What Science Did Last Summer

June Brood 10 of the periodical cicada reappeared in the eastern United States. Brood 10 is the largest group of these remarkable insects, which are known (erroneously) in American folklore as 17-year locusts. For 17 years the nymphs linger beneath the surface of the soil. Then millions emerge, climb the nearest tree, shed their skins, sing love songs that would do credit to a heavy-metal rock group, mate, lay eggs, and die. A few weeks later the new nymphs drop to the ground from which their parents came and burrow in to drowse and snack on roots for another 17 years. Astonishingly, much of our information about the periodical cicadas seems to come from investigations done early in this century by a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher who carried out his studies in his own backyard. A pleasant nostalgic picture of the long-gone gentleman-scientist, but it couldn’t be a clearer reminder of what’s happened to science in more recent times. Since then, although they have the longest periodicity in the insect world and no one knows what drives their unique biological clock, we have learned little about them. These creatures couldn’t be more alien if they arrived in a UFO. Indeed, it’s a pity they didn’t. If they rained down from tbe sky instead of crawling up from the earth, we would be all atwitter, swarming over them in a moment with calipers and chromatography and karyotyping. Instead, their startling numbers and their brief sexual clamor are simply a transient suburban nuisance, at best provoking mild curiosity. They don’t do much damage, so there’s no immediate practical stimulus for finding out more about them. Their only claim on scientific attention is that they are strange and amazing. Their 17-year cycle also works against them. Said an entomolo- gist at the Agricultural Research Service, “If our scientific productivity depends on a crit- ter that emerges only once in 17 years. there’s going to be a long dry spell between the papers we publish.” July The gigantic Washington meeting on superconductivity was a source of good news and had news. The scientists were, on the whole, careful, cautious, and bent on reducing the hype that has surrounded this sexy subject. Translating recent discoveries into technology is going to take some doing, and they made that point repeatedly. But the Reagan administration used the occasion to impose on science its continuing taste for making foreign policy with the gut rather than the head. It barred foreign scientists and foreign government officials from the meeting. Ignore for the moment the question of violating the tenet of open communication on which science likes to think it is based. Think instead of simple practicality. Is it possible to control information in this way? Of course not. Scientists will communicate anyway by phone, by post, by modem, and by going to other meetings from which foreigners are not barred. In addition, the conference was videotaped. Furthermore, press coverage was extensive, and foreign journalists not forbidden the premises. What did the administration think it was accomplishing?’ Let us be charitable and attribute this mystifying irrationality to July’s recordbreaking, stupefying, non-stop heat. Let us hew desperately to the hope that it doesn’t mean science is daily more hostage to politics. August Well, how much will mapping the human genome cost? A meeting sponsored by Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment spent a day trying to attach some semi-real numbers to various tasks therein. As they soon discovered, the cost is going to depend on how the project is organized. Thus, developing a 5-centimorgan map of restriction fragment length polymorphisms will cost $11-$15 million. But voices were raised in support of a 1 cM map, deemed much more mercifully useful. Price tag unknown, but probably orders of magnitude larger. The cost of developing a physical map, a library of all the DNA in the human genome, (perhaps $50 million) looks trivial compared with the possible cost of storing it ($250 million). Attendees hastily reduced that alarming figure to $60 million, mostly by assuring each other that new technology will work magic on expenses. Developing this new technology—for tasks such as automated DNA handling, mapping, sequencing and data acquisition— is, of course, a key to convincing the funders that this project can be done much more cheaply than the original estimate of $3 billion. No one seems to have a clear idea, though, how much money will have to be spent in order that money can be saved. Perhaps, it was suggested, a 25 percent surcharge for new instrumentation, enzymology, reagents, etc., and another 10-15 percent for computing. Also unsettled are infrastructural questions that will bear on costs. Examples: should the project be fielded through the grant system and done in academic and government labs, or by production technicians under contract? Should it be loosely organized among several agencies or coordinated under a kind of czar of the human genome? If there is anyone out there who thought whether to move ahead with the human gene map was still a topic for debate, abandon hope. But you still have a chance to vote on how—and how much. Welcome back. Powledge is editor of THE SCIENTIST.

What Science Did Last Summer

June

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of