Anders [
http://www.flickr.com/people/lanzen/ ] shared an old interesting article titled "Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis" written by Yuri Lazebnik [
http://www.cancercell.org/retrieve/pii/S1535610802001332 , if you can not access this then try
http://www.protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v69/pdf/bcm_1403.pdf ].
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Few lines from the article:
"seek advice from David Papermaster (currently at the University of Connecticut), who I knew to be a person with pronounced common sense" [ I thought David Papermaster was a fictitious name, but it turned out that he is a Harvard grad and a Professor of Neuroscience @ uchc.edu ,
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:NC36yXMMNzUJ:grad.uchc.edu/phdfaculty/papermaster.html+David+Papermaster&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a ]
"At some point, David said, the field reaches a stage at which models, that seemed so complete, fall apart, predictions that were considered so obvious are found to be wrong, and attempts to develop wonder drugs largely fail"
"At this stage, the Chinese saying that it is difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat, comes to mind too often"
"Conceptually, a radio functions similarly to a signal transduction pathway in that both convert a signal from one form into another (a radio converts electromagnetic waves into sound waves)" [Author applied experimental biology approach to fix a broken Russian radio]
"First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size"
"Although removing some components will have only an attenuating effect, a lucky postdoc will accidentally find a wire whose deficiency will stop the music completely. The jubilant fellow will name the wire Serendipitously Recovered Component (Src) and then find that Src is required because it is the only link between a long extendable object and the rest of the radio. The object will be appropriately named the Most Important Component (Mic) of the radio."
"Moreover, the graduate student would convincingly demonstrate that Mic is not required for the radio to work, and will suitably name his object the Really Important Component (Ric)."
"The fight will continue until a smart postdoctoral fellow will discover a switch, whose state determines whether Mic or Ric is required for playing music. Naturally, the switch will become the Undoubtedly Most Important Component (U-Mic)."
"The idea that one can investigate a component by cutting its connections to other components one at a time or in a combination (“alanine scan mutagenesis”) will produce a wealth of information on the role of the connections."
"Eventually, all components will be cataloged, connections between them will be described, and the consequences of removing each component or their combinations will be documented."
"However, if the radio has tunable components, such as those found in my old radio and in all live cells and organisms, the outcome will not be so promising. Indeed, the radio may not work because several components are not tuned properly, which is not reflected in their appearance or their connections."
"Yet, we know with near certainty that an engineer, or even a trained repairman could fix the radio. What makes the difference? I think it is the languages that these two groups use"
"Indeed, even though the impotence of purely experimental approaches might be a bit exaggerated in my radio metaphor, it is common knowledge that the human brain can keep track of only so many variables. It is also common experience that once the number of components in a system reaches a certain threshold, understanding the system without formal analytical tools requires geniuses, who are so rare even outside biology."
"In biology, we use several arguments to convince ourselves that problems that require calculus can be solved with arithmetic if one tries hard enough and does another series of experiments."
"One of these arguments postulates that the cell is too complex to use engineering approaches. I disagree with this argument for two reasons. First, the radio analogy suggests that an approach that is inefficient in analyzing a simple system is unlikely to be more useful if the system is more complex. Second, the complexity is a term that is inversely related to the degree of understanding. Indeed, the insides of even my simple radio would overwhelm an average biologist (this notion has been proven experimentally), but would be an open book to an engineer."
"A related argument is that engineering approaches are not applicable to cells because these little wonders are fundamentally different from objects studied by engineers. What is so special about cells is not usually specified, but it is implied that real biologists feel the difference. I consider this argument as a sign of what I call the urea syndrome because of the shock that the scientific community had two hundred years ago after learning that urea can be synthesized by a chemist from inorganic materials."
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Gisele [
http://www.ii.uib.no/~gisle/ ] shared another article in the similar spirit from Von Heijne, G. (1999), "A Day in the Life of Dr K. or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lysozyme: a tragedy in six acts" [
http://skirball.med.nyu.edu/research/sb/PSB03/Week6/VonHeijne.pdf ].
I have been bumping into many articles which reflect that specialists who are not satisfied the way their subject is being taught, another example is "A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart" [
http://randomthoughtsofani.blogspot.com/2008/04/mathematician-lament-by-paul-lockhart.html ].
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