Basic research is vital

Last month I had the flu. I was down with a fever of more than 40°C, four days in a row. Needless to say, it was a public holiday.

While the body is struggling to recover from illness, priorities shift. Survive first. Drink. Eat. Stand upright without fainting. Feed the kids because they can’t do it themselves. Two days earlier, I was thinking of running a half-marathon, now happy to make it to the bathroom. Forgotten the parking ticket and the tax return.

We see the same shift of priorities on other levels of our societies. If a system, may that be an organism or a group of people, experiences a potential threat to existence, energy is redirected to the essential needs, to survival first. An unexpected death in the family requires time for recovery and reorganization. A nation that is being attacked redirects resources to the military.

The human body’s defense against viruses does not require conscious control. It executes a program that millions of years of evolution have optimized, a program we can support with medication and nutrition. But when it comes to priorities of our nations, we have no program to follow. We first have to decide what is necessary for survival, and what can be put on hold while we recover.

The last years have not been good years economically, neither in the European Union, nor in North America. We all feel the pressure. We’re forced to focus our priorities. And every week I read a new article about cuts in some research budget.

“Europe's leaders slash proposed research budget,” I read. “Big cuts to R&D budgets [in the UK],” I read. “More than 50 Nobel laureates are urging [the US] Congress to spare the federal science establishment from the looming budget cut,” I read.

An organism befallen by illness manages a shortage of energy. A nation under economic pressure manages a shortage of money. But money is only the tool for the management. And it is a complicated tool, its value influenced by many factors including psychological, and it is not just under national management. In the end, its purpose is to direct labor. And here is the real energy of our nations: Humans, working. It is the amounts of working hours in different professions that budget cuts manage.

In reaction to a perceived threat, nations shift priorities and redirect human labor. They might aim at sustainability. At independence from oil imports. They invest in public health. Or they cut back on these investments. When the pressure raises, what is left will be the essentials. Energy and food, housing and safety. Decisions have to be made. The people who assemble weapons are not available to water the fields.

How vital is science?

We all know that progress depends on scientific research. Somebody has to develop new technologies. Somebody has to test whether they are safe to use. Everybody understands what applied science does: In goes brain, out comes what you’ll smear into your face or wear on your nose tomorrow.

But not everybody understands that this isn’t all of science. Besides the output-oriented research, there is the research that is not conducted with the aim of developing new technologies. It is curiosity-driven. It follows the loose ends of today's theories, it aims to understand the puzzle that is the data. Most scientists call it basic or fundamental research. The NSF calls it transformative research, the ERC frontier research. Sometimes I’ve heard the expression blue-skies research. Whatever the name, its defining property is that you don’t know the result before you’ve done the research.

Since many people do not understand what fundamental research is or why it is necessary, if science funding is cut, basic research suffers most. Politicians lack the proper words to justify investment into something that doesn’t seem to have any tangible outcome. Something that, it seems, just pleases the curiosity of academics. “The question is academic,” has to come to mean “The world doesn’t care about its answer.”

A truly shocking recent example comes from Canada:

“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value," John McDougall, president of the [Canadian National Research Council], said in announcing the shift in the NRC's research focus away from discovery science solely to research the government deems "commercially viable". [Source: Toronto Sun] [Update: He didn't literally say this as the Sun quoted it, see here for the correct quote.]

Oh, Canada. (Also: Could somebody boot the guy, he’s in the wrong profession.)

Do they not understand how vital basic research is for their nation? Or do they decide not to raise the point? I suspect that at least some of those involved in such a decision approve cutting back on basic research not because they don’t understand what it’s good for, but because they believe their people don’t understand what it’s good for. (And they would be wrong, if you scroll down and look at the poll results...)

I suspect that scientists are an easy target, they usually don’t offer much resistance. They're not organized, for not to say disorganized. Scientists will try to cope until it becomes impossible and then pack their bags and their families and move to elsewhere. And once they’re gone, Canada, you’ll have to invest much more money than you save now to get them back.

Do they really not know that basic research, in one sentence, is the applied research in 100 years?

It isn’t possible, in basic research, to formulate a commercial application as goal because nobody can make predictions or formulate research plans over 100 years. There are too many unknown unknowns, the system is too complex, there are too many independent knowledge seekers in the game. Nobody can tell reliably what is going to happen.

They say “commercially viable”, but what they actually mean is “commercially viable within 5 years”.

The scientific theories that modern technology and medicine are based on – from LCD displays over DVD-players to spectroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging, from laser surgery to quantum computers – none of them would exist had scientists pursued “commercial viability”. Without curiosity-driven research, we deliberately ignore paths to new areas of knowledge. Applied research will inevitably run dry sooner or later. Scientific progress is not sustainable without basic research.

As your mother told you, if you have a fever, watch your fluid intake. Even if you are tired and don’t feel like moving a finger, drink that glass of water. The woman with the flu who didn’t drink enough today is the woman in the hospital on an IV-drip tomorrow. And the nation under economic pressure who didn’t invest in basic research today is the nation that will wish there was a global IV-drop for their artery tomorrow.

And here’s some other people saying the same thing in less words [via Steve Hsu]:



I know that on this blog a post like this preaches to the choir. So today I have homework for you. Tell your friends and your neighbors and the other parents at the daycare place. Tell them what basic research is and why it’s vital. And if you don’t feel like talking, send them a link or show them a video.

