively recent catchword vigorously embraced by granting agencies. </p>
<p>No longer is there unquestioned support for the curiosity-driven research traditionally associated with individual scientists delving into their own hunches and embarking upon scientific fishing expeditions. If they collaborate with biologists, engineers and chemists, all the better. The public, government and granting agencies want more bang for the buck — multidisciplinary research that yields practical applications for the real world. </p>
<p>But that flies in the face of the fact that virtually every major scientific discovery, from the time of the ancient Greeks <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1983/mcclintock-bio.html">to present day,</a> was achieved by an individual driven almost solely by curiosity.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180062/original/file-20170727-27682-7d5qxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180062/original/file-20170727-27682-7d5qxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180062/original/file-20170727-27682-7d5qxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180062/original/file-20170727-27682-7d5qxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180062/original/file-20170727-27682-7d5qxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180062/original/file-20170727-27682-7d5qxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180062/original/file-20170727-27682-7d5qxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">German-born theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, in 1955.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(CP PHOTO ARCHIVE/ AP Photo/File)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Would the young Albert Einstein have conceived theories, ultimately confirmed by others, that space is curved, time is not constant, black holes exist, gravitational waves permeate the universe and E=mc2 had he been corralled into a collaboration with a group of scientists working on a specific, conventional research program? Einstein won a Nobel Prize for his work on <a href="http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae24.cfm">the photoelectric effect.</a></p>
<p>There’s an urgent need for a radical change in the philosophy and mentality of research funding bodies. </p>
<p>It’s time to establish a mechanism that provides career investigators with long-term, secure funding. An evaluation panel to select outstanding candidates for long-term support should be comprised of accomplished senior scientists.</p>
<p>In light of the ingrained policies, procedures and staffing of both university and governmental research administrations, such a reformation is unlikely to happen at any reasonable pace, if at all. </p>
<p>A more feasible approach would be the creation of new public foundations specifically dedicated to providing long-term, stable funding to scientists. Such foundations would allow investigators to concentrate their energies on research, not on the need to constantly validate their activities in order to qualify for renewed funding.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81712/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank LaBella during his career has received research funds and salary support from several government and public granting bodies. </span></em></p>Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein would have bridled under today’s research funding bureaucracy. It’s time to allow scientists to indulge their curiosity again.Frank LaBella, Professor Emeritus, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of ManitobaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/735532017-03-01T14:09:09Z2017-03-01T14:09:09ZThe next scientific breakthrough could come from the history books<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158892/original/image-20170301-5501-3a3zz4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C7%2C1213%2C833&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The idea that science isn’t a process of constant progress might make some modern scientists feel a bit twitchy. Surely we know more now than we did 100 years ago? We’ve sequenced the genome, explored space and considerably lengthened the average human lifespan. We’ve invented aircraft, computers and nuclear energy. We’ve developed theories of relativity and quantum mechanics to explain how the universe works.</p>
<p>However, treating the history of science as a linear story of progression doesn’t reflect wholly how ideas emerge and are adapted, forgotten, rediscovered or ignored. While we are happy with the notion that the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Creating_Minds.html?id=j_ziKEWmibMC">arts can return to old ideas</a>, for example in neoclassicism, this idea is not commonly recognised in science. Is this constraint really present in principle? Or is it more a comment on received practice or, worse, on the general ignorance of the scientific community of its own intellectual history?</p>
<p>For one thing, not all lines of scientific enquiry are pursued to conclusion. For example, a few years ago, historian of science Hasok Chang undertook <a href="http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-94-007-3932-1">a careful examination of notebooks</a> from scientists working in the 19th century. He unearthed notes from experiments in electrochemistry whose results received no explanation at the time. After repeating the experiments himself, Chang <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-010-9301-8">showed the results still don’t have a full explanation</a> today. These research programmes had not been completed, simply put to one side and forgotten. </p>
<p>New perspectives on old investigations might turn out to be promising routes to radical research. Most current research programmes represent attempts to make incremental advances, nurtured and supported by a conservative system of peer review. But the generation of really fresh ideas requires methods that don’t just rely on linear progression.</p>
<p>Sometimes this non-linearity comes from new experiments or theories. For example, Albert Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905 from studying a series of <a href="http://www.pitt.edu/%7Ejdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters_2017_Jan_1/origins_pathway/index.html">thought experiments</a> he had devised. The Nobel Prize-winning Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes’s experimental prowess while studying how metals behaved at very low temperatures led to his <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1913/onnes-bio.html">discovery of superconductivity</a>. But looping back into forgotten scientific history might also provide an alternative, regenerative way of thinking that doesn’t rely on what has come immediately before it.</p>
<p>Collaborating with an international team of colleagues, we have taken this hypothesis further by bringing scientists into <a href="https://theconversation.com/medieval-bishops-theory-resembles-modern-concept-of-multiple-universes-25460">close contact with scientific treatises</a> from the early 13th century. The treatises were composed by the English polymath Robert Grosseteste – who later became Bishop of Lincoln – between 1195 and 1230. They cover a wide range of topics we would recognise as key to modern physics, including sound, light, colour, comets, the planets, the origin of the cosmos and more.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158896/original/image-20170301-5507-19sce3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158896/original/image-20170301-5507-19sce3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158896/original/image-20170301-5507-19sce3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158896/original/image-20170301-5507-19sce3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158896/original/image-20170301-5507-19sce3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158896/original/image-20170301-5507-19sce3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158896/original/image-20170301-5507-19sce3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Medieval scholar.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We have worked with paleographers (handwriting experts) and Latinists to decipher Grosseteste’s manuscripts, and with philosophers, theologians, historians and scientists to provide intellectual interpretation and context to his work. As a result, we’ve discovered that scientific and mathematical minds today still resonate with Grosseteste’s deeply physical and structured thinking. </p>
<p>Our first intuition and hope was that the scientists might bring a new analytic perspective to these very technical texts. And so it proved: the deep mathematical structure of a small treatise on colour, the De colore, <a href="https://theconversation.com/our-latest-scientific-research-partner-was-a-medieval-bishop-42857">was shown to describe</a> what we would now call a three-dimensional abstract co-ordinate space for colour.</p>
<p>But more was true. During the examination of each treatise, at some point one of the group would say: “Did anyone ever try doing …?” or “What would happen if we followed through with this calculation, supposing he meant …”. Responding to this thinker from eight centuries ago has, to our delight and surprise, inspired new scientific work of a rather fresh cut. It isn’t connected in a linear way to current research programmes, but sheds light on them from new directions.</p>
<p>Take, for example, Grosseteste’s application of his colour theory to the rainbow, carried out in his final treatise. In explaining the differences of colours between and within rainbows on three axes related to his colour theory, Grosseteste put forward the basis of a coordinate system for colour embedded in nature.</p>
