A Lament of the Times

Comparing old and new.

Not long ago I was working in a TC hood

When a tale was told of funding good

A time when federal money supported inspiration and innovation

Back in the high days of the Clinton Administration

The speaker went on about the days of old,

Comparing then and now, with passion uncontrolled

Frustrating me greatly when I heard them say

That “kids” like us have it way easier today

It is natural to rankle at such an accusation,

But does that argument even have foundation?

It has been said many times, but does that make it thus?

Did those before us have it harder than us?

These days to produce work of significant ramification

Requires navigating a near overload of information

With no real way to settle this in a manner that is fair

Let’s just look at a few things to see how we compare

Let’s say you need to clone a gene,

Comparing 1995 to 2015

Back in ’95 that was hard, it’s a fact

But worthy of a paper of high impact

Nowadays cloning is easy, but as an art it is dying

An undergrad opens a box and is done without trying

The flip-side is that now past just one gene,

That same undergrad can do a whole forward screen

What about the other nucleic acid, that RNA?

Once hard to isolate, now it’s passé

Sequencing got deep so more flavors were found:

Activating, inhibitory, short, long, and round.

Sure it’s a lot of data, but are you sure it isn’t crap?

No manuscript is complete without a heat map.

Let’s say in the old days a protein got pulled down,

After a few experiments, its role in cancer was found

A druggable target whose activity is high

So-and-so et al. named it Protein X but another group called it Y

Both wrote a paper, then another, and a next

Then another group reported that Y equals X

These days we excise a band and send it for mass spec,

Get a sequence back and do an in silico check

BLAST results come up and make you exclaim

“Why does this thing have eight freakin’ names?”

Bragging will continue with embellishments that are exorbitant

But scientists of all generations can agree on what’s important

Everyone has a chance to figure out some puzzle pieces

And as long as the scope of our questions increases

Who had it harder hardly matters at all

Because on the shoulders of giants we are all small