#dnaEdit: Terrific science

Trondheim in interior Norway, nearer to Arctic Circle than anywhere else in Europe, will now become a famous name because of two of the three winners of this year’s Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, May-Brit Moser and Edvard. They  have created a research centre of excellence and pursued their passion of researching the brain. There are more interesting facts about this married couple than most glitterati can provide — for example they exchanged engagement rings atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. However, their discovery of “grid cells” in one part of the brain called entorhinal cortex helps show that the brain works through a hexagonal grid to move around.

John O’Keefe, who is the other winner and who had been their post-doctoral research guide — and the Mosers wanted to work only with him — at the University of London had discovered back in the 1970s “place cells” in the part of the brain called the hippocampus. It is the further study of the place and grid cells that will help find causes for the Alzheimer’s, a neuro-degenerative process that starts with the sense of loss of space. 

The physics prize is the recognition of the discovery of blue-light emitting diode (LED), which has led to the “white” light, an efficient and environment friendly bulb that has a work-life of 100,000 hours compared to the earlier incandescent bulbs which used only the green and red light emitting diodes with a work-life of 10,000 hours. The three who got the prize are all Japanese. Two of them, Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano are with the University of Nagoya. The third winner Shuji Nakamura had worked with the Japanese corporation Nichia, which initially funded his research on gallium nitride LED that was important for creating the blue diode light. The company later withdrew saying that the research was costing too much time and money.  Nakamura then sued the corporation for the bonus for his discovery and there was an out-of-court settlement for  US$ 9 million in 2005. 

This year’s chemistry prize has its own tale to tell. The prize has been given for the work on “development of super-resolution of fluorescence microscopy”. In simple language, it is a method to be able to look at the biological structures at the tissue and cell levels. Usually, there are severe limits to looking at biological structures through light microscopy. The fluorescence method is a way of getting round the problem and breaking the barrier. One of the three who have won the prize, Eric Betzig, is a self-described unemployed scientist, who moved from university to corporate research wing, and then returned to his father’s agricultural machinery factory. When what he tried to do at his father’s workplace failed, he could not get back to either university or corporation. But he did not despair. In the true American spirit, he set up a research place of his own. The other two winners are William Moerner of Stanford University, and Stefan Hell, the director of the Max Planck Institute of biochemistry. Hell has a doctorate in physics as well. These scientists did not start out to win a Nobel. What fired them was their passion for science, and even if the prize had not come their way, they would not have missed it. And they have created a niche for themselves and at their research centres reached out to other people. Two of these nine prize-winners had their brush with the corporations but that did not deter them from pursuing their subjects. There are lessons enough here for Indian scientists and policy-makers.