It is every scientist's dream to one day have an article, or, if lucky, many, in either Cell or Science, the two most-coveted scientific journals, the third best probably being Nature. Though many other very respectable journals exist, there is a sort of magic associated with being published in one of these above because they have the highest of standards for the works published, almost to the point of pure artistry.
Speaking of artistry, I am continuosly amazed at how well science (or nature) and art mesh together. Very often a microscopy image of a culture or a cell that I just took is so visually pleasing, I imagine I could look at it forever. Not only because it is beautiful but because of the intricacy. I like to imagine how thousands of invisible hands have painted this image working in unison each imparting a unique detail. This is somewhat true, in a cell there are maybe millions of different processes happening simultaneously with a single goal: survival. So much work goes into keeping a little unit intact, functional, able to divide and grow and communicate with the environment, continuously adapting to external cues. It blows your mind, doesn't it? That nature, life, is so incredibly complex. And that we are at the forefront of amazing discoveries, which will exponentially multiply as our microscopes and prediction software become stronger and better. Most of the valuable scientific hypotheses up until maybe 5-10 years ago have been reached after great sweat and toil blindly working in the "dark", with no structures of actual proteins and molecules involved available. As of today, less than 10,000 structures out of many millions (if not billions of life molecules and processes) have their crystal structures available.
Dr. Rout - a Rockefeller University researcher, best exemplified the dark age science currently is in by using an old indian proverb, while discussing the nuclear pore complex (the nucleus is a component of cells) a few days ago. All researchers in the world working to elucidate its fine structure are only like a group of six blind men together in a room with an elephant. The nuclear pore complex being the elephant. One touches the ears and says: it is a palm tree. One touches the tail and thinks it is a rope, while one touches the trunk and claims it's a snake. You get the - blurry - picture!
But there are amazing advances in the field, which will tremendously affect the scientific discovery process in the near future. Imagine you have to advance a theory of how a protein is translocated through the ER and the modifications necessary to accomplish this. You could work blindly at it, for 20 or more years, like Rockefeller University's Gunther Blobel did, for example, in the 60s. No worries, he did received a Nobel Prize for his work. Or, you could start with the structures of the "components" and see if they structurally fit, like lego pieces, before running an experiment that could last 4 months to see if piece A fits with piece B, when there are maybe 6000 different pieces. Because, one can reject from the start the hypotheses that do not make sense stereochemically, one can weed through an experiment, which is in essence a guessing game, much faster. Science is just a complicated lego game we play in the dark. Microscopy and structural biochemistry have just began to shine on us a faint ray of light. It is still 5:30 in the morning. I wish I was still alive at bright 12 noon (maybe a few hundred years?), when we will be quite amazing lego experts.
Thus, when coming across this picture show, I knew I had to share it. Enjoy and follow this link for more.
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