hi guys...i just wondered if you all ever thought how the hell have these people came up with the methods im using....i was sitting doing a western blot today and anyone whos ever done one will know there are a few steps to getting an end product with lots of optomisation. Fair enuf u sit and fiddle with concentrations of buffers and antibody etc to get things right but the general idea is mind boggling to me that i could ever be in a position to make up an assay like this...this is science specific example but im sure other disciplines have ideas and formulas which they just think....how the hell? not sure if that made sense at all...but just a thought while i was working away!?

I have had these thoughts too myself reccently whilst in the lab. Glad to see I'm not the only one.

I get this too, fair enough when it's a slight evolution from a previous test, but true innovation stuns me. I often stand and look at our massive DHPLC machine in awe....until it promptly breaks and I "fix" it by rebooting. Then I feel smug :)

Well, I guess it probably stems from something like this. We knew about gel electrophorsis, to sort proteins by size. We knew that we can use antibodies to detect proteins at the cell surface and in immunoblotting. So one could envision that we could use the antibodies to detect the protein in the gel. hence western blots. A PhD student probably then spent 3 years playing around with the idea until he got something that worked.

So in effect it was an idea stemming from ideas that were already in place. well, I guess that is the order in which it happended, I dont know, though once you understand those two concepts, putting them together is not so hard. So it was a kind of evolution, just one that was slightly bigger than others.

Southern blotting was developed by a guy called Edward Southern. Then, when other blots were invented, some scientists thought it would be @funny2 to name them after other directions. Hilarious.

I know, when I first heard that one, I think it took me a week to stop laughing. Us scientist have such a sense of humor!

I've been told by various lecturers that students have written in their assignments southern blotting was invented by mr Southern and northern blotting was invented by mr Northern, and western blotting was invented by mr Western