<p>It was only by looking at his discussion of rainbows recreated by modern physics that we could interpret his colour qualities in terms we use today. It’s the medieval equivalent of the way televisions combine coloured light, but written in the clouds with sunlight rather than on flat screens with liquid crystal displays. The finding also resonates with <a href="http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1119967031.html">open research questions</a> on why some colours seem closer to others in our perception. </p>
<p>One way of looking at the creative processes at work in this scientific dialogue with the 13th century is that it is just the kind of neoclassical (or neomedieval) science that some have assumed is impossible. We’ve found scientific ideas addressing current thinking in fresh ways in every treatise by Grosseteste we’ve examined so far, proving it’s not exceptional.</p>
<p>History is important. And through our collaboration through time with Grosseteste, we’ve shown it can undermine some of the brittle narratives told about modern science. We may be alone in space with our thoughts of communicating with the intelligence of other civilisations, but we need not be alone in time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73553/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Giles Gasper receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK and the Leverhulme Trust.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hannah Smithson receives funding from the AHRC, Wellcome Trust, and Fight for Sight.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tom McLeish receives funding from EPSRC, BBSRC and AHRC. He is Chair of the Royal Society's Education Committee and a trustee of affiliated with The John Templeton Foundation </span></em></p>The case for neoclassicism in science.Giles Gasper, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History, Durham UniversityHannah Smithson, Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology (Perception), University of OxfordTom McLeish, Professor of Physics and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/713462017-01-18T15:01:37Z2017-01-18T15:01:37ZWhen it comes to big finds, scientists need more than just luck and chance<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152838/original/image-20170116-8769-cublv1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The author's backpack was hiding this almost complete therapsid fossil. Was finding it all down to luck?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Julien Benoit</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The history of science abounds with stories about discoveries made by chance. One of the most famous cases, involves French physicist <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1903/becquerel-bio.html">Antoine Henri Becquerel</a>, who accidentally discovered radioactivity by leaving a piece of granite on photographic paper in a drawer of his desk. Another, is the story of Scottish biologist <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1945/fleming-bio.html">Alexander Fleming</a>, who forgot his bacterial cultures at home when he went on holiday. They rotted – and Fleming discovered penicillin.</p>
<p>These charming stories showcase science’s most human aspect: men and women who make lucky mistakes that can save lives or change the world. Even scientists are happy to believe these tales, though they don’t do much justice to our colleagues’ expertise. </p>
<p>But is this really the way science works? Can anybody, scientist or not, rely on luck to make important discoveries? My own “lucky strike” as a palaeontologist – finding a nearly complete fossil of a pre-mammalian ancestor – helped me to understand that good science isn’t rooted in chance. It’s based on people with expertise being in the right place at the right time, equipped with enough knowledge to know what they’re looking at. </p>
<h2>A fossil find</h2>
<p>My moment of “luck” occurred in South Africa’s Karoo in 2015. I’d been invited to join an international team of palaeontologists led by Professor Bruce Rubidge and Dr Michael Day from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. We came from Europe, South America and Africa to look for the fossils of <a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Therapsid">pre-mammalian therapsids</a>, which date back around 260 million years.</p>
<p>The Karoo is a semi-arid desert mostly populated by sheep and thorny bushes that covers a huge swathe of South Africa between Johannesburg and Cape Town. Hundreds of millions of years ago it was covered with lakes, rivers, dense primeval vegetation. Large reptile-like beasts roamed this landscape.</p>
<p>On the day in question we were fossil hunting between the towns of Sutherland and Fraserburg. There were rich pickings: Bruce and Michael had identified an area filled with fossil remains. So, we were in the right place. And, crucially, my shoes were totally wrong for the Karoo. Between the thorns and the heat, the plastic of my shoes had melted and their toes had been ripped open by thorns.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152839/original/image-20170116-8806-x8ur11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152839/original/image-20170116-8806-x8ur11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152839/original/image-20170116-8806-x8ur11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152839/original/image-20170116-8806-x8ur11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152839/original/image-20170116-8806-x8ur11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152839/original/image-20170116-8806-x8ur11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152839/original/image-20170116-8806-x8ur11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152839/original/image-20170116-8806-x8ur11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexander Fleming.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So I sat down on an outcrop of sandstone that formed a natural bench, putting my backpack down next to me. A brief burst of rain brought a bunch of critters out from their hiding places to drink; an astonishing spectacle. When the sun returned, I felt ready to carry on. I picked up my backpack – and saw the beautiful, nearly complete fossilised therapsid skeleton it had been covering.</p>
<p>It was 30cm long and in great condition, and it has been right next to me, under my backpack all the time ! I couldn’t contain my enthusiasm, exclaiming, “How lucky am I?”. And that’s when I started thinking about “luck” in the context of scientific discovery. Was I that lucky after all?</p>
<h2>Serendipity and science</h2>
<p>Bruce and Michael, two experts in their field, had chosen our prospecting spot carefully based on what they knew. They had sent out a complete team of palaeontologists who knew what to look for. This doesn’t look like luck to me: it was probability in action. </p>
<p>This is the very essence of what we call serendipity: the art of creating the good intellectual, scientific and experimental context for a “fortuitous” discovery to happen. Fleming may well have discovered penicillin by chance, but the conditions were right because he had all the equipment and specimens he needed.</p>
<p>Becquerel would never have realised what he’d found if he hadn’t been carefully studying natural fluorescence. His existing knowledge allowed him to recognise a major discovery.</p>
<p>Maybe I discovered this skeleton by chance – or perhaps I found it because that was what we were looking for, in the right place and with the right people.</p>
<p>My humble fossil was certainly far from the level of Fleming and Becquerel’s discoveries. But it offered a valuable reminder that pure luck can’t account for scientific breakthroughs. Hours of work, and countless people and money are invested to create the right opportunity for discoveries to happen. Serendipity happens when scientists create their own luck.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71346/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julien Benoit receives funding from PAST and its scatterlings projects; the NRF; and the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences (CoE in Palaeosciences).</span></em></p>Good science isn’t rooted in chance. It’s based on people with expertise being in the right place at the right time, equipped with enough knowledge to know what they’re looking at.Julien Benoit, Postdoc in Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/652462016-09-28T16:19:01Z2016-09-28T16:19:01ZAfrica’s MeerKAT ‘first light’ images have blown all expectations<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138487/original/image-20160920-12453-b7emdu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.ska.ac.za/gallery/meerkat/">SKA South Africa</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Something hugely important is happening in a vast, quiet stretch of South Africa’s Northern Cape province. A new radio telescope operating at just a quarter of its full power is revealing the universe’s secrets one image at a time.</p>
<p>MeerKAT will ultimately become part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope. Once it’s completed some time in the decade following 2020, the SKA will be the <a href="http://www.space.com/15883-worlds-largest-radio-telescope-ska-array.html">world’s largest radio telescope</a>. The project is shared between South Africa and Australia. It’s not just its size that sets it apart from other radio telescopes but also sensitivity and speed. At full power, the SKA <a href="http://www.space.com/15883-worlds-largest-radio-telescope-ska-array.html">will have</a> 50 times the sensitivity and 10,000 times the survey speed of the best existing telescopes.</p>
<p>It will see more, and see it faster. It can explore the universe and answer some of humanity’s biggest scientific questions – like, “Is there life out there?” and “How are galaxies formed?”</p>
<p>All of this lies some time in the future. But already, MeerKAT is yielding remarkable results. </p>
<h2>Off to a good start</h2>
<p>MeerKAT currently comprises 16 dishes (of an eventual 64) functioning as a telescope array – a radio telescope works by effectively linking smaller dishes together and operating as one. </p>
<p>These 16 dishes, known collectively as Array Release 1, recently embarked on their first assignment. It was an amazing start: Array Release 1 found 1300 galaxies in a patch of sky that was previously thought to contain only 70. That’s hundreds of new galaxies to be studied and understood, and greatly adds to our knowledge of the universe. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138501/original/image-20160920-12475-o5eluu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138501/original/image-20160920-12475-o5eluu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138501/original/image-20160920-12475-o5eluu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138501/original/image-20160920-12475-o5eluu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138501/original/image-20160920-12475-o5eluu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138501/original/image-20160920-12475-o5eluu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138501/original/image-20160920-12475-o5eluu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">View showing 10% of the full MeerKAT First Light radio image. More than 200 astronomical radio sources (white dots) are visible in this image. Before MeerKAT only five were known (indicated by violet circles). This image spans about the area of the Earth’s moon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.ska.ac.za/gallery/meerkat/">SKA South Africa</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Because MeerKAT specialises in radio galaxies, it can peer through the thick layers of dust that surround such galaxies. Astronomer Michael Rich, who wasn’t part of the study, <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/07/radio-telescope-new-galaxies-meerkat-south-africa-space-science/">told National Geographic</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In some cases, the radio galaxy can have a great deal of obscuring dust, and you wouldn’t be able to see anything – or almost anything – with an optical telescope.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These “first light” images are extremely exciting, whether for seasoned astronomers or ordinary people who crave more information about the world “out there”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w_q6kB2nCdw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The SKA, of which the MeerKAT is part, is searching for intergalactic answers.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Massive infrastructure</h2>
<p>There’s more than <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-science-behind-the-square-kilometre-array-40870">pure science</a> to any project of this scope. It takes remarkable engineering to bring any radio telescope to life, let alone what will become the world’s largest.</p>
<p>Each of MeerKAT’s completed 64 dishes will be 13.5 metres, or about 40 feet, in diameter. The dishes are accompanied by a plethora of cryogenic coolers, receivers, digitisers and other electronic systems.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138456/original/image-20160920-11100-cjw78j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138456/original/image-20160920-11100-cjw78j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138456/original/image-20160920-11100-cjw78j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138456/original/image-20160920-11100-cjw78j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138456/original/image-20160920-11100-cjw78j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138456/original/image-20160920-11100-cjw78j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138456/original/image-20160920-11100-cjw78j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138456/original/image-20160920-11100-cjw78j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of the MeerKAT’s massive dishes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.ska.ac.za/gallery/meerkat/">SKA South Africa</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s a challenge to get all of this equipment to work together in a fully integrated array. That’s why the telescope is being commissioned in phases: it allows any technical problems to be identified and resolved as early as possible. </p>
<p>As the “first light” images reveal, everything is functioning smoothly as the MeerKAT begins its sky-searching work.</p>
<h2>Space for science in action</h2>
<p>One of the important features of the SKA and MeerKAT is that it’s a massive, multinational endeavour. There are around 200 technicians, scientists and engineers working on the project. They come from all over the world and are collaborating with industry to build the technologies, hardware and software systems for MeerKAT telescope. </p>
<p>It’s not just about the construction, though. Scientists are also getting the chance to test their theories using MeerKAT’s infrastructure.</p>
<p>I am part of a team led by <a href="https://www.uwc.ac.za/Biography/Pages/Mario-Santos.aspx">Professor Mario Santos</a> of the University of the Western Cape involved in a large survey that will be conducted with MeerKAT. The team consists of scientists from South African and international institutions. Our goal is to do breakthrough cosmology and study the many new galaxies that will be detected.</p>
<p>Recently a new scientific technique called <a href="http://www.caastro.org/research/evolving/intensitymapping">HI Intensity Mapping</a> has emerged as a powerful and promising probe for cosmology with radio telescopes. It involves trying to map the universe’s neutral hydrogen content.</p>
<p>MeerKAT provides an exciting opportunity to put this science to the test. We’re seeking an extremely weak signal, much weaker than the galaxy and the contributions that the instrument adds to the data. My recent work has involved demonstrating that you can “clean” out all these other contributions to access the very weak hydrogen signal. Once we’re able to locate this crucial signal, we’ll be able to understand much more about the universe.</p>
<h2>Staring at the sky</h2>
<p>It’s not just those who are directly involved in the project who are excited about what MeerKAT has to offer. Just after Array Release 1, about 150 astronomers – two thirds of them from South Africa – <a href="http://meerkat2016.ska.ac.za/programme">met</a> to discuss and update the MeerKAT science programme in Stellenbosch. </p>
<p>Broadly, this programme will consist of two major elements. The first involves approved large surveys of the sky. These will peer into deep space; they’ll range from shallow and wide to deep and small, covering large volumes of space containing many, many galaxies. The images they’ll capture will deepen our understanding of what the universe contains, how it’s structured and how it works.</p>
<p>The second element is open time: time reserved for astronomers to propose new and interesting observations that can then be conducted using the MeerKAT. This encourages more research and could lead to even more of the universe’s secrets being revealed.</p>
<h2>Much more to come</h2>
<p>The “first light” images are just the beginning. Even at a quarter of its full strength MeerKAT – and ultimately the SKA project – seems set to prove that the sky really is the limit for what we can learn about our universe.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65246/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Prina Patel works for SKA South Africa. She receives funding from SKA South Africa. She is affiliated with SKA South Africa and The University of the Western Cape. </span></em></p>What’s particularly exciting about “first light” images from South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope is that they prove Africa is a rising star in the world of astronomy.Prina Patel, SKA Postdoc in Observational Cosmology, University of the Western CapeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/480692015-10-27T10:09:45Z2015-10-27T10:09:45ZThe modern, molecular hunt for the world’s biodiversity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99386/original/image-20151022-8010-1quj9ei.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">New forms of life are discovered in high-tech ways that leave yesterday's natural history collections in the dust.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=114480370&src=id">Detective image via www.shutterstock.com.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The news is full of announcements about newly discovered forms of life. This fall, we learned of a <a href="http://phys.org/news/2015-09-frankenvirus-emerges-siberia-frozen-wasteland.html">30,000-year-old giant virus</a> found in frozen Siberia. Until now, known viruses have contained so little genetic information that people have questioned whether they can even be thought of as living. But giant viruses like this one contain as much information as many bacteria, which are certainly alive, and are so big they can be seen with an ordinary microscope. </p>
