I see synchrotrons as exemplary investments in science for areas such as structural biology, medicine, and materials science where collaborative efforts coupled with invested government funding have provided enormous benefits to society. I am interested in how others see this investment and what are perceived as examples of major payoffs in the last decade. Also if you agree that synchrotron research seems to have retained merit-based competition, which can frequently be damaged by block funding intended to provide stability, why might this be the case?
I think synchrotrons are a excellent example how real basic science is translated to other areas and helps technological development. Accelerators and the cyclotrons were originally built as microscopes to investigate the nature of matter in particle physics. Today synchrotrons are built for investigations of all kinds of materials, study protein ligand interaction, image larger and larger life relevant complexes, as photosystems, ribosomes, and viruses, which are all relevant to the development of modern medicine. Synchrotrons are now used to image complicated non periodic structures from nanometers to meters. The next generation of X-ray microscopes are Free Electron Lasers (FELs). They generate unprecedented peak brightness, the most coherent x-ray radiation over a wide wavelength range, and most excitingly they deliver the intensity in a few femtoseconds. Chemical bonds are formed and broken in a few hundred femtoseconds. For the first time we can probe transition states and catalysis directly.
In addition to all the amazing and exciting things mentioned by Gebhard Schertler that can be done now and will be done in the future at synchrotrons and their relatives, synchrotron data collection has become the powerful engine of macromolecular structure determination. Along with cryo-protection of samples, synchrotron data collection has made phase determination using anomalous diffraction routine and has made it possible to obtain accurate diffraction data from small and huge macromolecules. The number of macromolecular structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank based on synchrotron data increased from about 1200 in the year 2000 to 5500 in 2010, while the number based on all other sources remained constant at about 1000 per year (see Berman et al., Protein Science 21, 1587, 2012).
You both make great points. When I think of game-changing breakthroughs in structural biology I think of cryo-cooling and anomalous phasing for example. As you point out, the synchrotrons provide many advantages including adjustable wavelengths, short exposure times, bright mini-beams for small crystals, and automation have been for enabling other advances including cryo-cooling and anomalous phasing.
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