dbk at aber.ac.uk ("Douglas Kell") wrote in message news:<3B3B0687.22335.3D386F38 at localhost>...
> I should know better than to respond to this...., but....
Douglas Kell wrote:
> Over to experts here I hope. The prize ('how enzymes really work')
> is worth it.
In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, I'd like to posit that "how
enzymes *really* work" might be progressively more and more
difficult to answer in the future, compared to the difficulty with
which partial answers had been obtained so far (e.g., Linus
Pauling). This might be true even to the extent that the answer
is getting away from us more rapidly than we gather information
about particular aspects of enzyme catalysis.
One reason for this guarded pessimism of mine is that people's
training and research work seems (to me anyway) more and more
specialized, whereas the subject matter itself is turning out to
be progressively more interdisciplinary. How many times have we
seen the following slogan posted on someone's office door or
bulletin board: "An expert is the person who knows more and more
about less and less, until s/he knows almost everything about
almost nothing."
Frauenfelder is a ... what: physicist? biochemist? biophysicist?
complexity theorist? In a certain way he seems to have escaped a
pigeon hole, but how many people managed to do that? We've all
got to be Experts, otherwise say good bye to tenure or promotion.
However, I have a feeling that Expert knowledge (too focused on
particular aspects of biochemical catalysis) might not be
sufficient for understanding how enzymes work.
Some sort of a "generalist" or "integral" approach might prove
more fruitful.
- Petr
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