Sweat, luck and eureka: Recipes for scientific discovery

Every week thousands of academic articles heralding discoveries in medicine and science are vetted and validated before being published in no-nonsense journals with names such as "Acta Crystallographica," "Methods in Enzymology," or "Macromolecules".

Like works of art, these building blocks of human knowledge vary in quality and importance. Some are trivial, or just plain wrong.

But a few will usher in major change in our lives or a seismic shift in perspective, whether the possibility of growing a new heart or liver from a tiny patch of skin, or a unified theory of the cosmos.

Mundane or momentous, an intriguing question lingers over the whole grey matter enterprise: where do all these ideas come from? How can so many researchers break so much new ground?

A rigorously unscientific review of research that has made headlines around the world in recent weeks reveals several driving forces behind new discoveries.

The first are breakthroughs in technology and computing power that provide finely-tuned tools for confirming a hunch and getting a result.

That was the case for the startling announcement last week that Earth's average surface temperature once shot up a full 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) over three short years, cooling gradually before experiencing another dramatic spike.

Bear in mind that the UN's Nobel-winning panel of climate change scientists has said that even a 3 C (5.4 F) rise over the next century would bring extreme hardship for human civilization. Above 6 C (10.8 F), their usually sober warnings become downright apocalyptic.

The first of these sudden sizzles happened 14,700 years ago, as Earth was emerging from what researchers call the last maximal ice age.

No one knows what triggered the big temperature rise. But the fear is that if it could happen once, it could happen again, belying the claim by some that global warming will be a slow and manageable affair.

The key to this unsettling discovery came from ice cores extracted from deep inside the Greenland ice sheet. Geologists have long used accumulated layers of snow to peer into the distant past, much as biologists read growth rings of ancient trees.

But only with techniques developed in the last few years has it been possible to distinguish temperature changes that far back in terms of years, rather than decades or centuries.

-- We may all be from outer space --

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More precise ways of analysing isotopes also lay behind the confirmation last week that chemical building blocks for DNA found inside a meteorite that crashed into Australia in the 1960s did, in fact, come from outer space.

This raised the intriguing possibility that at least some of the ingredients essential for creating life were extraterrestrial.

Scientists had long suspected that the DNA-like stuff came from out there, but until Imperial College London researcher Zita Martins figured out a way to isolate two types of carbon molecules -- one unique to objects from space -- using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, no one knew for sure.

"It was a very long an laborious process, and I was simply the first one to do it," Martins told AFP.

Another kind of discovery depends less on instruments than inspiration.

"I guess you could say it was just a light-bulb moment," recalled Shanan Peters, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about his insight into what unleashed mass extinctions of plant and animal life over the last half billion years.

Most theories blame these die-offs on the cooling effect of massive dust shrouds kicked up by volcanoes or by asteroids that crash into Earth, or on warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide.

Peters, though, speculated that the culprit was not abrupt, cataclysmic events but the ebb and flow of sea levels and sediment in time measurable over aeons. His theory took shape, he said, while his mind wandered during a conference.

A similar eureka moment came for Brent Helliker, a plant biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, as he puzzled over discrepancies in research on the temperature of tree leaves -- an area that is important in botany and, indirectly, global warming.

"The assumption of all these studies was that tree leaf temperatures were equal to ambient temperatures," or the temperature of the surrounding air, he said in an interview.

But the data were so different that Helliker realised this assumption had to be put to the test.

He was stunned to find that leaves, whether in the tropics or a cold-clime forest, tend toward a nearly constant 21.4 degrees Celsius (71 degree Fahrenheit).

-- A helping hand from lady luck --

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A third path to discovery is serendipity.

When William Pu, a pediatric cardiologist at Children's Hospital Boston, began investigating the impact of the GATA4 gene on the outer lining of the heart, he was not looking for a new source of stem cells with the potential to become several different kinds of heart tissue.

But that is what he found, along with the gene that gives rise to them. "It was a lucky observation," he recalled.

Likewise for Stuart Sealfon at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who was exploring the effects of LSD in the brain when he stumbled across a neurochemical mechanism that could lead to improved treatments for schizophrenia.

"We did not set out to study schizophrenia -- we were quite surprised," he recalled. "It all lined up so well. Things are not usually so neat in science."

John Long and Kate Trinajstic, both Australian paleontologists, were about to type up a routine description of what seemed an unexceptional fossil they had found in the Gogo Formation of western Australia, a rich deposit of wildlife remains from the Late Devon period some 400 million years ago.

"But we decided to give it one last acid bath to see if we could expose more of the shoulder from the rock," Trinajstic recalled in a phone interview.

It was a risky move, she said. Too much acid, and "the whole thing crumbles."

When they pulled fossil out of its bath an hour later, after eating a sandwich, they found a perfectly preserved 380-million-year-old fish attached to her offspring by an umbilical cord.

Their find pushed back the first known case of live birth in the animal kingdom by some 200 million years.

Luck, yes, but perhaps not dumb luck.

As French scientist Louis Pasteur said: "Fortune favours the prepared."

© 2008 AFP

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