noods, spacehoppers, hoverboards... fashions come and go.
When they’re later dusted off and wheeled out, usually by
TV documentary makers, they often seem laughable.
Even as a kid in the 1970s, I couldn’t understand why anyone
would want to buy a pet rock. Still, at least that fad only affected
pocket money – unlike the cosmetics marketed in the 1930s, which
claimed to make a woman’s face glow through the wondrous
effects of radioactivity.
Science has helped debunk fads over the years, from
silly diets to screens for blocking ‘harmful radiation’ from
PCs. But science itself is also prey to fashion, and the
consequences aren’t always quite so funny.
When I was a student, researchers working on the
properties of materials were seen as second-rate drudges
messing about in what was called ‘dirt physics’. The
proper term is ‘materials science’, and the theory
behind it is known as solid-state physics. Even so,
one Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist could
not resist referring to it as ‘squalid state’.
All very droll, except that such attitudes did little
to boost recruitment into the field. Which is a
shame, as ‘squalid-state physics’ is now at the centre
of a technological revolution. Understanding how
electrons and photons behave in materials holds the
key to highly efficient solar cells, long-life batteries
and a host of other game-changing technology.
What’s more, refusing to follow scientific
fashion can bring huge rewards as one
materials scientist showed in the 1980s.
Shuji Nakamura was fascinated by a
typically boring squalid-state challenge:
getting high-frequency light out of
semiconductors.
As a loner in an obscure Japanese
company, Nakamura knew he had little chance of success if he
followed the fashionable ideas pursued by everyone else. So he
focused on ideas everyone ‘knew’ were hopeless. It worked. He
won the Nobel Prize in 2014 and opened the way to the biggest
breakthrough in light technology since Thomas Edison: bright
white LEDs.
One area in which fashion seems especially influential is
medicine. Fields like cardiac surgery and neurology are proverbially
glamorous, not least because of the complexity of what they do.
Recently, gene therapy, stem cell research and cancer immunology
have garnered global publicity and funding to match, which is
understandable given their huge promise.
But what about all those less glamorous areas of research, and
the scientists toiling away with little publicity and less funding?
Who cares – surely they’re less glamorous because they’re not as
important?
Not so. Take the research, or lack of it, into a boring,“Researchers aren’t queueing up to work on
something unfashionable like the Menopause”
The Last Word
ROBERT MATTHEWS is Visiting Professor in Science at Aston University, Birminghamunglamorous condition that affects over a billion people worldwide:
chronic pain. We all know people struggling along with painful
conditions like arthritis and spinal damage. Yet despite their
prevalence, medical science can offer little but temporary respite.
Or how about a condition affecting half the global population
when they reach middle age: the menopause. Hundreds of millions
of women suffer its effects, from disturbed sleep and mood swings
to reduced cognitive abilities. But the remedies on offer are either
unproven, temporary or risky. And young researchers aren’t exactly
queueing up to work on so unfashionable a problem.
In the end, it hardly matters what ideas are in or out of fashion in,
say, particle physics. But it certainly does matter in medical science,
and the real ‘fashion victims’ could be us. ßS
MAIN ILLUSTRATION: ADAM GALE PORTRAIT: KATE COPELAND