Is innovative science an oxymoron?

WASHINGTON DC - Google “innovative science,” and what do you get page one? Three educational sites, three medical pharmaceutical companies, a beauty products firm, a $1 million governmental defense challenge for innovative work, a microscope products supply company and a consultant. 

“Innovative science” sounds good in brochures, business prospectuses and annual reports. But the phrase usually comes with tag lines like “ reliance on proven programs and projects,” or “partnering with governmental, corporate and other non-profit agencies.”

It’s not that innovative science doesn’t happen in mainstream laboratories. It does. Passion, dedication and painstaking experimental techniques sometimes yield startling results. But startling is not what mainstream is usually looking for.

Take the experience of Neuro-Pharmacologist Candace Pert, Ph.D. While working at the NIH (National Institutes of Health) near Washington D.C. in the 1980s, she discovered a way to block the AIDS virus from binding to a cell’s receptor sites and entering the cell…kind of like cutting off the attack at the beachhead, is the way she puts it.

Pert’s radical discovery enabled her and her research partner, Michael Ruff, to develop an AIDS drug called Peptide T, which has been in human trails and been found to have “very profound antiviral effects” without toxicities. “Our drug was the very first entry inhibitor,” says Pert. “And it was not greeted with open arms ‘cause it was kind of far ahead of its time.”

Not only did Pert and Ruff have difficulty getting their results published, highly inaccurate lab testing of their procedures at Harvard following publication resulted in a rapid death knell verdict for Peptide T for “failure to replicate.” Since then, Pert and Ruff have struggled to bring the drug to the markets independently. And yet, says Pert, “Ironically, today, every big company is looking … [for] entry inhibitors for HIV, hoping to find one that’s non-toxic.”

What happened? What combination of events and attitudes could knock such a promising discovery out of the mainstream scientific ballpark for 20 years?

Answer: Politics, tenure, good ‘ol boy networking and back-scratching in government, university, and corporate R&D labs the world over The higher up you go, the bigger the stakes, the more the research costs, the greater the potential payoffs, the tighter the game gets.

William A. Tiller, Ph.D., fellow to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and Professor Emeritus of Stanford University’s Department of Materials Science, concurs. “It’s a very difficult situation where the scientific community is just incredibly stuck,” says Tiller. “It can’t get outside the present box they’re in. The universities depend upon funding from donors who are likewise stuck. It’s very difficult for them to have professors who espouse strange things. … The government which funds the research in this country - they follow established lines. They are interested in the conventional. … It’s all incredibly difficult for the establishment to change.”

Changing scientific “acceptability”

When the establishment can’t be changed from the inside, the only recourse is to walk away, which is exactly what both Pert and Tiller ended up doing.

If Pert was the picture of someone trying to get on the playing field, Tiller exemplified the scientist who had a ballpark already named after him. Chairman of Stanford’s Department of Materials Science , he had major government contracts in play, and was sitting on numerous professional and governmental scientific committees. Tiller could hit the ball anytime he liked, with anyone, anywhere.

Yet, as much as he was a nuts and bolts kind of guy, Tiller was also fascinated by the field of psychoenergetics - how human consciousness interacts with “reality” Some of the implications of quantum mechanics were not lost on him, and he realized the potential importance of the field. But enmeshed in mainstream science, he had little or no time to devote to this avocation. So, he gave up his chairmanship at Stanford, and reduced his government contracts and his committee work to pursue science way outside the box.

“I had the naïve idea that if I continued to do conventional science, for which I was well respected in the world, and also did this other kind of science with equal integrity and quality, then they would look at this new science,” he says. “Well, I was wrong. They would not look at it – could not look at it - is what it really boils down to. Because these kinds of things cannot be looked at simply in an intellectual way. You have to have undergone some internal transformation to be willing to devote the time needed to get past the conventional view.”

If cross-pollination between scientific paradigms by well respected scientists isn’t bridging the gap, what can? Popular demand from the general public.

