Some things you take for granted. You expect your physician to know what’s making you itch or twitch and to prescribe a pill or a shot or some other miracle drug to stop it. Other things seem like happy accidents. Not only is your brand new laptop smaller than your Mom’s (or your boss’s) desk-hog of a PC, it runs all the latest games and stores half an ocean worth of data. And when you click on your modem and call into the Internet, it’s a cinch finding out what the weather was like in Iceland last Wednesday or sending that singing birthday card to Uncle Thorpe in Minnesota. Then there are things that needle at you, that make you worry or wonder when you see them in the news. Is the Earth heating up and if so, why? Is there another planet, somewhere in the universe, that’s habitable — just in case our children’s children’s children need to find a new homebase?

These sorts of things in science and technology were the target of this year’s Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science, held on six Saturdays in January and February. The six lecturers were Robert Simpson, James Gardner, Nitin Samarth, Gerry Santoro, Eric Barron, and Larry Ramsey.

"Like all explorers, we have two questions: What have I found that is new, and where am I?"

— Robert Simpson

Robert Simpson, who teaches molecular biology at Penn State, described how DNA analysis works. As a medical doctor, Simpson is excited by the Human Genome Project, hurrying toward its goal of sequencing all human DNA by 2003. Yet he himself works on the humble yeast. "The whole genome sequence of Baker’s yeast, which is my specialty, has been known for the last three years," he noted. "Yeast is just so tractable. It’s the simplest cell with a nucleus." At only 6,000 genes — compared to a human’s 100,000 or so —it’s a good model system for the new science Simpson calls "functional genomics": "All right, you’ve got the sequence, now what?" How do we go from knowledge of the alphabet to finding and fixing the typos in the book of life? "What’s going on in yeast research today," he said, "is going to define what’s going to go on in other organisms."

"If you understand genetic differences, you can screen patients. It won’t be ‘one drug fits all’ anymore."

— James Gardner

James Gardner, a vice president at Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the Penn State lecture series, told his audience how new drugs are made. "It’s sort of like the old game ‘Chutes and Ladders,’" he joked. "You roll the dice and land on that big chute and you’re back to the beginning." Even Pfizer’s "little blue pill," the blockbuster Viagra, was due to chance. (It was originally developed to treat high blood pressure.) But chance is giving way — slowly — to science: as we learn more about our genes, we’re learning more about illness and disease. "Genomics research — that’s were the insights will come from," Gardner said. "When we better understand where disease comes from, we’ll be able to create better tests, identify more drug targets, and customize treatment."

"At that scale, the physical laws we’re used to break down. It allows you to think of new ways of doing computing altogether."

— Nitin Samarth

Physicist Nitin Samarth teaches introductory courses on electricity and magnetism. In his lab, he works on such exotica as quantum dots and compact blue lasers. At the nano scales he studies, trying to control the spin of a single electron, "the physical laws we’re used to dealing with when we connect batteries and bulbs break down," he said. So far, computers have been getting smaller and faster due to good engineering, he explained in his lecture. Eventually, though, the electronics will be so mini that classical physics can no longer apply. Only a "quantum computer" will be any smaller — one that "describes the world using probability and wave functions." It won’t happen in Samarth’s lifetime, but we’re already on our way.

"The real limiting factor will be the ability of users to deal with all the information that’s going to be coming their way."

— Gerry Santoro

Gerry Santoro, a computer programmer who teaches speech communications, discussed the past and future of the Internet. He’s well-versed in its practical aspects, too. Although he keeps a tiny cubicle in the computer building on campus, he mostly telecommutes from his house in the woods at the foot of Tussey Mountain. In the classroom, he teaches from a computer console wired to his students’ desks and puts the bulk of his course material up on the World Wide Web. At home, Santoro estimates he spends four to five hours a day reading and answering the 400 e-mail messages he gets each day.

"You might say, ‘That’s unacceptable. I can’t live without beech trees.’ Or you might say, ‘Humans can adapt.’"

— Eric Barron

Eric Barron, who spoke about climate change, hobnobs at the highest levels. He’s a member of the National Research Council’s Board on Climate Change and chair of its Climate Research Committee. He is also a member of the Science Executive Committee for NASA’s Earth Orbiting Satellite. In 1994, he chaired a forum on climate modeling convened by request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the General Accounting Office. But the picture on the door of his office is a poster-sized photo of Barron on the deck of a ship, part of a program taking high school teachers to sea. He is stiff-limbed and smiling in a huge orange immersion suit, a sort of personalized emergency raft. "I look like a giant Gumby," he said — an accurate characterization.

"The name of the game for detecting planets is measuring those wobbles very, very precisely."

— Larry Ramsey

Astronomer Larry Ramsey thought up the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) back in 1983. The thing finally saw first light almost 15 years later. "Ten years is nothing for an astronomer," he said. Then an exhausted sigh. "But 1983 sure seems like a long time ago." In Texas during HET’s construction, Ramsey couldn’t resist climbing all over the telescope and its dome to take pictures. He was really kid like in this — distracted half-grin, gleam in his eye. He climbed to heights others wanted no part of (and that project team was one macho bunch, too). His resulting photo record is worthy of a book in itself. He has the precise eye not of an artist, but of a physicist and an engineer. And it’s an eye — translated into the HET — that’s now focused on other worlds around other suns.