Editorial

Recent Nobel Prizes and not so recent ones have shown that every branch of science has felt The impact of advances in other branches however remote they appear to be. Chromatography, discovered by a botanist and x-rays by a physicist have found applications from biology (this includes medicine), to nuclear physics.

However, of late, medical science has catalyzed technology tremendously because of the prospects of immediate applications. EEG, £CG, CT Scan, PET, MRI, Ultra Sound Scanning, X-ray imaging and medical lasers are only a few of them.

Simple determinations of potential differences in the various parts of the brain give information about which part of brain is active for which activity. Yet the mind and the will of man has to be studied more thoroughly.

Studies are getting quantified. Still a lot of research needs attention. After utilizing the latest technique, do we just look at the results and study the densities in various portions visually? It has been found that the much touted automatic spectrometers give very fast results at the cost of accuracy.

The cause of the variation in results will be known if one physically checks peak to peak. Enormous informations were being wasted be- cause a beautiful spectrum with least background looked so attractive.

Automatically operated spectrometers could analyse many samples in a very short time. But the major suspect was reliability. Now technology is in advance. But research has to take the lead if progress has to be meaningful. It is only the close co-operation of scientists from widely different fields that can open up new vistas of research.

Research has to at least keep pace with advances in technology if not overtake them. The motto for success is simple - unified approach for progress.