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Back to the Future

By clock on July 20, 2006.

There is a new question in the Ask a ScienceBlogger series:

If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...

Let me get the two runner-up answers out of the way first:
- the romantic time of mid-19th century England around the publication of the Origin of Species. This assumes I'd be an English landed gentleman and a buddy of Charles. This also assumes that I'd be aware of how great that period was for science.
- some time in the future, e.g., 2106, or 3006 AD. So much will be known then. But would I appreciate it? Will science be as exciting when everything is automated and dehumanized? Will there be Big Questions still to answer or just working out little details? Will it be all just applied science?

So, I choose 1955-1990. I am assuming I'd be in the same field. I'd be getting my start at the time of great expansion of science in the USA: lots of funding, lots of lab space and lots of jobs.

I'd be one of the pioneers of the field and get to go to the 1960 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium with a kick-ass lecture of my own.

I'd have no problem doing comparative work on a large number of species and sometimes doing some quite invasive work. And it would be relatively easy to publish that kind of stuff in Science, the way my advisor and his advisor and his grand-advisor used to routinely do.

Later on, nearing the 1990, as the safety and IACUC regulations get stricter and stricter, I could focus on one or two animal models and move away from organ/system/organismal (thus quite invasive) levels down to the molecular level as the techniques (and skillful students, postdocs and technicians) become available, and at the same time up to population level with some work out in the field (in some nice tropical place so I could really enjoy the last few years of my career).

But aside from my field, it would be great to be there when Watson and Crick announced their discovery, when Gould published "Ontogeny and Phylogeny" and thus started the new exciting field of evo-devo, and other stuff of science-historical legend.

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