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Has the Time Come? Or Has the Time Gone?

by Elio

In­evitably, there will be those who be­lieve in the value of high through­put data col­lec­tion in bi­ol­ogy and those who pro­pose that it's a waste of time and re­sources. At a time when pow­er­ful new method­olo­gies emerge, such ex­treme views can be ex­pected. The ar­gu­ment is usu­ally about the ul­ti­mate value of in­vest­ing large sums of pub­lic money in megapro­jects, ver­sus fund­ing in­di­vid­ual, hy­po­the­sis-dri­ven re­search pro­grams. A cur­rent di­a­tribe con­cerns the in­ter­na­tional Pro­tein Struc­ture Ini­tia­tive, a me­gaproject aimed at de­ter­min­ing the three-di­men­sional struc­tures of all pro­teins. A lively de­bate is tak­ing place in the pages of the jour­nal, Genome Bi­ol­ogy. Gre­gory Pet­sko, a bio­chemist at Bran­deis, has taken on PSI with a cheer­fully-writ­ten ar­ti­cle with the provoca­tive ti­tle An Idea Whose Time Has Gone. Not sur­pris­ingly, Eu­ro­pean pro­po­nents of PSI came back with a spir­ited re­join­der telling us that they think this is "an idea whose time has come." At the end of their ar­ti­cle, there is a re­but­tal by Pet­sko. Point, coun­ter­point.

Megapro­ject Dubai sky­scrap­ers. Source

We in­vite read­ers to come to their own con­clu­sion about which way the ar­row points. Con­cil­ia­tory sorts that we are, per­haps there is a mid­dle ground. At any rate, this is food for thought and highly read­able stuff.

 

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Shlomi Dagan
18 years ago

I don't know which op­nion is right, but I can say, from my own lit­tle cor­ner, that a large pro­tein data­base will greatly as­sist my small, in­di­vid­ual, hy­poth­e­sis-dri­ven re­search project.

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Welkin Johnson
18 years ago

I am a mid­dle-grounder. Un­der con­di­tions where there are plenty of re­sources to go around, both have value (what would Ke­pler have done with­out Ty­cho Brahe?). How­ever, if one were forced to choose, I would ar­gue that lab-ori­ented re­search can stand alone, while megapro­jects sim­ply don't make sense with­out a con­stituency of hy­poth­e­sis-dri­ven end-users (would his­tory re­mem­ber Brahe, if not for Ke­pler?).
I'll take this op­por­tu­nity to raise an­other, ad­mit­tedly nit­picky, is­sue (per­fect for blog­ging). The term "hy­poth­e­sis dri­ven" is also used in an­other sense — as the moral su­pe­rior to "fish­ing ex­pe­di­tions", the lat­ter re­fer­ring to things like mu­tant hunts, li­brary screens, selection/enrichment schemes, shots-in-the-dark guesses, and so on. I hap­pen to like fish­ing, the real kind and the ex­per­i­men­tal kind. It re­quires faith, a sense of ad­ven­ture, a cer­tain level of com­fort with risk. Many great hy­pothe­ses were born from fish­ing ex­pe­di­tions (in some cases quite lit­er­ally — af­ter all, what would Dar­win have be­come with­out the HMS Bea­gle?) This is the or­ganic, fuzzy logic, artis­tic, nov­elty seek­ing, right-brained com­ple­ment to hy­poth­e­sis test­ing, and noth­ing to be ashamed of. Go fish­ing!
......
Come to think of it, did the Voy­age of the Bea­gle con­sti­tute a megapro­ject?

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