The book of life can now literally be written on paper : Harvard Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering.
Mind - How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect - NYTimes.com
This is exactly how science works. Experiments often don’t make sense, and many of the biggest breakthroughs came from nonsensical experimental results (that doesn’t mean that everything that doesn’t makes sense leads to a breakthrough). Seeing patterns where no one did before, synthesizing things known from all kinds of fields in order to begin to explain what we see in front of us is what scientists are supposed to do. It’s interesting that it took another non-intuitive experiment to figure out that this may be intimately tied to how the brain works in general.
Of course, this also means that we have to be careful. In our search for meaning, sometimes we can find patters that aren’t there or our explanations that seem to fit the pattern don’t always hold up. When we stumble onto nonsense again, when the data in front of us don’t support the explanation that used to explain a pattern, we have to keep an open mind and remember that this all happened before.
“Whether we are conscious of it or not, much of the direction taken in labs isn’t based on pure science, but based on what the editors of a high impact journal will publish.”
“If you can read a popular-science publication (and enjoy it), then you most likely have enough brainpower to help us make massive scientific breakthroughs.”
Great paper from John Dueber in the Keasling lab about using synthetic scaffold proteins to improve the function of an engineered metabolic pathway. Besides the ridiculous improvement in pathway function because of having a perfectly tuned pathway, this is neat because the scaffold proteins come from mammalian cells, but are functional in bacteria where there is nothing that can interact with the scaffold proteins to interfere. There are many possibilities of adapting this kind of scaffold to other projects (including mine!) and of using this kind of thing to better understand how protein interactions work and evolve. Awesome!