<p>Earlier this year, we heard that deep in the ocean, by the boiling hot sulfurous vent called Loki’s Castle after the Norse god, a species called <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32610177">Lokiarchaeota</a> was discovered. It uniquely straddles the three <a href="http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/alllife/threedomains.html">domains of life</a>: Eukaryota, including animals and plants; Bacteria; and Archaea, a domain that includes species pumping out methane in your gut right now.</p>
<p>Not only are new life forms being discovered, but so are entirely new ways of living. In the last week we learned of rich communities of bacteria that <a href="http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/biologists_discover_bacteria_communicate_like_neurons_in_the_brain">communicate</a> with each other electrically, in the same ways as the neurons in our brain.</p>
<p>The way researchers made these three discoveries illustrates how much the modern study of biodiversity has changed in the last 200 years. Instead of visiting pleasantly warm places with binoculars and a butterfly net, we now look for life in places we never would have before, and we use the same molecular techniques that help catch criminals. </p>
<h2>To boldly go…</h2>
<p>Traditionally, the study of biodiversity was carried out by gentlemen such as <a href="http://www.aboutdarwin.com/timeline/time_04.html">Charles Darwin</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/banks_sir_joseph.shtml">Joseph Banks</a>, sailing the high seas of global empires and <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-we-still-collect-butterflies-41485">sending back specimens</a> to be stored in drawers of museums of natural history.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99693/original/image-20151026-18443-198c5dz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99693/original/image-20151026-18443-198c5dz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99693/original/image-20151026-18443-198c5dz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99693/original/image-20151026-18443-198c5dz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99693/original/image-20151026-18443-198c5dz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99693/original/image-20151026-18443-198c5dz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99693/original/image-20151026-18443-198c5dz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99693/original/image-20151026-18443-198c5dz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alvin made discoveries of life at depths that had never been visited before.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/nur07508.htm">OAR/National Undersea Research Program (NURP); Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For this kind of exploration, out of sight was truly out of mind. Until 1977, we had no idea the ocean floor was home to life at all, never mind rich communities including Lokiarchaeota. They were first discovered by the submersible <a href="http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/technology/subs/alvin/alvin.html">Alvin</a> – which wasn’t even looking for life. Its <a href="http://www.divediscover.whoi.edu/ventcd/vent_discovery/">original mission</a> was to study the ocean floor looking for evidence of plate tectonics. As well as finding evidence that the sea floors are spreading, Alvin <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/life-in-the-abyss.html">sent back images</a> of a rich new ecosystem of completely <a href="http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-videos/hydrothermal-vent-creatures">unknown species</a> fueled entirely by chemical energy, instead of solar energy like all other ecosystems previously known.</p>
<p>A fact we now take for granted is that <a href="http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=462">wherever</a> we look for life, we find it, including concentrated acids, fluids as corrosive as floor stripper, in <a href="http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/living-large-in-microscopic-nooks">rock</a> and kilometers beneath the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-lies-beneath-evidence-of-life-under-the-antarctic-ice-18210">Antarctic ice sheet</a>. It can even <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/eu_tef/#.VgageflVikp">survive</a> in outer space (though of course we haven’t identified any non-Earth-originated life – yet).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99696/original/image-20151026-18458-14e4ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99696/original/image-20151026-18458-14e4ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99696/original/image-20151026-18458-14e4ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99696/original/image-20151026-18458-14e4ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99696/original/image-20151026-18458-14e4ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99696/original/image-20151026-18458-14e4ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=588&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99696/original/image-20151026-18458-14e4ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=588&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99696/original/image-20151026-18458-14e4ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=588&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Comparative DNA profiles of 14 people, obtained via PCR.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wellcomeimages/15531328629">Wellcome Images</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Genetic fingerprints</h2>
<p>But what’s amazing about the discovery of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/science/under-the-sea-a-missing-link-in-the-evolution-of-complex-cells.html?_r=0">Lokiarchaeota</a> is that no one has ever actually <em>seen</em> it. Everything we know about it is discovered by the new field of <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3351745/">metagenomics</a>, which allows us to extract fragments of DNA from the environment, read the sequence information and study it with computational techniques.</p>
<p>The starting point for metagenomic research can be anything, including feces, in the case of the <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/109/2/594.full">human microbiome</a>, or a sample of ocean sediment, in case of Lokiarcheota. Ultimately these genetic profiles are known to us only as an electronic string of 1’s and 0’s in computer memory and described to us by mathematical algorithms. </p>
<p>Such molecular and computer technologies are also how modern detectives “use DNA” to catch murderers. </p>
<p>First, we find some DNA in the environment that may be of interest to us, by fishing for it with molecular probes called <a href="http://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/primer-305">primers</a>. Then we can use the Polymerase Chain Reaction (<a href="https://youtu.be/2KoLnIwoZKU">PCR</a>) to make a huge number of copies of the DNA of interest. That allows machines to read the genetic information it contains directly into computer databases. </p>
<p>These digital databases are where biodiversity information is now stored. They’re replacing the dusty drawers of natural history museums, filled with corpses of specimens collected over the centuries.</p>
<h2>Is the concept of species itself endangered?</h2>
<p>Anyone who watches crime shows knows well the detective value of such databases in identifying criminals by allowing the comparison of enormous quantities of information.</p>
<p>It’s the same for biodiversity study. For example, a <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000564">new species of elephant</a> was recently discovered using these techniques to analyze and compare the DNA of living elephants and even DNA extracted from museum specimens of the extinct mammoth. We now know that African elephants that live in the forests are as genetically different from those on the savanna as humans are from chimpanzees. </p>
<p><em>Eschericia coli</em> – perhaps the most famous microbial species of all – provides an example of how the idea of “species” itself is on its way to extinction. Look at one genome of <em>E coli</em> and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2974192/">you will find</a> that more than half the genes may or may not be found in some other <em>E coli</em>. Looking at the sequences, many isolates of the food-poisoning bacteria <em>Shigella</em> look more like <em>E coli</em> and vice versa.</p>
<p>So these days questions of molecular diversity arise, not questions about species number. How and why does gene content change, not just in microbes like <em>E coli</em> but in us as well: we have about 20,000 genes and have recently discovered that at least 200 of them may be <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-genome-study-reveals-certain-genes-are-less-essential-than-previously-thought-a6674001.html">dispensable</a>, given that perfectly healthy people do not have them at all.</p>
