Doves, Diplomats, and Diabetes – A Darwinian Interpretation of Type 2 Diabetes and Related Disorders
Milind Watve
2013
A physicist, a chemist, and a biologist decided to collaborate for an ambitious experiment that needed expertise from all the three disciplines. Painstakingly they put all the experimental set up together. They performed the experiment and it appeared to work. They got some results in hand. Now they thought they wanted to prove the reproducibility of the results and so they did it again. Everything worked fi ne and they had the fi nal readings again, just that it was somewhat different than the earlier one. To see which of the two results was correct; they performed it again and got a still different result. Pretty soon they realized that although they could draw some roundabout conclusions, the experiment was not quite precisely reproducible. Everyone started wondering what could be wrong. The physicist said that the experimental systems were perhaps not very stable. He started checking all the circuits, instruments and their errors, sensitivity to voltage fl uctuations, temperature variations, etc. The chemist believed that they needed greater care and more precision in performing the experiment and thought they would achieve it by doing it again and again and he would be happy when they get three consecutive identical readings. The biologist appeared least worried and said “well, there is bound to be some intrinsic variation. Let us take an average!!” Leaving aside the naivety of the story, it illustrates how people trained in different disciplines of science think in different ways, although they might be addressing the same problem. It is dif fi cult to predict whose approach would ultimately turn out to be fruitful. What is important is to try more than one way of thinking and that increases the chances of fi nding a solution. Until you have the solution you need to keep your mind open to all the different possible approaches. At times the solution comes from the most unexpected approach and perhaps the least authoritative person…