One thing that is frustrating about being an amateur is that you are not part of the social group. This makes it virtually impossible to get your work known. My situation is a case in point. Professionally, I work in Artificial Intelligence, specifically Natural Language Processing. But I got two papers published in peer-reviewed journals. The first was on genomics/epigenetics and the second was how that implied a new modality for trating cancer. Since I am a computer person, it was natural for me to think about treating cancer by hijacking the inter-cellular message passing by flooding the tumor with your own information packets.
But since I am not part of the community, it is virtually impossbile to get this work known. I did one poster presentation at a conference, but I am went to it on my own dime and my wife would object to spending our vacation money gallawanting around like that. To use the Mendelian example, he published, but nobody paid much attention. And to make things worse, the "publish or perish" paradigm today results in a flood of papers that are only incrementally different. This makes for a big, big haystack to find your needle in.
Adam Mastroianni (a frequent contributor to this newsletter) has lots of thoughts on this and the fate of science in general - I really love his publications @ExperimentalHistory
One thing that is frustrating about being an amateur is that you are not part of the social group. This makes it virtually impossible to get your work known. My situation is a case in point. Professionally, I work in Artificial Intelligence, specifically Natural Language Processing. But I got two papers published in peer-reviewed journals. The first was on genomics/epigenetics and the second was how that implied a new modality for trating cancer. Since I am a computer person, it was natural for me to think about treating cancer by hijacking the inter-cellular message passing by flooding the tumor with your own information packets.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2021.104587
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2020.110205
But since I am not part of the community, it is virtually impossbile to get this work known. I did one poster presentation at a conference, but I am went to it on my own dime and my wife would object to spending our vacation money gallawanting around like that. To use the Mendelian example, he published, but nobody paid much attention. And to make things worse, the "publish or perish" paradigm today results in a flood of papers that are only incrementally different. This makes for a big, big haystack to find your needle in.
Adam Mastroianni (a frequent contributor to this newsletter) has lots of thoughts on this and the fate of science in general - I really love his publications @ExperimentalHistory