Today, I'm putting on my Spock ears to speak to you as PHCentral's Chief Science Officer. For the non-Trekkie, Mr. Spock was both the second in command of the Enterprise and its Science Officer.

Our exact topic is "The Importance of Basic Research". I'm going to explain the concept, tell you how it pertains to PH, and suggest that every one of us can put pressure in the right places to make good things happen.

Maybe I'll start by offering a bit of autobiographical info. I grew up in the house of a brilliant graduate student and later medical school professor. My father's field of endeavor was sleep research, and in 1953 he discovered the Rapid Eye Movement (REM). I was 9 years old when he began work on the dissertation that led to this discovery, and I was throughout his labors a frequent participant in experiments involving the early use of electro-encephalography to explore the strange world of sleep.

Even before that year, I hung about science labs with the other kids from the student housing of the University of Chicago campus. While we played our share of hide and seek and tag, we also visited "Doc Urey" to get his old chem-lab glassware for our home chemistry sets. (It wasn't until I took college chemistry that I learned that the nice fellow with the spare test-tubes was Harold Urey, winner of the Nobel Prize.)

My father and I took walks through the campus, and discussed the sights. Going by the wall of Stagg Stadium, I was taught that the University had no football team, but that the stadium was more important for what went on under the stands than on the playing field. This was the location of the first man-made nuclear reaction. On the day that experiment took place over 50 years ago, no one knew whether the reaction once started would ever stop. This seemed like an even better story than one about a last minute game-winning touchdown.

Not too far from where I lived, was the famous Museum of Science and Industry, full of fascinating buttons and levers that demonstrated scientific principles. My friends and I walked to this museum and took in lectures on topics ranging from coal-mining to the origins of electricity. We also climbed onto the roof of the Ida Noyes womenís Dormitory when our curiosity took us in other directions.

Stamp collecting was a big hobby in my peer group, but since we were students' kids we had no money--just initiative. We discovered that the International House was home to students from nearly every country on the map. Stamp collecting for us meant sneaking past the lobby desk clerk and searching out student rooms with inhabitants from the most exotic places. We knocked on doors, and were invited into the rooms of young adults who offered us a soda or a cup of tea, told us stories about their homelands, and carefully tore off the stamps from the letters from mother and dad back in The Gold Coast (Ghana).

Years later, I gave up stamp collecting when a snobbish rich kid in my high school saw my collection and unimpressed with the whole thing, had the audacity to tell me to get rid of one stamp in my album that had a little tear in one corner. "It's torn and worthless", he said. And I said I'd never get rid of that stamp because it didn't come from a stamp dealer; it came from Mr. So and So of Nigeria, a very nice man who even gave you cookies with tea while he searched for letters with stamps.

As I grew older, my involvement in my father's work increased. I helped out in his lab, operating on a few dogs and cats, and deciding at those moments that I probably wasn't going to be a surgeon. I much more enjoyed the thorny problems of temperamental tube-driven experimental equipment, and the study of the fascinating squiggles that mapped out the electrical activity of various parts of the brain.

In the early sixties, I helped run what are called "Fourrier" analyses of complex waves. The scientifically inclined reader will recognize what a beastly job that was to do by hand. Today there are microchips in inexpensive equipment used to put music on a CD that are doing in seconds what took days forty years ago. Heck, even taking the square root of a number was a big deal back then. One could either fire up a mainframe computer or do it by hand.

From those days as a child and young man, I developed a burning curiosity, a respect for knowledge, an appreciation for the hard work of science--and most of all the understanding that finding things out brings unexpected rewards. Today I apply those insights to my own profession, which lies in the social sciences. But it makes no difference which shaft in the mine of Science one works in, the principles of digging the richest ore are always the same.

Some scientific work has a clear practical application. Edison is the great example of a man who added little to our store of knowledge , and only temporarily to our enjoyment of life. He did not 'discover' the light bulb, but took the theoretical work on the passage of current through media of different resistance and went into his lab to find the substance that would give the most light for the longest time at a reasonable price. Like many applied findings, Edison's discovery was soon replaced. Today's lighbulbs and neon tubes and glowing diodes bear little resemblance to Edison's device. The principles with which Edison worked, however, are still of great use. Similarly, you might find it interesting to note that Edison's phonograph company did not survive the great depression while several others did. Once he'd latched on to a technological answer, he was slow to change, and his records and playing machines were surpassed as early as 1900, when Emil Berliner came up with a design for the phonograph record that lasted nearly 50 years. Now of course we have the Compact Disc.

Now get ready for the big shift...

The answer to Pulmonary Hypertension lies in work that deals with fundamental issues of the growth and degeneration of vascular tissue. While we are all anxious to press ahead with modifications of current treatment technologies, the "Cure" word is dependent upon basic physiological discoveries. We need to understand certain mechanisms in order to understand how to build drugs or machines that affect those mechanisms.

Coming from the particular background that I do, has more than a general connection with PH. Many of you are doubtless aware that one of the most common causes of PH is Sleep Apnea. It's also one of the most treatable forms, with a pretty good prognosis for many patients.

Ask anyone doing research in this area whether the discovery of Rapid Eye Movements was significant in the work they do today. A discovery with absolutely no known utility opened the way for the modern scientific exploration of sleep. From the discovery that eyes move in a particular way during a particular phase of sleep (in which dreaming takes place, in most mammals, at least), scientists have piled on the variables they wanted to study. What about various aspects of brain function during sleep. How about metabolism. Maybe people's use of oxygen varies as sleep varies. Maybe some people aren't getting enough oxygen while they sleep---voila, sleep apnea.

None of the questions asked in the series above mattered to you until we got to the final one, which had bearing on PH. But all that other inquiry, with no direct application in mind had to come before.

...And now the sales pitch...

So what are you supposed to do with all this ? The answer is both simple and complicated. Our society has grown to discredit the scientist and even science in general. We want big TV's and VCR's but we don't respect the guy who discovered radio waves or the applied devices necessary to use them, the vacuum tube and the transistor.

Lets take this down to the day to day level. In your local high school, who is the captain of the football team? Who has the best grades in Math?

You see, it's simple and complicated. We value the product that the great mind produces, but we don't value the great mind. And least of all do we value the great mind whose discovery, though essential for research to follow, does not directly put a new appliance in our house or cure in our bodies.

We need as a society to have an attitude adjustment, and those of us whose lives hang by a thread can least afford to let things go on as they are. We applaud the worthless, denigrate what we don't understand, and demand that everything that is done have a quick and obvious payoff.

People want a new baseball stadium, but no one is demanding that more medical information be put on the internet. What if those suffering from a disability could gain access to the full text of everything at the nearest medical school library?

We're doing what we can on this site to provide you with all the information that we can find about PH. But we're going to push you to become more appreciative of the science that is going to save your lives and more active in urging everyone you encounter to think about where they want money to be spent. The movie Titanic has grossed nealy two Billion dollars. That ís a lot to pay for three hours of entertainment. Yet we question the "expensive playtoys" of egghead scientists. We don't need another particle accelerator. We need another cardboard Titanic that costs just as much.

I'm taking off my pointy ears now. We can all go back to watching the ads for the Psychic Friends network. Perhaps they'll come up with a cure.