Bubble speak

almost impossible even to ask many of these questions clearly without understanding statistics and computational approaches. And these problems require ever-sharper experimental tools, many of which will come from exploiting highly specific chemical reactions and interactions. What are the main challenges you see for the biomedical science community? We are tackling more genomes, ever more protein–protein interactions, and more complex cell behaviors and developmental programs. In the process we find ourselves needing larger research groups, bigger microscopes, more powerful mass spectrometry, more gene arrays, faster throughput in solving crystal structures, etc. In this way the increasing pace of biological discovery is slowly changing the social network of biomedical research. I hope we can preserve and strengthen the cottage-industry laboratory, with a single PI supervising students and postdocs, which still works admirably for solving many questions. But the old model simply will not accommodate the new biology that is emerging everywhere. We need to devise new career paths and administrative structures to motivate investigators and reward cooperative research among individual labs and larger research groups. A second challenge is the increasing role of industry and commerce, relative to government, in funding and motivating research in academic labs. These changes stem in large part from profound changes in the personal, political, and economic values of first-world societies — changes I find alarming. In different ways, both challenges threaten the tradition of individuality in science, which has effectively fostered creativity and new discoveries for more than two centuries. A scary prospect. I do hope, however, that these fears are unnecessary symptoms of senescent nostalgia. After all, human curiosity and creativity are hardy perennials. It is not surprising that we know quite a lot about the biology of the Atlantic and Pacific herring, given their commercial and ecological importance, but new work suggests we may have missed something: their ability to produce sounds. That they can hear is well documented but the new work suggests that fast pulses of sound emitted by the fish may help individuals remain within shoals. at a laboratory in Oban in Scotland (published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, online), have carried out studies on captured wild juveniles from the Pacific and Atlantic held in tanks onshore. They found that the fish can produce a burst or pulses of sound lasting between 0.6 and 7.6 seconds, which occurred mostly at night. Video studies showed that the sounds …