Will we be able to buy the technology itself? Or only the energy that it produces? If I invented a really workable source of clean renewable energy, and I was interested in extracting all the personal benefit from it that I could - I wouldn't sell the goose, just the golden eggs.

This is the concern here. Technologies that companies develop for economic gain (or political/military gain, in the case of a nationally-owned company) do not have to be sold directly. Computer chip makers don't sell you the fab or information on their lithography process - they sell you the product. There's nothing of xenophobia or nationalism in this - American companies act the same way. (Companies also trade the technology, and this also benefits the consumer - but not in the scenario where I buy the details to Intel's i7 and try to make it home.)

Whoever develops technology that really makes "alternative energy" workable (and can implement it reliably, and bring the energy to market at a price that drastically undercuts any competition) would - will? - have very substantial economic power. And there will be nothing at all that requires them to share that technology - even in this country, and still less in some others.

"Making ... a job doing what you love" involves finding someone who's got money and convincing them that your work (what you love) is worth spending their money on. In other words, persuading someone to fund you because you're needed.

There's nothing, technically, stopping smart scientists or engineers from doing exactly that, and in fact some have done so - they've collected donations to start a research institute. It's a lot more rare than getting VC to start a company that makes something technical, for the reasons that you yourself (and others) already gave.

That said - the strategy of "strike out on your own, dazzle people into helping you create a job for yourself doing basic research" is difficult for most scientists to imagine, perhaps partly because of how we're trained: by collaboration and learning directly from others. "Lone wolf" self-teaching works well in some fields, but only occasionally in science.

Bzzt. "Medicine" is when you take a list of symptoms, look for the immediate cause (a germ, a nutrient deficiency, an imbalance, a defect in anatomy, a new growth or lack of growth), and figure out how to remove the symptoms by removing the cause. The practice of medicine is much more similar to repairing a car than it is to "science". (Scientific research in medicine does exist, of course, but either as statistics on which treatments are effective, or as an offshoot of fundamental research on biology or biochemistry.)

A "theory of evolution", generically stated, may well help to explain why that particular cause is possible. It tries to explain the origin of that particular germ, the reason why that nutrient is needed, or the reason why this particular organ in the human animal is like a similar structure in the fruit bat.

Answers to "where did this tissue ultimately come from?" have very little to do with keeping it in good repair.

I'm a chemistry prof, currently teaching the "general chemistry for science majors" track at a comprehensive university. (So, these aren't the most brilliant students ever, but they're not stupid; most did take at least one chem class in HS, and about half took Honors or AP level.)

We teach them spreadsheets in lab, and they pick it up fairly quickly. The best way for most of them is by peer example, which is why it works better teaching that in a lab setting. We expect to teach them spreadsheets, even the engineering students.

If you really want to help your students learn chemistry by using technology, then focus on what they're worst at. You *are* keeping records on how well they do on different concepts or types of questions, right? (There's an excellent use for "spreadsheets in the classroom", even if it's just behind the scenes.) Use that data to identify one or two concepts per year. Maybe computers could be used to animate gas molecules to help them picture kinetic theory. Maybe computers could be used to do nice "3D" displays of crystal structures. Or maybe the easiest and most effective way to get that across would be with a hands-on model, or a game.

Students in the first semester chem class - and again, these are STEM majors, many of them in calc/precalc for math - are weak on some very basic concepts: Units & unit conversions. The mole. Names of ions - it's astonishing that some of them don't seem able to understand that there's a difference between words like "chlorite" and "chlorate" or "sulfate" and "sulfide". (Then again, they're just as insensitive to errors in English spelling.)

Teach them how to take "the chemistry" in a problem and decide whether it's better to express that relationship in math, or to analyze it in a qualitative ("cartoon picture in my head") sense. Help them learn to pick the right formula, plug in the given values in the right spots, and manipulate it to get the right answer. Help them start to look for patterns in different kinds of problems - "isotopic abundance problems" and "density of a mixture of two liquids" are indistinguishable once you strip off the chemistry and start working them algebraically, but it takes some of them literally forever to see that they aren't radically different kinds of problems. Instead of expanding coverage, it might even help to reduce coverage - drop a couple of chapters if it gives them more time to really understand the basics. What's the point in getting them turned on by making nanotubes in lab or whatever other sexy demo/lab project you can come up with, if they go off to college and discover they're already behind from the first week of classes?

Would computers help with that? Sure. Some kind of Flash game, maybe; I'm trying to decide whether an idea I've had for one would be more effective as Flash or as hands-on game pieces. But computers aren't automatically the solution to "they can't convert miles to nanometers".

And no, I don't know of any "chemistry software" that I'd expect them to know coming in. Molecular modeling tools might be a help, but the good ones are expensive to license and require deeper knowledge to use than 99% of HS students probably have. Spreadsheets might be useful, but again, they'll learn those as freshmen anyway.

> We should have an inalienable right to communicate as we wish, by whatever means we wish.

Okay, sure, whatever. This doesn't mean that you can go to T-Mobile (or Cingular or Verizon or anyone else) and *demand* that they respect your "inalienable right to communicate" by supplying you with every possible means of doing so.