Credit: iStockphoto
She was very aggressive. At one point I expected her to jab me with a pointy finger, like Sarah Palin chastising a lover of moose. “You shouldn’t try to give us that nerdy stuff about nerves and worms. What we want is the science of Doctor Who. Then we might listen!”
My browbeating interlocutor was a student at the University of Queensland and she was surrounded by nodding friends. I was being taught a lesson in science communication. She repeated the instruction, gave a curt nod for emphasis, then turned on her sharp heel and led her scolding entourage off to their next lecture.
I stood aghast. It’s not nice to be told that your life’s work has been thrown in the garbage bin of history. I had just been talking to a hall full of young people studying various sciences, including medicine, physiology and psychology – ostensibly they were the cream of one of our top eight campuses. What’s more, their professors had provided extracts from my radio program The Science Show as part of the curriculum.
The item the young woman was questioning was indeed a trifle abstruse – like much cutting-edge science – though not that hard to comprehend if you put your mind to it. It was an interview with a young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Boston, U.S., who had just set up a new lab to do front-line investigation of the nervous system. And, yes, it was about a worm. A worm so small they’d actually managed to put it into a microchip.
The worm’s nerves are lit up under a powerful microscope and are carefully cut with lasers, then monitored while they re-grow. This, for me, is the stunning coup: they can actually shut down individual genes to see how they influence nerve repair and offer various drugs to see which will compensate. You can see the next step: if you can orchestrate the genome to make nerves do what you want with worms, why not people?
What’s the point? Well, mainly to rewire injured parts of the central nervous system using sections of the genome that once were involved in development early on when we were babies.
Some of these ideas are expressed in the best-selling book The Brain That Changes Itself by Canadian Norman Doidge, a researcher at Columbia University in the City of New York. Nerve growth in the brain and spinal cord doesn’t cease when we’re mature. Under the right circumstances it’s dynamic. Hence the experiment at MIT. Similar work is being done at the University of Oxford in England, by Gero Miesenböck, an Austrian who has developed ways to visualise and control nerve cells with light.
The great thing about nerves is that the gaps between them, the synapses, communicate in the same way right down to micro-organisms like yeast cells. Nature is deeply conservative, so you can examine microscopic worms and still draw useful conclusions about people. Should I not spare such big ideas from a radio audience, or a bunch of busy students? Should they be treated as consumers, whose choice is paramount, to be given only your sure-fire favourites: dinosaurs, miracle cures, asteroid collisions – and Doctor Who?
Well, I don’t think so. Public broadcasting, like education, is presaged on giving you something you didn’t know you wanted. If we are effective in offering the public what we think is special, you will perhaps trust our judgment, give the idea a fair go, and then accept it’s worth your further attention. The alternative, as the Internet demonstrates, where most of us find only those topics we set out to look for, is that you only ever reinforce what you already know.
This may seem paternalistic. It’s not meant to be: each story I consider to be a joint exploration of a fascinating natural world. Why cover these stories?
In this instance: to understand the nervous system of bugs and humans, so we might one day make the paralysed walk again and maybe even repair a damaged brain. To me, that’s a lot more exciting than exploring the scientific veracity of a fictional time lord from Gallifrey.
Robyn Williams is the celebrated host of The Science Show on ABC Radio National, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a member of the Cosmos Editorial Advisory Board.
changing minds
I have read several accounts by academics and journalists that since using the internet, their thinking and 'information acquisition' habits have changed, and noticed the same thing in my reflex prioritising of information.
If we middle-aged people can notice changes in our own thinking, how different might the thinking be of those who, like my kids, have grown up with the internet in their homes, libraries and classrooms?
What challenges and opportunities have arisen if there are significant cognitive changes?
Could COSMOS and/or Robyn Williams produce a piece on this phenomenon?
Robyn Williams
Creative science fiction like Dr.Who,Star Trek and Andromeda (which used string theory as a means of almost instant travel in real time), not to mention the wide variety of SF books and stories, stimulate the rare imaginative scientists to think outside the square - or inside the TARDIS if you prefer.The science highlighted by Mr. Williams is the Professor Plod type in which the participants pick up somebody else's fixed ideas at a university (which is the exact opposite of a TARDIS) and try to achieve a goal somebody else dreamed of. The worm in a computer chip is both amusing and novel, but does it have any real value? Or is just another way of whiling away time and grants?
It is only fiction...
I love Sci-fi; I write it and it is fun. But as the basis for that - I must love science; If I didn't I would write romances. Even that small worm is exciting - I can take an idea like that and it grows in my imagination and becomes something else; ficton. But without a base of interest in many science's and lots of study I would have nothing to write about; certainly no Tardis would come into my mind. And more importantly that worm might be an exciting medical breakthrough and help many people lead better lives; isn't that exciting enough?
Perhaps it is my imagination that makes me fear something I do not really understand. Articles such as this niggle at me - why I ask, are our children behaving so oddly and I first think the obvious - it is what we put in their minds...then I think no - I would not have been seduced by such banality as I see offered for them on television and the web..and then I get really scared..or would I? I come back to reality...NO I WOULD NOT! At least not for long... I might pretend of course to impress my friends - perhaps that is all it is - they need to mature. However I am not convinced. So then we get back to - what is wrong with them? Not everyone asks these questions - are their parents worried about what is happening? The clue might be they can't always see either; their children are apparently clever and get good marks; they are seduced too. So why are some of us really worried? Until we do work it out... then it is just another interesting idea that might make good fiction and I have quite a few ideas; all terrifying.
why the crack about Sarah Palin?
totally irrelevant. So much for openmindedness.
Williams, look at yourself first.