Albert Lasker
Basic Medical Research Award

Acceptance remarks by David Baulcombe

My initial reactions to hearing about the Lasker award were surprise, delight, satisfaction, gratitude to colleagues and a nice warm feeling. I was also pleased that there had been recognition of plants as model systems — I have written about that in the commentary article. After a while, I also started wondering how I got into this prize winning position. Part of the answer of course is luck and having great colleagues. The other part is because EVENTUALLY we — my group — did what we should do as scientists. Through a process of deduction and controlled experimentation we worked out that the important molecules are antisense of the target molecule and they are small and finally we made some progress.

Now the point I would like to make is about the word "EVENTUALLY" — the whole process took some considerable time and it was a while before we even realised that we were looking at something extraordinary. Even then, we messed about with misguided models based on proteins or even DNA interactions before we got on the right track. What we did initially was what all people do most of the time — we were jumping to conclusions. The right side of our brain took over and our thinking was based on preconceptions, hunches and incomplete information.

In everyday life the intuitive right hemisphere process serves us quite well: it would be a pretty strange and feeble existence without it. Right hemisphere thinking may even have a proper place in the early pathway of a scientific discovery. But, for most of the time in science, the evidence based logical left hemisphere should dominate.

Now the point of all of this is that practically everyone on the planet has a functioning left hemisphere, and potentially everyone could embrace the scientific way of thinking from time to time, but they do not. Perhaps if people could understand that many scientists struggle with this right and left hemisphere conflict it would be easier for them to accept science and what it has to offer. I see getting widespread acceptance of science and its technological opportunities as being a significant challenge — even now. The Lasker Foundation has established an excellent forum to promote science and I am honoured to be associated with it.