The beauty of being basic
Sometimes tinkering with an original idea can result in a really big breakthrough – and even lead to a Nobel Prize. And sometimes it’s only curiosity that keeps driving things onwards. We look at researchers both present and past and at their work on the foundations of their disciplines.
Illustration: Iris Weidmann
An aptitude for dreams
Some 14 years ago, Benjamin Stucky, a sleep researcher at the University of Zurich, woke up from a deep sleep and felt unusually relaxed and content. Since then, he’s wanted to find out just what we are capable of feeling when we dream. He shares this curiosity with many others – after all, there are innumerable books and theories about interpreting our dreams, about how we might influence them, and about psychoanalysing them.
It’s actually been possible to use electroencephalography (EEG) to record the activity of the sleeping brain since the 1920s. “It enabled researchers to make physical measurements of subjective experiences”, says Stucky. Scientists also found out that the most detailed accounts of dreams originate from the rapid eye movement phase of sleep (REM). Stucky now wants to get a better understanding of what people experience during sleep – even when they claim that they haven’t dreamt anything at all.
The difficulty with this research is that our sleep memories are fragile. We remember dreams better if we’re woken up deliberately. But previous studies did this by using a relatively abrupt alarm. In contrast, Stucky brings the participants in his study back into a waking state in his sleep laboratory by means of a harmonious sound that gradually rises and falls in volume. “This allows them to stay more in touch with what they’ve perceived”, he says – or, at least, that’s what he hopes.
The way questions are then posed also influences the results of the study. Until now, he’s mostly asked: “What was going through your mind?”. But Stucky thinks that this is overly intellectual. “It encourages reflection, which can dispel subtle emotional states”. He is interested in people’s actual sensations. For example: “Did you have a feeling of calm?”. What’s more, right at the start of the study, Stucky’s participants meditate in order to learn how to observe their inner states.
“Besides typical dreams, which are often very concrete and comprise stories, we also experience more nuanced emotional states”, says Stucky with conviction. Just like in the deep sleep that left such an impression on him, too, 14 years ago.
Illustration: Iris Weidmann
Fragile cells in bone marrow
Olaia Naveiras, a physician-scientist at the University of Lausanne, has chosen a challenging field for her work: the adipose precursor cells that make up 70 percent of our bone marrow. Despite their prevalence, we barely know anything about them except that they form part of the system that produces a staggering 600 billion new blood cells in our bodies every day.
But there are good reasons for this gap in our knowledge. “They’re incredibly fragile and are difficult to handle and investigate in the lab”, says Naveiras. If you try to isolate them from the honeycomb structure of bone marrow, you’ll almost inevitably destroy them. And if you put them in a centrifuge, as is usually done with cells that we wish to separate from other tissue, they burst. The same happens if you put them on ice. Naveiras and her team are now working, step by step, to find ways of handling adipose precursor cells so they can explain their mechanisms.
It would seem that they are in fact medically significant. Few of them occur in those areas of human bone marrow where new blood cell production is going well. But many of them do occur where the production of blood cells is inhibited. Naveiras and Co. recently discovered that these adipose precursor cells actually play a part in deciding whether blood stem cells mature into blood cells, or instead fall into a kind of dormancy.
“We want to investigate this in greater detail now, and also find ways in which we can use medication to intervene in the process”, she says. This would be medically relevant, both for people with leukaemia and for those with other types of cancer whose treatment causes them to suffer from anaemia.
It might even be possible in future to develop artificial bone marrow structures. The idea for this arose out of necessity in the lab, when it transpired that the delicate adipose precursor cells are at their most stable when their natural environment is replicated as closely as possible. It will probably take years before Naveiras’s painstaking basic research bears fruit. But her motivation is perfectly clear: one day, her work is going to help humanity.
Illustration: Iris Weidmann
Servers behaving like bees
It’s 11 September 2001 and Sunil Nakrani, a computer scientist doing his PhD at Oxford, gets an e-mail from a colleague, saying “America is under attack”. He tries to find out more online. But too many people around the world are trying to do the exact same thing, and one news website is crashing after another. Eventually, even the BBC website goes down. The servers across the world just can’t cope with the sheer volume of enquiries. Nakrani thought at the time: there has to be a solution to the problem.
He began by trying out different ways of organising web servers more effectively. Initially it was without success. Then he met Craig Tovey in 2002, who promptly dug out a research paper of his that had been gathering dust for 14 years. It was in a completely different field – biology. Tovey and his then colleague, the bee researcher Tom Seeley, had used mathematical equations to describe how honeybees collect nectar.
They calculated that every collecting bee returning to the hive would assess how urgently its colony needed food. If it has difficulty locating a hive bee that can accept its nectar to store it, it means that all the hive bees are busy, which in turn means there’s plenty of nectar. But if the collecting bee finds a hive bee easily, then it must be because nectar is in short supply. In addition, the collecting bee then recruits more of its colleagues, provided that it knows a productive source. “This is how the collecting bees distribute themselves optimally across nearby flowers”, says Nakrani.
