On the one hand: there is evident incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, one contribution to which could be environmentally friendly biofuels. On the other hand: fuels like ethanol from sugarcane and other crops may require extensive cropland acreage that competes with food production.

On the one hand: corn-derived ethanol is a useful alternative to petroleum-based fuels. On the other hand: some researchers think the energy required to produce ethanol may be more energy than is yielded when consumed.

On the one hand: there are a variety of useful sources for producing biofuels. On the other hand: each source has corresponding and non-overlapping disadvantages, including toxin production, ecosystem damage, and industrial-processing effects.

What to do? Trust to scientific analysis, of course, as the Swiss government has done in a recent study (R. Zah et al., Ökobilanz von Energieprodukten: Ökologische Bewertung von Biotreibstoffen,Empa, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2007). The work catalogues key environmental impacts of a large array of different crops that produce a wide variety of fuel types. This in turn allows a systematic comparison of multiple, and often confounding, variables.

No obvious savior to humankind emerges, but this form of meta-analysis lays the foundation for a more rational, less ideological approach to solving our energy-related challenges. Hear, hear!

Whoever said “time is money” probably didn’t anticipate the relevance of this equation for contemporary science. The pulse of basic research, which in turn drives innovation, continues to pound because of the large infusion of public money supporting the ideas of working scientists. The result is that time spent writing grant proposals yields the money necessary to realize the fruits of scientific imaginings. Ergo, time is money.

The news isn’t good, however, for keeping this equation balanced. Scientists of every flavor, from chemists to zoologists, spend inordinate amounts of time for decreasing returns of money. My hunch is if you put two scientists together in a room, within minutes the conversation will turn to their grant woes, rather than the ever-so-much-more-productive science itself.

The latest budget numbers from Washington increase the agony: all the major science agencies are facing up to 90 percent reductions in the budget enhancements originally proposed by Congress. Blame can be assigned all around, according to your predilection, from congressional unwillingness to forego earmarks that haven’t been peer-reviewed, to the administration’s recent threat to veto anything deemed “fiscally irresponsible.”

The wrangling and politicking is no doubt frustrating to those we elect to represent us, but the lost opportunities to scientists are more than temporarily frustrating; they’re irreplaceable. Can’t we think of a better way to do this?

E. O. Wilson, legendary Harvard professor, wrote a wonderful book on connections between the sciences and the humanities. Consilience was the title, reviving an old word meaning “jumping together” of knowledge. The wildly ambitious goals were to reduce the fragmentation of understanding across disciplines so common in our highly specialized world and to seek linkages between the technological and the literary spheres.

Others have worked in this vein too, including C. P. Snow in The Two Cultures, David and Nanelle Barash in Madam Bovary’s Ovaries, and Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist. I highly recommend all three.

And now there is a magnificent Web site, LabLit.com, completely devoted to the culture of science in fiction. Astute readers will note that science in fiction is altogether different than science fiction. Prepositions do make a difference.

Editor and microbiologist Jennifer Rohn of University College London maintains a lively and growing list of reviews of novels, films, plays, and TV programs that portray science as it is or as it might be. If you can’t resist both the adventure of science and the grand imaginings of literature, this site is for you. But be warned: your list of must-read books will surely grow longer.

Since last week’s post “Laboratory on a Chip,” I’ve become more sensitized to the many and varied implications in this area, and I’ve been noticing other advances.

For example:

It is a central dogma in the cancer field that early detection of disease leads to better treatment outcomes. This makes perfect sense: smaller tumors will produce less damaging invasion of normal tissue; smaller tumors won’t as easily have developed resistant cells that will escape chemotherapy; smaller tumors are less likely to have spread to other body locations.

But early detection isn’t easy. The right combination of self-awareness of symptoms, willingness to do invasive biopsy, accurate pathologic analysis, or the presence of defining molecular markers is necessary before the threshold of being “too late” has been reached.

In a recent paper in Nature (20/27 December 2007, pp. 1235–1239, and related commentary on p. 1168) a group of researchers centered in Boston made a very practical advance in early cancer detection using microfluidics (i.e., a lab on a chip). They searched for circulating tumor cells (CTCs) with a small chip that has a specific antibody recognizing the tumor of interest. This miniature detector allows for separation, identification, and quantification of CTCs with remarkably high accuracy (99% correct in tests of lung, prostate, pancreatic, breast, and colon cancer).

You might worry that detecting tumor cells in circulation is already too late. However, only a tiny fraction of such cells actually have the ability to form a new tumor, so rapid, reliable, and inexpensive detection could save some folks currently at risk. I’m starting to really like these very small laboratories.