Science

• Recent achievements
• Ideas Ahead of Their Time

Scholarship knows no boundaries: ssholars forgot about them long ago. The best evidence of this comes the large numbers of foreign researchers working in Polish institutions of higher education, and their Polish counterparts who lecture abroad. The success of Polish academics today has its roots in the past. The library catalogue of the Cathedral Chapter of Cracow dating back to 1110 shows that already in the early twelfth century Polish intellectuals had access to the European literature of that period - including the Classics like Ovid, Terence, Statius and Sallust. Polish scholarship has brought many academic achievements and discoveries of global importance

Recent achievements

Professor Sylwester Porowski's group managed to beat the world's foremost scientific institutes in the race to produce the blue laser. It was constructed at Unipress, the Warsaw Center for High Pressure Research, part of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). This achievement was possible thanks to the Polish scientists' ability to obtain crystals of gallium nitride under very high pressure. With their diodes, which emit light of a wavelength in the blue part of the electromagnetic spectrum, four times more information than before can be packed on optic disks, which means that in future CD-ROM disks will be able to hold much more data than they do now with the red lasers used to record and read information. Blue diodes are used in medical diagnostic tests, and also in environmental monitoring. In addition, the military is also very interested in the blue laser. The application of red, green, and blue lasers will bring a new generation of televisions and video projectors.

Scientific instruments designed and constructed by Polish physicists have been launched into space, installed on board the satellite Koronas. Mirosław Kowaliński and Ireneusz Gaicki constructed the ReSIK and Diogenes X-ray spectrometers, which study the processes taking place in the sun's corona and send current data round-the-clock to the Moscow space centre. The processing of the data collected gives further information about the sun's outer layers. ReSIK and Diogenes will spend several years in space.

Recent work by Polish astronomers has also brought impressive results. A team of scientists led by Professors Andrzej Udalski and Marcin Kubiak has discovered 46 new planets outside our solar system. They used OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment), a new method of largescale "planet-hunting", opening a new chapter in the history of astronomy. In 2001, after several years of research, Polish archaeologists celebrated a major success: a group led by Professor Karol Myśliwiec, Professor of History at Warsaw University and Director of the Centre for Mediterranean Archaeology at the Polish Academy of Sciences, discovered a group of graves in Egypt dating back to the Old Kingdom, at a site near the pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser in Saqqara. In Sinada, another Polish expedition discovered a church which most probably had been a mausoleum belonging to the kings of Nubia. The portraits of their presumable users are painted on its walls. Polish archaeologists led by Dr. Bogdan Żurawski have been participating in a project to rescue historically significant monuments of Nubian culture in an area due to be floodedon completion of a dam which is being constructed by the Sudanese government between the third and fourth cataracts. An archaeological mission led by Dr. Stefan Jakobielski has been active for thirty-five years in the Sudan, in Old Dongola. One of the most spectacular highlights of recent years in this field has been the discovery of several dozen frescoes in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, an apt sequel to Professor Kazimierz Michałowski's discovery of the now famous Faras frescos in the 1960s.

Ideas Ahead of Their Time

Some discoveries are far ahead of their time. This is certainly true of one of the achievements by Jan Czochralski, one of the best-known Polish scientists abroad. Today one of his discoveries is used in the production of semi-conductors in the world's largest electronics companies, such as the Intel and Motorola (US), Samsung (Korea) or NEC (Japan). Almost all of the world's silicon, from which diodes, transistors and chips are made, is processed using a method developed by Czochralski. In 1916, he happened by accident to discover an ingenious way of growing large crystals of metal and semi-conductors. Although an application for this method was found only in the 1950s, today's electronics would be impossible without it: none of the equipment we have all come to rely on in our daily lives - such as televisions, computers, telephones, robots, microwave ovens and quartz watches - which all require silicon chips would have been possible. In 1924 Czochralski patented the composition of a new alloy which did not contain tin, ideally suited for casting railway carriage bearings. The German railways obtained the patent for this alloy (which is why in Germany this metal is known as the "railway metal", Bahnmetal). A few years later, the USSR, USA and Czechoslovakia also bought it. Czochralski discovered big and small things - the liquid used for hot perms at the hairdresser's is based on his recipe. Professor Andrzej K. Tarkowski's discoveries were also far ahead of their time. During the 1960s, he collaborated with Dr. Anne McLaren of the UK. Tarkowski and McLaren studied embryos during the earliest stage of development, using mice. They were the first to grow embryos in vitro (outside the mothers' bodies), conducted various kinds of experiments on them, and then implanted them in surrogate mothers. Tarkowski was also the first to show that it is possible to direct the development of mouse embryos. He showed, for example, that it is possible to grow a healthy mouse from only half an embryo. Thanks to these studies, today pre-natal, pre-implantation diagnostics are used, making it possible to take single cells from embryos grown in vitro and determine whether or not their DNA contains dangerous mutations. Another of Tarkowski's most important achievements was to demonstrate that parthenogenesis (virgin birth) is possible in mammals - i.e. that it is possible for a living creature to develop which has been created without the participation of sperm. Tarkowski's work on parthenogenic mice was published in the authoritative journal Nature, which even featured a photograph of one such mouse on its cover. In 1983, Tarkowski developed a method of joining the cells of mice embryos by using "cell fusion", using electricity. Thirteen years later, it was that same method that was used by Ian Wilmut to implant a nucleus into a sheep's egg cell, which was how Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, was created. In 2002, Professor Tarkowski received the Japan Prize from that country's Foundation for Science and Technology, considered to be the equivalent of a Nobel Prize.