The price of research

Words to remember (or borrow) on the business of science

"Basic research may seem very expensive. I am a well-paid scientist. My hourly wage is equal to that of a plumber but sometimes my research remains barren of results for weeks, months or years and my conscience begins to bother me for wasting the taxpayer's money. But in reviewing my life's work, I have to think that the expense was not wasted. Basic research, to which we owe everything, is relatively very cheap when compared with other outlays of modern society. The other day I made a rough calculation which led me to the conclusion that if one were to add up all the money ever spent by man on basic research, one would find it to be just about equal to the money spent by the Pentagon this past year." 

Albert von Szent-Györgyi (1893-1984).
From his book, "The Crazy Ape", Grosset and Dunlap, New York, 1971. (Available from Amazon.com)

Albert von Szent-Györgyi won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1937, for co-discovering Vitamin C and other aspects of body chemistry. The account of his discovery, as reported on the Nobel Prize Web site, makes good reading in itself:

"There is another strange story here. He (Szent-Györgyi) was a Hungarian biochemist who had worked in a number of countries and had a special interest in oxidation-reduction mechanisms in the body. After detecting an antioxidant compound in the adrenal cortex, he was invited to Cambridge in England in 1927 and there, using a simple in vitro test to measure its relative concentration in fractions obtained from the tissue, he was able in a few months to isolate a compound that he named hexuronic acid, and that he showed to have the empirical formula C6H8O6

"Meanwhile, several groups had for years been attempting to isolate the anti-scurvy vitamin C from lemon juice, carrying out successive, time-consuming biological assays with guinea pigs at each fractionation stage. In 1932, Charles Glen King of the University of Pittsburgh in the U.S.A. reported success, and added that his crystals had all the properties reported by Szent-Györgyi for hexuronic acid. The latter had by now returned to Hungary and quickly confirmed the biological activity of his crystals. So, for four years, the vitamin had been isolated and to hand without Szent-Györgyi realizing what he had done. After multiple nominations, he received the Prize in 1937. It has been suggested that the citation was expanded to include more than just the isolation of vitamin C because of feeling in the U.S.A. that Charles Glen King deserved most of the credit for the isolation since 'he knew what he was after.'

The final citation language, settled on by the Nobel committee: 'for his discoveries in connection with the biological combustion processes, with especial reference to vitamin C and the catalysis of fumaric acid.'"

(Account from "The Nobel Prize and the Discovery of Vitamins" by Kenneth J. Carpenter)