Three pioneering technologies have forever altered how researchers do their work and promise to revolutionize medicine, from correcting genetic disorders to treating degenerative brain diseases.
It takes time to see which finding might be a golden egg.
Neamov/Shutterstock.com
Basic research can be easy to mock as pointless and wasteful of resources. But it’s very often the foundation for future innovation – even in ways the original scientists couldn’t have imagined.
Astronaut Cady Coleman harvests one of our plants on Space Shuttle Columbia.
NASA
Plants on the International Space Station must figure out how to grow in a completely novel environment. Their adaptability hints at how they’ll react to changes here on Earth – or in future space outposts.
Multiple fluorescent proteins illuminate the cells in a human brainstem.
Jeff Lichtman/Harvard University
First found in jellyfish, but now inserted into all kinds of organisms, GFPs illuminate biological structures and processes that researchers otherwise couldn’t see.
What happens inside plant cells? How can we see proteins in living cells that aren’t even visible with a microscope? This was a problem in plant cell biology until the discovery of a fluorescent jellyfish…
The molecule that causes the eel to glow when blue light is shone on it is unlike any found in other living organisms.
Akiko Kumagai & Atsushi Miyawaki
Luc Henry, EPFL – École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
Researchers have discovered a fluorescent protein in a Japanese eel consumed as a popular sushi snack. The discovery could help develop simpler and more sensitive tests to detect jaundice and other diseases…