BioMed Central Blog
Ockham’s broom and the disclosure of dirty secrets – New in Journal of Biology
No, not Ockham’s razor and the parsimony
principle. Ockham’s broom, newer by some centuries, is an implement 
conceived
by Sydney Brenner whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet, and
now adopted by Journal of Biology as the umbrella title for a new series in
which the inconvenient facts hitherto resolutely ignored by some subsection of
biologists are confronted.
A notable example of the past operation of Ockham’s broom is in what Charlie Janeway memorably called the immunologist’s dirty little secret: briefly, you can get lymphocytes to produce antibodies against pretty well any defined chemical, but only if you inject something messier, usually at that time dried mycobacterium, along with them. Immunologists, focusing on the lymphocytes that produce the antibodies, disregarded the implications of the mycobacterial adjuvant until Janeway brilliantly exposed the now accepted reality that lymphocytes generally don’t respond to anything unless they are activated by more evolutionarily ancient phagocytic cells geared to the recognition of conserved features of pathogens.
Another example is the focus in the 1970s on viral causes of human cancer, inspired by insights from animal tumor viruses but that did not account for the vast preponderance of tumors of epithelia which viruses do not selectively infect.
The Ockham’s broom series will be eclectic and occasional, because interesting and appropriate topics crop up across all of biology but not every day: the first, by Bruce Mayer and colleagues, is on signaling complexes which they argue we must stop seeing as defined assemblages of interacting proteins in favour of the dynamic reality. A signaling complex is not a ribosome.
The internet has made it possible for researchers to base all their reading on key-word searches and thus avoid distraction by articles outside their field, thereby also avoiding any consequent breadth of scholarship and or intellectual vitality. Journal of Biology hopes, by linking on their own series page articles unrelated in scientific content and pitched to provoke thought, to undermine this relentless focus. A bit, at least.Posted by Miranda Robertson at 15:35 Comments (1)
"thereby also avoiding any consequent breadth of scholarship and or intellectual vitality"
... and those damn kids better get off your lawn if they know what's good for 'em, hey old-timer?
Posted by bill on October 19, 2009 at 04:34 AM BST #