Thoughtful mood today, sitting at work watching the progression of a 543 nm laser inching down a microarray slide on a computer screen. The growing image is beautiful: it looks like little squares of the night sky arranged to form a larger square. A mini-fractal, so to speak. Of course, what the image really represents is a group of carefully spaced DNA fragments attached to a chemical matrix on a glass slide, with the bright spots showing where DNA fragments recovered from heat-shocked Arabidopsis plants have hybridized to their matching sequences among the probes on the slide. The results will help us understand which genes are active in our plants. Being one half of the resident cheap labor for my project, I'm the one who gets to sit in this icy corner on the third floor, making sure the images from the two lasers (543 and 635 nm) coincide in brightness. I actually like this job. I get to stare at a pretty picture, tinker with it in the name of science, and think. I have a down jacket that is just preventing my hands from turning blue with cold. I also have a stack of papers that I am forever planning to read and this stack of blank paper for notes. I never turn down "thinking time" tasks at the lab. I've spent a lot of the past hour and the past weeks thinking about Polanyi's ideas.
Polanyi's view of biology has me both deeply intrigued and deeply unsettled . I love his book. It hits some key, rarely-addressed aspects of biology unflinchingly. Most importantly to me, he acknowledges that our human foundations of knowledge have their roots planted most unquestioningly in our biological heritage. He does no dabbling about the role of evolution and the place of this critical theory in our quest to understand ourselves. While reading the book I never got the sense, as I do from proponents of intelligent design theory, that he's going to spring some gotcha revelation about the Biblical origins of the human race on me. He's trying to understand the real universe.
Yet in some ways this questing of his is what troubles me the most. He has left me with many more questions than he raised in the book and not much insight to answer them. How do I, an aspiring researcher, frame questions in my routine research based on his view of science? Where does this vitalistic "force" he proposes towards the end of the book originate in the history of life and what is it anyway? How can we integrate our understanding of different levels of biology in order to glimpse a more complete picture of ourselves and the rest of life? The thread of these questions can be traced through stacks of systems biology papers. They pose a gargantuan problem to modern biologists. Are these questions outside or beyond the scope of Personal Knowledge or did I miss something critical when I read it?
Image upper right: combination of microarray images scanned by 543 and 635 nm laser, image scanned and saved by Arabidopsisgirl
Polanyi's view of biology has me both deeply intrigued and deeply unsettled . I love his book. It hits some key, rarely-addressed aspects of biology unflinchingly. Most importantly to me, he acknowledges that our human foundations of knowledge have their roots planted most unquestioningly in our biological heritage. He does no dabbling about the role of evolution and the place of this critical theory in our quest to understand ourselves. While reading the book I never got the sense, as I do from proponents of intelligent design theory, that he's going to spring some gotcha revelation about the Biblical origins of the human race on me. He's trying to understand the real universe.
Yet in some ways this questing of his is what troubles me the most. He has left me with many more questions than he raised in the book and not much insight to answer them. How do I, an aspiring researcher, frame questions in my routine research based on his view of science? Where does this vitalistic "force" he proposes towards the end of the book originate in the history of life and what is it anyway? How can we integrate our understanding of different levels of biology in order to glimpse a more complete picture of ourselves and the rest of life? The thread of these questions can be traced through stacks of systems biology papers. They pose a gargantuan problem to modern biologists. Are these questions outside or beyond the scope of Personal Knowledge or did I miss something critical when I read it?
Image upper right: combination of microarray images scanned by 543 and 635 nm laser, image scanned and saved by Arabidopsisgirl
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