Roberts

By anders pearson 12 Mar 2004

i came down to austin yesterday. SXSW doesn’t really start until friday night, so i’ve mostly been following lani around campus. today, we went to a bioinformatics lecture by <a href=”http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1993/roberts-autobio.html”>Richard J. Roberts</a>. the lecture was on enzyme’s or something that i didn’t really have the background to understand. still, he was a good speaker and even though i wasn’t sure what he was talking about most of the time, i managed to pay attention to the whole thing instead of getting bored and dozing off.

i did understand the first 10 minutes or so of the lecture which he spent passionately arguing for the support of the <a href=”http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/“>Public Library of Science</a> (which i’ve <a href=”http://thraxil.org/nodes/4743”>linked to before</a>) and <a href=”http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/“>PubMed</a>. he doesn’t seem to be a big fan of the scientific journal industry. he pointed out that he’s served as an editor and referee for a number of journals, and, like almost all other editors and referees, worked for free. the vast majority of the research that is published in the journals is paid for by the taxpayers, authors actually have to pay the journals fees to get their work published, and then the journals are only available to institutions that can pay the exhorbitant subscription fees, so the taxpayers can’t even access the research that they’ve paid for. something really seems to be wrong with that picture. he is now refusing to work with or publish in any journal that doesn’t deposit their articles in PubMed.

he also concluded the lecture with some interesting information about microbial life and bacteria. he pointed out that the total mass of microscopic life on earth is greater than the total mass of macroscopic life. he also mentioned that we’ve really only been able to grow about 1% of the bacteria we know about in laboratory cultures. the vast majority of microbial life just refuses to be studied. he suggested that the reason is that when scientists take bacteria and try to grow it in a petri dish, the goal is to isolate a single species to make it easy to study. the problem is that most species actually need to live in complex symbiotic relationships with other microbes, so they really just can’t be easily studied. some bacteria even behave radically differently when grown in cultures. eg, when some bacteria are grown in cultures, some of their genes just aren’t expressed. scientists only know about the genes because they can splice them into other bacteria where they <em>are</em> expressed.

Tags: science bioinformatics biology bacteria scientific journals microbes nobel laureates