Here is the text of John Allen's talk. His write-up in the Independent is
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/research-matters-cash-for-questions-1737519.html
and his web site is at
http://jfallen.org
""
Thank you for the invitation, and for the compliment. Two terms require definition: "research" and "impact". Let us leave "research" for the moment, but I'll come back to this.
IMPACT What is "impact"?
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Note "also fig.".... Can it therefore mean anything one likes....?
However, collision requires two bodies. So we have to ask; impact of research - upon what? And is the collision elastic or inelastic? Two billiard balls collide elastically. A train collides with a car inelastically, probably. The asteroids that left craters on the moon collided inelastically, probably. Perhaps the impact of science on society is mostly inelastic....
RESEARCH
Please cast your mind back to 1772. The year that Captain Cook (who lived just down the road in Stepney Green) landed on the South Island of New Zealand.
Quote from 1772
In 1772, Joseph Priestley demonstrated that oxygen is consumed by combustion or by respiration using a burning candle, or a live mouse, in a closed glass jar. His discovery pre-dated the term oxygen, which was coined later by Lavoisier20,21. The results were reported in a paper in Philosophical Transactions (of the Royal Society) entitled Observations on Different Kinds of Air:
“...I flatter myself that I have accidentally hit upon a method of restoring air which has been injured by the burning of candles, and that I have discovered at least one of the restoratives which nature employs for this purpose. It is vegetation. In what manner this process in nature operates, to produce so remarkable an effect, I do not pretend to have discovered; but a number of facts declare in favour of this hypothesis...
“One might have imagined that, since common air is necessary to vegetable, as well as to animal life, both plants and animal had affected it in the same manner, and I own that I had that expectation, when I first put a sprig of mint into a glass-jar, standing inverted in a vessel of water; but when it had continued growing there for some months, I found that the air would neither extinguish a candle, nor was it at all inconvenient to a mouse, which I put into it.
“…Accordingly, on the 17th of August 1771, I put a sprig of mint into a quantity of air, in which a wax candle had burned out, and found that, on the 27th of the same month, another candle burned perfectly well in it. This experiment I repeated, without least variation in the event, not less than eight or ten times in the remainder of the summer”.
The author of this paper was Joseph Priestley, after whom Queen Mary has recently named a building (on the dubious ground that he lived in Clapton, near Hackney, for about 18 months, prior to joining the enlightenment "brain drain" by moving, in 1792, to live with his son, in Pennsylvania, one of the soon-to-become-independent American colonies.)
Note that Priestley had an hypothesis - an expectation - which was that plants would injure air, just as animals do, and make it unfit for sustaining combustion or supporting life. His observation falsified this hypothesis. He contributed new knowledge. He had done RESEARCH.
After nearly 240 years, what can we say was the IMPACT of Priestley's research?
1. He had discovered a chemical element - oxygen. The simplest "missing difference" between "good air" and "bad air" is oxygen. What causes "malaria"? Not bad air... but Plasmodium -
2. Priestley had discovered, partly, PHOTOSYNTHESIS - the process by which plants, algae, and some bacteria capture and store the energy of sunlight, and incidentally, fix carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere to make more of themselves. All animals, including ourselves, depend absolutely on photosynthesis as the source of the oxygen in the air we breathe, and as the source of thefood we eat - which is either parts of plants, or parts of animals that have eaten plants.
3. Priestley's discovery is now EMBEDDED in our understanding of chemistry, chemical transformations, and of living things and how they work.
MY RESEARCH
What have I done? I see no way of avoiding a few technicalities.
1. Provided the first evidence that oxygen is consumed in photosynthesis (first shown in 1952 by Alan Mehler) by a reaction involving transfer of a single electron onto and oxygen molecule, producing the toxic free radical SUPEROXIDE. The toxicity of many herbicides - to plants and to animals - can be explained by their passing single electrons on to oxygen to make superoxide. Superoxide is bad news. All the basic processes of biochemistry evolved before photosynthesis had learned how to release oxygen, about 2 billion years ago. Much os subsequent evolution is a succession of "patches" that lmit the damage that free oxygen would otherwise cause.