Nakrani’s subsequent research showed how this self-organisation can work when it comes to allocating web servers. Here, the servers function like the bees, distributing their capacity optimally across requests from different web services. In line with his research ethos, Nakrani didn’t simply sell his ‘honey-bee algorithm’, but made it openly available. For this, many years later, he received the so-called Golden Goose Award. This was established in 2012 to honour research that advances society through ideas that may initially seem peculiar. This was in turn a response to the Golden Fleece Awards that were issued by the US Democratic senator William Proxmire from 1975 to 1988 in order to criticise institutions, research projects and others for – in his opinion – squandering public money. It’s quite possible that he would also have criticised the same bee research that today helps to prevent websites from crashing.
Illustration: Iris Weidmann
One man’s terrorist
That same date – 9/11 – also marked a turning point for an entire field of research: Islamic studies. It had long been regarded as a niche subject that concerned itself with Arabic language and literature and had little to do with the here and now. As Reinhard Schulze recalls – a professor emeritus at the University of Bern, formerly the head of its then institute for Islamic studies – it had accordingly been difficult to set up university lecture courses in the field, or to create professorships.
Then came the attack on the World Trade Center. “For the first time, the general public was confronted with a major act of terrorism that had been carried out in the name of Islam”, says Schulze. Suddenly, Islamic studies became an important source of information, with Schulze himself a sought-after expert.
The media needed him to put current events into context and to explain how terrorist acts could be motivated by factors different from those that had led past groups to commit such acts, e.g., the far-left Red Brigades. “There was a great need to understand just how much the motives of the terrorists were linked to religion”, says Schulze. Islamic studies also now became increasingly seen as a discipline that might help to tackle the supposed ‘problem’ of Islam. Under Schulze’s leadership, the University of Bern subsequently emerged as an acknowledged centre for Islamic studies.
That changed on 7 October 2023. Hamas carried out a massacre in Israel, triggering the war in the Gaza Strip that continues to rage today. And a researcher at Schulze’s former institute posted a tweet, praising what Hamas had done. The man in question was also the husband of the new director of the Institute. The ensuing investigation found that the Institute had failed to draw a clear line between scholarship and opinion. It was then temporarily dissolved. “The Institute ought to have been tasked with analysing the attack in a scholarly, well-founded manner”, says Schulze. But the loss of trust in Islamic studies was immense. To this day, says Schulze, it’s been impossible to restore that trust. All the same, Islamic studies remain highly relevant and important.
Illustration: Iris Weidmann
Take note, Newton and Einstein
Camille Bonvin is a cosmologist at the University of Geneva who’s just launched a project to challenge the standard cosmological model – and thereby also the theories stemming from Newton and Einstein. It seems quite a bold move by anyone’s standards. “A bit, perhaps”, says Bonvin rather sheepishly. But she also adds that this is in the very nature of physics itself. “We have to test our physical models, which means we have to think beyond them. If we find signals that aren’t predicted by them, then we might lose a model, but we’ll have gained new insights”.
The Universe is expanding, and it’s doing so at an ever-increasing speed. Researchers can see this clearly in their measurements, and it’s also what’s predicted by the standard cosmological model, called the Lambda-CDM. This model combines the theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, visible and dark matter, and dark energy.
But recent measurements made by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at the Mayall Telescope in Arizona have revealed flaws. Their data cast doubt on the existence of a constant dark energy as postulated by the Lambda-CDM model. So perhaps this dark energy takes on a form different from previously assumed. “Or perhaps there’s no dark energy at all”, says Bonvin.
After all, she explains, other theories could also explain the accelerating expansion of the Universe. “It could also be the case that gravity behaves differently on a very large scale, and that the general theory of relativity then simply doesn’t apply any more”. She and her team want to test gravity and the general theory of relativity on the scale of several million galaxies. But it’s complicated. They will be investigating distortions in the geometry of space and time and how these are becoming increasingly visible and measurable thanks to modern observatories such as DESI, the Euclid Space Telescope or the Square Kilometre Array (a huge telescope currently being built in Australia). With their help, Bonvin aims to explore modified theories of gravity. Einstein would surely approve.
Illustration: Iris Weidmann
The scent of Switzerland
What scents do you associate with Switzerland? At first glance, this might seem like an odd research question. To whom could it be of any benefit? Well: to all of us, it seems. Because scents and smells are powerful things. “We retain a memory of them for a long time, and they are strongly linked to our emotions”, says Dorothée King, a professor of art and design education at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). She has been studying olfactory perception for 20 years and is currently investigating how this perception is linked to our sense of belonging within societal structures.
