Harvard chemist talks about the problem of solving problems

Q: "What problems are being neglected?"<p>Whitesides: "I don't have strong feelings about that. There are so many problems in the world"<p>I've was recently at a conference with a bunch of Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Chemistry. I was asking them a similar question, and some version of Whitesides reply was what I almost always got.

<p><pre><code> it's very easy in academic science to end up working on projects that are just little extensions of previously known stuff, and that's sort of a waste of time.</code></pre>

I get page not found error for the op's submission. But I assume this is the page which was submitted, <a href="http://www.technologyreview.in/biomedicine/41024/" rel="nofollow">http://www.technologyreview.in/biomedicine/41024/</a>

<i>Technology Review: What's the problem you have most wanted to solve and haven't been able to?<p>Whitesides: There's an intellectual problem, which is the origin of life. The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, which I just don't understand. I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactions that are getting more complicated spontaneously. I just don't understand how that works. So that's a scientific problem.</i><p>--This is a rare, intellectually honest view of Evolution. Notice, there is reasonable doubt. However so constrained.