T he ultra high field instrumentation is currently employed to run the demonstration activities that are part of the project. T he specific aim of the workshop is to disseminate the results among the broadest possible audiences and to discuss what is needed for further progress. The programme aims for a cross-disciplinary workshop to include NMR spectroscopists, biochemists, molecular biologists, as well as physicists and organic chemists, in fact all those scientists who use solid state NMR in biology, in a converging multidisciplinary approach. Scientific breakthroughs of course are always at the base of further developments, are at a higher level of abstraction, and are in fundamental scientific views. They set the stage for applied conceptual or practical developments, of value for society in the most general sense.
New instrumentation is crucial here.
Whenever new technology for measurements becomes available, this leads to a wave of progress and discoveries in science. Over the last decade the techniques for isotope labelling, membrane protein expression and solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy have gone through a phase of rapid technological growth. With hundreds of potential drug targets in companies worldwide, and thousands more to come from the human genome analysis, the importance of such techniques is hard to overestimate. Molecular biology research into mechanisms is still highly descriptive. It follows the phenomenology of the central dogma, which states that the information in DNA leads to structure and function.