While sitting to one of my last meals tonight (how morbid sounding!), it occurs to me that I’ve permitted a glaring error to escape my notice for several months. All scientific research is built upon the work of its predecessors, for the simple reason that working within a vacuum is both impractical and, in all honesty, impossible. One would have to question absolutely every detail of one’s experiment, and end up stumped at “but what is a protein?” All scientific research, without reservation, is built “on the shoulders of giants”, and a large part of participating in scientific discovery is working smart, not hard, by looking up and digesting the work of previous researchers in the field — and, of course, giving them credit if and when one makes and publishes a discovery. I highly recommend anyone interested in performing an experiment according to the strictures of the scientific method use tools such as Google Scholar to learn what has already been published on the chosen subject and avoid reinventing the wheel.

While sitting to one of my last meals tonight (how morbid sounding!), it occurs to me that I’ve permitted a glaring error to escape my notice for several months. All...