How I now know that unless we know what we don’t know we don’t know what we need to know

What if we stopped doing experiments altogether, and started thinking? Previous articles have suggested that a systematic approach to building a computational model of a very well-known biochemical pathway rapidly led to the identification of some pretty hefty gaps in the literature. In this case the literature was the biochemistry of butyrate handling, but as another article suggested I had the same experience in a different area of nutrition. Given the sheer volume of papers published on my favourite biochemical entity, I don’t think that the reason for these gaps is lack of funding or lack of experimentation. Likewise I don’t think that there’s anything particular about this super-sub-specialism that causes gaps. I’ve paused several times recently and wondered if there is an inappropriate amount of training time and an expectation on practising scientist to spend time doing experiments, exercising those pipetting muscles, rather than reading around (exercising those information literacy muscles, for their own sake). When researching we are driven almost wholly by the acquisition of data; when managing our students and postdocs we are driven wholly by the acquisition of data; when writing grants we tell our funders we will be highly successful in the acquisition of data. We recognise the importance of thinking about the data and sometimes even go as far as registering on statistics courses to helps with its interpretation (there’s some great courses coming up on t...
Source: The Nutrition Society - Category: Nutrition Authors: Source Type: news