Salon.com > William Speed Weed

Nobel dude

Wed, 29 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

"Take all the MVPs from professional baseball, basketball and football. Throw in a dozen favorite movie stars and a half-dozen rock stars for good measure, add all the television anchor people now on the air and collectively we have not affected the current good or the future welfare of mankind as much as Kary Mullis." -- Ted Koppel, on ABC's "Nightline"

At the Inventors Hall of Fame, Kary Mullis' work stands with that of Louis Pasteur and Guglielmo Marconi. Every research university in the country has tens, if not hundreds, of the machines that run on his ideas. Somewhere in Mullis' home is a round medal with a bas-relief of Alfred Nobel, representing the highest honor in science, one shared by the likes of Albert Einstein, James Watson and Francis Crick.

That's because Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a technique that makes a billion copies of one tiny gene, thereby allowing scientists to study that gene in great depth. As the historic Human Genome Project pulls into its home stretch, physics passes on to biology the mantle of most revolutionary science. In the last century we conquered the atom; now we will conquer the gene. And we will do it with PCR.

Timothy Ferris

Tue, 21 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Five hundred years ago, philosophers thought the universe was a few hundred
thousand kilometers across (with the Earth at the center). These days, scientists estimate the observable universe to be about 15 billion light-years across (with the Earth at the center of nothing because the universe has no
center). That's a change of 14 billion trillion kilometers in 500 years.
Do the math and you discover that our conception of the cosmos has expanded
at a rate of about one light-year per second over the past half-millennium.

Science is fast.

It is also frighteningly accurate: Using equations provided by 16th
century astronomer Johannes Kepler, we sent a tiny hunk of metal called Voyager on a billion-mile journey to the outer planets and beyond. Our aim in sending Voyager is as accurate as that of a sharpshooter firing a bullet from
Earth and hitting a 1-foot target on the moon. It's not easy to get one's mind around science's achievements, and most of us -- who left science behind
when we lost our high school textbooks -- regard science with a mixture of suspicion and the cold fear that it's generally over our heads.

Slaves to science

Mon, 28 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Sally bounds up the stairs two at a time. She fumbles with the key, then bursts into the lab. With fingers still frozen from the morning air, she takes a tray of hockey-puck-size clear plastic cups out of an incubator. The cups contain fish embryos and water. She drops some of the fluid onto a slide and looks through the microscope. There they are, little spheres with dark paisley inlays.

These particular fish are growing without hearts because Sally knocked out a gene fish need to grow hearts. She can now study this missing gene by watching what doesn't happen in its absence. She had to get the fish out of the incubator at exactly this stage of development -- just as the organs are forming, but before these fishlings die when they discover they have no hearts. Having not left the lab until midnight, Sally overslept the 6 a.m. alarm.

The right stuff for the Red Planet

Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

On a summer's day 30 years ago in her parents' Montana living room, a 5-year-old girl named Dava Newman sat before the television mesmerized by the image of a man bunny-hopping on the moon. Most people would agree: That mission was not just any old "giant leap for mankind," but -- all hyperbole aside -- our greatest achievement in space. But what have we done since? Well, we went to the moon until we got bored, and now we send up the space shuttle, which is as practical as a repair elevator, and about as exciting.

Newman wants more. She's grown up to be an MIT engineer, and she's determined to get us where we really want to go: Mars! She's got a good chance of succeeding: NASA funds a growing force of engineers like Newman who were children when the Eagle landed and who are now eager and capable enough to further our foray into the solar system.

Newman's graduate students, her fellow professors and her NASA astronaut colleagues all praise her for a rare alignment of qualities: She is a bright and incisive thinker; she is a driven, "roll up your sleeves and solve it now" engineer; and she is a collaborator, a team player who disdains the usual competitive stance of top scientists.

I set up President Clinton

Wed, 09 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Seen from the Ferry Terminal, San Francisco's Bay Bridge is gorgeous on a winter's day: The water reflects a luminescent sky, the fishing boats glide by and the bridge connotes strength -- a feat of thinking and doing. Last Thursday morning, nostalgic for my own days of creating political spectacles for Bill Clinton, I watched Sen. Bill Bradley's young advance team set up the press riser and the podium, placing each with precision.

They set up the shot perfectly for Bradley, who was flying in and out specifically for this photo-op; there was no fund-raiser, and no crucial meeting with party big shots. On TV screens around the state, voters were to see a majestic image of Bill Bradley, one that said: I'm honest as a fishing boat, broad and reliable as a bridge, and look, I'm in California!

If only it hadn't rained. The Bradley rally was forced inside a restaurant where cameramen took messy pictures of jumbled bodies. The result? Vice President Al Gore's Los Angeles town hall meeting that day dominated the TV news and next day's papers. Visually quite dull, especially compared to the would-have-been Bradley-Bridge shot, Gore's event was still a cleaner image. I felt sorry for the Bradley advance team. They exist to make candidates look good in the news, and Gore looked better that day only because of the weather.

Show me the money shot

Wed, 09 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Anybody can play armchair critic of the candidates' advance teams. Just remember: All press images of candidates are as visually scripted as a campaign commercial. The location of an event, the angle of a shot and everything that is in that shot -- buildings, bridges, banners and people -- have all been predetermined. Or should have been.

Here's a handicapping of the four major candidates so far:

George W. Bush

Advance Team: Bush has the old party pros working for him.

Ideal Images: Given his loss in New Hampshire, Bush needs to convince us that people want him to be president. He has to steal John McCain's populist look. Crowd events, crowd events, crowd events: overflow situations, packed halls and supporters from all walks of life carrying hand-painted, personalized signs. Also, if Bush has the interpersonal charisma that some reports claim, then advance teams should set up close encounters with supporters and let the press get right in their faces.

Master of the universe

Thu, 02 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Pick your favorite image of an extraterrestrial. Perhaps it's a stumpy green guy with red eyes and purple antennae. Maybe it's that sleek alien with a huge forehead and black eyes that earthlings put on bumper stickers and key chains. It could be Jabba the Hut or Marvin the Martian. Doesn't matter. Imagine he's sitting on, say, the third rock from some star 30 light-years away (the distance of 7 trillion marathons) and peering at the light from our own sun through a powerful telescope. The question is: Can he see us?

No, no and no. He cannot see us. To him, the sun is just a pinprick of light, and the Earth and its eight fellow planets are too dim and too close to our star to resolve. The kind of vision needed to see us would be equivalent to us being able to see someone on Neptune drop a quarter; our green friend Marvin would need a telescope the size of his solar system to actually see the Earth.

So the fact that Berkeley, Calif., astronomer Geoffrey Marcy has been able to detect planets around other stars is, simply, amazing -- both as a technological feat for modern earthlings and as a cosmological double take. Scientists once assumed Earth was a unique locus for life in the universe, but the more planets Marcy finds, the more likely it seems that there are real extraterrestrials out there sitting on them. Forget the science fiction; they may soon be fact.