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Discoveries involving a laboratory accident, a poisonous snail, and a scientific instrument made of paper are some of the more mysterious, convoluted or complicated discoveries. Wednesday’s progress was rewarded with awards celebrating research that ultimately had a significant, if unexpected, impact on society.
Three teams of scientists won the Golden Goose 2022, an award organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for their research projects that morphed from “Wait, what?” Moments for revolutionary discoveries.
Sudeep S. said: Barrick, CEO of AAAS and executive editor of the Scientific Journals Group: “The Golden Goose Award reminds us that potential discoveries can be hidden in every corner and demonstrates the benefits of investing in basic research to drive the innovation”.
Here are this year’s award-winning findings, highlighting the unpredictable path of science and the benefits of investing in research that may not pay off immediately.
More than a decade ago, Manu Prakash, a Stanford University bioengineer, was in the Thai jungle on a field trip for his anger research when he came up with an idea for a cheap and easy-to-use microscope.
“I saw this $ 50,000 microscope in a wood in the middle of nowhere locked in a room. It was a sarcastic moment. “I quickly realized it wasn’t the right tool,” said Prakash, an associate professor and researcher at the university’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
Why not use this essential scientific tool that can help diagnose devastating diseases like malaria? The carriage was bulky and difficult, required training to operate and was difficult to maintain. Prakash explained that although the device is accurate and expensive, even trained technicians may be wary of using it.
Prakash envisions an inexpensive microscope that anyone can use anywhere but powerful enough to see a single bacterium. Together with his colleague Jim Cybulsky, Prakash created the Foldscope, a flat microscope made of paper and a single spherical lens.
“It took a tremendous amount of engineering. At that early stage, I was sitting next to labs with multimillion-dollar microscopes. We wanted to make a $ 1 microscope. ”
Prakash said people initially thought the idea was a bit silly and that getting funding for the company was a challenge.
Fast forward to 2022. The Foldscope isn’t as cheap as a dollar, but at $ 1.75 to make, it’s a small fraction of the price of most lab equipment. The final magnification of the telescope is about 140 times, which is powerful enough to see the malaria parasite in a cell. The tools have been distributed around the world in an extraordinary range of applications. Last year in India, Foldscope was used to identify a new species of cyanobacteria. The microscope also helped identify fake medicines, Prakash said.
Prakash said Foldscope – and the broader premise of frugal science – has a more important role to play in a world full of misinformation: “I want to put science in everyone’s hands. Make it more personal. We have separated everyday life from the scientific process ”.
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While scientists working in the Philippines in the 1970s, biochemists Baldomero Oliveira and Lord Cruz, Professor Emeritus at the University of the Philippines Diliman, found it difficult to get the right supplies for DNA research.
“We had to find something to do that didn’t require sophisticated equipment because we didn’t have any,” said Oliveira, a distinguished professor at the University of Utah School of Biological Sciences, in a video produced for the Golden Goose Awards.
Oliveira and Cruz devised what they hoped would be a fruitful side project. Cone snails are a common sight in the Philippines and have always fascinated Oliveira, who collected shells as a child. The couple decided to research the nature of the poison the snails used to paralyze their small fish prey.
The team found that the bioactive compounds in the venom were small proteins known as peptides. After moving to The United States and in collaboration with graduate students of the University of Utah d. Michael MacIntosh and the late Craig T. Clark, Oliveira and Cruz learned that some toxic peptides reacted differently in mice than in fish and frogs. It turns out that in mammals the compounds play a role in pain sensation, not muscle paralysis.
“There was an incredible vehicular goldmine,” Macintosh said in the video. He is currently a professor and research director in psychiatry at the University of Utah College of Biological Sciences.
Work on a type of toxin compound known as omega-conotoxin led to the development of a powerful pain reliever, ziconotide, known commercially as Brialt.
Their work on nematodes also changed neuroscience. Other scholars now Explore the possibility of using occult toxins to treat a wide range of diseases, including addiction, epilepsy and diabetes.
The most famous laboratory accident in the history of science, when mold contaminated one of Alexander Fleming’s petri dishes, led to the discovery in 1928 of the first antibiotic, penicillin.
Less well known is the laboratory accident that contributed to the development of LASIK, a laser procedure to correct vision problems, including nearsightedness and farsightedness. It is a measure that has allowed millions of people around the world to give up on glasses forever.
In the early 1990s, Ditau Du was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the laboratory of Gérard Moreau, a French physicist and professor. Moreau with Canadian physicist Donna Strickland, It has developed optical technology that produces short, intense laser pulses that can engrave precise points without causing damage to the surrounding material. The discovery earned Moreau and Strickland, a professor at the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of Waterloo in Canada, the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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One evening while working in the lab, I inadvertently raised my glasses while aligning two femtosecond laser mirrors, then a brand new type of laser that emits an extremely short pulse of light. Your eyeball was hit by a stray beam.
“He walked into my office very worried. “He was afraid they would close the lab,” said Morrow, who encouraged you to see a doctor.
You were treated by Dr. Ron Kurtz, then a medical student intern at the Kellogg Eye Center at the University of Michigan.
“When we enlarged the eye, what I saw was a very small number of very fine burns, what we might call retinal burns in the center of the retina,” Kurtz said in a video produced for the Golden Goose Awards. “I was curious what kind of laser it was.”
Convinced that he might have a medical application, Kurtz met with Morrow’s team and ended up researching with you, who quickly recovered from the injury. A year later, they presented their findings in Toronto Optometry Conference in 1994. There they met and collaborated with a researcher who was already researching lasers for vision correction named Tibor Johas, then a researcher at the University of California. In 1997, Kurtz and Juhasz founded IntraLase, a company focused on commercializing bladeless LASIK technology for corrective eye surgery.
Moreau said he never imagined his precision lasers would have applications beyond physics. He also credited the university’s leadership, which, while insisting on better security protocols, didn’t shut down his lab as he feared. Instead, officials funded some of the research that led to the corrective eye surgery technique.
“It took an accident like this to make a new pitch,” Morrow said. He suffered no lasting effects from his injury.
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