> You must be a young man or woman and have never read the
> original papers on cloning experiments or or the development of
> new restriction enzymes or protein purification of membrane
> proteins or transcriptional protein-DNA interactions.
yup, i can honestly answer 'yes' to all of those questions. i'm not a molecular biologist nor do i play one on tv. that's my sister (phd from harvard). i'm an undergrad in uc berkeley in engineering.
i suppose you're right in the sense that if you're applying known and now standard techniques, then there *is* a handbook that tells u, "use x mol of this and y mol of that and expect the following ...". anyway, can't comment on the specific examples. though "developing restriction enzymes"? my understanding is that they're all found. and there its just a combinatorial exercise, not a statistical one. to some extent the statistics is hidden, since - if in the end - you just run a gel or do the equivalent - then you're pretty much using a tool that reduces everything to digital, "this is the overwhelmingly correct answer", and most folks can live with that.
> the accuracy of the sequence data.....
on the other hand, a company like celera had a huge bank of statisticians and bioinformatics folks that do nothing but statistics. (hell, their first "fellow" was a statistician). in fact, that's a place where you'd have to say, without statistics, that whole approach to sequencing was a non-starter ...
> there were no clinical trials of penicillin or
> glucocorticoids either before they were given to people,
> because they worked.
i don't think there were clinical trials of leeches and moxie(tm) either.
> Statisticians make assumptions about the preconceived reality
> of what they are studying time after time.
everyone does. this is not news.
