As Americans, our passion for technology often leads us to confuse technological productivity with scientific advancement. Science applies an agreed upon system of knowledge to the understanding of fundamental principles and mechanisms that control and explain the natural world in which we live. Technology uses the knowledge generated from scientific investigation to design products that will better be able to serve specific functions. So it would seem that technology follows science.

Interestingly, what has evolved in the modern world of cardiovascular (and other) research is much more complex. Certain technological advances have not only enabled more advanced scientific investigation, but they have even changed the very nature of that investigation. For example, the advances in data-processing over the past several decades have been nothing short of phenomenal. Today’s hand-held devices have more processing power than the room-sized computer monsters of the past generation.

If we look, for example, at the field of genetic investigation, a major research interest here at the Florida Heart Research Institute, we see two rather remarkable developments. First, the ability to process and integrate enormous amounts of information in a rapid fashion led to the near completion of the Human Genome Project approximately a decade ahead of schedule. The genetic information regarding the human (as well as several experimental animal species) that is currently available in the public domain is enabling researchers to explore areas and ask questions not even accessible to earlier investigators. But the process is even more dramatic. Because huge quantities of information can be processed very rapidly, databases can be mined for associations that were not previously predicted. What does that mean? In classical scientific research, the investigator uses his observations of phenomena to generate a hypothesis. He then designs an experiment or series of experiments to test that hypothesis. The findings either prove or disprove or modify the hypothesis, while at the same time raising new questions to be explored. And so science marches on. Now, however, the scientist can take one huge set of data, like the human genome, and another huge set of data, such as a population with a known form of heart disease, replete with all sorts of clinical details, and bring the two together, looking for patterns of association. The results may be somewhat predictable. For example, when we use this technique and discover that there is an association between an abnormal heart rhythm and a mutation in the gene that codes for one of the proteins that sit in the cell membrane and determine the flow of ions (charged particles) across that membrane, we are not particularly surprised. That flow of ions is the mechanism by which heart rhythms are generated and maintained. However, determining which specific mutation(s) are associated with which arrhythmia would have been, without this technology, like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Moreover, other results, may have been completely unpredictable, such as finding an association between congestive heart failure and the genes encoding certain poorly understood cytoskeletal proteins, or even more mysterious genes which do not encode anything, but regulate the expression of other genes.

What is happening here? Not only is technology enabling scientific investigation but it is changing scientific method!! Now the power of the information which is being processed can generate the hypothesis, rather than vice versa. Perhaps in the area of informatics, this dramatic potential of technology to impact science can most readily be appreciated. However, there are other areas of evolving technology whose impact on scientific discovery is likely to be enormous. The exact nature of that influence is now only a matter of speculation. For example, what will happen when nanotechnology will soon enable us to evaluate living organisms on the subcellular level? To perhaps tell us which cells “sound” or “look” more like cancer cells? To “listen” to the communication between cells? What will be the impact when proteonomics can distinguish for us the specific modifications that certain cells make of certain proteins under certain conditions of health and disease? When noninvasive tests will be able to identify for us which atherosclerotic plaques will be the ones en route to rupture and cause a heart attack? And which ones can be reversed?

Between science and technology we are reminded of Humphrey Bogart’s classic line at the conclusion of Casablanca, “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship…”