The Enantiomers’ Swimming Competition

Image Source.

The spatial arrangement of some large molecules can exist in two different versions which are mirror images of each other, yet their chemical composition is entirely identical. These mirror versions of molecules are said to have a different “chirality” and are called “enantiomers.” The image to the right shows the two chiralities of alanine, known as L-alanine and D-alanine.

Many chemical reactions depend not only on the atomic composition of molecules but also on their spatial arrangement, and thus enantiomers can have very different chemical behaviors. Since organisms are not chirally neutral, medical properties of drugs made from enantiomers depend on which chirality of the active ingredient is present. One enantiomer might have a beneficial effect, while the other one is harmful. This is the case for example for Ethambutol (one enantiomer treats tuberculosis, the other causes blindness), or Naproxen (one enantiomer treats arthritis pain, the other causes liver poisoning).

The chemical synthesis of molecules however typically produces molecules of both chiralities in approximately equal amounts, which creates the need to separate them. One way to do this is to use chemical reactions that are sensitive to the molecules’ chirality. Such a procedure has the disadvantage though that it is specific to one particular molecule and cannot be used for any other.

Now three physicists have shown, by experimental and numerical analysis, that there may be a universal way to separate enantiomers

Separation of chiral colloidal particles in a helical flow field
Maria Aristov, Ralf Eichhorn, and Clemens Bechinger
Soft Matter, 2013,9, 2525-2530 

It’s strikingly simple: chiral particles swim differently in a stream of water that has a swirl to it. How fast they travel with the stream depends on whether their chirality is the same or the opposite of the water swirl’s orientation. Wait far enough downstream, and the particles that arrive first will almost exclusively be the ones whose chirality matches that of the water swirl.

They have shown this as follows.

Molecules are typically of the size of some nanometers or so, and the swimming performance for molecules of different chirality is difficult to observe. Instead, the authors used micrometer-sized three-dimensional particles made of a type of polymer (called SU-8) by a process called photolithography. The particles created this way are the simplest example of configurations of different chirality. They labeled the right-handed particles with a blue fluorescent dye, and the left-handed particles with a green fluorescent dye. This allows taking images of them by a fluorescent microscope. Below you see a microscope image of the particles

Next you need a narrow channel through which water flows under some pressure. The swirl is created by gratings in the wall of the channel. The length of this channel is about a meter, but its height and width is only of the order 150 μm. Then you let bunches of the mixed chiral particles flow through the channel and photograph them on a handful of locations. From the amount of blue and green that you see in the image, you can tell how many of each type were present at a given time. Here’s what they see (click to enlarge)

This figure is an overlay of measurements at 5 different locations as a function of time (in seconds). The green shade is for molecules with the chirality that matches the water swirl orientation, the blue shade is for those with the opposite chirality. They start out, at x=32.5mm, in almost identical concentration. Then they begin to run apart. Look at the left tail of the x=942.5 mm measurement. The green distribution is almost 200 seconds ahead of the blue one.

If you aren’t impressed by this experiment, let me show you the numerical results. They modeled the particles as rigidly coupled spheres in a flow field with friction and torque, added some Gaussian white noise, and integrated the equations. Below is the result of the numerical computation for 1000 realizations (click to enlarge)

I am seriously amazed how well the numerical results agree with the experiment! I’d have expected hydrodynamics to be much messier.

The merit of the numerical analysis is that it provides us with understanding of why this separation is happening. Due to the interaction of the fluid with the channel walls, the flow is slower towards the walls than in the middle. The particles are trying to minimize their frictional losses with the fluid, and how to best achieve this depends on their chirality relative to the swirl of the fluid. The particles whose chirality is aligned with the swirl preferably move towards the middle where the flow is faster, while the particles of the opposite chirality move towards the channel walls where the flow is slower. This is what causes them to travel at different average velocities.

This leaves the question whether this study of particles of micrometer size can be scaled down to molecules of nanometer size. To address this question, the authors demonstrate with another numerical simulation that the efficiency of the separation (the amount of delay) depends on the product of the length of the channel and the velocity of the fluid, divided by the particle’s diffusion coefficient in the fluid. This allows one to estimate what is required for smaller particles. If this scaling holds, particles of about 120 nm size could be separated in a channel of about 3cm length and 3.2 μm diameter, at a pressure of about 10⁸ Pa, which is possible with presently existing technology.

Soft matter is not anywhere near by my area of research, so it is hard for me to tell whether there are effects at scales of some hundred nanometers that might become relevant and spoil this simple scaling, or whether more complicated molecule configurations alter the behavior in the fluid. But if not, this seems to me a tremendously useful result with important applications.

Money Talks

The Federation of American Scientist reports in a summary about Technology Collection Trends in the U.S. Defense Industry that spies have been embedding tiny transmitters in Canadian coins:

'On at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006, cleared defense contractors’ employees traveling through Canada have discovered radio frequency transmitters embedded in Canadian coins placed on their persons.' (p. 32)

See, that's what technological progress is good for.

More Info

• Washington Times:
  Foreign spy activity surges to fill technology gap


• Globe and Mail:
  If you're a spy, Canadian money talks


• Canada.com:
  Spies embedding tiny transmitters in Canadian coins, U.S. report says

Thanks to Kerstin for the interesting info.