re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition in article apr cs rochester edu fulk cs rochester edu mark fulk writes in article c kv p jm unx sas com sasghm theseus unx sas com gary merrill writes in article apr cs rochester edu fulk cs rochester edu mark fulk writes what is wrong with the above observation is that it explicitly gives the impression and you may not in fact hold this view that the common perhaps even the correct approach for a scientist to follow is to sit around having flights of fancy and scheming on the basis of his jealousies and petty hatreds flights of fancy and other irrational approaches are common the crucial thing is not to sit around just having fantasies they aren t of any use unless they make you do some experiments i ve known a lot of scientists whose fantasies lead them on to creative work usually they won t admit out loud what the fantasy was prior to the consumption of a few beers the danger in philosophizing about science is that theory and generalization can end up being far removed from the actual day to day of the grunt at the bench yes its great to be involved in a process were i can walk into the lab after a heavy night of dreaming and just do something for the hell of it as long as my advisor doesn t catch me which is easy enough to do but stamping out such behavior seems to be the purpose in life of grant review committees and the peer review process in general in today s world that s what determines what science is what gets funded and a damn good thing to flights of fantasy just don t have much chance of producing anything at least not in biomedical research the surest way for a graduate student to ruin their life is to work in a lab where the boss is more concerned with fleshing out his her fantasies than with having the student work on a project that actually has a good chance of producing some results md s seem to be particularly prone to this aberrant behavior simple example warren jelinek noticed an extremely heavy band on a dna electrophoresis gel of human alu fragments he got very excited hoping that he d seen some essential part of the control mechanism for eukaryotic genes this fantasy led him to sequence samples of the band and carry out binding assays the result was a well conserved or so bp sequence that occurs about times in the human genome unfortunately for warren s fantasy it turns out to be a transposon that is present in so many copies because it replicates itself and copies itself back into the genome on the other hand the characteristics of transposons were much elucidated the necessity of a cellular reverse transcriptase was recognized and the standard method of recognizing human dna was created other species have different sets of transposons fortunately for me warren and i used to eat dinner at t g i fridays all the time i have to agree with gary merrill s response to this i ve read alot of the alu and middle repetitive sequence work and it s really very interesting good work with implications for many fields in molecular genetics it s really an example of how a well reasoned project turned up interesting results that were unexpected mike
