Ireland has long excelled in the sciences, but few of us seem to realise it. A new book should ensure that we celebrate our scientists' achievements, writes Arminta Wallace.
Hands up if you've heard of the Grubbs. No? See, there's the problem in a nutshell. By this time each year we have spent a few weeks digging in the sandbox marked "Irish cultural identity". We bang on about Beckett and Bono, Robbie Keane and Riverdance, and whatever you're having yourself. But when it comes to totting up our cultural strengths and weaknesses, we usually count science as one of the latter - if we think of science as part of Irish culture at all.
Which is why we don't know that the Grubbs are not characters in some sitcom but a family of master telescope builders from Co Meath whose skill with optics and precision clock drives helped ensure that Ireland led the world in that field for much of the 19th century. Can we name the Irishman who invented the submarine? Or the woman who, in the late 1880s, drew detailed maps of the moon? Can we heck. You don't hear "John Philip Holland" or "Agnes Mary Clerke" trip off the average Irish tongue with any kind of ease.
But Ireland has been involved in the appliance of science ever since the builders of Newgrange pipped the Egyptian pyramid lads at the post - and a book just published by the Royal Irish Academy aims to show that Irish scientists are still at the cutting edge of all things technological. Flashes of Brilliance , a collection of articles by Dick Ahlstrom, science editor of The Irish Times, puts the spotlight on young men and women, in laboratories around the country, whose research should, one day, affect the development of everything from better methods of hip-replacement surgery through smaller, sharper television screens to more efficient computer software.
Take Robert Burns. A macrobiologist based at Dublin City University, he is working on the chemistry behind a matchbox-sized gizmo that could make scare stories about the quality of drinking water a thing of the past. "It's like an early-warning system which would detect the presence of toxic metal residues in lakes and reservoirs," he says. "A molecular switch, which we can turn on and off from the lab using LED lights and wireless technology." At the moment, water-quality sensors have to be permanently switched on, which not only requires an energy-gobbling pump but eventually leads to a deterioration in sensitivity. "The switches would only be active when we want them to be, and a measurement would only take 60 seconds," Burns says. In an ideal world such spot checks would be carried out daily, which is precisely what could be done with a system of molecular sensors in the nation's reservoirs.
Burns says his interest in science began when he read Roald Dahl's George's Marvellous Medicine as a child. "George mixing all his little solutions together, you know? That's the first book I ever remember reading. Until after the Junior Cert I had no interest in science at all. Then I had a teacher, a Christian Brother in my school, Drimnagh Castle, who really sparked it off for me. I got interested in how things work. I began to realise that everything around us is made up of atoms." And he was off.
He's still big into sport, though. "I play GAA and I play for an Australian Rules team here in Dublin as well. I'm a big sports fan - and I would be a big socialiser as well, to be honest. The rule of my life is, I do my work and then, when I finish work, I can forget about it and do my own thing. Even my supervisor would say that you have to have your skates on at the end of the day, to get out of this crazy world of chemistry."
Gareth Murphy, by contrast, spent a year working in the internal-audit section of a bank, "to see what it was like in the outside world", as the astrophysicist puts it. It was, well, ordinary. "On my lunch break one day I was walking down Merrion Square, and I just knocked on the door of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and said I'd like to work there," he says. "Which I suppose is not quite the normal way to do it, but anyway, I had seen an ad in the paper which said they were offering postgraduate research positions."
He now spends his time studying the jets that are emitted in the star-formation process - trails of goo that dribble from baby stars, to you and me - which is, let's face it, anything but ordinary. "Really young stars form out of clouds of gas which collapse on top of each other into really dense bodies," he says. "During that process they spit out jets of material - almost like what you'd see coming out of the tail of a jet plane flying across the sky." The purpose of the jet is to slow the star down, "a bit like ice skaters when they hold their arms inwards - they spin faster. It's now thought that without them there wouldn't be any stars", Murphy says. "So, for example, our own sun would have had a jet at some time in the past."
