Science, quo vadis?
July 1st was Science magazine's 125th anniversary, so to celebrate they had their editors draw up a list of 125 big questions facing science over the next 25 years. I think it's a great State of the Field address as it were highlighting the gaps in our understanding of the world, spanning everything from the stuff that makes up the universe to the possibility of creating artificial life. Like Tom Siegfried notes it's the hard questions that really push the field forward, so this survey of what we don't know is also a survey of where the next breakthroughs in basic science are going to come from. Broadly speaking to me there seem to be two models of doing science - once is the Martin Arrowsmith model of the researcher who dedicates his life to a single problem, the other is the Francis Crick model of the scientist who brings his mind to bear on the most pressing questions, of course not everybody has Crick's genius, so while going for glory you run the risk of ending up with precious little.. So, who's the role model of choice for the budding scientist - Arrowsimth or Crick? Or is there someone twixt the two?
Which leads me to the problem that vexed even Francis Crick - the biological basis of consciousness. This is to me is the Holy Grail of neuroscience, if I had to pick but one problem to solve - this would be it. Like Greg Miller's notes in this essay this is hardly a new problem, but one that has engaged philosophers for centuries. It's starting to move from philosophy into science, aided by studies on patients like the somewhat cryptically named D.F. who is "unable to identify shapes or determine the orientation of a thin slot in a vertical disk. Yet when asked to pick up a card and slide it through the slot, she does so easily. At some level, D.F. must know the orientation of the slot to be able to do this, but she seems not to know she knows.".
Is consciousness limited to humans or are other animals also conscious? I would tend to think so, but no one can seem to agree on a reasonable definition of the phenomenon, it's hard to study something if you're not very sure exactly what it is :p Had this interesting conversation at a conference a while back with this guy who seemed to think consciousness might be related to a sense of time - a realisation that there was a past, is a present, and an anticipation of a future. There's certainly food for thought there, and it's not hard to see how experiments can be devised to test that.
Anyways, of late I've been questioning just how socially applicable science is, I don't have any answers so I'm just going to throw these questions out into the ether. Some of the 25 top questions have clearly been picked for their societal relevance such as Greenhouse gases or HIV vaccines, how socially relevant are the others? Should social relevance of their work concern scientists? What about funding agencies, which are after all accountable to the taxpayer - should they prioritise socially relevant work as opposed to more esoteric / fundamental questions like what the universe is made of? Any thoughts, dear reader?
Which leads me to the problem that vexed even Francis Crick - the biological basis of consciousness. This is to me is the Holy Grail of neuroscience, if I had to pick but one problem to solve - this would be it. Like Greg Miller's notes in this essay this is hardly a new problem, but one that has engaged philosophers for centuries. It's starting to move from philosophy into science, aided by studies on patients like the somewhat cryptically named D.F. who is "unable to identify shapes or determine the orientation of a thin slot in a vertical disk. Yet when asked to pick up a card and slide it through the slot, she does so easily. At some level, D.F. must know the orientation of the slot to be able to do this, but she seems not to know she knows.".
Is consciousness limited to humans or are other animals also conscious? I would tend to think so, but no one can seem to agree on a reasonable definition of the phenomenon, it's hard to study something if you're not very sure exactly what it is :p Had this interesting conversation at a conference a while back with this guy who seemed to think consciousness might be related to a sense of time - a realisation that there was a past, is a present, and an anticipation of a future. There's certainly food for thought there, and it's not hard to see how experiments can be devised to test that.
Anyways, of late I've been questioning just how socially applicable science is, I don't have any answers so I'm just going to throw these questions out into the ether. Some of the 25 top questions have clearly been picked for their societal relevance such as Greenhouse gases or HIV vaccines, how socially relevant are the others? Should social relevance of their work concern scientists? What about funding agencies, which are after all accountable to the taxpayer - should they prioritise socially relevant work as opposed to more esoteric / fundamental questions like what the universe is made of? Any thoughts, dear reader?