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[News > Science]
The year ahead: science
Is this finally the year that artificial life will be created?
Ian Sample
The Guardian, Thursday 31 December 2009 Article history
The year ahead is shaping up to be one long celebration for the world's oldest science academy. The Royal Society formed on a dreary night in London 350 years ago, when the acquisition of scientific knowledge was little more than a hobby for amateurs and polymaths. As part of the celebrations, world-leading researchers have been invited to Britain to thrash out the most pressing questions facing science today: what is consciousness? Where did the universe come from? How are we ever going to feed everybody? Whatever the scientists decide, it will reflect the agenda for the next two decades.
Science and scientists have been transformed since the creation of the society and the year ahead will emphasise this. Modern science is more complicated and costly. It is dominated by huge groups, not individuals. It is more international, professional and specialised.
A decade ago, scientists from more than 80 countries began the world's first comprehensive census of sea life. In 2010, they will publish their results, giving us the first global snapshot of ocean life from the Arctic to the Antarctic, via corals, continental shelves and deep-sea vents.
The importance of the Census for Marine Life project is hard to overstate. It will help to predict the future health of the oceans; to spot species on the brink of extinction and highlight spectacular new species that had hitherto gone unnoticed. It will quantify the biodiversity of the oceans and give scientists unprecedented insight into these complex and fragile ecosystems.
The new year also marks the beginning of a critical period for physics. The Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European Nuclear Research Organisation near Geneva, will go into full operation and begin crashing subatomic particles together at unprecedented energies. The future of physics hangs on what scientists find there. The long-sought-for Higgs boson, which confers mass on fundamental particles, is one hoped-for discovery. Before that, Cern scientists might create previously unseen particles that prove a theory called supersymmetry, which pairs every particle in the universe with a heavier twin. Some of these might make up the mysterious and invisible dark matter that accounts for a quarter of the mass of the universe.
If the optimists are to be believed, the year ahead will see tentative steps towards stem-cell-based medical treatments. Geron, the US biotech company, expects to launch its first clinical trial of embryonic stem cells in patients with spinal-cord injuries. Laboratories around the world are racing to make stem cells from patients' skin, a technique that raises the possibility of treating a person's illness with their own cells.
The steady advances in genetics are beginning to bear fruit and will continue in the coming year. The cost of reading a person's whole genome is falling almost by the month, making the technology cheap enough for mainstream use in hospitals. In the year ahead, doctors will use genetic sequencing machines to pinpoint the genetic defects that drive patients' cancers, information that should help them select more effective drug treatments.
Finally, this could be the year that Craig Venter, the American genetics pioneer, achieves his goal of creating artificial life. A mere microbe it may be, but if Venter pulls it off, he will have opened the door to a new and potentially powerful branch of science. Venter's forceful style and taste for competition have seen him cast as the bad boy of modern science but, more than anyone, he personifies the spirit of individualism that has underpinned the success of the Royal Society since its birth.
[News > Science]
The year ahead: science
Is this finally the year that artificial life will be created?
Ian Sample
The Guardian, Thursday 31 December 2009 Article history
The year ahead is shaping up to be one long celebration for the world's oldest science academy. The Royal Society formed on a dreary night in London 350 years ago, when the acquisition of scientific knowledge was little more than a hobby for amateurs and polymaths. As part of the celebrations, world-leading researchers have been invited to Britain to thrash out the most pressing questions facing science today: what is consciousness? Where did the universe come from? How are we ever going to feed everybody? Whatever the scientists decide, it will reflect the agenda for the next two decades.
Science and scientists have been transformed since the creation of the society and the year ahead will emphasise this. Modern science is more complicated and costly. It is dominated by huge groups, not individuals. It is more international, professional and specialised.
A decade ago, scientists from more than 80 countries began the world's first comprehensive census of sea life. In 2010, they will publish their results, giving us the first global snapshot of ocean life from the Arctic to the Antarctic, via corals, continental shelves and deep-sea vents.
The importance of the Census for Marine Life project is hard to overstate. It will help to predict the future health of the oceans; to spot species on the brink of extinction and highlight spectacular new species that had hitherto gone unnoticed. It will quantify the biodiversity of the oceans and give scientists unprecedented insight into these complex and fragile ecosystems.
The new year also marks the beginning of a critical period for physics. The Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European Nuclear Research Organisation near Geneva, will go into full operation and begin crashing subatomic particles together at unprecedented energies. The future of physics hangs on what scientists find there. The long-sought-for Higgs boson, which confers mass on fundamental particles, is one hoped-for discovery. Before that, Cern scientists might create previously unseen particles that prove a theory called supersymmetry, which pairs every particle in the universe with a heavier twin. Some of these might make up the mysterious and invisible dark matter that accounts for a quarter of the mass of the universe.
If the optimists are to be believed, the year ahead will see tentative steps towards stem-cell-based medical treatments. Geron, the US biotech company, expects to launch its first clinical trial of embryonic stem cells in patients with spinal-cord injuries. Laboratories around the world are racing to make stem cells from patients' skin, a technique that raises the possibility of treating a person's illness with their own cells.
The steady advances in genetics are beginning to bear fruit and will continue in the coming year. The cost of reading a person's whole genome is falling almost by the month, making the technology cheap enough for mainstream use in hospitals. In the year ahead, doctors will use genetic sequencing machines to pinpoint the genetic defects that drive patients' cancers, information that should help them select more effective drug treatments.
Finally, this could be the year that Craig Venter, the American genetics pioneer, achieves his goal of creating artificial life. A mere microbe it may be, but if Venter pulls it off, he will have opened the door to a new and potentially powerful branch of science. Venter's forceful style and taste for competition have seen him cast as the bad boy of modern science but, more than anyone, he personifies the spirit of individualism that has underpinned the success of the Royal Society since its birth.
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