Friday, October 17, 2008

Consider Classic Experiments

As part of the class I teach, the students get grades and complete some assignments on WebCT. One of them complained to me the other day about not being able to do something on the system and how much they loath it. I’m inclined to agree.

When I went to college, I didn’t actually want internet. I didn’t want to sit for hours at a time in front of the monitor surfing pointlessly, playing LAN games, or getting into trouble. Since I also know about Echelon, I also balked at the prospect of being tracked by the government whenever I opened a site, even if I ended up their accidentally. However, before too long, in one lab course I took in Biochemistry, we were required to, like my students are, complete assignments on WebCT.

If not for that, I probably would never have started a blog or wasted as much time as I have playing MMORPGs or in IM conversations. When it’s up to me, I prefer now to sit in my chair and read or play my guitar, now that it’s fixed. I find those things far more fulfilling, probably since I control them. You control very little on the internet.

Besides, old technology has its advantages. So many thieves have switched to online for easy money, that it’s almost become safe to send checks in the mail. Plus, they never steal a password for websites if I transact business via the USPS. It’s a lot of work to steal money through the mail, and you have to be physically there in order to do it. People can steal money from your account from the comfort of their home in Estonia while sitting nude smoking crack if they like.

Scientific technology likewise has come along so far that you can get publications for simpler things. For demonstrating that a gene has incomplete dominance or only a single allele (which is something they spend one whole lecture on in genetics classes), you can get into a journal because nobody does that anymore. A researcher in the lab I worked got his MS doing Chlorophyll fluorescence as a marker of stress. Nobody uses it, but it’s indisputable and very very easy, if only you own the equipment. Don’t ignore classics like Southern Blotting for ELISA or Y2H assays. Besides being simple and cheap, it leaves tangible results, not just readouts of electrons on a screen.

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