Far beyond the high tributes embodied in the Nobel Prize and its $1.4 million honorarium, three U.S. scientists who won the honor for achievements in medicine and physiology are living testaments to a more aggressive and visionary public approach to science. In advancing knowledge of cell biology to understand cancer and aging, Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak:
· Acted on a hunch that a seemingly unimportant discovery about chromosome telomeres might be a key to understanding cell DNA and deserved more research.
· Continued tenacious research for more than 20 years—Dr. Blackburn at the University of California/San Francisco; Dr. Greider at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Dr. Szostak at Massachusetts General Hospital—with moments of failure as well as success.
· Used $33 million from the National Institutes of Health for long years of research, without which their final achievements wouldn't have been possible.
Scientific research has endured hard times in recent years. Politicians have scoffed at irrefutable findings, for example, that destructive pollutants are battering the planet. And excessive paranoid xenophobia has choked the immigration of foreign scientists to the United States to a trickle, thus denying the nation exciting research possibilities. It's worth noting that Dr. Szostak, British-born, and Dr. Blackburn, Australian-born, are immigrants who arrived under the wire.
And, scientific research requiring outsized, sustained support must confront the obstacle of political hard-liners who live by the mantra that "government isn't the solution, government is the problem."
Short-term research to quickly produce products that can easily and immediately reap marketplace profits has its place. However, quantum leaps in science cannot be achieved without enormous public funding commitments that endow the likes of the three doctors who devoted major parts of their lives to a single mystery.
Government support for research, especially in medicine, is urgent. Killer diseases such as diabetes and cancer are on the rise. Catastrophic illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease are striking more Americans as the population ages.
Left untreated, the national state of health will deteriorate and demand more health care funds for treating the afflicted.
The Blackburn-Greider-Szostak model shows the way, if politics can be removed from science and health care and the nation pledges itself to getting the job done, no matter how difficult.
Correction: An editorial in the Friday, Oct. 2, edition about the Blaine County School District's proposed plant facilities levy incorrectly stated the amount allocated for a new elementary school. The correct amount is $13.8 million. A total of $47 million is allocated for the school, eight new middle school classrooms, Carey School improvements, a new maintenance and storage facility, and improvements at other schools and district buildings.
