Radio astronomy

I have learnt the little science I know at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) when I spent 2003-2004 there as their Moore Visiting Professor in the Humanities. Caltech manages NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the agency responsible for unmanned space flights like the Mars Rovers.

It is also is one of leading science institutions in the world, having produced 25 science laureates (South Africa as a whole has produced 4, to give the figure some perspective). It is on the high end of physics, biology, chemistry, enginee-ring and astronomy.

It is there that I first met the South African astronomer Tony Readhead. Readhead runs an extraordinary observatory in the Andes. He made his expertise available to the South African astronomy community, helping with our bid for the Square Kilometer Array (SQA) for example.

The SQA will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. It will consist of thousands of dishes and collecting devices acting as one and covering a square kilometer. The competition is down to Australia and South Africa. The outcome will be announced by 2012.

Reporting discoveries...

The model of science journalism is the New York Times’ Tuesday edition. Four pages of the best science journalism usually accompanied by more topically directed health coverage. Quality is superb, because the journalists have science degrees and know what they are writing about.

There are other newspapers – West European largely – that also take science journalism seriously. Science breakthroughs make great news. Some developments, like the 2008 announcement of the particle physics laboratory called CERN, were spectacular.

Public interest in science coverage is for the high-tech junkies and for those individuals interested in health-related breakthroughs. This is why science and health journalism usually go together. More recently, with climate change issues on the rise, environmental science is increasingly popular.

Neurodegenerative diseases are doubly traumatic. Seemingly healthy people can gradually lose control of their muscles, motor-skills and even their minds. Then, even if the source of the degeneration can be stopped, neurons regenerate extremely slowly, if at all.

The bulk of neurons are formed during pre-natal development from stem cells. These are cells that have the potential to form a wide variety of different types of cells and are undifferentiated. Adults do have stem cells, but these are multipotent or oligopotent, meaning that they can only differentiate into a few types of cells. The adult brain even has a small pool of neural stem cells.

However, the most useful stem cells are those found in embryos, particularly those in the morula phase of foetal development. These stem cells are totipotent and can form any cell at all. It is hoped that research in this area will unlock a way to repair degenerative ailments. 

As far as scientific advancement goes, this is all very encouraging. However, there is one very large problem. The only way that these embryonic stem cells can be harvested is by sacrificing a set of cells that have the potential to become a human being.