Small World of Science

Scientists are so connected to one another! In "The World is Flat", Friedman credits the scientific community with producing the original "community developed software":

"The first community-developed software movement really to make a mark took the intellectual commons approach. It came out of the academic and collaborative academic and scientific communities, where for a long time self-organized collaborative communities of scientists have come together through private networks (and eventually the Internet) to pool their brainpower or share insights around a particular science or math problem. The Apache Web server had its roots in this form of open-sourcing..."

What a great ideal to strive for. Collaborative, self-organized, sharing, the scientific ideal expressed in terms of the modern world. In the past semester, I've met quite a number of academics from interviews and revisits, and I found it is amazing that, without even the services of something like Facebook, I rarely find more than one degree of separation from me to them just by virtue of the number of people in the scientific community each one of them has connections to. The younger set will be very familiar with my younger mentors, the older set had all known my former boss as an HHMI member, and everyone in between had some collaboration or connecting interest.

In one instance, one of my interviewers insisted on walking me to my next interview despite my protests that I knew the way. His reason? The next interviewer was a high-power guy that he, as a new faculty, might not mingle with for a long time yet, so he wanted to use the excuse for a visit. haha so I can serve as connector too.

I am terrible at remembering names and faces, and I thought I was terrible at remembering names and scientific interests too. My first discussions always entailed the words "um and that scientist whose name I can't remember but he did such-and-such an experiment.." Once, I met the person who DID the experiments and almost referred to him in the third person!! But I've found that even after even short conversations, I remember names, the institution where I we met, and their specific area of expertise quite well, and could begin referring to them by name. I can't remember what most of them looked like, but perhaps this is what it means to remember names and not faces!

I was just reflecting on all this, because friends coming across articles I might be interested in have been sending me articles relating to developmental biology. In the past month, of 3 articles sent to me, I have met at least one major player in each study and already made plans to meet others. What I found most intriguing is that I found a link to this article on one of my friends' facebook ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26devo.html?pagewanted=5&ei=5124&en=bfa5e85c192de12d&ex=1340510400&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook ).  Now, I have no strong interest in evo-devo and have not even tried to meet anyone in the field. Imagine my surprise when I met cliff tabin (cited in this article), and instead of talking about everything that I wanted to talk to him about, he went through all the places in the world where he had set up study sites and all the animals he now kept in his lab and how they were doing comparisons between this and that... I can't say I was wholly intrigued, but here I see his name in nytimes and think "I met this guy. I know what he's like. Imagine that."