To this end, King combed through newspaper articles from the 1970s to the present day for references to ‘travellers’. “These articles often used the sense of smell both to express aversion and to justify it”, says King. Statements made by the general public tended along the lines of: “They stink, that’s why we don’t want them near us”. “Mechanisms of exclusion lie behind this”, says King, “but what’s verbalised is the smell”. She has also noted how similar mechanisms played out in connection with the first groups of migrant workers from Italy and Spain, where the smell of garlic was emphasised – a vegetable that was barely known in Switzerland at the time.
To find out what scents people associate with Switzerland, King conducted a survey of some 100 people. Those who had been living in Switzerland for a long time often mentioned the smell of hay, mountain meadows, cheese and cow dung. “I can imagine that these are smells from their childhood, reinforced by recurring stereotypical depictions of Switzerland”, says King. In contrast, people who have immigrated to Switzerland barely associate the country with any smells at all. Their most common responses were that Switzerland is clean, neutral and doesn’t smell of anything.
Is this an accurate assessment or a prejudice? It’s hard to say. But King’s surveys have also shown that those who are sensitised to their own olfactory memories and prejudices and engage with them can ‘re-code’ them and break free of them. Rather like what happened with garlic. After all, the Mediterranean cuisine with its characteristic aromas now has positive connotations.
Illustration: Iris Weidmann
DNA tools for everything
Today, Emmanuelle Charpentier is the director of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. But twenty years ago, she was an unknown bacteriologist investigating a defence system in streptococci that uses repeating DNA sequences (called CRISPR) to recognise foreign viral DNA, then cuts it up to render it harmless. Together with the US biochemist Jennifer Doudna, Charpentier used gradual, painstaking basic research to explore this ingenious mechanism on the part of bacteria.
In 2011 and 2012, Charpentier and Doudna published their findings. They attracted worldwide attention, not just because they demonstrated how the so-called CRISPR ‘gene scissors’ work and what components it requires, but also because they provided a blueprint for how one might use these scissors in future as a well-nigh omnipotent DNA tool. But CRISPR initially sparked controversy too. Earlier methods of modifying DNA had left traces; those methods had inserted base pairs that allowed researchers to identify genetically modified gene segments.
CRISPR, on the other hand, remains invisible. Genes can be modified using its method that then look exactly the same as if they occurred naturally – whether in bacteria or in humans. What’s more, CRISPR allowed researchers to remove or insert gene segments into DNA much more quickly, cheaply and precisely. Researchers have now long been using CRISPR to make farm animals and crops more resistant to disease or to develop gene therapies for cancer.
Originally, Charpentier simply wanted her research to help her understand fundamental biological processes. But as she has explained in an interview with the German radio station Deutschlandfunk: “I also realised that a mechanism like this could be utilised in new technologies and therapies”. All the same, she was surprised at how swiftly things took off. “You start with a vague idea and think it’ll take 30 years before anything useful comes of it”, she says. In 2020, Doudna and Charpentier were together awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry – though this certainly wasn’t a surprise to anyone in their field.
Illustration: Iris Weidmann
Seeing atoms with your own eyes
“When we saw an atom under the microscope for the first time, it was an overwhelming moment”, said the physicist and Nobel Laureate Gerd Binnig in a video interview with DW News back in 2013. He and his mentor and colleague Heinrich Rohrer from the IBM Research lab in Rüschlikon outside Zurich had been working since the 1970s to figure out how to make these particles visible. Although it had long been known that everything around us is made up of atoms, even the most powerful electron microscopes back then still had far too low a resolution to make them visible.
Binnig’s idea was to scan the surfaces of materials. To this end, he and Rohrer developed a device in their lab that they called a ‘scanning tunnelling microscope’, STM for short. It scans the surface of a sample using an extremely fine tip and measures the so-called tunnelling current between the tip and the sample. This current arises because electrons can sometimes jump across a narrow gap between two conductive substances. This enables the STM to measure the distance to the sample, mapping its contours exactly, down to the level of a single atom.
Binnig’s STM was now able to answer questions that no other method had previously been capable of addressing. “For example: silicon was already an important material in technology back then, but no one knew what its surface looked like in three dimensions”, says Leo Gross, an STM specialist at the IBM lab. What’s more, the new microscope even let you lift up atoms and deposit them elsewhere. “A completely new method for synthesising chemical materials now emerged”, says Gross. And the STM provided the basis for nanotechnology.
Today, Gross uses it to conduct research into physical principles for IBM, such as new materials that “have crazy electronic and magnetic properties”, as he puts it. He produces these in his lab, characterises them and can then model them using his company’s quantum computer located in the USA. Gross still benefits today from Rohrer’s and Binnig’s work in the lab that was once theirs. And what applies at universities also applies in industry: in basic research, it’s almost impossible to predict a direct benefit or financial success from your work. Nevertheless, the Nobel Prize in Physics, which Binnig and Rohrer were awarded in 1986 for their invention, still contributes to the prestige of the IBM laboratory in Rüschlikon today.
