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...Electron Localization in Semiconductor Superlattices--by Mark Lee, NEC Research Laboratory, Princeton, N.J. Pierce Hall, Room...
Author E.D. Hirsch Jr. set educators squabbling with his 1987 best seller Cultural Literacy, which tried to establish the minimum shared knowledge that American schools ought to provide. The University of Virginia English professor listed 4,600 items, ranging from the electron to the Emancipation Proclamation, that every educated adult should be able to identify. Now Hirsch is taking his program of core knowledge to the elementary-school level. In the first two of a six-textbook series for Grades 1 through 6, he boldly proposes the things tots ought to learn...
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...