... may be your son or daughter.

Perhaps he’s just now starting high school, or perhaps she’s in elementary school. When others are playing video games and watching TV, does he want to understand why things are the way they are? Does she spend time by herself reading, thinking and coming up with the most wonderful, creative ideas about how the world works? If these are your children, then encourage them, praise them, and tell them about Isaac Newton.

During a span of almost 170 years, from 1473 to 1642, Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe and Kepler changed our perception of the stars and planets. With improved optical technology and experimental techniques, they challenged the celestial views of their time and discovered miraculous things about the planets.

But astronomy remained muddled until the late 1600s, when Newton proposed his universal theory of gravitation and determined that the gravitational attraction between objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, a result consistent with Kepler’s Laws of Motion, which were built on the observations of Copernicus, Galileo and the meticulous astronomical data of Brahe. Newton made sense of voluminous astronomical data, and the classical mechanics he developed are still used today to build bridges, launch rockets and determine how far a home run is hit.

Biology has gone through a similar evolution, though starting later, because life is so much more complicated than physics and because, as an interdisciplinary science, molecular biology depends critically on advances in many other fields.

Robert Hooke discovered cork cells in 1665, but early microscopes acted as prisms, separating light into its component frequencies, and didn’t become useful until the development of achromatic lenses around 1830. Interestingly, that was 170 years ago.

By 1838, Mathias Schleiden had concluded that cells were the building blocks of biological structure, much as John Dalton had concluded, during the same period, that atoms were the building blocks of chemistry. In 1866, Mendel proposed that genes were responsible for inherited characteristics. Though DNA was first chemically identified as a cell constituent in 1869, its role in genetic inheritance was not understood until 1944. The mystery of how DNA accomplished this feat was solved in 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, which is stable enough to replicate reliably yet flexible enough, with its two twisted strands, to divide.

Then last month, on June 26, just two months after the fruit-fly genome had been sequenced, the sequencing of the 3-billion letters of the human genome was announced by Celeron and the public consortium that was first directed by James Watson, who had predicted, in 1988, that sequencing would be complete by 2005. The more than 1000 scientists in six nations who collaborated on the project managed to beat Watson’s prediction by 5 years!

This accomplishment and euphoric promises for the future took my breath away, until I went to the doctor, which I did recently, with a sore throat and cough.

I felt really lousy and had waited for a week to see if my illness would go away on its own. It didn’t, and a nurse swabbed my throat. After the culture came back negative, I was told I had a virus and nothing could be done. Drink plenty of water, get lots of rest, etc., etc., was what I was told. I’m sure I was told roughly the same thing back in 1953 when I was seven.

In 1957, the same year Sputnik scared the hubris out of us, Thomas Kuhn’s study of the Copernican revolution led him to conclude that science is not a business in which more work yields more results. Rather, he said, science changes dramatically, through paradigm shifts. Of course, the data and knowledge that precede a paradigm shift are necessary, perhaps even critical, but someone eventually comes along, someone like Newton, who, through his special intelligence and insight, changes our world forever.

I’m pretty sure that by the time my sons are my age, doctors will be able to help them when they have a "virus". The genetic alphabet is now in place. Scientists are beginning to make sense of biological words and grammar. I’m optimistic.

Now we need a biological poet, someone like Newton, who can pull it all together in a meaningful way, and if the past is any guide, she may have been born this year.