One of the most readable overviews of the state of science can be found in the article "So Much More to Know" published a few weeks ago in a special edition of Science. For this article, scientists were surveyed on what they saw as the most important unanswered questions in science which could conceivably be solved on the 5-20 year time scale. You may read it here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5731/78b. Maybe I better rephrase that. You should read it here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5731/78b. Or better yet, run, do not walk to your nearest internet enabled computer and READ IT!
Why the fuss? If you read this blog occasionally you will realize that one of its purposes, in addition to whatever happens to strike me as interesting, is to educate and provide perspective on science. This article gives a picture of the scientific enterprise in it rawest and most exciting form. It tells us about the unknown in a clear and accessible way. This is the true realm of science, not the ghost of science past you find in a science textbook. These questions will be the stuff of future Nobel prizes and scientific greatness.
I read the article with some relish. It is a wonderful article because it gives a sense of where scientists perceive excitement will be found. For graduate students, hold that thought and try to figure this out for yourself whenever you attend a scientific meeting. You should "sniff the wind" in an abstract sense and see if you can get a feel for the emergence of new paradigms. I will give you two examples from my own experience. In the mid-80s I went to some meetings related to oceanography. At one of those meetings I sat down with a more advanced colleague (he was a Ph. D. student at the time, I was a research assistant) at lunch and we got to asking ourselves what was "new" in the talks at the meeting. This particular meeting was held at a time when the concept of the "biosphere" regulating global climate was "getting traction" as an idea and moving mainstream. For me it was completely and wonderfully new. This notion is still emerging and in some places there remains stubborn resistance (notably the Bush white house).
A second example was two visits I made to PITTCON in the 90s. PITTCON is the premier meeting concerned with analytical chemistry and chemical instrumentation. In 1995, PITTCON was still entrenched in the classical view of analytical chemistry. It was full of atomic spectroscopy, GC, etc. I am not saying there wasn't anything else, but the bulk of what you would have seen there is what you can find in a standard text on analytical chemistry. When I went back a few years later, there had been a sea of change in 4 years. Bioanalysis, DNA sequencing, and other "bio" applications had taken over center stage. This is likely to be the paradigm for many years to come. In other words, people realized that the great unsolved problems in what might be better called "analytical sciences" lie in the direction of biology. Unfortunately, the classic textbooks from which we teach analytical chemistry have not caught up.
The second point I found interesting is a continuation of the status quo in physics. Reading it, you will find the traditional Physics/Philosophy questions about the nature of the universe and dimensions. The "philosophical" position that physics has played in science and life since at least the beginning of the last century (at perhaps going back to Galileo, Descartes, and Newton - Ok, Ok maybe I should say Aristotle and Ptolemy) remains. There are no real surprises there. It is interesting to see this as essentially an old paradigm representing the status quo. What it is missing is the fact that many "traditional" physicists and physics departments have retooled themselves in biophysics while many others struggle to find direction.
A third point of interest is plain as day. Those of you who have not realized that biology is the center of attention, inspiration, and creativity in science need to take a good hard look at this list. Not only are the great problems in biology attracting attention but clearly many people with creativity and imagination have found a home in biological sciences. This bodes well for the strength of the discipline for many years to come. Need I say more? Physics leads the list, but the paradigm this represents is old news while the new focus of imagination is clearly in the biosciences.
The final point was a sense of disappointment and being let down. It is as if they didn't bother to survey chemists. Sure there are one or two (ok maybe three or four) questions that focus on chemistry, but there is a certain spark lacking. Maybe they did talk to a few chemists and they just couldn't give a good account for themselves. What found itself into the list is a set of questions that make you go "huh?" If the best we can come up with to provide 5-20 years worth of excitement for chemists is "the structure of water" and a few other lame notions there is something deeply wrong in the field. It is no wonder that we have trouble attracting students and chemistry departments in places like the UK are being shut down. Let me put it this way. I think of myself as a chemist. I like chemistry. I have worked as a researcher in chemically related fields for roughly 20 years. Even with that background, if someone wrote the definitive paper on the structure of water, I would not give it more than passing interest. I might not even notice. I wouldn't write home. I doubt it would change my outlook on chemistry is any substantive way and I can't imagine making it a centerpiece in my teaching. The question is where are the new paradigms in that question? Even as a chemist I can barely stifle a yawn, call me a Philistine but that's facts. Oh my goodness, let's go out to a secondary or high school to get students excited about the science of chemistry and tell them that we still don't know how many hydrogen bonds between water molecules there are. They are all going to go into medicine. Ok that isn't quite fair since most of our best students want to go into medicine anyway. But, you get my point. As my Ph. D. advisor taught me (he had a unique way of doing this - more on that another day), you gotta ask yourself "Who the hell cares?"
Having come to that conclusion, I decided to spend some time coming up with some questions of my own (not all of them are chemistry oriented). Let me know what you think.
1) Can a chemical sensing system be built that beats a dog? The nose of a dog is a pretty amazing thing. Even in the USA, the center of insane technological approaches to sniffing and screening, when you go through an airport you may find yourself being approached by well mannered dog. There is a reason for that. It means that analytical chemistry can't beat the dog yet for sensitivity, diversity, and cost-effectiveness. Hmm... we have a problem here. I am trying to come up with a question for chemists and here I am taking inspiration from biology. Perhaps I should close up the lab and raise dogs. All kidding aside, what are the unique characteristics of a dog's nose which allow it to beat the best technology the world has to offer. A bloodhound can track a person's scent hours after the fact based on a sniff of clothing. That is simply amazing. I am not aware of a "sniffing" technology that can even recognize the scent of a person, much less track him or her across a field.
2) Is it possible to create a secure operating system for an internet connected computer? Having received a bunch of viruses via e-mail and having noted a spike in the attempts to access my currently "clean" computer I have come to wonder. The triumvirate of virus production, spam, and money seems to be winning the war at present. While there are incremental approaches to new threats that protect for a time, I have not seen any fundamental thoughts on whether it would be possible to create a secure operating system. I suspect this one requires an interdisciplinary answer. My sense is that it will be no more possible to wipe out computer viruses (and related) that it has been to wipe out bacterial disease. I am not convinced that the latter is impossible, but, under the current policies of anti-biotic use, it is unlikely to be anytime soon. I think an analagous situation applies to computers as well.
3) This one is a pretty abstract question, but bear with me. What is the future of dissipative systems in chemistry? What is this guy talking about? A scientist contemplating the characteristics of chemical clocks and related reactions (look up the Beluzov-Zhabotinsky reaction) in the 1960s came up with the concept of dissipative systems. These are structures that form spontaneously in systems far from equilibrium. Perhaps the most approachable dissipative system is the whirlpool that forms in the sink when you pull out the plug. Some argue that the formation of dissipative structures is a characteristic of systems which are far from equilibrium. In undergraduate chemistry, we primarily teach about the thermodynamics of systems close to equilibrium. Systems far from equilibrium appear to have fundamentally different behavior and there seems to be a self organizing principle in at least some of them. This is really a pretty exciting concept and it is to our discredit that we do not try harder to teach these fascinating concepts. As a result, I am convinced there is much gold to be mined if someone were able to harness the self organizing principles in new ways.
So, those are some of the questions that come to mind. Perhaps you have your own questions.
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