Some of the experiments included in this gallery have beautiful results — not just because the images they’ve captured are beautiful to look at. Great to see cutting edge science married to art like this (wonder is at the root of both science and art, ultimately).
This is such a fantastic article, and something I've thought about a lot regarding how biology is done nowadays vs. just a few decades ago. I think the difference is not only because science is getting complicated, and therefore messier - it's also because of the supposed promises of big data and AI. It seems like a lot of money and resources are now flowing towards chasing "big data" methods such as -omics research (RNA-seq etc) and using AI and/or traditional bioinformatics to try and find correlations in large datasets. Doing this kind of research is certainly valid and can indeed provide insights into fundamental biology. But I think we will have a big problem if these kinds of "fishing expeditions," which are not driven by any specific hypothesis, eat up all the money in biology research leaving no funding for the experimentalists.
thank you for the kind feedback! and yes, the technological scaling up of methods available in biology right now is what affords collecting large amounts of data, and we then resort to complex models to predict the behavior of the systems we study based on that data. the systems themselves are complex taken as a whole so in a way it’s a necessity. prediction takes precedence over understanding but maybe it’s the stage of development we find ourselves in at this point
Some of the experiments included in this gallery have beautiful results — not just because the images they’ve captured are beautiful to look at. Great to see cutting edge science married to art like this (wonder is at the root of both science and art, ultimately).
https://unswscience.substack.com/p/the-secret-beauty-of-microscope-art?r=62e707
This is such a fantastic article, and something I've thought about a lot regarding how biology is done nowadays vs. just a few decades ago. I think the difference is not only because science is getting complicated, and therefore messier - it's also because of the supposed promises of big data and AI. It seems like a lot of money and resources are now flowing towards chasing "big data" methods such as -omics research (RNA-seq etc) and using AI and/or traditional bioinformatics to try and find correlations in large datasets. Doing this kind of research is certainly valid and can indeed provide insights into fundamental biology. But I think we will have a big problem if these kinds of "fishing expeditions," which are not driven by any specific hypothesis, eat up all the money in biology research leaving no funding for the experimentalists.
thank you for the kind feedback! and yes, the technological scaling up of methods available in biology right now is what affords collecting large amounts of data, and we then resort to complex models to predict the behavior of the systems we study based on that data. the systems themselves are complex taken as a whole so in a way it’s a necessity. prediction takes precedence over understanding but maybe it’s the stage of development we find ourselves in at this point
I loved reading this. It was like reading a scientific novel.