MUSIC: "Our World" theme
Straight ahead on "Our World" ... Presentation this weekend of the Nobel Prizes; we talk with some of the winners ... water on Mars and men on the moon ... and how climate change is affecting agriculture ...
PARRY: "We are going to have to adapt. We cannot scrub that away. Even if we chop emissions off at the knees now we are not going to be able to mitigate our way out of the problem."
Those stories, videos for scientists, and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
This is the weekend when the Nobel Prizes are presented ? in Oslo, for the Peace Prize, and in Stockholm for the others. Five American scientists will be accepting awards for physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine, and four of the five stopped by the Swedish embassy here in Washington to talk about their work and what it means
NASA scientist John Mather and his colleague George Smoot of the University of California are getting the physics prize for their work on probing the origins of the universe. As Smoot explains, they used measurements from the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, satellite to create a map of the infant universe just after the Big Bang, which showed irregularities that would become the galaxies, stars and planets that later came into being.
SMOOT: "What we did was, we used this light from the very early universe to make a picture of what the early universe looked like. So when you look out at the sun, you don't actually touch the sun, you see an image of the sun ? either photographic or in your eyes - that shows you what the sun looks like. And it's what the sun looked like eight minutes ago. We look much further out. So if you look at the nearest stars it's a few years ago, if you look at the nearest galaxies it's two million years ago. We looked back to almost the very beginning of the universe and made an image of what the universe looked like at a time when it was very, very young. It's sort of in the embryonic stage, that's later on going to develop into the universe we see today."
The prize in physiology or medicine went to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their work on RNA interference. RNA is the genetic stuff that takes the instructions in DNA and transfers the information to the proteins that actually do the work. RNA interference is basically a way of preventing the instructions in DNA from being carried out. For now, it's mainly helping researchers in the laboratory, but Andrew Fire of Stanford University says it holds out the prospect of treating diseases such as cancer:
FIRE: "There's an area, which a lot of us are very, very excited about, which is the area of therapeutic RNA interference. For instance, if we want to shut down a gene that's responsible for a tumor progressing, we can put in the double-stranded RNA for that gene, and we can ask for the tumor to then do something we want to do, which is, for instance, regress. And that kind of work has begun in a number of different settings. I think it's going to be something like a five, 10, 15 year process, rather than walking into the drugstore tomorrow and picking up a pill of double-stranded RNA."
Fire and Mello's RNA work would seem to be worlds apart from Smoot and Mather's on the origins of the universe. But the scientists find common ground in that all of them are, in very different ways, trying to answer the question of where we come from. Every culture, every tribe has a story of its origins. Sometimes it is steeped in mysticism and legend. For others it's based in astronomical observatories, archaeology and biology.
For the physics laureates, who probed the origins of our universe, the link is pretty apparent. Perhaps not as obvious, though, for the RNA researchers. But Craig Mello points out that while individual species may come and go, the fundamental mechanisms of life have been around for a very, very long time.
MELLO: "The thing that I find as a biologist to be one of the most incredible discoveries of modern biology is the remarkable stability of biological mechanisms over geological time, or you could even say over cosmological time, because it's that amazing, that creatures that shared a common ancestor more than a billion years ago still use the same basic genetic code to interpret sequences of their genes in order to make the proteins. I find that amazing."
Incidentally, if you sometimes find it a bit difficult to follow the groundbreaking work these scientists did, you're in good company. Both Big Bang researcher John Mather and genetic scientist Andrew Fire admit they have trouble understanding each other's work.