Another well–informed optimist is about the future of science in Russia
Konstantin Severinov: "It seems to me that this will be a difficult year for Russian science"Konstantin Severinov, a well-known Russian microbiologist, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of laboratories at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Gene Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers University (USA), answered the New Year's poll "Polit.
What was the scientific event/discovery in your discipline in 2009 and in general in the past decade 2000-2009? Did you remember the most, did you find it the most interesting?Among the breakthrough areas of the past decade in the field of life sciences, the most important work seems to me to be related to the establishment of the role of small RNAs in the regulation of gene expression.
Although two pioneering works, Fire and Mello, awarded the Nobel Prize, were published in 1998 and 1999, the real revolution in the minds of scientists took place in the past decade.
It turned out that the so-called central dogma of molecular biology, which has remained unshakable since the early 70s, is incomplete, and that a huge class of genetic regulation was simply not noticed by the scientific community. Which, however, did not prevent many people from claiming in the recent past that the basic principles of the transmission of genetic information are known, it remains, they say, to clarify only some details.
Now it is difficult to understand how this could be, because in modern works, wherever you poke, it turns out everywhere that small RNAs play a crucial role. Of course, there is a fashion in this, hoopla, but the fact remains that ten years ago we studied how genes work without noticing that there is a huge conceptual hole in our understanding. I am both fascinated and frightened by the realization that even now our understanding/knowledge is incomplete, and that the coming decade will probably bring no less remarkable fundamental discoveries in areas that are now unknown to us.
The second most important area of the past decade has been the development of methods for determining DNA sequences and the resulting explosive development of bioinformatics as an independent scientific discipline that is able to make non-trivial predictions and determine the directions of experimental research. In fact, theoretical biology was born, akin to theoretical physics.
The third area was methodological breakthroughs in biological mass spectrometry, which led to the development of proteomics. The combination of genomic, proteometric, bioinformatic and experimental approaches has led to the development of so-called systems biology, which will clearly dominate in the next decade and will allow us to move away from the classical reductionist approach of molecular biology and biochemistry and get closer to understanding how the whole organelle, cell, organ, etc. A good illustration of this approach can be three articles, published in November 2009 in the journal Science by scientists from Barcelona. In these works, an attempt was made to systematically analyze the expression of genes, proteome, and metabolic pathways of a simple mycoplasma bacterium.
On the one hand, it became clear that even this simple organism is complicated, and we don't understand a lot. On the other hand, system analysis made it possible for the first time to intelligently interpret and make testable predictions about cell physiology based on a map of metabolic pathways.
When I was a student, such cards hung in many classrooms and were horrified by their size, obvious complexity, and, in general, worthlessness, since the meaning of numerous arrows, shunts, and intermediates was difficult to assess and understand. New approaches will make these maps "talk", will allow us to quantitatively predict how the physiology of the cell and the growth rate of the culture of the microorganism will change when the composition of the growth medium changes.
What do you, as a scientist and a person, expect from 2010?It seems to me that this will be a difficult year for Russian science.
The reluctance of the current academic authorities to somehow begin reforms that would make science classes in Russia more effective naturally leads (and has already led) to a reduction in the academic budget.
Unfortunately, in conditions when the main strategy of the RANOVO authorities is the desire to maintain the status quo and evenly smear funding with a thin layer, while not forgetting their dear ones, the most active research teams will suffer the most. Young graduates of postgraduate studies, with the possible exception of the recently organized "academic Komsomol", which has a chance to get attached to the procedure of distributing promised, but still non-existent apartments for young scientists, will leave. And, in general, they will be right.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru12.01.2010