2. Discovered the reason for the activation, by light, of protein phosphorylation in CHLOROPLASTS. The light -activation is actually an activation by electrons, which are moved by light in the primary photochemical reaction of photosynthesis, and control arises from a particular point in the chain of electron transport that makes the oxygen-evolving part of photosynthesis. This discovery explained a previously-described but otherwise mysterious ability of plants and algae to "tune" their photosynthesis to give high yield, or efficiency, despite otherwise unfavourable changes in the wavelength of light.
3. Proposed a hypothesis for the occurrence of genes, as DNA, in chloroplasts, and so for the phenomenon of non-Mendelian, maternal, or cytoplasmic inheritance. This hypothesis proposes that gene in chloroplasts are turned on and off by electron transfer reactions of photosynthesis, and that this REDOX SWITCH has been so important in evolution that it alone justifies the cost of maintaining a genetic system in the cytoplasm, outside of the cell nucleus.
What am I doing now?
1. Finding evidence for the hypothesis. Recent progress of Sujith Puthiyaveetil in my lab has identified the predicted "ELECTRON SENSOR" - and shown that plants require it in order to switch chloroplasts genes on and off. 2008 paper in PNAS.
2. Looking for ways to test the hypothesis further, examine its predictions, and apply it, to MITOCHONDRIA - descendants of bacterial cells, now within animal and plant cells, which also, like chloroplasts, transfer electrons, in respiration, and which also, like chloroplasts, contain genes for a small subset of their own proteins.
3. Looking for ways to test a connected hypothesis - that mitochondria have a single-electron "leakage" to oxygen, that this initiates ageing in animals, and that "new" mitochondria arise in each generation through the maternal line because mitochondrial genes are switched off in egg cells.
What is the impact of my research?
It has contributed, and will contribute, to become EMBEDDED within our understanding of living things, their evolution, the emergence of complex cells from simpler ones, and, possibly, life on this planet in the first place, from purely geochemical reactions. It will "exclude falsehood".
THE PROCESS OF SCIENCE ITSELF HAS "IMPACT".
Correspondence
Nature 459, 774 (11 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/459774b; Published online 10 June 2009
How science upholds civilization, human rights and democracy
Dick Taverne
House of Lords, London SW1A 0PW, UK
Email: taverned@parliament.uk
Sir
I would like to add two important points to the discussions of C. P. Snow's 'two cultures'
(Nature 459, 10 and 32–39; 2009).
First, it is not ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics that is the most serious gap in the education of many non-scientists, but a lack of basic understanding of how science works. For example, a recent UK survey, Public Attitudes to Science 2008, by Research Councils UK (http://tinyurl.com/o96lwg) showed that, although the public overwhelmingly believes that science makes the world a better place, a strong majority also maintains that no innovation should be licensed unless science has first proved it to be safe. As if it could! The controversy over the mumps–measles–rubella (MMR) vaccine showed that large sections of the public and, worse, the media either fail to understand the importance of evidence or have no respect for it.
Second, science is one of the pillars of civilization and liberal democracy, as that eminent philosopher of science, Karl Popper, convincingly argued. It is, he said, "one of the greatest spiritual adventures man has yet known". Because science rejects claims to truth based on authority and depends on the criticism of established ideas, it is the enemy of autocracy. Because scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, it is the enemy of dogma. Because it is the most effective way of learning about the physical world, it erodes superstition, ignorance and prejudice, which have been at the root of the denial of human rights throughout history.
Perhaps "how science works" is an important impact that science has, and will have, on society, at least equal to the technological progress that follows basic research.
I have a strong feeling that Joseph Priestley, were he alive today, would agree with Dick Taverne.
I know I do.
