April 27, 2004
A Cup of Worms... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
I recently visited a European genomics research institute where the managing director rued the day that sophisticated equipment made its way into the lab. There was a time, he said, when graduate students knew how to do all the basic lab work, and now it was more a matter of pushing buttons. He feared they would lose touch with the science, that they might be prone to what the machines told them, rather then what they could see for themselves. In fact, he wondered if there could be errors introduced into science, as a result of this arm's length approach to experiments.
There was something very familiar about what he was saying, and finally it hit me. When calculators were first introduced, there was talk that kids would no longer learn their multiplication tables. Calculators were even covertly discouraged through requirements to "show your work."
This all seems rather dated, thirty years hence, especially when you consider the fact that calculators do a lot more than add up numbers.
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Today, high school math students routinely enter equations on their hand-held scientific calculators. The screen lights up with the function completely graphed, its limits and parameters clearly marked. Years ago, we also worked with the exact same equations. And the difference? Except for simple equations, we never saw what they looked like. They were just too darn complicated to plot. Now even our youngest students can look at equations of all sorts and get a visual sense for exactly what they mean. Press a button, and wonderful math functions appear. The complex calculus of Isaac Newton lives in these tiny little machines, and I can't say that the multiplication tables have taken all that much of a hit.
So, let's give some thought to this new age of science with its leap forward in technology. Not do long ago, a graduate student might have spent several years on a single molecule or a simple set of chromosomes. It took an incredible amount of work to break down all the parts. And while it's hard to admit, much of it was grunt work. That's right. Grunt work. No great science could be done without new data, and there's no other way to get there. And mark my words - the high-tech button-pushing of today's advanced biotech laboratories will ultimately be viewed as primitive.
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This same professor took us then for a tour of his labs. At one point he showed us what he called a "worm distributor." Some of the experiments they were conducting called for placing a single tiny worm in each well of a tray containing perhaps 100 little plastic test tubes.
He told us that graduate students used to have the job of meticulously pipetting a single miniscule worm in liquid solution into each small hole. It was back-aching work, prone to problems, difficult to sustain and compromising to the experiments. This simple robotics set-up now let them fill a container with "a cup of worms," and then you loaded a whole stack of trays. Before you knew it, there was one worm in each tube.
Who in heaven's name would want to go back to the good old days?
It seems to me that the job of science today is not only to make significant breakthroughs, but also to deal with how we ensure that good science - and better scientists - come from each great leap forward in technology.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
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