Manuscript Venting

I have been writing a manuscript and it seems forever, of course, considering going through every responsible co-author's comments and edition. While the overall goal of this endeavor is to get the manuscript past the reviewers’ wrath or unforeseen comments, the main author or the first author unavoidably seems to bear the brunt of other co-authors’ irresponsibility and reckless comments. As to fulfill the entire business of manuscript publication, we tried every possible technique to prove that our finding might be useful for other researchers in the same field who might be toying with the idea of testing his hypothesis in this very technique.

Preparing the main manuscript, figures, tables, supplementary and all, I cannot help but to think of the main author as an expert civil engineer who carefully designs the floor plan or lay the groundwork for this entire industry in his hands. On the other hand, there are people or quite commonly known as VIPs, coming late and comment this and that while pointing their fingers aimlessly. Because of their astute comment on reminding putting the toilet tissue in the toilet, they are well received and claimed “Very professional advice”. 

I am not a whiner myself and do the job to my best. My principle is “Give credits where credit is due.” Don’t patronize me just because you made a very useful edition. I struggled myself learning the journal particular format and author guideline policy while keeping the writing as concise and grammar error free. Besides, I am not paid to write only manuscript; my job entails doing benchwork for ongoing project as well. I commend every one if our purpose is to make our paper look good, and outstanding. But, I’ll say again, BUT!!!.... don’t try to condescend me as if my particular writing is rookie. If you dare, why not you develop your own idea and take the first author responsibility? 

How many percentages?

I recently found out a very interesting aspect of other percentage of our human genomes which has 3 billion base pairs. Looking through literatures, though I cannot safely say which percentage of our genome is functioning to the best of our knowledge, it is well known that only 2 to 3 % of our 3 billion base pairs encode functional genes. What the other percentage of 97 to 98% represents is still unknown.

Even from those 2 - 3 % established regions which encodes genes, functions of certain genes are still unknown. Some are established as in p53, tumor suppressor proteins, or VEGF, FGF, IDH, and so on. We are still figuring out the functions of unpopular genes.

As our knowledge on biochemical pathways increased incrementally over the years, it becomes difficult to pin point a very specific function of a particular gene in the first place without going through a vast arrays of molecular techniques. Mendel's earlier observation of phenotypes of his experiments on peas would have been much simpler comparing to nowadays technological advancement and state-of-the-art molecular technique.

I'm rambling and typing whatever comes into my mind. Coming back to our topic, the other percentage of our genome? What are they doing? I have some idea. Since it is not yet been formally tested, I cannot divulge what I have been toying with my idea. But I do have some idea though.

In the same field

One of the things we must learn during our scholarly study is which symbols represent what kind of meaning: which words say what we wanted to express. In a way we first conceptualize our way of thinking with words to describe and share or pass our thought or idea through expressing the words or symbols or gesture which we assume we all have the same meaning.

Nothing is better than understanding the meaning behind the words we use everyday. I am particularly interested in how words develop and how deeply they evolved to such an extent that we no longer grasp the true meaning of what they represents. Rather we use them for their single meaning in their entirety.

Recently I learnt the word pUC, one the plasmids commonly used in cloning in the laboratory. I knew nothing but the small 'p'. The small 'p' here describe it is a plasmid. Until recently I realized that UC symbolizes where the plasmid was initially constructed. The place is University of California. I still need to find out in which campus the plasmid was developed. Was it Berkeley, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara? No idea.

Epilogue

I have been dwelling and learning in biosciences field for almost a decade, and everything I learnt has not yet been annotated as in what I have been learning, and shared with someone else who might be interested in learning weird and strange, and yet peculiar and fascinating aspects of sciences in nature. Until this very post, I enjoy reading articles, journals, forums, blogs, and so on, but I never inked my idea and thought or at least my attitude towards sciences or research in written forms. Here come my personal musings on research and anecdotal life events reflected on history and present of biosciences.