<p>How promiscuous is life with its genetic information? We have seen <a href="http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/23469/title/Virus-may-aid-photosynthesis/">viruses borrowing cassettes </a> of photosynthetic information from their hosts. How does our genetic diversity interact with that of the rich ecosystem living in our <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667473/">gut</a> with its impacts on human health? One entire domain of life, the Archaea, has not a single example of a “species” causing disease in <em>anything</em> – <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/archaea-are-more-wonderful-than-you-know/">why</a>? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99695/original/image-20151026-18458-1t808dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99695/original/image-20151026-18458-1t808dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99695/original/image-20151026-18458-1t808dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99695/original/image-20151026-18458-1t808dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99695/original/image-20151026-18458-1t808dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99695/original/image-20151026-18458-1t808dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99695/original/image-20151026-18458-1t808dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99695/original/image-20151026-18458-1t808dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Not a butterfly net in sight in the modern biodiversity lab.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/qiagen/7690578078">QIAGEN</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What do we gain by studying biodiversity?</h2>
<p>We study biodiversity for two reasons that go hand in hand. First, of course, we value scientific knowledge for its own sake. </p>
<p>Remarkable discoveries in pure knowledge abound. We now know that an organism discovered so recently that most people have still never heard of it, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/tiny-ocean-organism-brought-earth-life/">Prochlorococcus</a>, produces 20% of the world’s oxygen. That’s one in every five breaths you take! The research spotlight has recently focused on the <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/gut-bacteria">biodiversity of your gut</a>, an ecosystem at least as complex and interesting as the tropical forest.</p>
<p>Secondly, this knowledge lets us lay claim to the natural world and exploit our knowledge of it. The European study of biodiversity has long had <a href="http://www.britishempire.co.uk/science/agriculture/plantimperialism.htm">imperial</a> motivations. Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark expedition to further America’s Manifest Destiny but ensured it had a pure <a href="http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/lewisandclark/encounters.htm">biodiversity research</a> component as well: <a href="http://fwp.mt.gov/mtoutdoors/HTML/articles/2006/lcbotany.htm">Jefferson’s interest</a> in botany and its applications was well-known. </p>
<p>People have a long history of exploiting the knowledge that comes from basic research. For instance, the molecular detective work that identified <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/health/07nobel.html?oref=slogin&_r=0">HIV as the cause of AIDS</a> has enabled us to turn a dreadful fatal disease into a chronic, manageable affliction. The commercial potential in Archaea is famous and almost unbelievable, as <a href="http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/microbe-matters/a_microbepowered_battery">batteries</a> or <a href="http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/84/20130197#sec-4">optical computer memory</a>, for example.</p>
<p>New forms of life continue to turn up. Most viruses, like HIV and influenza, have about 10 genes. Giant viruses, only discovered in the last decade, have over 1,000, the same order of magnitude as Prochlorococcus. The huge <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130718-viruses-pandoraviruses-science-biology-evolution/">Pandoravirus</a> is full of genes that are unlike anything known – hence the name – prompting the question whether they’re a fourth domain of life.</p>
<p>As the hunt for biodiversity gets ever more technical and specific, get ready for a continuing stream of radical new discoveries. As Hamlet said: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48069/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Nee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Forget the pith helmet and butterfly net. Discovering biodiversity now is much more about metagenomics and the 0’s and 1’s of digital databases.Sean Nee, Research Professor of Ecosystem Science and Management, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/428462015-06-05T15:34:31Z2015-06-05T15:34:31ZExplainer: how does an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider work?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84113/original/image-20150605-8677-1ykfc31.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Supersize symmetry</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Maximilien Brice/CERN</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s not every day my Twitter feed is full of people talking about flat-tops, squeezing and injections, but then Wednesday 3 June was not an average day for the Large Hadron Collider.</p>
<p>The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator and lies in a tunnel below <a href="http://home.web.cern.ch">CERN</a>, the European physics lab just outside Geneva. And on Wednesday it was restarted after two year break for repairs and upgrades, ready to push our understanding of the universe to new limits. </p>
<p>As my fellow physicists crowded into the control rooms and waited for things to get underway, I was at a workshop in France. But I was able to follow the <a href="http://run2-13tev.web.cern.ch">switch-on online</a>. Here’s how things went down.</p>
<p><strong>8.09am. Injection: Billions of protons are loaded into the LHC.</strong></p>
<p>The LHC is a ring roughly 28km around that accelerates protons almost to the speed of light before colliding them head on. Protons are particles found in the atomic nucleus, roughly one thousand-million-millionth of a metre in size.</p>
<p>They are easiest to get from hydrogen, the simplest atom with just one electron orbiting one proton. The LHC starts with a bottle of hydrogen gas, which is sent through an electric field to strip away the electrons, leaving just the protons. Electric and magnetic fields are the key to a particle accelerator: because protons are positively charged, they accelerate when in an electric field and bend in a circle in a magnetic field. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84109/original/image-20150605-8725-9xav1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84109/original/image-20150605-8725-9xav1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84109/original/image-20150605-8725-9xav1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84109/original/image-20150605-8725-9xav1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84109/original/image-20150605-8725-9xav1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84109/original/image-20150605-8725-9xav1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84109/original/image-20150605-8725-9xav1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Big data.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">M.Brice/CERN</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>9.45am. Ramp: Once the LHC is fully loaded, its two proton beams are slowly accelerated up to collision energy, now a world-record 6.5TeV per beam.</strong></p>
<p>Accelerating billions of protons to close to the speed of light, directing them all the way around the LHC, and then colliding them head-on, is a delicate balancing act performed by high voltage equipment and giant magnets. This is an amazing technical achievement. Indeed one of the main applications of particle physics research is in the industrial applications of the technology it develops along the way, from proton therapy cancer treatment to the <a href="http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/birth-web">world wide web</a>.</p>
<p>But for me, the excitement is in the science: the LHC is exploring the universe at the smallest scales. Everything we have learned so far is formulated in the <a href="http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/standard-model">Standard Model</a>, a theory which describes the universe made of tiny particles, and gives the rules for how these particles behave. By smashing some of these particles together at high energy, we are able to test these rules and make new discoveries.</p>
<p>The LHC “Run 1” (2010-2013) provided enough data to test the Standard Model to new levels of precision and discover the <a href="https://theconversation.com/definitely-maybe-evidence-grows-for-positive-id-of-higgs-boson-12790">Higgs boson</a>. This particle was predicted in the 1960s and plays a central role in the Standard Model. But it was almost 50 years before we had a machine powerful enough to discover it. As well as high energy, it needed lots of data: the Higgs boson is a rare thing, and fewer than one in a billion collisions at the LHC produce one.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84110/original/image-20150605-8697-1094eps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84110/original/image-20150605-8697-1094eps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84110/original/image-20150605-8697-1094eps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84110/original/image-20150605-8697-1094eps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84110/original/image-20150605-8697-1094eps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84110/original/image-20150605-8697-1094eps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84110/original/image-20150605-8697-1094eps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tense moments.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Laurent Egli/CERN</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>10.12am. Flat top: Beam energy levels off after reaching the target.</strong></p>
