CDB Special Seminar - Prof Martin Chalfie, Columbia University

Zoom: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/93960224520

Talk abstract: In 1939, the first director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Abraham Flexner, wrote an article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.” In this article he questioned “whether our conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit,” and he argued that real discoveries are made when scientists are allowed to explore the world without recourse to usefulness. Several Nobel prizes have been given for discoveries tangential to what was initially studied.  I will argue that “useless knowledge” is needed as much today as in the past to improve human well-being and health. I will also suggest ways that we can encourage the finding of the unexpected, the discoveries that will enable future scientific revolutions. Martin Chalfie shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein, GFP as a biological marker. During his postdoctoral research (with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston) he developed an interest the molecules, neurons and neural circuits responsible for touch sensitivity/mechanosensation in C. elegans, a subject he has been pursuing in his own lab for many years.

Links:

• https://chalfielab.biology.columbia.edu/people/martin-chalfie
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Chalfie

Hosts: Richard Poole and Arantza Barrios, UCL CDB