Herbert's points about a non-closed society are well made and well
taken, but this list of 'reach-out' activities still doesn't explain
WHY it is entirely possible for a research student purportedly
studying metabolic modelling and the like but who is not personally
acquainted with the main MCA-aware groups to have absolutely no
knowledge of MCA or BST.
Nowadays of course the main start point for someone getting up to
speed on a topic is not the large, daunting, mixed-quality and
diffuse literature.... but the Internet. So typing 'metabolic
control' into my preferred search engine (FAST - via
http://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/home.htm#search ) gets a good entree to
the core MCA literature on the Web. However, 'Metabolic regulation',
'metabolic modeling [or modelling]' and 'metabolic flux' get next to
nothing of said core (though the first does get Stefan's home page).
Conclusion: authors of Web pages wishing to proselytise MCA need to
stick all the other key phrases into their html, even if only as
comments, so the search engines pick them up. (Yes, I know,....I'll
get round to it.....)
Douglas.
> I was talking to a PhD student yesterday about his interest in
> modelling and theoretical aspects of cellular networks (which is
> what he research is about), and he'd never heard of MCA or BST, but
> then he hadn't heard of Garfinkel either nor any of the past
> modelling attempts. The modelling software he was aware of was
> E-Cell, VCell and the mythical BioSpice, he's never even heard of
> Gepasi, this is after a year of research which presumably included a
> literature search. One could argue that the supervisor is to blame
> but many of the supervisors who are thinking of starting projects
> like this (and it seems there are many) are also completely in the
> dark when it comes to past work and for some reason they don't
> bother to check either. If anything, this situation is only going to
> get worse now that finally the penny has dropped and people are
> wondering what are we going to do with all these genome sequences?
>> Perhaps it's not a case of the field being
> 'closed' but more likely that researchers don't read around their
> literature areas any more.
(Prof.) Douglas B. Kell, Cledwyn Building,
Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Wales,
Aberystwyth SY23 3DD
Tel: +44 1970 622334 Fax: +44 1970 622354
dbk at aber.ac.ukhttp://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/home.htm
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