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LICHTMAN, WHO IS A PROFESSOR OF MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR BIOLOGY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND HAS PARTICIPATED IN PLANNING FOR HHMI'S JANELIA FARM RESEARCH CAMPUS, IS A SELF-DESCRIBED "NEURONAL ETHOLOGIST." HE WATCHES NERVE CELLS IN THEIR NATIVE HABITAT—THE ANIMAL. POWERFUL NEW MICROSCOPES ARE FACILITATING A TREND TOWARD OBSERVATIONAL BIOLOGY, WHICH LICHTMAN CONTENDS HAS SOME KEY ADVANTAGES OVER EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY.
For me, an observational approach to biology is very natural, but it's not that common in my field. Most of modern biology, and indeed science education from elementary school on up, is actually rooted in deduction: You start with an idea and use experimental tools to manipulate variables to test that hypothesis.
The aim of the deductive scientific method is to try your hardest to prove the idea wrong. If you keep failing at these attempts, the hypothesis stays alive, even though you haven't actually proved it. But where have you gotten? Given that the idea was already out there, all you've done is maintain the status quo. Refuting a hypothesis, on the other hand, leads to paradigm shifts. But it requires compelling data against the hypothesis, which is difficult to obtain, and when it is negative data, it is even more difficult to publish.
So with deduction, hypotheses tend to become entrenched as the weight of the published record becomes progressively lopsided. You could provide a virtually limitless amount of evidence consistent with the hypothesis that Earth is flat, but that doesn't make it so.
Observational, or inductive, science proceeds in a different way. The researcher simply observes a biological system, and hypotheses emerge as a consequence of, rather than as the motivation for, the observation. Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner said, "Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries, and new ideas, probably in that order," which is a good way to sum up how inductive science works. This approach, however, has its own pitfalls. First, your hypotheses are only as good as the observational tools at your disposal. Second, your life experience molds your worldview and therefore your observational abilities. You see things that resonate in your mind as real and interesting, and you ignore those things that don't.
Photo: Sean Kernan
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