This short note is to be published as the proceeding of a Laurent Schwartz PDE seminar talk that I gave last May at IHES, announcing our recent results (on channel flows and boundary layers), which provide a complete mathematical proof of the viscous destabilization phenomenon, pointed out by Heisenberg (1924), C.C. Lin and Tollmien (1940s), among other prominent physicists. Precisely, we construct growing modes of the linearized Navier-Stokes equations about general stationary shear flows in a bounded channel (channel flows) or on a half-space (boundary layers), for sufficiently large Reynolds number $R \to \infty$. Such an instability is linked to the emergence of Tollmien-Schlichting waves in describing the early stage of the transition from laminar to turbulent flows. In fact, the material in this note is only the first half of what I spoke on that day, skipping the steady case!