The people of the United States ultimately pay for all the research that goes on in this country, whether through taxes to the government or through consumer spending and private investments. The incredible rise in the popularity of alternative medicine and healing modalities is just one example. In the last 20 years alternative medicine has become a multi-billion dollar new industry in this country.

“If the general public – as it did do with alternative medicine vis a vis conventional medicine [can] put their own money on the line … if the general public sees this connection between the inner and the outer and they want more of that kind of research to be done,” says Tiller, “they have to, and they can, push that issue with their congressmen and senators and so on. The people can cause change in our society which will eventually, in the long run, move things out of the box.”

Price, potentials and payoffs

The march of science and technology into new realms is a journey. The price it demands doesn’t seem to vary too much: nothing less than everything.

“I have come to believe that science, at its very core, is a spiritual endeavor,” says Pert, “… a truth-seeking endeavor, which encompasses the values of cooperation and communication, based on trust – trust in ourselves and in one another.”

For Pert, the payoffs for making the leap from the NIH and government subsidies to scientific entrepreneurship are numerous. Her discoveries and theories about the molecules associated with various emotions are benefiting millions; Peptide T is turning out to be even more than she and Ruff ever imagined. At long last they are close to final funding and the next stage of development they have worked so hard for.

Tiller, who has, for decades, steadfastly pursued his vision of elevating science – taking it through a quantum leap, as it were – is also undaunted.

“It’s not easy to do this kind of science,” he admits. “But, we’ve been doing science long enough that we know how to do science. It’s just now the game has expanded to a larger domain. And science can do it – if it wanted to. And if one could get the huge majority who are trapped inside the box, outside of the box. The game is won.”

Information about Candace Pert's work can be found at www.candacepert.com, or information about Peptide T can be found at www.tinm.org/ for info about Dr. Tillers’ work www.tiller.org

Black hole found in ancient lair

A black hole has been found inside a compact group of ancient stars known as a globular cluster. Courtesy BBC News

SOUTHAMPTON, UK - Astronomers say the discovery is interesting because many doubted black holes could exist in such locations.

Some computer simulations had suggested a newly formed black hole would simply be ejected from the cluster as a result of gravitational interactions.

Tom Maccarone, of the University of Southampton (UK), and colleagues report the finding in the journal Nature.

It was made using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite, with follow-up observations on the US space agency's Chandra Space Telescope - both are sensitive to the X-ray light that is emitted when gas consumed by a black hole is torn apart.

The international team says its work provides the first convincing evidence that some black holes might not only survive but grow and flourish in globular clusters.

In between

What has astonished the scientists is how quickly the black hole was found.

"We were preparing for a long, systematic search of thousands of globular clusters with the hope of finding just one black hole," said Dr Maccarone. "But bingo, we found one as soon as we started the search. It was only the second globular cluster we looked at."

The black hole is located in a globular cluster associated with a galaxy named NGC 4472, some 55 million light-years away.

Globular clusters are among the oldest structures in the Universe. They contain thousands to millions of stars packed into a region of space just a few tens of light-years across.

These high densities should lead to frequent interactions and even collisions; and some models have suggested that large black holes - several hundred times the mass of our Sun - could develop in the densest inner regions of clusters.

Other simulations, however, predict that such gravitational interplay would probably eject most or all of the black holes that form in such an environment.

The team is uncertain about the size of the NGC 4472 hole; but if it is reasonably large - and one interpretation of the X-ray data suggests it could be 400 times the mass of our Sun - it might have been able to anchor itself in the cluster, said co-author Arunav Kundu of Michigan State University, US.

"This is one of the interesting aspects of this study," he told BBC News.

"People have seen stellar-sized black holes that form from [an exploded] star, and then there are the super-massive black holes at the centres of galaxies that are millions of times the mass of our Sun - but there's nothing in between.

"Some people expect that globular clusters might be the environment where you would see intermediate-mass black holes."