3 ms·

As a fellow scientist, thank you for your dissemination of how science is actually conducted, and what any single paper or series of papers mean. Progress almos

• epistasis 5y ago
  Exactly, the phenomena are often way too complex for even a series of papers to come up with the proper abstractions to plan the right experiments. The history of chromatin marks is really illustrative of this. We had lots of early experiments to establish the antibodies to even measure the chromatin marks, and then then two decades of gathering enough data to lead to useful abstractions. And now it's all converging with the 3D organizational data from Hi-C experiments, and DNA methylation from methyl-Seq, and over the past decades the measurement technology (driven by DNA sequencing) has advanced so much that somebody in 2001 trying to anticipate this trajectory would be amazed. What was a single paper back then? Reproducible? Maybe, but that's much less important than pointing to the correct direction in this n-dimensional search space of what to examine next. I've never looked at the historical literature from, say, 100 years ago, but I suspect that it's quite the same as today in all regards. There's a ton of great ideas that never get the attention they deserve, a bunch of ideas that get way too much attention due to fashion or due to influencers that chose the wrong path. But who could we trust to chart a better path? Just like startups, we must accept a high failure rate when exploring the unknown.