China Liposuction Reduces Big Science Fat
February 28th, 2008 | by This is China! |
A biochemistry breakthrough without the “bio” and without the “chemistry?” In China? How can that be? Just mix an insightful scientist with a group of bright young things likely constrained by shoe-string academic research budgets at Beijing University. Pose the question, then pour through thousands of online databases with reams of data others around the world have collected.
An Economist Magazine article describes how a Chinese research team made a discovery that had previously had researchers around the world scratching their heads:
“There are now so many of these papers, and the databases linking them are so good, that it is possible to use scientific methods to investigate the bibliome [all the mentions in research papers of known biomolecules] in its own right, just as any of the other, wetter “omes” may be investigated. Which is exactly what a group of researchers from Peking University, led by Wei Liping, have done to get at the biochemical heart of drug addiction.”
In the West with our fat defense budgets and VC funding, we’ve developed an addiction to promote projects for what will sound sexy to those who hold the purse strings. However, when you’ve not got two yuan to rub together, what you have to do is innovate. For me, a believer that “Small is Beautiful,” that means the kind of innovation that strips away at the obvious.
“What Dr Wei hoped to do was to take these fragmentary answers and patch them together to make something approaching the whole truth. And, in a paper just published in the Public Library of Science, she seems to have managed just that.”
And few biochemistry fields are as crowded with sexy research grants as Dr Wei’s:
“Dr Wei’s group looked at more than 1,000 studies of the biochemistry and genetics of drug addiction. They were interested in the four sorts of drug reckoned most addictive: alcohol, cocaine, nicotine and opiates (heroin, methadone and so on)…Dr Wei therefore ran her 396 genes through a database of all known pathways to see which involved several enzymes encoded by those genes.”
I must say, I haven’t been this excited about a scientific insight since reading Steven Hawking’s paper on the activity at the event horizons of black holes back in ‘76. But it’s not so much the discovery that titillates me as the way it was gone about: a kind of liposuction of the fat of Big Science to reveal the realities that lay between the folds of our understanding. In this, because of extreme constraints that include facilities, budgets, and labs with proper equipment in which to train from early on in one’s career, China may contribute insights in ways we in the West had considered beneath us – cock-eyed as some of those approaches might seem at the outset.
“None of this, of course, directly helps the addict, though it reinforces the message that it is better not to start taking these drugs in the first place. But working out how the addiction machine operates may point those looking for therapies in the right direction. And this study also shows that the old cry ‘more research is necessary’ is not always true. Sometimes all you need to do is look at what you already have in a different way.”
