Some revolutions start with a whimper barely noticed. On April 25, 1953, a short paper written by two relatively obscure scientists was published in the British journal Nature. That article by James Watson and Francis Crick described the double helical structure of DNA. The authors famously ended their paper with the classically understated conclusion that the structure they elucidated "suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." The quest to understand DNA's structure was a bit messy, and some would say achieved with dirty play; but no matter the process, with that article a revolution was born, one that still reverberates today.
We may look back 50 years hence and draw a similar conclusion about a brief news article published in the April 2011 issue of Science, the American counterpart to Nature. The short review mentions a presentation given at this year's American Chemical Society annual meeting in which chemist Daniel Nocera explains the results of his team's research over the past three years. (The paper describing this latest work has not yet been published; the team is in the process of patenting their discovery). What Nocera and his team did, barely noticed, was create an "artificial leaf" that could revolutionize our quest for renewable energy much as the Watson and Crick paper revolutionized the field of biology.
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