Fundamental Research, Precision and All That -- What's It's Use? (March 28, 2008)

In today's Science the editorial by the Editor in Chief, Bruce Alberts, "Shortcuts to Medical Progress" dovetails well with an article by MIT physicist Daniel Kleppner on "A Milestone in Timekeeping" in that both make the case for the importance of fundamental research.

Professor Alberts makes the point: "...scientists still know only a small fraction of what is needed to understand even the simplest bacterial cell. The knowledge gap is of course much greater for scientists trying to come to grips with multicellularity; that is, with the workings of an organism like a fruit fly or a human, in which many billions of individual cells must cooperate to produce an individual.

    "The public and the Congress in the United States, including many of the most effective advocates for increased public funding of the biomedical sciences, appear largely unaware of this knowledge gap or of the need to remove it in order to intervene effectively in most human diseases.

    "I certainly support a head-on assault against diseases wherever feasible. But, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, the shortest path to medical breakthroughs may not come from a direct attack against a specific disease. Critical medical insights frequently arise from attempts to understand fundamental mechanisms in organisms that are much easier to study than humans... For this reason, an overemphasis on 'translational' biomedical research (which focuses on a particular disease) would be counterproductive, even for those who care only about disease prevention and cures.

    "The private sector energetically pursues translational biomedical research in many areas. But only governments (and a select group of foundations such as the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) provide the resources needed for pioneering work on fundamental biological mechanisms. With so many mysteries remaining about the incredibly sophisticated chemistry of life, it is certain that future medical breakthroughs will depend to a substantial extent on research on organisms that are much smaller and easier to investigate than ourselves. This counterintuitive fact may need to be much better conveyed to the public if governments are to make sound investments for improving health." [our emphasis]

Put simply: "It usually helps if you know what you're doing."

Professor Kleppner discusses current work on increasing the precision of the clock.

So, for example, the current time standard, the cesium atomic clock has had its systematic uncertainty reduced a 1,000 fold since it was first developed while much more recently ion-based and atom-based optical clocks have overtaken the "Microwave cesium clock", and while "It will take some time to engineer an optical clock so that it can operate with the reliability and simplicity needed for practical applications, ...once the goal is clearly in sight, this sort of engineering can move speedily."

But why should we care to press for ever greater precision -- unimaginable accuracy?

"The question inevitably arises," Professor Kleppner says, "as to what the next generation of clocks will be useful for. One can point to basic tests such as the constancy of the fundamental constants, and possible applications such as geodesy. However, the best response to that question is simply to note that when atomic clocks were invented 50 years ago, nobody was dreaming of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The development of the GPS illustrates the truth of the adage that revolutionary technologies are likely to generate revolutionary applications."