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How Toby Spribille Overturned 150 Years of Biology about Lichens
- ctingom 10y agoWhy couldn't he go get a GED? Most colleges accept those, and lots of homeschoolers go to college.
- alistairSH 10y agoIt sounded like he got no support from his family and "ran away" as soon as he was able. But, he probably could have earned a GED. But, that takes time - perhaps it was faster/easier to move to Germany? The home-schooled teens that go on to college may lack formal paperwork form a school, but they generally do have some test results, paperwork filed with the county/state, and other items they can put on a transcript in lieu of actual grades. It sounded like the scientist didn't have the benefit of a structured home education.
- safeignorance 10y agoExactly. It's not just that he was home-schooled. It's that he was apparently home-schooled by people who were apparently particularly incompetent at home-schooling.
- astrodust 10y agoYes, the singular goal of all Hutterite parents is to raise their children to be Ph.D scientists. They utterly failed here.
- leephillips 10y agoThis is not only cool scientifically but inspiring because of the discoverer's life story.
- xkcd-sucks 10y agoCould we change the title to something a little less clickbaity/classist? Even though it's the title of the actual article, trailer parks have nothing to do do with the actual content.
- safeignorance 10y agoIt's also misleading -- although he did grow up in a trailer park, he also attended an world-renown university of both undergraduate and doctoral studies prior to making the discovery. And he wasn't working alone in the middle of nowhere -- he as working with a team of other scientists. It's a fantastic life story, but the title is definitely distracting click bait.
- SeanDav 10y agoI disagree. This is not only a scientific story, it is also an inspirational story. The title shows that.
- Iv 10y agoOne doesn't need to lie over stories to make them inspirational.
- fit2rule 10y agoWhere is the lie? There isn't anything un-true about the title. More to the point, the inspirational aspect of the story is quite worthwhile. You might say the "trailer-park" inspiration is one aspect, the "we don't know everything we think we do, even 150 years later" angle is another aspect, and there is a third, possibly overlooked facet, which is that this opens up immense new opportunities for understanding life, as a whole, where and when we find it. You might consider it some sort of symbiotic, inspiration.
- markc 10y ago>There isn't anything un-true about the title. That's true from a literal standpoint, however the title misleads many people into expecting that the subject isn't just from a trailer park as part of his past, but that he somehow made the breakthrough as a current, stereotypical, trailer park resident, i.e. not highly educated. If there was an intention to mislead it is a lie. If it's unintentional, it's just poor headline writing (ambiguous and easily misleading).
- an_d_rew 10y agoNicely told feel-good story!
- archgoon 10y agoThe main revolution 150 years ago was that lichen was not a single organism. I'm not sure if refining that number from 2 to 3 is legitimately "overturning"; I was reading the article expecting them to say that the two organisms were in fact sharing the same DNA and were in fact sexual dimorphs all this time. On the other hand, figuring out why we've been failing to grow lichen by merging the two species manually for the past century and a half is definitely a job well done. :)
- frandroid 10y agoWe all learn this story in school, and people have been looking at these guys for a long time. What did you want, a human/algae symbiosis to make this an overturn?
- s0rce 10y agoI think its very exciting work and he clearly made an important finding in lichen biology. But, overturning would be if he found that it wasn't 2 organisms but just 1. The previous 2 organisms are still there, there just happens to also be another one that people missed. Everyone else wasn't wrong and the previous work hasn't been overturned, simply added to. This is the basis of most modern science. This doesn't take away from the importance of the work, simply that the headline is a bit click-baity.
- ghostly_s 10y agoThe previous understanding of these organisms was fundamentally wrong (although partially right). I think it's very odd to be sawing on this idea that 'overturning' a scientific theory requires a complete negation of it. (If your argument is that "overturning" should never be used to describe a scientific breakthrough you may have a point, albeit a rather uninteresting one.)
- eridius 10y agoDid you read the entire article? The end of it goes into how many things we thought we knew about the previously-known fungus and algae may not be true after all, there's a lot of work that's going to have to be reevaluated.
