FROM THE EDITOR
Innovation Farming
Nurturing ideas to fruition, like growing plants, is a complex process
that relies on a suitable substrate and favorable conditions.
BY BOB GRANT
I
am a gardener. I love sowing seeds or digging vulnerable
baby plants into rich earth in my backyard. As fellow gar-
deners will know, the journey from these early phases of
growth to the enjoyment of fruits, vegetables, or flowers is
seldom a straight line. Successfully growing plants is often
punctuated by challenges, frustrations, and failures along
the way. As plants struggle to reach maturity, competitors
can sap the resources they need to grow, pests and diseases
can damage their leaves and stems, and the climate can
drown or dehydrate them. Sometimes, even when plants
make it to maturity, fruit withers or freezes on the vine.
This same nonlinear trajectory seems to play out in the
innovation pipeline as germinal ideas blossom into fully
realized commercial products, methods, or technologies.
A suitable substrate and growth-conducive environmental
conditions (soil and a moist, warm climate in the case of
plants; a welcoming and wide-open environment for ideas)
are essential to the maturation process. But just as weeds,
pests, and wild climatic swings can hinder plants, doubts,
failures, competition, or resource limitation can doom
innovation. In addition, scientific products mature on a
protracted timeline—instead of a growing season, decades
can stretch between fundamental insight and commercial
realization—increasing a potential innovation’s exposure
to such difficulties.
Yet, here we are at the end of another year, with an
abundant crop of innovations to celebrate. It’s appropriate
that The Scientist’s December issue, where we highlight
the winners of our annual Top 10 Innovations competi-
tion, is also centered around the theme of cell biology. As
the past several years have demonstrated, basic biologi-
cal discovery tends to focus on the levels of the cell and its
molecules, with new tools making it increasingly possible
to peek inside cells to uncover the secrets they harbor.
Evidence of this harmony between technological
innovation and fundamental biological discovery is on
display in a feature article (see page 34) from Archa Fox,
a cell biologist at the University of Western Australia
in Perth who writes about her role in detecting novel
structures called paraspeckles inside the nuclei of cells.
Fox tells a tale that stretches back nearly two decades,
to her time as a postdoc studying nuclear proteins. Over
the course of her research journey, she encountered feel-
ings of isolation and doubt as she strove to legitimize
10 T H E SC I EN TIST | the-scientist.com
her discovery and character-
ize the cellular features she
had found. Through fruitful
collaborations and the use of
enabling technologies such
as fluorescent labels and
super-resolution micros-
copy, she managed to bring
paraspeckles into the light, and now there are several
labs studying these tiny membraneless organelles.
Another story in our December issue, written by
associate editor Shawna Williams (see page 26), simi-
larly showcases the potential of advanced technologies,
this time to help researchers and clinicians battle the
scourge of Alzheimer’s disease. Henrik Zetterberg, a
University of Gothenburg researcher who is engaged in
the quest to find reliable and meaningful biomarkers of
the neurodegenerative disease, tells her that improve-
ments in protein analysis have been instrumental in
driving research in the field over the last decade.
I expect this year’s crop of Top 10 Innovations to facili-
tate advances across the life-science spectrum, from basic
insights into the structure and function of cells and sub-
cellular structures to breakthroughs in the clinic. Some of
the winning products—such as a new mass photometer, a
long-read sequencer, and a live-cell imaging microscope—
are poised to grant laboratory researchers access to previ-
ously inaccessible regions of biology. Others—such as a
wireless blood glucose tester and a platform for detecting
biomarkers in patients’ breath—are already changing the
way physicians treat their patients.
As I look forward to 2020, I do not anticipate that
the pace of innovation in the life sciences will slow one
bit. Researchers will continue to overcome the consider-
able challenges that face them to develop technologies
that will bear healthy fruits for years to come. g
ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
Editor-in-Chief
eic@the-scientist.com