Herbert Sauro wrote:
>I remember as an
>undergrad, our metabolic pathway lecturer ridiculing the so-called 'armchair
>biochemists' (i.e the theorists) and that experiment alone was the only true
>way forward for our science (perhaps unknown to him he was of course
>theorizing all the time if he'd only stop to think!). I grew up, so to
>speak, and I'm sure many others did too, thinking that theory was something
>that one didn't speak too loudly about, and computers, well one didn't go
>near computers! At the end of my undergrad days I was 'advised' not to
>pursue a theory based research career, which is what I wanted, but should
>instead concentrate on one based on experiment.
>Probably we've all had this sort of advice from people older and wiser than
ourselves.
However, I want to ask another question: are the theoretical and
experimental approaches to science so different in practice, or are they
just different in degree?
A few years ago I was engaged in ultimately unsuccessful efforts to
convince various UK publishers that Enrique Melendez-Hevia's book "La
Evolucion del Metabolismo: hacia la simplicidad" (Eudema, Madrid, 1993)
contained some interesting and potentially important ideas that merited
diffusion in English so that they would be more widely discussed. Now
Enrique, like me, is sometimes regarded as what Herbert's metabolic pathway
lecturer would call an armchair biochemist, but in his book he described a
simple apparatus that anyone could make with cheap equipment from a
hardware shop and use in their kitchen or bathroom to show that for a given
total head of pressure and diameter of tube water flows faster through a
short tube than a long one.
While his book was being studying by Portland Press I had a telephone call
from their expert reviewer to say that this experiment did not work as
described. At that time I had taken Enrique's word for it and hadn't
actually done the experiment, so I felt embarrassed, and asked the
reviewer, a biochemist known for his experimental contributions to the
subject, what he had observed when he tried the experiment.
However, he had not done it either; he had telephoned a physicist to ask if
it would work and the physicist had said no. So, I asked, presumably this
opinion was based on the physicist's own experiments. But no, he hadn't
done the experiment either; he had done some quick calculations on the back
of an envelope that convinced him that it would fail.
Subsequently, of course, I did the experiment myself, and found it to work
exactly as described in Enrique's book.
So who is an armchair biochemist in this story? Who, indeed, is an
experimental physicist, and who is an armchair physicist?
athel
Athel Cornish-Bowden
athel at ibsm.cnrs-mrs.frhttp://ir2lcb.cnrs-mrs.fr/~athel/homepage.htm
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