- whack 10y agoThe headline makes it seem as though some guy overturned a fundamental precept of modern biology, while living in a Trailer in Montana. None of the above is true. 1) He happened to grow up in a trailer in Montana, but eventually moved on to attend a good German university, and was no longer living in a "Montana trailer park" while making this discovery. 2) The guy corrected a misunderstanding that people had, regarding one very specific phenomenon found in nature; something that most biologists don't work with, depend on, or care about. The replication crisis around Ego Depletion, for example, can credibly be claimed to have overturned decades of psychological thought. The specific makeup of Lichens though, is an extremely niche field, that doesn't affect the broader field of Biology in any significant way.
- safeignorance 10y agoOf course, the guy's life story is still an inspirational tale of creating opportunities for yourself where none seem to exist. And his discovery -- although probably not rocking the foundation of the (sub)field -- is still impressive and pretty interesting. And the article is written well enough. So you should still read the article. Just pretend the link-baity title doesn't exist and don't go in with pre-conceptions :-)
- whack 10y agoI agree. The article was a cool read and props to the guy for successfully building a career in science, despite his shitty upbringing. I just wish the headline didn't wildly exaggerate his admirable accomplishments.
- l3m0ndr0p 10y agoWhat's also impressive and maybe sad too, is that he received a free education outside of the United States. Sad because he couldn't get educated for free in the the USA.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- James001 10y ago
- adultSwim 10y agoHow one click-baity title overturned 158 years of publishing integrity
- dang 10y agoPlease don't make the threads even worse by posting comments like this. If you want to complain about a title, the valuable way to do it is to suggest a better title, i.e. an accurate and neutral one.
- sampo 10y agoThe Science paper is here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/07/20/science.aaf8287 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/07/20/scien...
- sabujp 10y agoThe link between lichen and basidiomycetes was known before this paper, but it was mainly thought that most lichens had none of the basidiomycetes spores, e.g. : https://www.anbg.gov.au/lichen/basidiolichens.html https://www.anbg.gov.au/lichen/basidiolichens.html
- thieving_magpie 10y agoI lived in Montana for years. The only population of folks that speak German that I'm aware of are Hutterites (German variation of the Amish or Mennonites). If he comes from that group, it makes the story all the more amazing.
- Practicality 10y agoThank you. I was trying to deduce which religion he was referring to but there was not enough information in the article.
- astrodust 10y agoThey don't name it, but they do strongly hint at it. I bet he got some strange looks when using his arcane German in a modern setting.
- thieving_magpie 10y agoWow, I hadn't thought of that. It would be really interesting to hear about his experiences in his own words.
- triangleman 10y agoSo they have Wal-Mart in Germany, or did he get his degree in Germany and then return to the U.S. and do his research there?
- mod 10y agoFrom the article: > The path to this discovery began in 2011, when Spribille, now armed with a doctorate, returned to Montana. He joined the lab of symbiosis specialist John McCutcheon...
- smt88 10y agoDid he create opportunities for himself, or did he live in a country where other taxpayers covered the cost of his college education? He's an impressive person, but "poor guy pulled himself up by the bootstraps using sheer force of will" narratives usually fall apart when you look more closely.
- jessaustin 10y agoDo we really need this political bullshit here? Dude made a discovery, let's not pick it apart for bizarre partisan reasons.
- smt88 10y agoPolitics is inextricable from human life, news, and technology. Any story here can be political, and that should be fine. Whatever my political leanings, I had an issue with this sentence: > creating opportunities for yourself where none seem to exist The fact is that there were opportunities. In countries where education is free and accessible, there are always opportunities. If the subject is spreading education, I will happily be partisan and political, even if you find it irritating. It's too important to ignore, especially when it's a core factor in this headline and story.
- dang 10y agoThat argument isn't valid here and does not lead to positive contributions to HN. Why? Because the topic here is/was concrete: a biologist who made a discovery about lichens. To use that as fodder for an ideological argument is to take the discussion in the wrong direction: away from something that gratifies intellectual curiosity into something that does not, however important it may otherwise be. Intellectual curiosity is HN's core value. Curiosity is gratified by things that are specific, so the specific is precious here. Generic ideological arguments are the opposite: they're reruns of episodes seen many times, for which circumstances are interesting only as primer fuel, quickly to be discarded on getting going. Worse, the energy they mobilize is agitated and the stance they induce is rigid. They throw people out out of the relaxed, reflective state that makes for good HN conversation, charging their reflexes and putting them into battle mode . From an intellectual curiosity point of view, it doesn't matter what the battle is—we end up with scorched earth either way. It may be important to get people marching, but let's not march over a lichen garden.