The work of an astrophysicist does not, surprisingly, involve peering through a telescope at the outer regions of space. "Astronomers peer through telescopes," he says. "We astrophysicists try to explain what's going on out there. I do computer modelling. You need giant computers, because there's a seriously large amount of calculation to be done. It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours on the biggest computers you can find."
Murphy has spent three years on this project, which he describes as "a pretty amazing experience from start to finish", not least because of the amount of air miles he has clocked up along the way. He spent six weeks in Bologna and has been to Hawaii for an annual conference that is attended by all the big names in international astrophysics. Does he agree with those who say that this is a golden age of astronomy? "Very much so. I think it's one of the best ever, certainly in terms of star-formation studies," he says. "These regions of the galaxy are so far away that you need really powerful telescopes to see them. The Hubble [ space telescope] has opened up a whole new area which we can work with."
Back in inner space, Kieran Ryan, a microbiologist, is studying the bacteria that cause stomach ulcers and stomach cancer. His laboratory is the scene of a bizarre daily fight to the death - at microscopic level, naturally - between pathogens (the bacteria that cause disease) and probiotic, or potentially good, bacteria. "We're trying to see whether we can find any strains of the latter that will help treat the diseases caused by the bad guys," he says. "We mix the two together to see what happens, generally by growing the bad guys on a Petri dish and then adding a drop of the good guys. If the good guys are winning you'll see a zone of clearance around them."
If it all sounds like something out of a science-fiction novel, take a look, next time you're in the dairy section of your supermarket, at the number of probiotic products on the shelves. "It's big business," says Ryan. "There's a lot of literature out there which says probiotics are good, but we don't really know why they're good. That's why we exist - to try to find out."
He is based at the alimentary-pharmobiotic centre at University College Cork, which is funded by Science Foundation Ireland. "Our research also touches on antibiotic resistance, as stomach bacteria are growing increasingly resistant to those. And the good bacteria also seem to have an all-round anti-inflammatory effect on people, so there are lots of good reasons for finding better probiotics."
Although he says the centre is "a great place to work", with regular international exchanges and a constant flow of new ideas, Ryan is still mildly surprised to find himself in a scientific milieu. "Art was really my thing when I was at school," he says. "I applied to the National College of Art and Design, but I didn't get a place. I was offered science at NUI Galway, so I took it, even though I wasn't, and I'm still not, a maths person."
He keeps his hand in as a cartoonist, having recently drawn a series of comic strips for the centre's online education and outreach programme. "It's good to be able to combine the two."
Another scientist whose work sees her combine the two loves of her life is Emmeline Hill, who is studying the genes of thoroughbred horses to try to establish whether there are any significant differences between the DNA of top-class elite animals and those that have never won a race. "The main focus is to understand the genes that contribute to athletic ability in the thoroughbred," she says. "We're selecting candidate genes that we know have an association with health-and-fitness-related traits in humans."
Hill grew up with horses. Her father and brother breed them on the family farm, in Wexford, and her grandmother, Charmian Hill, was not only the first jockey to ride against men under the rules of racing but also the owner of the famous Dawn Run. "At one stage I wanted to be a vet, but I'm too squeamish," says Hill. Instead she went to study science at Trinity College in Dublin, where she opted to specialise in genetics. "I remember my father saying to me that there were few, if any, horse geneticists and that it might be a possible niche to get into. That caught my interest, the idea of doing something different."
Different is the word. Hill, who has been based at University College Dublin for more than three years, is the only person in Ireland to work in this field, and only a handful of scientists around the world are engaged in similar projects. "Most people in horse genomics are trying to understand disease and health-related things," she says. But in the horse world, as in every other, things are changing fast. "I think owners, breeders and trainers here are beginning to understand that the way to maintain Ireland's competitiveness is to embrace novel biotechnologies. It's really important to be able to put the science into a context for the person who is most likely to benefit from it. I see that as one of my roles."
Putting science into context for all of us is the job of another Irishwoman: Carol Gibbons, deputy to the Government's chief science adviser. How? "We need to get the message out there that the standard of our research is very, very high," she says. "Both internationally and at a national level." No better group to get the message across than this lot.
Flashes of Brilliance, a double pack that features a book and a DVD, is published by the Royal Irish Academy, €16.99