Marc Roussel wrote:
>> Herbert M Sauro wrote:
> > a friend told me last week that there was an
> > interview on the radio (2) where according to my source, a molecular
> > biologist was being interviewed and he suggested there there were no
> > great concepts left to be developed in biology and all that was left
> > to do was catalogue!
>> I wonder if the person interviewed was a direct lineal descendent of the
> turn-of-the-century physicist who claimed that there was nothing left to
> do in physics but minor problem solving. This kind of utterance is an
> excellent argument for requiring all science students to take a course
> on the history of science.
Brenner & Crick & others apparently decided many years ago that
molecular biology had run its course and that they must move on
to neurobiology and other such glamourous areas if they were to
continue to win Nobel prizes at the same rate. See
http://eatworms.swmed.edu/Sydney.html
The attitude that you all are describing among biochemists is
every bit as common among molecular biologists. They have a curious
sense of ownership of knowledge, believing that others do not have a
right to analyze "their" data or to challenge their interpretations.
They
instinctively distrust statistics, computers, and math, and they have
an inherent disdain for modelling. This is very strange because, one
could argue, the dawn of molecular biology was one of the few times
that the leading edge of biology was dominated by modelling and
hypothesis-testing, rather than by incessant butterfly-collecting.
Perhaps this was allowed because the experimentalists did not understand
the physical form of the entities whose activities they were observing.
No one had grounds to complain that Jacob & Monod over-simplified
the genes in the operon model, because no one knew what the genes
were, exactly.
Perhaps we are now faced with the more difficult problem of convincing
experimentalists that, although they understand the physical entities
in great detail, they do not understand the rules governing the system
of which the entities are a part.
Arlin
--
Arlin Stoltzfus
Department of Biochemistry
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4H7 CANADA
(email) arlin at is.dal.ca
(phone) 902-494-3569
(fax) 902-494-1355
