- Title
- Emerging concepts
- Creator
- Lee, James J.; Ptaschinski, Catherine; Arizmendi, Narcy; Moqbel, Redwan; Smith, Dick E.; Comeau, Michael R.; Plank, Maximillian; Mattes, Joerg; Foster, Paul S.; Balla, Keir M.; Traver, David; Ilarraza, Ramses; Odemuyiwa, Solomon O.; Orihara, Kanami
- Relation
- Eosinophils in Health and Disease p. 607-641
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-394385-9.00016-X
- Publisher
- Academic Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- My attraction to science and doing basic research comes from the misguided perspective, which usually develops early in life, that the world and events can be described from first principles. One simply had to devise ways to explain the series of absolute truths that surround us—the sky is blue, water is wet, and eosinophils are clearly the most important leukocytes in the blood (sorry … I simply couldn’t help myself!). Unfortunately, too many of us never fully lose this simplistic early childhood view of the world and it interferes with our thinking as we try to develop hypotheses to account for experimental observations. That is, the eosinophil community at large (including me!) is often not immune to this bias. Many times the only eosinophil studies believed are the ones that reinforce previously held views and fundable research is usually only an incremental advance on previously established results. While this cynical view of the eosinophil research is clearly an exaggeration, sadly, there are more elements of truth here than most of us are willing to admit in public. On this point, the enduring and pervasive character of this safe and intellectually soft approach is surprisingly robust. This is especially true given the truly extraordinary scientific achievements in biomedical science that have occurred from thinking outside the box. One need look no further than the story surrounding the molecular tools that are now indispensable and commonplace elements of research activities in any medical center. Who would have thought that studies of bacterial mating types and host defense strategies against bacterial phages (see for example) could possibly have led to the molecular biology revolution that is the driving force currently behind many basic as well as patient-based clinical studies. Even in those cases where the ideas and concepts were eventually refuted, the resulting discussions and debates substantially move areas of research forward. For example, in 1969 Britten and Davidson proposed a model for eukaryotic gene expression based on the presence of repetitive elements that could regulate batteries of genes in a coordinated fashion. Clearly, subsequent studies showed the shortcomings of this hypothesis. Nonetheless, the outside-the-box character of this idea created the discourse and experimental strategies that have led to the currently accepted understanding of unique cis-acting regulatory sequence elements that drive the coordinated expression of multiple genes and/or gene families. I would suggest that this type of event (i.e., thinking outside the confines of established parameters) isn’t an oddity at all and is instead all too often a moment of clarity. In this spirit, the coauthors of the subchapters within this ‘Emerging Concepts’ chapter describe research that neither reinforces current views of eosinophil effector functions nor are incremental advances of existing paradigms. As the heading suggests, you never know where the next ideas will come from or how far they will take you!
- Subject
- eosinophils; leukocytes; blood
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1299747
- Identifier
- uon:19930
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780123943859
- Language
- eng
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