Basic research is sometimes mocked or misunderstood because its ultimate value to human society may not be obvious. Most modern advances in medicine, science and technology originated with basic research that created new knowledge and laid the path to greater health and prosperity.
In the October 29 issue of Nature, the journal celebrates “7 basic science discoveries that changed the world.” Among them, the discovery of a heat-loving bacterium named Thermus aquaticus in a Yellowstone National Park hot spring by microbiologist Thomas Brock (1926-2021) and his undergrad assistant Hudson Freeze, PhD, now director of the Sanford Children’s Health Research Center at Sanford Burnham Prebys.
“I was seeing something that nobody had ever seen before,” Freeze told the journal. “I still get goosebumps when I remember looking into the microscope.”
The discovery of T. aquaticus in 1966 and the isolation of a key bacterial enzyme by Brock and Freeze began the scientific journey that led to the development of the polymerase chain reaction or PCR, a method for rapidly making thousands of copies of a single fragment of DNA.
PCR has since proven to be an indispensable and ubiquitous tool throughout biomedical research and medicine.