Well lets see where are budding endeavour has gone. 4 Scienceblog bloggers are heading this joint project. So far we have collected a measily 4 entries, a ton of comments/emails from disgruntled scientists, and a rusty can openner.
My favorite comment (so far) comes from a lab blog (Wow! I didn't know that some labs blog about freezer space journal clubs and other lab business). Here is what this self described molecular biologist has to say:
biochemists are friends of mine...and you can tell that Alex Palazzo at the Daily Transcript isn't a biochemist. Consider his biochemist entry in his taxonomy of Biologists:... {my biochemist post} ...
The part about proteins is OK, but then he goes off the rails. I'm afraid Palazzo only hangs out with molecular biologists, and being a cell biologist he doesn't recognize them as biochemistry posers. Palazzo has omitted perhaps the most important machine for the biochemist: the spectrophotometer...and not just the kind molecular biologists try to avoid using except to measure cell ODs. A real biochemist's spectrophotometer has a stopped-flow attachment. If you ask a real biochemist to show you pretty data, they don't show you bands...they show you a table of numbers with headings like Km, kcat, and V/K. In fact, they hesitate to show you primary data at all. They might show you the fitting program they still have running on an aging computer, written in FORTRAN.
FWIW, by these standards, while I'm on the faculty of a Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, I'm more of a molecular biologist myself...which I would define as someone who knows enough biochemistry to fake expertise among geneticists, and enough genetics to fake it among biochemists.
Such passion!
Little does he know that in my immediate work environment, half of the individuals are self-described biochemists. This includes my boss who occasionally dabbles in kinetics theory. Maybe your biochemist friends and my biochemist friends can meet in the local hallway and we can have a pipette off! (We'll be the Sharks, you can be the Jets - call it Wet Side Laboratory!)
Seriously, over here we would call anyone who touches the Michaelis-Menton equation, an enzymologist (or if you will, a hard-core-biochemist) ... but give me a break, they're just silly names!!!
So as an ode to this rant I present the latest entry:
Enzymologist:
This ancient breed of biologists, are the Greeks of the biomedical science world. Their tools of the trade are the secret ancient tools of kinetic measurement: specs, stop-flow devices, and the graph. Their forefathers are not Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but Michaelis and Menton. This group sneer at the "neo-primitive" biochemists and molecular biologist with their puny gel derived bands. "A real scientist converts these raw, shadows of data, into platonic truths" (i.e. kinetic constants). While we are on the subject, enzymologists use Greek like lingo (i.e. Kcat, Km, Kd, Vmax and allostery). Beware! If enzymologists get really pissed they'll pull out Scatchard plots, Lineweaver-Burke plots and Hill coefficients. Enzymologists kill biochemists and molecular biologists, but fortunately this event is rare as the stuffing of lifeless bodies into homogenizers seems to be the rate limiting step in this reaction.
(I am ready to receive hate mail from half the Enzymology community)
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Real enzymologists don't even bother with that boring steady state crap...we dig the transient state. The faster the better. We like our kinetic traces like our cars. (Um, yeah, that made sense in my head.) Get me down to the picosecond scale baby.
I started out as an Enzymologist. Your description is accurate. Unfortunately the only stop-flow we had was my pipet hand and our spec looked like something from a 60s sci-fi movie.
Do you know the classical test to determine whether a post-doc's training is in engineering or biology? Here is the protocol.
1. Have the post-doc trained in tissue culture of he/she is not already.
2. Ask the post-doc the following question: "For how long do you trypisinize cells?"
If the answer contains a unit of time, e.g. "Five minutes", the post-doc is an engineer.
If the answer is "Until the cells come off the plate", the post-doc is a biologist.
Addendum: If the answer is "Until after I've checked my email and gone to the bathroom" the post-doc is actually a graduate student.
Hate mail? Perish the thought! As a bona fide card-carrying enzymologist (yes, I carry my "Enzymologist" card in my wallet), I am tickled right over my activation barrier by your good humored description of my species.
One of the guys on my thesis committee (this was in the Jurassic Era) is recognized as the grand old man of enzyme kinetics. He is something of a character and made many blunt assessments of non-enzymologists, including the following:
"Any monkey with a cuvette and Gilford can run enzyme assays. It takes a human to interpret the data."
Glad you enjoyed it! I was going to put something in about kinetic isotope effects, but thought that might be overspecialized. My enzymologist friends scoff at linear fits, btw. Gives inappropriate weights to some of the points.
The lab blogging is related to the origin of the term web+log. Not entertaining as this kind of blog, but sort of useful (see also how some of your neighbors down the street at MIT are using lab wikis at http://openwetware.org)...and how I justify blogging on the side as incidental use of the blog software...which I also use for teaching.
Oops, that should be "across the river" not "down the street".