Michael Gross was born in Kirn, Germany, but considers himself a European citizen. He began his writing career on the school’s magazine, covering arts and humanities from Asterix to Picasso. As his Bohemian dreams of writing books in a Parisian café did not fulfil immediately, he opted for studying the sciences, and eventually managed combine his writing addiction and scientific training in a career as a full-time science writer after all not in Paris, but in Oxford. He earns his living mainly with the publication of articles in magazines, but also does some editing, translating, and lecturing, and occasionally writes entire books. Though his scientific interests span from quantum computation through to psycholinguistics, his heartfelt sympathy is with the strange creatures that live in volcanoes, the deep cold sea and hot geysers.
Michael Gross has been writing about science full time for the last eight years and as a night time hobby for the previous seven. From his treasure troves, he now presents his favourite science stories from these 15 years. What are the attractions that make him revisit a topic or reread an article again and again? Often, it’s the sheer craziness of wildly unexpected findings or grotesquely oversized challenges. In other stories, there is a sexy element or a an unexpected insight into the human condition. And sometimes, when reporting new and future technologies, the author just can’t help thinking: “cooooooool!” So here are xx crazy, sexy and cool science stories for you to enjoy.
Looking through the articles I have written in the past 15 years to pick out the ones collected in this book, I realized how futile some of my optimistic predictions have proven. In the excitement over a new discovery, one gets easily carried away and extrapolates the latest development toward a rosy future. My standard prediction runs along the lines: now that the fundamental questions have been solved, practical applications should become possible within the next five (or ten?) years.
But have they? In some cases, my optimism turned out to be justified. Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP, pages 101 and 193) and RNAi (page 179) became widespread in laboratory procedures within a matter of months. In other cases, my outlook may have been too rosy, as unexpected roadblocks turned up at the next bend after the breakthrough discovery. Thus, gene therapy continues to be just out of reach, as it was in the mid-1990s. Bacteriorhodopsin and other biomolecules were considered exciting alternatives for computation, but the runaway progress of silicon chips, still obeying Moore’s law to this day, has left these contenders behind. And the expression of spider silk proteins in goat milk (page 188) did not lead to the production of spider silk in useful quantities.
Prophecies have the nasty habit of falling back on the hapless prophet. Maybe my optimism isn’t quite as embarrassing as those negative predictions that are often quoted with the benefit of hindsight, for instance that airplanes would never fly, and personal computers would never find a market. But still, one needs to be careful in predicting the unpredictable future.
Having said that, I can’t resist the temptation to speculate a little about what stories I might include if I were to do a similar collection in 15 years’ time. If, of course, books still exist in 2023. Their replacement with e-books is one of the predictions I’ve read repeatedly over the years, without any signs of it actually coming true.
Current global problems, from overcrowding through to global warming, will not have gone away by then, but hopefully we will have come closer to constructive solutions. (There’s my runaway optimism again – realistically, we should count ourselves lucky if we haven’t wiped out the biosphere by then!) In a sense, the leading edge technologies, which I mostly write about, will not matter as much to the fate of humankind on a global scale as the robust technologies that can help the majority of people who still fight hunger and infectious diseases as their main enemies.
Vaccines that are affordable for the poorest nations, drugs that can be stored without the need for a fridge, or computers that can carry the information revolution to Africa, these are the things that will probably have a lot more impact over the next 15 years than any next-generation chip that allows your PC to crash even faster, or a drug that increases the life expectancy of rich people from 87 to 88. In other words, the fate of the world will depend critically not on how fast the leading edge of science and technology will move forward but on how well the trailing edge can catch up.
But in terms of science as an intellectually stimulating and fun activity, of course, much of the excitement is to be had at the leading edge. Bearing in mind that these advances will not make the world a better place, here are some crazy, sexy, and cool things that I would like to be able to include in my next round-up:
Of course it’s quite possible that none or only a few of these things will actually happen. But many other things will, and there will be plenty more crazily unexpected discoveries, irresistibly sexy insights, and blindingly cool innovations to be reported in the coming years, and that’s what keeps me going.