After I asked
>>What does this question have do with the theme of this News Group? Is it
>>assumed that nowadays any biological scientist is interested in this
>>kind of thing?
Paul Schlosser suggested
>It's a marketing survey/junk mail. You can try to send the originator
>a polite "stop" note, if you think it will do any good.
As it happens I did send my questions to the original questioner as well
as to the News Group, and his reply (in full) was
>So, you would not have any set of criteria to study a gene sequence??
which struck me as a curious conclusion to draw from the questions that
I had asked. I would not ask my car repair man the best way to cook a
chicken, but if I did and he replied that garages did not dispense that
sort of advice I could hardly conclude that he had no interest in food
and would be happy for his children to starve. Let us hope that when he
is doing his research Dr Miano has a clearer idea of the inferences that
can be drawn from limited information than he has displayed today.
Many readers of this News Group may feel that this is a trivial matter
and that asking irrelevant (but biological) questions is less of a
nuisance than the blatantly commercial stuff. I disagree: the stuff that
comes with subjects like "$$$$ $50,000 for the New Year $$$$" is less
of a nuisance because it is so obviously junk that we can trash it
unread, but messages that look as if they might have something to say
need to be looked at. The only reason that the commercial junk appears
worse is that there is more of it, but I'm sure that if we equal numbers
of $$$$ messages and ones like Dr Miano's we'd have little doubt which
sort was worse. In any case, moderation would get rid of both, so I
agree with Paul that we need it.
Athel
