{"id":696,"date":"2009-02-01T23:00:59","date_gmt":"2009-02-01T23:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2009\/02\/01\/in_which_i_wade_through_the_fringes_of_textbook_fact\/"},"modified":"2009-02-01T23:00:59","modified_gmt":"2009-02-01T23:00:59","slug":"in_which_i_wade_through_the_fringes_of_textbook_fact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2009\/02\/01\/in_which_i_wade_through_the_fringes_of_textbook_fact\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I wade through the fringes of textbook fact"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve recently turned in a commissioned review article about the role of the actin cytoskeleton in cell shape. I’m an old hand at reviews, but this was something special: a ‘Cell Science at a Glance’ poster for the Journal of Cell Science<\/a>. In this nifty piece of front matter, the words are secondary: what authors are asked is to conceptualize their topic in the form of a large poster of visual art (four times the size of a journal page) which will be redrawn by a professional artist into a full-color piece, folded as an inset into the print issue and available as a PowerPoint slide online. And it must stand alone, with the accompanying 1,500 or so words of text serving as a mere bonus. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nA room with a mess<\/strong> The edges of truth are seldom tidy<\/em><\/p>\n

\nNow, I am a wordsmith primarily, and after so many years of practice, there are very few gigs that cause me undue trouble. I’ve never suffered from writer’s block, and the 1,500 words were duly researched, executed, polished and EndNoted in about seven days.<\/p>\n

\nBut the sketch was another story. I was raised by artists, so I’ve always done a bit of drawing; when I was an undergraduate on financial aid, I even helped bankroll my education by doing graphic design for the college. But how can you actually draw<\/em> the role of actin in cell shape? And then, once you decide on your conceptual framework, what goes in and what goes out? Biology, after all, is a nightmare of reductionism, its various elements going on relentlessly in all directions; every protein is touched by dozens of others, and so on, ad infinitum. One has to somehow incorporate three dimensions, and a dynamic temporal aspect too. I also wanted to compare yeast to higher metazoans, so there was that facet to depict as well.<\/p>\n

\nBut there is an even more interesting problem here, as I was soon to find out. In words, you can deal fairly easily with controversial or unknown elements of a topic. You can present caveats and conflicting viewpoints, and attempt to synthesize some sort of consensus. But a drawing is absolute: something is either depicted, or it isn’t. And as I started to flesh out all the details of my drawing, I kept finding myself stumbling into grey areas. Were these particular filaments catalyzed by formins or Arps? Scouring the literature, I could see that one vociferous camp claimed the former, and another, the latter. No sooner had I dispatched one ambiguity that the next would arise: which signalling cascade was truly upstream of this particular protrusion? Looking into it, I found that the jury is still out, and entire review articles had been written about something that I was trying to reduce to a one-centimeter squiggle of graphite.<\/p>\n

\nIn the end, I just did my best. It turned out to be very soothing, sitting in a quiet room with a pile of colored pencils and a very large eraser \u2013 a far cry from normal lab life. And now, I am hoping that the chosen peer reviewers are not so embroiled in such a fervent battle over the genesis of bulge X or protrusion Y that they fail to appreciate what it takes to generalize in art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve recently turned in a commissioned review article about the role of the actin cytoskeleton in cell shape. I’m an old hand at reviews, but this was something special: a ‘Cell Science at a Glance’ poster for the Journal of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}