The golden age of biomedical research.

I n 1492, Columbus set sail on a voyage to reach the riches of the East and instead found a new world. His was not an isolated act of discovery but part of the Golden Age of Exploration —a multinational effort to find new lands, new wealth, and new trade routes. Prince Henry the Navigator, Magellan, Cabot, Bering, and many others from the major European powers used large government subsidies to explore and lay claim to the Americas and large parts of Africa and Asia. The end of the 15 th century saw the blossoming of exploration because of dramatic improvements in the technology of sea travel. Devices for navigation such as the sea-quadrant, improvements in cartography, and especially great improvements in ship design so that fully rigged sailing ships supplanted slave-rowed galleys or single-sail vessels, all combined to make practical the long voyages needed for exploration. These technological innovations and improvements justified the high priority that many nations gave to an exuberant and, for the times, enormously expensive effort. The result was Western civilization as we know it. At the end of the 20 th century, we are in the midst of another golden age. Abundant historical examples convincingly demonstrate the effect of developments in technology on the progress of science and society, but few are as impressive as today's growth in the biomedical sciences. The advent of molecular biological technology and advances in computing, robotics, organic chemistry, imaging , microscopy, crystallography, and many other sciences and technologies have allowed biomedical scientists to answer questions that were previously completely unap-proachable. My personal experiences are typical of my generation. As a junior faculty member teaching immu-nology, I presented the clonal selection of antibody-forming cells as a widely accepted theory, but I had to indicate that there were several quite different views of how the immune system might have sufficient genetic flexibility in order to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of different antibody molecules that we can make. Just a few years later, the genetic information for the immunoglobulin genes had been sequenced and the complex organization of the immune response at the level of the genome was exposed. The passionate debate between the somatic mutation theorists and the germ line theorists was closed forever, and in the process, a new science had been born. My personal experience was replicated in all areas of biomedical science as the new techniques solved …