The problem is it is not the PI who is jumping, it may be a postdoc he/she is throwing.
Priority makes careers (look back at the Lavoisier/Priestly, Adams/LeVerrier or
Cope/Marsh controversies), and the history of scientific reviewing is not all edifying.
Too many checks, not enough balances. Science is probably better served if the
author can publish without passing on the pdb model to a potentially unscrupulous
reviewer, and if there are minor errors in the published paper then a competing
group also has reason to publish its own view. The errors already have to evade the
excellent validation tools we now have thanks to so many talented programmers,
and proper figures and tables (plus validation report) should be enough for a review.
The picture we have of haemoglobin is now much more accurate than the ones
which came out decades ago, but those structures were very useful in the mean
time. A requirement of resolution better than 2 Angstroms would probably stop poor
models entering PDB, but I don't think it would serve science as a whole. Science
is generally a self-correcting process, rather than a demand for perfection in every
paper. Computer software follows a similar pattern - bug reports don't always invalidate the
program.
I have happily released data and coordinates via PDB before publication, even back in the
1990s when this was unfashionable, but would not do so if I felt it risked a postdoc
failing to publish a key paper before competitors. It might be helpful if journals were
more amenable to new structures of "solved" proteins as the biology often emerges
from several models of different conformations or ligation states. But in a "publish or
perish" world, authors need rights too. Reviewers do a necessary job, but there is a
need for balance.
The attached figure shows a French view of Le Verrier discovering Uranus, while
Adams uses his telescope for a quite different purpose.
On Apr 26, 2012, at 2:01 AM, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 25, 2012 09:40:01 am James Holton wrote:
>
>> If you want to make a big splash, then don't complain about
>> being asked to leap from a great height.
>
>
> This gets my vote as the best science-related quote of the year.
>
> Ethan
>
>
> --
> Ethan A Merritt
> Biomolecular Structure Center, K-428 Health Sciences Bldg
> University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742
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