Their work in the laboratory is only made more urgent.
"Some researchers believe biometrics work in the laboratory only," he said in a phone interview.
But Nevada officials say Mr. Guinn's ideas may need more work in the laboratory before they can be put into effect nationwide.
Yet making it work in the laboratory is one thing, commercialising the tricky processes involved to mass-produce the battery quite another.
The pathologist does much of his work in the laboratory and reports to and consults with the clinical physician who directly attends to the patient.
Although he retired in 1996, Lainson continued to work in the laboratory until 2012, when the increasing traffic in Belém finally deterred him from making his daily commute from his home to the office.
He studied biochemistry at Córdoba University and then went to work in the laboratory of a provincial leprosarium, in the years when Guevara was studying medicine in Buenos Aires.
"We don't want to go to the space suits because it's just a little too cumbersome to work in the laboratory and it's a little too impractical," Dr. Kornblum said.
The website of the UK's Medical Research Council defines translational research as "the process of the bidirectional transfer of knowledge between basic work (in the laboratory and elsewhere) with that of the person, in health or disease".
While the mine trainees are on their way back to headquarters, their medical colleague Wilbard is hard at work in the laboratory, sniffing samples of human sputum to see if he can pick up the familiar bouquet of tuberculosis.
Current models of these chemical reactions are based on much smaller-scale experiments, often from work in the laboratory "plopping a piece of rock in a beaker," he said.
