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The cross-disciplinary blogosphere
As I was proofing the transcript of my conversation
with Steve Burbeck about multicellular computing, I noticed that
Steve had said that ten percent of the cells in our bodies are
bacterial, not human. The actual complement is much more shocking:
90%, a number so surprising that it's no wonder Steve
misspoke. It jumped out at me because the notion that we are
human/bacterial super-organisms is in the news, thanks to an article
in last week's New York Times magazine (title: Fat Factors,
cover tease: Microbesity?). The article discusses how our microbial fauna may
affect food metabolism. Although it doesn't make this point,
by the way, there's an interesting twist here on the
old nature versus nurture debate. In the case of a surrogate birth,
you get genes from your biological mother (and father) but microfauna
from your surrogate mother.
The blogospheric vector for the super-organism meme appears to have been Wired
News, which popularized the
phrase human-bacteria
hybrid. Bloglines finds 46
citations of that October 2004 story, which was
based on a review that appeared in the journal Nature
Biotechnology. The original article, The challenges of modeling mammalian biocomplexity, is online here, exquisitely
rendered as HTML that preserves all figures and legends. How many
times was this original article cited by the blogosphere? According to
Bloglines, none.
I probably shouldn't be too surprised by that, but it does contradict a
point I made in last week's conversation with Peter
Suber about open access. I said that bloggers typically respect
primary sources, and are scrupulous about tracking them down and
citing them. Clearly that didn't happen in this case.
When I did track down and read that paper, here's what jumped out at me:
It is possible to conceive of each cell as a node with a set of metabolic pathways within the node as above, but with each node connected to other nodes and then the problem reduces to the modeling of the internodal connections.
So, IT folks and biotech folks are converging on a similar (maybe the
same) problem: modeling and managing complex networks. In principle the
blogosphere stands ready to enable the kinds of cross-disciplinary
conversations that will move us forward. In
practice I suspect that, so far anyway, it is doing so less often and
less effectively than it could.
Update: Peter Briggs noted that I had incorrectly linked that Nature Biotechnology article. While fixing that, I checked the PDF version that he cited for blog mentions. None there either.
Update 2: There is, however, one citation in Connotea, the academic version of del.icio.us. The Connotea bookmark uses the article's Digital Object Identifier, doi:10.1038/nbt1015, which appears in the HTML and PDF versions, and is resolved (to a third version, the abstract) by way of the DOI's resolver. Bridging between the DOI-style citation tracking of Connotea, and the URL-style tracking of del.icio.us, might be a helpful conversation starter.
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