Word: electronic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sometimes PCR is compared to a computer that speedily executes the most complex calculations. But its significance far exceeds a simple increase in efficiency and productivity. Like the radio telescope and the electron microscope, it represents an advance of a fundamental nature. Before PCR, scientists could not consider analyzing the DNA contained in a single cell, much less the degraded DNA recovered from dried blood or old bones. PCR, says Dr. Barry Eisenstein, chairman of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Michigan Medical School, "is enabling us to answer questions we only dreamed of five years...
This was the ideal, anyway. But Big Science costs big bucks and breeds a more mundane and calculating kind of outlook. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to run a modern biological laboratory, with its electron microscopes, ultracentrifuges, amino-acid analyzers, Ph.D.s and technicians. The big bucks tend to go to big shots, like Baltimore, whose machines and underlings must grind out "results" in massive volume. In the past two decades, as federal funding for basic research has ebbed, the pressure to produce has risen to dangerous levels. At the same time, the worldly rewards of success...
...full of similar discoveries, some of which have revolutionized ideas about the universe and many of which turned out to be less than they had seemed. In the former category, for example, is the 1936 discovery of a new particle, the muon, an elementary particle similar to the electron but more massive. Existing theories had predicted no such thing, and its appearance greatly complicated high-energy physics. "Who ordered that?" grumbled theorist I.I. Rabi at the time. But the muon and its kin led eventually to a new understanding of the subatomic world...
...House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. At the time, the scientific community rallied behind Baltimore, one of its brightest stars, calling the hearings a "witch hunt" and Dingell a "new McCarthy." Dingell called in the Secret Service, which began going over lab notebooks with the forensic equivalent of an electron microscope...
...birth of the universe, so the theory goes, all matter was condensed into a package much smaller than an electron. This package had a nearly-infinite amount of energy--enough to cause the four forces to "melt" into one symmetric force. Measuring, probing and just thinking about the present universe, scientists hope to learn about the newborn universe, and how one force somehow became four in the intervening 15 or 20 billion years...