The OpenHelix Blog

This post is in response to the challenge by a fellow science blogger, which inspired me to look back to one of the most memorable papers I ever read.

My “challenge”, for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre- World War II, as that was the era of hand-crafted, “in your basement”-style science. There’s a lot to learn not only about the ingenuity of researchers in an era when materials were not readily available, but also about the problems and concerns of scientists of that era, often things we take for granted now!

It will become part of a collection of blogging on classic science papers on the Skulls in the Stars site.

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There was one day in the early 1990s where I found myself in my graduate advisor’s office—Dr. Joanna Olmsted was sitting at her desk. It was just a regular meeting on my thesis progress. I don’t remember the date, it didn’t seem remarkable at the time. I’m sure she has forgotten the specific incident as well. We were discussing something about a draft of my thesis or it may have been a committee meeting progress report—but it was related to the work I was doing in the lab, and had to do with some writing.

Joanna said that I needed to have a citation for some phrasing I had used. It was something about the antibodies I was using to look at the subcellular cytoskeletal structures that were the topic of the research in our lab. The conversation went something like:

Me: “I need a citation for fluorescent antibodies? You’re kidding. They are totally standard. They come out of a catalog. And they come out of the freezer.”

Joanna: “Yes. You need a citation.”

Me: Rolls eyes. Huffs. Stomps out of room and back to the lab. {ok, I’m not certain of these specific details. But I’m pretty sure there was eye rolling, at a minimum}