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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!masscomp!rick
From: rick@masscomp.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.bio
Subject: Re: Purpose of bio newsgroup
Message-ID: <228@masscomp.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 11-Mar-84 05:38:08 EST
Article-I.D.: masscomp.228
Posted: Sun Mar 11 05:38:08 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 12-Mar-84 04:57:31 EST
Organization: MASSCOMP, Littleton, MA
Lines: 98

Thanks, Paul Dolber.  I agree 100% with your defense of net.bio.
Like some of the folks who are asking to abolish net.bio, I too
had a brief hope of learning through voyeurism.  Your reasoned
analysis of the enormous scope of the field of biology and the
minimal probability of two experts in the same field being on the
net at the same time helped bring me back to reality.

Another reason why biologists may not have interest in the net is
that biological research is slow.  Time is spent developing technique,
or waiting for a cell type or species to develop or reproduce.  One of
the joys of biology is absorbing the intricacy of the observed
phenomenon (e.g. gardening).  Maybe 80% of the knowledge gained is
useful only to the biologist in question for figuring out what the
next experiment should be.  By the time any publishable results are
in, the biologist has already talked to most everybody else who is
expert in that particular field (and promised them pre-publication
manuscripts).  In general, biology has had to develop a successful
informal information network already, and speed is not a significant
factor.

Since I agree that state of the art biology has small likelyhood of
emerging on this net in the near future, I am pleased that you came up
with a couple very reasonable uses for net.bio:  [1] answering
non-medical biological questions;  [2] advising the computer/biology
interface.  Who knows, there may even be an opportunity to get into	
esoteric things due to conflicting answers.

Biology had been traditionally divided to Botany and Zoology.  More
recently, many universities have recognized a 4 part division:
molecular and cellular biology; anatomy, physiology, and developmental
biology; neurobiology and behavior; ecology and (rot 13) ribyhgvbanel
biology.  (Of course, these are general categories and vary from place
to place.)

To put a few of my own biased ideas into the fray, I'll point out that
electroenzymological study of Na,K-ATPase and impulse propagation in
developing hearts are nigh unto medicine.  Few organisms other than
Homo sapiens (and maybe those wimpy Canadian white rats) have raised
enough interest for such in depth study.

There are a wide variety of biological questions which could be
considered which are completely non-medical:  What is that green stuff
in the thorax of a lobster? (liver &/or semi-digested food in the
cecum)  When will researchers definitively determine if acid rain is
caused by industrial SO2 emissions? (about 15 years ago, by
Scandinavians concerned about pollution from England)  Why is there
sex? (recombination and vegetative propagation both have (rot 13)
ribyhgvbanel advantages, but the mathematics of the (rot 13)
ribyhgvbanel genetic models, and the diversity of models themselves
leads to unresolved complexity)  In a couple of decades, genetic
engineering will be an established technology; when walking through
the Amazon Basin, every 10th species you run into is not known to
modern biology; what irretrievable resources are going up in smoke
along with the deforestation of the tropics, 50% of which is for
charcoal production? (who knows, but probably several new food crop
species as well as the genes for natural immunity to many crop pests)
What are the minimum population levels for various marine mammals
below which extinction is probable? (remember the california condor
and the whooping crane)

Then there are the more trendy almost medical issues:  The difference
between female and male human neuroanatomy is statistically
significant (not to mention neuroendocrinolgy).  Behavior has a
significant genetic component in all species other than Homo sapiens;
are people truely different?  Why has the artsy-fartsy dogmatic theory
of left- and right- hemispheres glossed over the corpus collosum?
(significantly larger in female humans than in males)

It makes sense that the computer technical news groups have traffic.
These are very narrow fields of expertise with many folks involved in
R&D.  How many news groups are devoted to languages and hardwares?
Compared to biology, the differences are trivial.  If you work on a
different organism, you have completely different hardware and
operating system (both of which you must *master*, not merely cope
with).  If you run a different experiment, even on the same organism,
the new techniques involved are much more dissimilar than differences
corresponding to new programming languages and editors.

But if there is merit to Paul's suggestions, then it doesn't matter if
a unix wizard asks a dumb question.  Chances are that none of the
biologists on the net knows a definitive answer (but those of us out
here would not mind a chance to give our 2 cents worth).  On the other
hand, I hope that the biologists will not be solicited for input
regarding certain current net debates which shall remain nameless, and
which rightly belong in net.philosophy because they have *no*
biologically factual basis.

So, Paul, while I consider myself a mathematician (1/3 of my degrees),
since half of my degrees are in non-medical biology, I'll try to carry
my share.  One of my Ph.D. interests was ecology, a.k.a. field
biology, a.k.a. natural history (much more complex mathematically than
physics, chemistry, or biochemistry; i.e. stochastic functional
differential equations).

Now, you folks who are flaming about a lack of biology in net.bio,
what do you want to know?
-
Rick Curren @ masscomp