Many years ago, a colleague in Biology introduced me to the paper "Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis". It is a funny and educational look at the different approaches to understanding in biological sciences and electronic engineering, including such gems as:
How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Figure 2). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we would investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some can discern some distortion) this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.
And so on.
So when I came agross the blog post "The Flightosome" with the wonderful sketch showing a biologist's model of air travel:
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| (I particularly like the inhibitory links) |
I had to send him the link immediately. His response: "it’s hilarious (and tragic)"
It's just that biology is so complex, and complicated, and messy, and variable. And endlessly fascinating.
