As Nobels near, slow science pays

While the world wants flashy quick fixes for everything, especially massive threats like the coronavirus and global warming, next week's Nobel Prizes remind us that in science, slow and steady pays off.

It may soon do so again. Science builds upon previous work, with thinkers “standing on the shoulders of giants,” as Isaac Newton put it, and it starts with basic research aimed at understanding a problem before fixing it. It's that type of basic science that the Nobels usually reward, often years or decades after a discovery, because it can take that long to realize the implications.

Slow and steady success in science has made researchers hopeful in the fight against the pandemic. It even offers a glimmer of climate optimism.

Many years of advances in basic molecular science, some of them already Nobel Prizewinning, have given the world tools for fast virus identification and speeded up the development of testing. And now they tantalize us with the prospect of COVID-19 treatments and ultimately a vaccine, perhaps within a few months.

“This could be science's finest hour. This could be the time when we deliver, not just for the nation but the world, the miracle that will save us,” said geophysicist Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences.

The coronavirus was sequenced in a matter of weeks, testing became available quickly, and vaccinesthat would normally take years may be developed in a year or less, and “it's all been built on the back of basic science advances that have been developed in the past three decades,” McNutt said.

Basic research comes first. The benefits are typically reaped only later, in what is called applied science.

John Mather, who won the 2006 physics Nobel for cosmology, which is the study of the origin of the universe and is thus the ultimate basic science, said nearly everything we use around us is there because of basic science.

“Engineers and entrepreneurs use this knowledge to build commercial empires,” he said. “Doctors use what we find to develop new cures.”