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When in your undergrad do you finally understand the implications of research papers.


sgt.pepper

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I always read nature and other papers for fun and most of the time the papers seem so anticlimactic. I sort of say so what? These papers are suppose to be top notch high impact papers, but yet they seem so insignificant. Does science move this slow? I am referring mostly to cell biology,stem cells and cancer. To grad student: What was your experience?

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i guess i see where you are coming from

 

i think you are saying you don't understand how studying one protein or gene in some seemingly obscure pathway can have an impact that is relevant to us humans/ or you don't see the big picture. i think the fact that a lot of animal models are used for cell biology research may make it seem irrelevant to some people also.

 

you will learn later in your undergrad that cancer will probably not have a "miracle pill" cure and it will be a cocktail approach - small advances in the field could translate into something huge later on. like think of the BRCA1 gene - at the time when people were studying that if you read a paper you would be like "what good is that!" but you see, that type of research was necessary to get to where we are today in terms of breast cancer therapy. it wasn't overnight that something was found (although that does happen and when it does, it's amazing, like pencillin) but point is, it was meaningful! you might just not see it now.

 

also, research done in drosophila, or other animal models, like zebrafish, xenopus, c. elegans etc. may not necessarily lead to something absolutely breakthrough, but the hope is that if nothing is found therapeutics wise, at least you will be able to learn new things about genetics, as we are far from knowing the full picture in terms of how genes and interactions actually work.....and this finding can be applied later on by researchers who COULD find something breakthrough in terms of diseases, hence making that past research useful. if no one had studied RNAi silencing, or shine dalgarno sequences (which might have sounded pointless and boring at the time) we wouldn't be where we are today.

 

sure there are papers which truly aren't that awe inspiring when you first read them, but point is to look at a paper overall - see how it fits in - a good paper does that on it's own in the discussion section....at the end of the day a reader wants to know WHY this research should matter. but the art of being a good scientific reader is to see that even when it's not explicity stated. try to think of the big picture and answer yourself why it could matter.

 

i hope that helps? :)

 

I feel like such a nerd for knowing all your examples except for shine dalgarno sequences.

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before i answer your question i have one for you: why are you reading research papers in science and nature in highschool rather than focusing your energy on hitting on/dating girls? highschool isn't about gunning for meds, its about developing social relationships when you still have time

 

and to answer your question - different fields in science are progressing at different paces. there are certainly fields that are stand-still, but there are also areas that are currently hot fields, with new papers published daily. one thing that fuels research in a particular area is the advent of new technologies, and this is especially true for molecular biology (stem cells/cancer fall under this heading). so your statement about cancer/stem cell research is false, because some papers that have been published only 5-10 years ago are now obsolete because there are so many new technologies that researchers are harnessing to study their particular questions

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Environmental Genome Shotgun

Sequencing of the Sargasso Sea

 

Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene

involved in speech and language

 

Especially the second one. It doesn't look to ground breaking.

 

dude, Nature declines 96% of the manuscripts it gets.

 

everything that makes it past there is the real deal.

 

edit: that finding is HUGE!

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dude, Nature declines 96% of the manuscripts it gets.

 

everything that makes it past there is the real deal.

 

edit: that finding is HUGE!

 

the sargasso sea article is important for the simple fact that its the genome of unknown unculturable organisms.

 

That being said, not all nature articles are "automatically" huge. 90% of citings (and therefore 90% of the impact factor) comes from about 10% of the papers, which are truly the top of the top. The other 90% of "space-fillers", are not necessarily that much more important than those you find in another premier journal, like cardiovascular research.

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nope second year. Was just talking to some of my friends about a paper we read in class and we had no idea why this paper was anymore deserving of a spot in nature compared to others

 

ah... my apologies. one of the big mistakes of making inferences!

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Environmental Genome Shotgun

Sequencing of the Sargasso Sea

 

Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene

involved in speech and language

 

Especially the second one. It doesn't look to ground breaking.

 

Isn't FOXP2 supposed to be, like, THE gene that confers language ability to humans when compared to other primates? Forgive me if I'm wrong (didn't look it up) but I would say that's pretty important.

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Isn't FOXP2 supposed to be, like, THE gene that confers language ability to humans when compared to other primates? Forgive me if I'm wrong (didn't look it up) but I would say that's pretty important.

 

I heard Svante Paabo speak at a human genetics conference back in 2008. The work he presented absolutely insane. After identifying genes involved in human language ability they were cloning the genes in to mice to see which ones were needed to produce a human-like vocal system....in mice. He's pretty intense.

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Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene

involved in speech and language

 

Yeah, I'd say this is a pretty huge finding. Demonstrating that a single gene is capable of altering an individual's ability to articulate? Demonstrating that this gene is conserved across species, but that there are significant differences between the human cDNA and those of other species (thus showing why humans are capable of language acquisition but other species are not)? Seems pretty big to me.

 

And, according to Scopus, cited 342 times since its publication. That's a high impact paper, for sure.

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Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene

involved in speech and language

 

Especially the second one. It doesn't look to ground breaking.

 

Considering that the FOXP2 gene was a major milestone in human evolution, if that article wasn't published in Nature then I'm sure nothing else would be.

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