Rolf-Dieter Heuer with one of the 1,232 dipole magnets used in the Large Hadron Collider
International law should oblige governments to invest in basic science, through hard times as well as good. Applied science—making everything from MRI scanners to electricity—is largely the job of the private sector, and the biggest risk to future prosperity is that the pure scientific research which underpins it dries up. Without this basic science, industry and society as a whole will be impoverished.
“One day, sir, you may tax it!” was Michael Faraday’s apocryphal riposte to William Gladstone’s question about the utility of his investigations into electricity. More recently, Robert Wilson, the great American particle physicist told his paymasters, who had asked what particle physics did for the defence of the US: “Nothing, except to make it worth defending.” Wilson did his field an injustice. Particle physics technology has found all kinds of uses: security scanning is just one.
In times of plenty, governments are good at supporting science. But when times are tough, their instinct is to look for winners to pull the economy out of recession in time for the next election. Instead, they should put more money into science to help future growth. It takes far-sighted leadership to make that decision.
Progress is a complex beast, but it relies on the wellspring of curiosity. Without that curiosity, the human race would still be in the Great Rift Valley. With it, we’ve mastered our world, are exploring others, have put ourselves in a position to contemplate the nature of our universe, and made the lives of ordinary people unimaginably better than they were when we took our first steps out of Africa.
I used to think that innovation was a linear process: basic science provided the knowledge and applied science turned it into something useful. But since becoming director general of Cern, I’ve been forced to refine my ideas. Innovation is a virtuous circle linking basic to applied science. The development of PET scanners to diagnose medical problems is a case in point.
The idea for PET came from the medical community, but the “P” of PET stands for positron—a particle of antimatter. Detecting particles of antimatter is a forte of particle physicists. In the 1970s, one of the first prototype PET scanners was built in collaboration between Cern and Geneva’s University Hospital, and contributed to the development of commercial PET scanners. This happened because the techniques of particle physics turned out to be relevant to medicine, and the physicists were quick to spot the link. From there, industry took over the research and development, and our particle physicists went back to contemplating the universe.
A decade later, experiments demanded better particle detection, so physicists teamed up with industry to develop crystal detectors with unprecedented sensitivity. This turned out to be just what the PET industry needed, so those crystals found their way into the latest scanners.
Fast-forward ten more years, and particle physics needed to use crystal detectors inside a strong magnetic field. Electronics companies had not developed the necessary chips, but with a nudge from the particle physics community, they soon did. Physicists’ needs were satisfied, and the medical imaging industry seized the new technology for scanners that give the functional information of a PET scan with the structural information of an MRI scan.
This story has run for decades, and will probably run for many more. It’s no accident that a publicly-funded research organisation is the common thread. Cern is a privileged place for basic science, thanks to the foresight of those who founded it 57 years ago. If all basic science could be carried out on this model—international, collaborative and open, with a stable public sector funding structure—our progress would be assured. The world might also be more recession-proof than it is today.
International law should oblige governments to invest in basic science, through hard times as well as good. Applied science—making everything from MRI scanners to electricity—is largely the job of the private sector, and the biggest risk to future prosperity is that the pure scientific research which underpins it dries up. Without this basic science, industry and society as a whole will be impoverished.
“One day, sir, you may tax it!” was Michael Faraday’s apocryphal riposte to William Gladstone’s question about the utility of his investigations into electricity. More recently, Robert Wilson, the great American particle physicist told his paymasters, who had asked what particle physics did for the defence of the US: “Nothing, except to make it worth defending.” Wilson did his field an injustice. Particle physics technology has found all kinds of uses: security scanning is just one.
In times of plenty, governments are good at supporting science. But when times are tough, their instinct is to look for winners to pull the economy out of recession in time for the next election. Instead, they should put more money into science to help future growth. It takes far-sighted leadership to make that decision.
Progress is a complex beast, but it relies on the wellspring of curiosity. Without that curiosity, the human race would still be in the Great Rift Valley. With it, we’ve mastered our world, are exploring others, have put ourselves in a position to contemplate the nature of our universe, and made the lives of ordinary people unimaginably better than they were when we took our first steps out of Africa.
I used to think that innovation was a linear process: basic science provided the knowledge and applied science turned it into something useful. But since becoming director general of Cern, I’ve been forced to refine my ideas. Innovation is a virtuous circle linking basic to applied science. The development of PET scanners to diagnose medical problems is a case in point.
The idea for PET came from the medical community, but the “P” of PET stands for positron—a particle of antimatter. Detecting particles of antimatter is a forte of particle physicists. In the 1970s, one of the first prototype PET scanners was built in collaboration between Cern and Geneva’s University Hospital, and contributed to the development of commercial PET scanners. This happened because the techniques of particle physics turned out to be relevant to medicine, and the physicists were quick to spot the link. From there, industry took over the research and development, and our particle physicists went back to contemplating the universe.
A decade later, experiments demanded better particle detection, so physicists teamed up with industry to develop crystal detectors with unprecedented sensitivity. This turned out to be just what the PET industry needed, so those crystals found their way into the latest scanners.
Fast-forward ten more years, and particle physics needed to use crystal detectors inside a strong magnetic field. Electronics companies had not developed the necessary chips, but with a nudge from the particle physics community, they soon did. Physicists’ needs were satisfied, and the medical imaging industry seized the new technology for scanners that give the functional information of a PET scan with the structural information of an MRI scan.
This story has run for decades, and will probably run for many more. It’s no accident that a publicly-funded research organisation is the common thread. Cern is a privileged place for basic science, thanks to the foresight of those who founded it 57 years ago. If all basic science could be carried out on this model—international, collaborative and open, with a stable public sector funding structure—our progress would be assured. The world might also be more recession-proof than it is today.
