Science Moves Fast
One things that still astounds me is how fast the field of biology changes. If one looks back even just ten years, the human genome was yet to be sequenced (as was the genome of a vast number of organisms), and microarrays were just being invented. Lester wrote recently about how medical knowledge gets obsolete every 5 years, but individual fields in biology and medicine move much faster than that, and the pace is only growing faster.
Even in the past year, the number of things that I’ve learned that have gone out of date is pretty amazing, especially on the fundamental ways in which life works. For example, my knowledge of RNA export, the basic redundancy of duplicate ribosome genes, and the “fact” that miRNA downregulates translation, have all become obsolete, even though just last year, I took a class on the regulation of gene expression that incorporated all the latest research in the field. Actually, this isn’t the advancement of the field in the last year; it’s the advancement of biology in the last month!
I have no idea how professors manage to keep up with the changing face of biology year after year after year! Just think about all the scientists around who lived before the days of BLAST, PCR, and PubMed, to list three tools indispensable to any working molecular biologist.
The fast pace is exciting, though! Research science is like white-water rafting through through a river of knowledge; the challenge here is to keep from drowning!