<p>These were tense moments for the CERN team on Wednesday. The LHC was operating at the <a href="https://theconversation.com/large-hadron-collider-is-back-to-change-our-understanding-of-the-universe-again-42775">highest energy ever</a> achieved in a particle accelerator. “Run 2” will collide protons at 60% higher energies than Run 1 by pushing the magnets and accelerators to the limit. We hope this extra reach will allow us to tackle some of the big questions in particle physics.</p>
<p>One of the main topics is <a href="http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/dark-matter">dark matter</a>. This seems to be a new type of particle spread through the entire universe. And with the LHC Run 2 we hope to make it in the lab for the first time. But if the Higgs boson is rare, dark matter is even rarer, and we will need to sort through a lot of collisions before having a hope of finding it.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84111/original/image-20150605-8725-szj84l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84111/original/image-20150605-8725-szj84l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=309&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84111/original/image-20150605-8725-szj84l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=309&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84111/original/image-20150605-8725-szj84l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=309&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84111/original/image-20150605-8725-szj84l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84111/original/image-20150605-8725-szj84l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84111/original/image-20150605-8725-szj84l.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Worlds collide.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">CMS/CERN</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>10.17am. Squeeze: The beams are fine-tuned, and focused at the four points around the LHC where they cross, and the experiments will record the collisions</strong></p>
<p>Almost there. The experiments now need to wait for the all-clear before they can start recording, and we begin studying things that have never been seen before. Still, many of the collisions will not be interesting, as the protons just smash apart without doing anything exciting.</p>
<p>To make matters worse, the rare new particles we are looking for also tend to be very unstable, and decay too quickly to be seen directly. So the job of the experiments is to measure whatever particles do come out of a collision and try to reconstruct what happened, looking for evidence of something unusual.</p>
<p>As well as dark matter, there are many other ideas to test, such as <a href="http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/supersymmetry">supersymmetry</a>, new gauge bosons, quantum black holes and heavy neutrinos, all of which we could reconstruct from the LHC collisions. Part of the joy and pain of science is that a <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-this-the-end-of-particle-physics-as-we-know-it-lets-hope-not-42849">new discovery</a> could come in a matter of days, or a matter of years.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84107/original/image-20150605-8674-1xscz2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84107/original/image-20150605-8674-1xscz2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84107/original/image-20150605-8674-1xscz2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84107/original/image-20150605-8674-1xscz2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84107/original/image-20150605-8674-1xscz2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84107/original/image-20150605-8674-1xscz2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84107/original/image-20150605-8674-1xscz2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Champagne flowing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mike Struik/CERN</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>10.43am. Stable beams: The LHC is now running smoothly, the beams are behaving as expected, and the experiments can start recording data.</strong></p>
<p>Run 2 has begun! Champagne is flowing at CERN. Now the attention moves to analysing the new data, and it’s time for the rest of us to get back to work.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/42846/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gavin Hesketh receives funding from The Royal Society and STFC.</span></em></p>Running the world’s largest particle accelerator requires a lot of energy, but it could reveal the secrets of the universe.Gavin Hesketh, Lecturer in Particle Physics, UCLLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/372172015-02-10T11:19:06Z2015-02-10T11:19:06ZFailure in real science is good – and different from phony controversies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71492/original/image-20150209-24700-101mqc1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The BICEP2 telescope at twilight at the South Pole. The supporting data for the inflation of the universe have also gone off into the sunset.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://bicepkeck.org/visuals.html">Steffen Richter, Harvard University </a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last March, the BICEP2 collaboration <a href="http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2014-05">announced</a> that they had used a microwave telescope at the South Pole to detect primordial gravitational waves. These tiny ripples in spacetime would be the <a href="https://theconversation.com/first-hints-of-gravitational-waves-in-the-big-bangs-afterglow-24475">first proof of the theory</a> known as “inflation,” an astonishingly rapid expansion of the universe in the instants after the Big Bang. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZlfIVEy_YOA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>The result was announced in a paper, a press conference, and a viral video of BICEP2 member Chao-Lin Kuo visiting cosmologist Andrei Linde, one of the inventors of inflation, at his home with a bottle of champagne to celebrate.</p>
<p>Last week, a <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.00612">new paper</a> was released <a href="https://theconversation.com/gravitational-wave-discovery-still-clouded-by-galactic-dust-37106">backtracking on last March’s announcement</a>. The BICEP2 team joined with rivals on the European Space Agency’s Planck experiment, and found that their results were contaminated by dust. The signal is not large enough to constitute proof of inflation, so cosmology returns to its prior uncertain state. Rather than revolutionizing our understanding, the BICEP2 result is just the latest in a long line of highly public flops.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71498/original/image-20150209-24682-1o02qv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71498/original/image-20150209-24682-1o02qv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71498/original/image-20150209-24682-1o02qv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71498/original/image-20150209-24682-1o02qv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71498/original/image-20150209-24682-1o02qv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71498/original/image-20150209-24682-1o02qv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71498/original/image-20150209-24682-1o02qv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71498/original/image-20150209-24682-1o02qv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Oh, those gravitational waves we detected…? Yeah, that could have just been dust.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://bicepkeck.org/visuals.html">BICEP2 Collaboration</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Did the hype hurt or help science?</h2>
<p>Along with general disappointment, the new announcement has prompted discussion of what, if anything, the BICEP2 team did wrong. Many commentators fault them for over-hyping their results to the mass media before peer review. Some even argue that this has dire consequences – astronomer <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/01/30/bicep2-wrong-sharing-results/">Marcelo Gleiser says</a> the announcement and revision “harms science because it’s an attack on its integrity,” giving “ammunition” to those who raise doubts about politically charged areas of science.</p>
<p>Looked at another way, though, the BICEP2 story may in fact be ammunition for supporters of science. BICEP2 shows how science is properly done, and makes it easier, not harder, to detect the pseudo-science of attempts to discredit science for political gain.</p>
<p>We tend to think of science as a collection of esoteric information, but science is <a href="http://chadorzel.com/?p=11">best understood as a process</a> for figuring out the workings of the universe. Scientists look at the world, think of models to explain their observations, test those models with further observations and experiment, and tell each other the results. This process is familiar and universal, turning up in everything from <a href="https://medium.com/biblio/waldo-at-the-galaxy-zoo-e1f7cdecd2d1">hidden-object books</a> to <a href="https://theconversation.com/super-bowl-athletes-are-scientists-at-work-36698">sports</a>. More importantly, we can recognize the process even in cases where we don’t understand all the technical details, and use that to distinguish real science from phony controversies.</p>
<h2>Refining real science versus phony controversies</h2>
<p>Real scientific controversies are widespread and mainstream. The BICEP2 results <a href="https://theconversation.com/has-dust-clouded-the-discovery-of-gravitational-waves-27177">were publicly challenged</a> within weeks, by other scientists working in the field, who quickly identified dust as a trouble spot. While few of the participants were disinterested—most complaints came from scientists associated with BICEP2’s competitors and theorists who prefer alternatives to inflation—they were active and respected members of the community.</p>
<p>Phony controversies, on the other hand, can usually be traced to a handful of opponents, often outside their fields of expertise. Challenges to the scientific consensus on climate change mostly come from engineers and economists, not working climate scientists, and tend to originate in think tanks and lobbying groups, not university research labs. Fears about vaccines can be traced to a handful of thoroughly debunked studies, and are stoked by politicians and celebrities, not medical researchers.</p>
<p>Real scientific controversies play out in the scientific literature, through papers drawing on many other sources of data. Within months of the original announcement, a <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2014/08/039">detailed re-analysis</a> of the data was posted to the physics arxiv (the online repository physicists and astronomers use to share their results), using multiple alternative models to show how dust could explain the results. Others drew on previous measurements to show that BICEP2’s claims were difficult to reconcile with existing data.</p>
<p>Phony controversies tend to play out in the media, through press releases, stump speeches, and polemical writing reshared via social media. Reliable reports from scientific journals are difficult to find, even after chasing back long chains of references.</p>
<p>And most importantly, real scientific controversies are self-correcting. The final nail in the gravitational-wave coffin was a joint paper by both BICEP2 and Planck, combining their data to settle the question. The end result is professionally embarrassing for scientists involved in the original announcement, but they were at the forefront of the effort to resolve the controversy because for real science reputation is less important than the truth.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71517/original/image-20150209-24679-9h4b1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71517/original/image-20150209-24679-9h4b1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71517/original/image-20150209-24679-9h4b1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71517/original/image-20150209-24679-9h4b1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71517/original/image-20150209-24679-9h4b1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71517/original/image-20150209-24679-9h4b1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71517/original/image-20150209-24679-9h4b1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71517/original/image-20150209-24679-9h4b1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The media can perpetuate phony controversies.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cactusbones/4285370145">cactusbones</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>Phony controversies, on the other hand, are endless, with proponents clinging stubbornly to the same positions year after year. Even as their sources are discredited, their conclusions remain unchanged, because phony science is less interested in truth than in selling a conclusion.</p>
<p>Rather than weakening the standing of science, then, the BICEP2 saga should serve to enhance it. While few of us can follow all the technical details on which the controversy turns, everyone should be able to follow the broad outlines of the process. By providing a clear example of real science done the right way, the controversy over BICEP2 exposes politically motivated phony controversies as hollow frauds.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37217/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chad Orzel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Last March, the BICEP2 collaboration announced that they had used a microwave telescope at the South Pole to detect primordial gravitational waves. These tiny ripples in spacetime would be the first proof…Chad Orzel, Associate Professor of Physics, Union CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/313622014-09-29T19:11:14Z2014-09-29T19:11:14ZThe risks of blowing your own trumpet too soon on research<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/59762/original/4t3t948z-1411447248.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Things can and do go wrong when some announcements are mad ahead of time.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/narshada/8691220993">Flickr/Narshada</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH: What do we actually mean by research and how does it help inform our understanding of things? Today a cautionary tale of why you should be careful of some new announcements made in the name of science.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>It was dubbed a “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26605974">spectacular</a>” discovery – even “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26605974">Nobel prize-worthy</a>”.</p>
<p>But the March announcement <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iasqtm1prlI">via a press conference</a> that researchers at the <a href="http://bicepkeck.org/">BICEP2</a> facility in Antarctica had detected the imprint of relic gravitational waves from a period of super-fast expansion in the early universe now looks <a href="https://theconversation.com/has-dust-clouded-the-discovery-of-gravitational-waves-27177">a little shaky</a>.</p>
<p>As an astrophysicist who works on the interstellar medium, I wouldn’t be surprised if the claimed detection eventually all went away. If so, this episode – much like the 2011 faster-than-light neutrinos story (more on that later) – is a telling example of the dangers of “science by press conference”. </p>
<p>The BICEP2 team invited the press to Harvard University to announce their result even before it had been refereed, alongside which they posted a now-infamous video of their champagne-on-doorstep announcement to Andrei Linde, one of the theorists whose work they claimed to have proved:</p>
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<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-peer-review-27797">Peer review</a> – where scientists evaluate the quality of other scientists’ work – may be the “<a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmsctech/writev/856/m59.htm">least worst</a>” system but it is the foundation on which modern science is built.</p>
<h2>Open to review and scrutiny</h2>
<p>Granted, the BICEP2 results were <a href="http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.241101">eventually published</a> in a June edition of the journal Physical Review Letters – three months after the the initial announcement – and some would argue that putting it in the public spotlight involved being scrutinised by hundreds or thousands of expert opinions, instead of just one. </p>
<p>But the claim of discovery in science is a dangerous one, and in my view one best left to the gentle momentum built up over time as a result is confirmed by others and its importance understood.</p>
<p>At the very least it deserves waiting until the refereeing process has been completed, if only to avoid the embarrassment of the whole team should the result not hold up.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s not just in physics that the temptation of science by press conference or by press release exists – some notable recent examples include successfully <a href="http://embor.embopress.org/content/7/12/1193">cloning a human baby</a>.</p>
<figure>
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<p>Another press release announcement that caught the media’s attention was that Oreos chocolate biscuits are <a href="http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2013/10/28/the-disturbing-trend-of-science-by-press-release/">as addictive as cocaine</a> – but I’ll examine a couple of examples from my own field in detail.</p>
<h2>BICEP2: flexed or flabby?</h2>
<p>The issue with BICEP2 was a fairly simple one — to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the relic radiation from the <a href="http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/">Big Bang</a> that fills the universe at microwave wavelengths, you have to first subtract the glow of our own galaxy in the same wavelengths.</p>
<p>Take for example the recent maps (below) of the sky in microwaves from the European Space Agency’s <a href="http://sci.esa.int/planck/">Planck</a> satellite.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/58544/original/6mg2z82d-1410244187.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/58544/original/6mg2z82d-1410244187.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/58544/original/6mg2z82d-1410244187.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58544/original/6mg2z82d-1410244187.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58544/original/6mg2z82d-1410244187.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58544/original/6mg2z82d-1410244187.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58544/original/6mg2z82d-1410244187.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58544/original/6mg2z82d-1410244187.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ESA and the Planck Collaboration</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The big red stripe is the microwave radiation from gas in the Milky Way, which has nothing to do with the microwave radiation from the early universe.</p>
