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Resurrection science

2018; Springer Nature; Volume: 19; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15252/embr.201846577

1469-3178

Brooke Morriswood, Oliver Hoeller,

Protist diversity and phylogeny

Opinion27 June 2018free access Resurrection science Brooke Morriswood [email protected] Department of Cell & Developmental Biology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany Search for more papers by this author Oliver Hoeller Freelance Science Illustrator [email protected] San Francisco, CA, USA Search for more papers by this author Brooke Morriswood [email protected] Department of Cell & Developmental Biology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany Search for more papers by this author Oliver Hoeller Freelance Science Illustrator [email protected] San Francisco, CA, USA Search for more papers by this author Author Information Brooke Morriswood1 and Oliver Hoeller2 1Department of Cell & Developmental Biology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany 2San Francisco, CA, USA EMBO Rep (2018)19:e46577https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.201846577 PDFDownload PDF of article text and main figures. ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InMendeleyWechatReddit Figures & Info Scientific progress flows like water. The historical course of a research topic runs like a river, with one or more small sources at the start that gradually quicken and combine, eventually streaming downhill in cascades of thought. And as with any river, progress is faster in some channels than in others. The direction that the flow takes though is hard, if not impossible, to predict—a point that is well illustrated by a scene in the first Jurassic Park movie when mathematician Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) is flirting with palaeontologist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). Attempting to explain chaos theory, and quite probably also running a well-honed seduction routine, he asks her to watch the tracks made by water droplets he deposits on her hand: despite starting at the same place, each one ends up tracing a different course. That sensitivity to initial conditions—a hallmark of mathematical chaos—mirrors the twists, turns and currents of a research field. Even though each research paper represents only an incremental gain in terms of knowledge, the overall route the field takes is impossible to predict from its outset, or from analysis of any point along its way. The flow of ideas is not quite comparable to the consolidating tendencies of a watercourse however, as single ideas can often spawn many offspring, while others languish unrecognised. These differing fates are generally not a reflection of a concept's actual quality, but just due to the stochastic way in which research progresses. Some papers, some ideas—through luck, timing or other factors—become more influential than others and nudge the activity of a research community ever so slightly in one direction. Other ideas are simply not as fertile, sometimes for no other reason than the tools at hand being insufficient to properly interrogate them; eventually work on that idea goes underground or dies out. In this sense then, the progression of scientific knowledge more properly resembles a family tree. Some branches are enormously fecund; others less prosperous but nonetheless stable from one generation to the next, some briefly prolific but then dying out, and others never really getting going at all. Every research area currently active can boast a dynastic pedigree as convoluted and intertwined as the British royal family, and for every Queen Victoria with litters of grand- and great-grandchildren, there are plenty of Queen Annes. It is something worth remembering for young scientists, usually nursed on the milk of the last decade or so of results, and often ignorant of the ancestry of the intellectual family in which they are being raised. If they are granted glimpses of the ur-ideas from further back, it will be the grand and successful ones whose progeny have multiplied and whose descendants are now indoctrinating and being fed to the new generation. The portraits in the family hall, a single sublime lineage of success. But that lineage is a legacy of luck. The dead and forgotten ideas are not necessarily black sheep of the family to be rightfully rejected—they were merely barren; the St. Johns who died alone while the Jane Eyres went on to cosily reproduce. That does not automatically make them bad ideas and certainly does not mean they all deserve to be forgotten. The predicament is one that many writers have appreciated and explored: Terry Pratchett (Small Gods), Neil Gaiman (American Gods) and, on the silver screen, Pixar (Coco) have all pushed the point that spirits, whether human or divine, weaken and vanish when nobody remembers them. They may have vanished, but in science, they still have graves. Interred within the pages of the scientific literature these ideas lie, possibly undisturbed for many years, but still intact. Some may be in their final resting places, but others were perhaps simply unfitted to their first era of existence and are now primed for new activity. Like the vampire Lestat in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, it just takes someone to find and resurrect them. The biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on vitamin C, was a great advocate of going back to the origins of a field and repeating classic experiments in order to stimulate new research directions. Reading and then repeating the nineteenth-century work of Wilhelm Kühne led him and his coworkers to the discovery of actin and a first delineation of the principles of actomyosin-based contractility. Modern genetics was birthed by the rediscovery of Mendel's works at the turn of the 20th century. A more recent example comes from the laboratory of Bruno Antonny 1. Here, work from merely 25 years previous was revisited, which detailed the bizarre phenomenon that the Golgi complexes of permeabilised cells show almost exclusive capture of infusions of pure lipid liposomes 2. The subsequent experiments by Magdeleine et al showed that this was largely due to the binding propensities of a single Golgi surface protein, GMAP-210, a finding of real significance for the membrane trafficking field despite the fact that the original publication accrued only five citations in 27 years. Going back to old papers can let a young scientist see what was being done before research activity became focused on particular conceptual pedigrees, and what ideas were alive before dogma set in. Those ideas may now lie entombed, but not necessarily rotten—and, perhaps, ripe for rediscovery and reanimation. If you are looking for inspiration, head to the graveyard (Fig 1). Brooke Morriswood is a junior group leader at the University of Würzburg; Oliver Hoeller is a freelance science illustrator based in the California Bay Area. Together they produce the science blog Total Internal Reflection (https://totalinternalreflectionblog.com). Figure 1. Resurrection science Both Gregor Mendel's and Ignaz Semmelweis’ discoveries went largely unrecognised in their own lifetimes. Mendel's rediscovery paved the way for modern genetics, while Semmelweis is now acknowledged as a pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Download figure Download PowerPoint References 1. Magdeleine M, Gautier R, Gounon P et al (2016) Elife 5: e16988CrossrefPubMedWeb of Science®Google Scholar 2. Kobayashi T, Pagano RE (1988) Cell 55: 797–805CrossrefCASPubMedWeb of Science®Google Scholar Previous ArticleNext Article Read MoreAbout the coverClose modalView large imageVolume 19,Issue 8,August 2018Cover: Functional compensation between individual stem and progenitor cells is critically important during disease progression and treatment. This study shows how individual HSC clones heterogeneously compensate for lymphopoietic deficiencies of other HSCs in vivo. From Lisa Nguyen, Rong Lu and colleagues: Functional compensation between hematopoietic stem cell clones in vivo. For detail, see Scientific Report on page e45702. Cover concept by the authors. (Cover design by Uta Mackensen) Volume 19Issue 81 August 2018In this issue FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsLoading ...