哈佛教授讲述简化的科学

Any idea that science is running out of things to study. All you have to do is peel one layer off the onion and you'll find that is all unknown underneath. I'm George Whitesides. I'm a university professor at Harvard. I'm a chemist. And one of the things that chemists are interested in is order and disorder in general.

The simplicity is an interesting subject. How do you make things as reliable, as workable as you possibly can. Almost everything ends ultimately in giving up because it's so complicated, so complex. And we’re interested in the question of how do you make things simple. And it turns out that there's no good science space for simplicity and that’s what we're interested in.

We have a project to my own research group which is devoted to what we call the zero cost diagnostics. So our initial project in this effort is the idea of  diagnostic chips. The way we do it is to use technology that is basically related to the technology that one uses for making comic books. We print these diagnostic chips on a piece of paper. Ideally, what you do is cut them out or tear them off. You put a drop of blood on one side and what appears then on the other side is a series of diagnostic colors and that pattern of colors gives you information that you'll use for diagnosis. That's the notion. And if that works, it will be very expensive. It will not completely replicate what’s available in a first growth diagnostic clinical laboratory but it’s a start for the world we're interested in.

The biggest problem that we need to put our efforts towards solving right now is probably how we make life on earth sustainable for some period of time. And I think of this problem as being a combination of resources available divided by the number of people. So you can increase the standard of living either by making the resources more available, using them more efficiently, conserving them or having fewer people. Probably the best strategy for having fewer people is to raise the educational level, since in every society it seems that as the education goes up, women have fewer children. There's no shortage of interesting problems to work on.