Is Science where IT was 25 years ago?

In case you haven’t noticed, my blogging has lately been dragged into the blackhole that has become the Twitterverse.  I spend so much time tweeting and reading interesting articles posted by my followers and friends and scouring my Google Reader RSS feeds to spew forth things I find interesting to the twitterverse.  I am neglecting FredCoBio.

My apologies.

I do promise to be more engaged this week.  I am leaving in the early afternoon tomorow for Palo Alto, CA to attend SciBarCamp.  Silicon Valley, the land of Google and Yahoo.  A Stranger in a Strange Land, me a Biotech guy in The Garden of Eden of IT.

I was just thinking about the way things were 25 years ago in 1984.  The Orwellian era, the first 4 years of Reganonimics.  Man, things were interesting back then.

After graduating a term early from Wittenberg in 84, we moved back between Rochester and Cleveland for a few months looking for work.  Finally, I landed a job selling windows in Rochester which lasted for about 3 months.  The windows were “made” by US Steel.  One of the lines in the canned pitch I spewed was that “if US Steel goes under , we’re all in trouble.”   I quit because I couldn’t stand bilking people for more money in windows than their house was worth, even without windows.  Then I got a contract job at Xerox, another local company in a new concept called “telemarketing”.

I was there about 18 months, from ‘84 until ‘85.  I was selling photocopiers (when you work at Xerox, you learn not to call them Xerox machines), Xerox Memroywriter Typewriters ( a daisy wheel typewriter/printer with a limited 10-40K of memory ) and this nebulous thing called an “ethernet”.  The idea of an ethernet was invented by Joseph Wilson for a “paperless office” some time in the mid 1960’s.  Our training was primarily composed of watching 16mm movies (probably Kodak film, which had entered the xerography business by his point in time) made by Joseph Wilson explaining how this “ethernet” would revolutionize the modern American office place.  In retrospect, it was fascinating.  At the time, for a 20-something more interested in what soccer match or practice was coming up that afternoon than actual work, it was like “meh”.    I could push more photocopiers and Memorywriter memory upgrades (after using it, most people did realize how much time it really saved to hit the F1 button to type the return address on an evnvelope than to key every stroke) without having to deal with trying to explain how a “paperless office” would make their life simple.  I made good money for the 80’s, but was still selling more than an entire sales branch of 5-6 field reps and only making 1/2 what one field guy would make.  Selling an ethernet installation over the phone was an entirely different issue.  That got under my skin, so I quit and decided to get back to my college training in Biology and Chemistry.

Before I left Xerox, I witnessed the most remarkable thing: a “facimile” transmission (perhaps the first in North America, The Japanese were rumored to have done this already) between Xerox Palo Alto and our building, building 813 on Henrietta Rd.   A single page of typed text took probably 45 minutes to transmit, but think of how much better that was than via US Postal Service back in 1984?

And so, as I prepare to leave my family alone for nearly a week,  I can’t help but to think of the irony of returning to Palo Alto.  I had this moment of transcendental thought perhaps linking those events of 25 years ago with today.  I hope to engage intelligent (mostly 20 something) people in conversations about how we need to be able to explain in common terms how the medical breakthroughs we have been working on for the past  25 years are analogous to the situation of  ”IT” ( a term surely not yet invented in ‘85) and the state opf science today.  So much ignorance and denial of the potential benefits.  So much misunderstanding of the basics of the art.  And how quickly the art of IT advanced and how bio science is in the same state today.  That people could actually question the nature of life as evolving and dynamic, not fabricated by one of many Gods. That our collective knowledge of biological sciences is still so preliminary because the “hardware” doesn’t exist to exploit it fully.  Geesh, it freaks me out.

So I am going to Palo Alto in the AM, leaving FredCoBio.  As may late, great friend Ian Clarkson used to say (who’s father ained considerable noteriety as a UK trained toxicologist at the U of R who discovereded that methylmercury hydroxide, a by-product of some type of fungal infection of grain silos in Baghdad, was responsible for killing 10’s of thousands of people in the 70’s):  If you’re going to trip, you might as well travel.

And what a Long Strange Trip it’s been.