Not much time tonight before my early morning flight, but sometimes building a habit is just showing up consistently even if the effort isn’t quite the same every time.
Today I’m thinking about the cyclic nature of trends. I’ve finally hit the age where I’ve lived my adult life through some clothing and style fashion cycles, where the things I wore as a teenager or young adult are now considered “cool” again. I can’t pull them off anymore, of course, things like crop tops and low-rise bellbottoms, but it’s jarring to drive past the university and see the students in stuff I might’ve worn when I was their age. My clothing definitely dates me now. I’m told nobody wears skinny jeans.
My PhD advisor likes to say that “everything old is new again”, and while it’s obviously true of clothing, music, and other fashions, he’s usually referring to science. The trends of what’s hot or popular in science cycles just like white eyeliner or hair scrunchies. I’ve found that mantra to be pretty inspiring, because you can look back at what was being published and hyped 20-30 years ago, and almost any one of those ideas replicated today will generate the same interest since we have new technologies to apply. Some of those ideas were extremely elegant in concept, but were ahead of their time. Resources like hardware or software weren’t fast enough or sensitive enough to make those concepts really shine, so revisiting them today with the tools we now have available gives them an intellectual resurrection. For example, I’m looking back at Nature journal’s 1995 articles and seeing a lot of protein crystal structure work; just last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for protein structure prediction. (I’m also seeing a lot of transcription factor work, so… hmm…)
Now if mass spectrometer vendors could figure out how to make a clear, see-through instrument like the vintage iMac computers, we’d really be cooking.
Lindsay K. Pino 