Some heroes wear lab coats, not capes

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/02/2022 (1298 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

QUICK quiz: name three living scientists.

Sorry contestants, no points will be given for naming the stars of the Oscar-nominated movie Don’t Look Up. They’re not real scientists. They’re actors portraying fictional scientists.

Admittedly, the quiz would be easier to answer if it asked for the names of actors, musicians, politicians or authors. And the Winnipeg Jets are so well-known that even children can name their favourite players, as well as the players’ positions and the numbers on their backs.

But scientists? Most of us are hard-pressed to identify any of the innovative giants who work tirelessly to discover ways to improve our heath and the health of our planet.

Perhaps during this current convergence of bleak events — Russia waging war, a pandemic that is dragging on and a particularly harsh Manitoba winter — we need purveyors of optimism. And recent achievements by scientists certainly offer encouraging alternatives to doom and gloom.

A timely example are the masterminds who worked together to create and evaluate COVID-19 vaccines with unprecedented speed. Global urgency was the taskmaster that drove them to find a safe way to develop and authorize vaccines in about a year, a process that usually takes eight to 10 years.

Here’s an unnerving question: where would we be today if these COVID-19 scientists hadn’t found a way to speed things up? We’d be without effective vaccines. In other words, we’d be in big trouble. We would be entering the third year of a pandemic without the shield of vaccines, and death rates and social disruption would be unimaginably higher.

Beyond the genuises who found a way to accelerate the testing of COVID-19 vaccines, there are plenty of scientists in other areas whose work also has the potential to help many people. They include surgeons in Baltimore, Md., who transplanted a pig’s heart into a human last month, the first time it’s been done successfully.

It’s taken genetic engineers and medical specialists more than two decades to reach the point at which a human’s body doesn’t reject a pig’s heart. Last month’s breakthrough meant eliminating three pig genes that are rejected by the human immune system, and adding six human genes that helped the human accept the organ.

Scientists continue to strive to make it more feasible to transplant animal organs, including kidneys, into people. The implications are huge for the many people who in the future might appreciate an animal-donor alternative when the other choice is getting sicker and possibly dying while waiting in a lengthy queue for human organs that are in short supply.

Meanwhile, on Christmas Day space scientists launched the James Webb Space Telescope, which will eventually be stationed about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth. It succeeds the Hubble Space Telescope, and is expected to be about 100 times as powerful, transmitting images of objects that were hidden to the Hubble.

U.S. scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) hope that because of Webb’s unprecedented sensitivity, it will be able to see back to a time when the first galaxies were forming after the Big Bang, which took place about 13.8 billion years ago. It stretches the mind to ponder what they will discover.

In other research news that’s considerably more down-to-earth, scientists from Germany have found a bacterium that eats away at polyurethanes, a particularly troubling type of plastic that is often molded into foam and used in items such as car seats, thermal insulation, running shoes and floor covering.

The discovery, as outlined in the publication Frontiers in Microbiology, was part of a European Union program to find microorganisms that can help turn oil-based plastics into substances that can be broken down biologically.

It would be a big deal if the bacterium leads to a safe way to break down polyurethanes, which are difficult to recycle or destroy, and which release toxic chemical in landfills.

Discoveries such as the four listed above garner excitement when they are finally confirmed in peer-reviewed journals and emerge into the public realm as credible innovations. What the public doesn’t see is the exhaustive behind-the-scenes work that precedes the shout of “Eureka!”

Diligence is an essential attribute for the researchers and inventors who study deeply in their disciplines and work together in a pursuit of knowledge, who build off each other’s insights, who have the doggedness to keep at it even when it takes endless experimentation to forge the path to discovery.

Science is a high calling that aspires to nothing less than solving the world’s problems. When they can’t eliminate the problem, as with the pandemic, they find new ways to help us cope. They are heroes in lab coats, and they deserve our gratitude.

carl.degurse@freepress.mb.ca

Carl DeGurse is a member of the Free Press editorial board.