scientific means and ends

Yesterday in the afternoon attended the system biology workshop where speakers talked about different aspects of it, from sequence comparison, to transcription factors being derived from transposons to development in Drosophila. The approaches taken were unique in the sense that teasing out problems depends so much on the thoughts that get into designing the experiments. Analyzing the data without any bias is the next step. Often scientists have their pet genes or processes and every thing seems to lead towards that, subconsciously. Joining the bandwagon is not foreign to science, as fads come and go. Over all approach seems to be to start with a system which is not complicated, like studying bacteria instead of human to find out metabolic pathways. A good model system to work on and a methodology that is easy or straight forward to follow help in the reproduction of the results. However still the data could be mined to get what will prove one’s hypothesis and lead one astray.