Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?
Y. Lazebnik’s “Can a Biologist Fix a Radio? – or, What I Learned while Studying Apoptosis” in Biochemistry (Moscow), Vol. 69, No. 12, 2004, pp. 1403-1406:
To understand what this flaw is, I decided to follow the advice of my high school mathematics teacher, who recommended testing an approach by applying it to a problem that has a known solution. To abstract from peculiarities of biological experimental systems, I looked for a problem that would involve a reasonably complex but well understood system. Eventually, I thought of the old broken transistor radio that my wife brought from Russia. Conceptually, a radio functions similarly to a signal transduction pathway in that both convert a signal from one form into another (a radio converts electromagnetic waves into sound waves). My radio has about a hundred various components, such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors, which is comparable to the number of molecules in a reasonably complex signal transduction pathway. I started to contemplate how biologists would determine why my radio does not work and how they would attempt to repair it. Because a majority of biologists pay little attention to physics, I had to assume that all we would know about the radio is that it is a box that is supposed to play music.
How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size. We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radios performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.
A more successful approach will be to remove components one at a time or to use a variation of the method, in which a radio is shot at a close range with metal particles. In the latter case, radios that malfunction (have a phenotype) are selected to identify the component whose damage causes the phenotype. Although removing some components will have only an attenuating effect, a lucky postdoc will accidentally find a wire whose deficiency will stop the music completely. The jubilant fellow will name the wire Serendipitously Recovered Component (SRC) and then find that SRC is required because it is the only link between a long extendable object and the rest of the radio. The object will be appropriately named the Most Important Component (MIC) of the radio. A series of studies will definitively establish that MIC should be made of metal and the longer the object is the better, which would provide an evolutionary explanation for the finding that the object is extendable.
[snip]
Eventually, all components will be catalogued, connections between them will be described, and the consequences of removing each component or their combinations will be documented. This will be the time when the question, previously obscured by the excitement of productive research, would have to be asked: Can the information that we accumulated help us to repair the radio? It will turn out that sometimes it can, such as if a cylindrical object that is red in a working radio is black and smells like burnt paint in the broken radio. Replacing the burned object with a red object will likely repair the radio.
Really, incredibly amusing. Go read the rest of it, it’s not gated.