<p>Subtracting this reveals (below) the small fluctuations in temperature from just after the Big Bang, which are the seeds of the galaxies that we see today.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/58542/original/cgwk7jb8-1410243977.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/58542/original/cgwk7jb8-1410243977.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/58542/original/cgwk7jb8-1410243977.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58542/original/cgwk7jb8-1410243977.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58542/original/cgwk7jb8-1410243977.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58542/original/cgwk7jb8-1410243977.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58542/original/cgwk7jb8-1410243977.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/58542/original/cgwk7jb8-1410243977.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ESA and the Planck Collaboration</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A similar procedure applies to the observations of polarised light that was the basis of the claimed gravitational wave detection from BICEP2.</p>
<p>Polarised microwave light in our galaxy is produced by dust grains that spin on their axes and align like mini-compasses with the interstellar magnetic field. </p>
<p>Because the grains all line up in a similar direction this produces polarised light — precisely the kind of polarised light also produced by gravitational waves in the early universe. </p>
<h2>Now comes the tricky bit</h2>
<p>In subtracting the galaxy, the devil is in the details. The interstellar medium is a complicated place, full of turbulent, messy gas.</p>
<p>Understanding the foreground emission is therefore a complicated business, and one that requires very detailed maps of the galaxy itself (we have a saying in astronomy: “one person’s annoying foreground is another’s data”).</p>
<p>This is precisely what the Planck mission has been doing — so much so that the best results out of Planck for the first year or two were the exquisite maps they released of the gas and dust in the Milky Way, nothing to do with the cosmic microwave background.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/59692/original/mpmb9dzt-1411364241.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/59692/original/mpmb9dzt-1411364241.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/59692/original/mpmb9dzt-1411364241.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59692/original/mpmb9dzt-1411364241.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59692/original/mpmb9dzt-1411364241.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59692/original/mpmb9dzt-1411364241.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59692/original/mpmb9dzt-1411364241.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59692/original/mpmb9dzt-1411364241.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The sun sets behind BICEP2 (in the foreground) and the South Pole Telescope (in the background).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://bicepkeck.org/visuals.html">Steffen Richter, Harvard University</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By contrast, detailed maps of the dust polarisation from the Milky Way is precisely what the BICEP2 team were missing, so they had to rely on models of the dust emission to do the subtraction rather than actual maps.</p>
<p>So what? Well, it turns out they may have underestimated the foreground emission from dust, and therefore over-estimated the significance of any claimed gravitational wave detection.</p>
<p>Happily for science, we’ll be able to resolve this fairly soon: accurate maps of the polarised dust emission are exactly what the Planck team have been constructing, so they’ll be able to do a much better job of subtracting the foreground.</p>
<p>Indeed, Planck maps of the foreground dust emission, though not yet covering the patch of sky observed by BICEP2, are already being used to refine the foreground estimates, and these revised estimates are what is casting doubt on the claimed detection.</p>
<h2>The need for quality control</h2>
<p>Of course this is not the only case of scientists making their announcement too soon, before the research has been put forward for review.</p>
<p>Back in 2011 a team of physicists in Europe called a press conference to announce that they had measured neutrinos <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/09/neutrinos-travel-faster-light-according-one-experiment?ref=hp">travelling faster than the speed of light</a>.</p>
<p>The claim made <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos">headlines</a> around the world because such as result would be in contravention of Einstein’s special theory of relativity that nothing could travel faster than light.</p>
<p>One prominent UK physicist and broadcaster, <a href="http://www.jimal-khalili.com/">Jim Al-Khalili</a>, even promised to eat his boxer shorts if the results were found to be true.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/59690/original/j5zjxcrr-1411363627.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/59690/original/j5zjxcrr-1411363627.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/59690/original/j5zjxcrr-1411363627.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=189&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59690/original/j5zjxcrr-1411363627.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=189&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59690/original/j5zjxcrr-1411363627.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=189&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59690/original/j5zjxcrr-1411363627.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=237&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59690/original/j5zjxcrr-1411363627.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=237&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/59690/original/j5zjxcrr-1411363627.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=237&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://twitter.com/jimalkhalili/status/117160630527594496">@jimalkhalili</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Well the claim was soon tested and <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/2012/06/once-again-physicists-debunk-faster-light-neutrinos">debunked by other teams of physicists</a> who could not repeat the results. That lead to <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2012/03/leaders-faster-light-experiment-step-down">some resignations</a> from the original team that first made the claim.</p>
<p>The erroneous result was eventually blamed on some <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/08/neutrino-researchers-einstein-right">faulty wiring</a> in the experiment’s equipment.</p>
<h2>Let’s bring back humility in science</h2>
<p>Rather than the endless chasing of headlines and press-conference-worthy claims of results I’d like to see more considered papers such as the <a href="http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1965ApJ...142..419P">original discovery paper</a> for the cosmic microwave background, published in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965.</p>
<p>It landed astrophysicists <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1978/penzias-facts.html">Arno Penzias</a> and <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1978/wilson-facts.html">Robert Wilson</a> the <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1978/">1978 Nobel Prize in Physics</a>.</p>
<p>And what was the title of this ground breaking research? Just simply “A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4,080Mc/s” and published in a regular journal. Possible explanations were left to others.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>This article is part of a series on <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/understanding-research">Understanding Research</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Further reading:</strong> <br>
<strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/why-research-beats-anecdote-in-our-search-for-knowledge-30654">Why research beats anecdote in our search for knowledge</a></strong> <br>
<strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/clearing-up-confusion-between-correlation-and-causation-30761">Clearing up confusion between correlation and causation</a></strong> <br>
<strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/wheres-the-proof-in-science-there-is-none-30570">Where’s the proof in science? There is none</a></strong> <br>
<strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/positives-in-negative-results-when-finding-nothing-means-something-26400">Positives in negative results: when finding ‘nothing’ means something</a></strong> <br>
<strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-find-the-knowns-and-unknowns-in-any-research-26338">How to find the knowns and unknowns in any research</a></strong> <br>
<strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/how-myths-and-tabloids-feed-on-anomalies-in-science-29337">How myths and tabloids feed on anomalies in science</a></strong> <br>
<strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-10-stuff-ups-we-all-make-when-interpreting-research-30816">The 10 stuff-ups we all make when interpreting research</a></strong> <br></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/31362/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Price does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH: What do we actually mean by research and how does it help inform our understanding of things? Today a cautionary tale of why you should be careful of some new announcements made…Daniel Price, Senior Lecturer in Astrophysics and ARC Future Fellow, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.