At the end of his really useful post in response to my reading of
Kacser, Athel asks if I have any insight into why MCA has not cought on
in the States.
In the US, the typical response to theoretical biology is summed up in a
phrase from my interview with Fran Ganong, then president of the
American Physiological Society, when I was a graduate student regaling
him with the wonders of physiological modeling. He pushed back in his
chair and said, "Physiology is an experimental science and mathematics
has no place in it."
There is a fork in the road for all of us who choose to pursue
theoretical biology as our life's work. That fork comes when you decide
who your audience is going to be. Are you going to speak to fellow
theoreticians, or are you going to speak to biologists?
I make no value judgement here. There is plenty of interesting and
important work to do on either fork in the road. But the number of
members of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
is probably 2 orders of magnitude greater than the number of SMB
members.
Long ago, I decided my audience was biologists. Theoreticians still snub
me. But I am making useful inroads, and I am able to convey the power of
modeling to classically trained bench biologists. In large part that is
because I too am a classically trained bench biologist.
So my tentative diagnosis, subject to feedback from the newsgroup, is
that MCA has not become a mainstream tool because you publish most of
your best work in journals read only by other theoreticians. I
completely understand the pressures that make this desirable, but I have
NEVER met a bench biologist who reads JTB. Since 99% of biologists are
bench biologists, your choice of journals and meetings assures that the
mainstream will never hear your message.
To make MCA a mainstream biological tool will require only one thing.
You have to use it to solve an important biological problem that cannot
be solved by experiment alone. And you have to publish the result where
bench biologists will see it. (One man's opinion)
I have posted a message about MCA on the BioInformatics Services
Computational Biology Forum (there's a link to this on my website) and
have encouraged my colleagues to read something about MCA and come visit
your newsgroup.
My impression is that there is a massive convergence of schools of
biological modeling that is underway right now, and I think the point of
convergence is functional genomics. I think this is a really great time
to be in biological modeling and I'm pleased to have encountered all of
you on my own personal fork in the road.
Regards,
Bob
--
Robert D. Phair, Ph.D. rphair at ix.netcom.com
BioInformatics Services http://www.webcom.com/rphair
Partnering and Outsourcing for Computational Biology
