You would need to know what Magic: The Gath­er­ing is, I suppose.

But still worth a look — before WOTC comes along and kneecaps them.…

In my expe­ri­ence, a large major­ity of smart and well-​​trained peo­ple (who should know bet­ter) don’t have any clear idea of what it’s like inside a cell. I blame this squarely on bio­chem­istry ped­a­gogy, with its unmen­tioned but implicit lin­eariza­tion of chem­i­cal reac­tion kinet­ics and tacit assump­tion that every­thing can be sep­a­rated into func­tion­ing com­po­nents and stud­ied sep­a­rately: we are taught (and have taught, when we were doing that sort of thing) that all mol­e­cules always bump into each other in iso­lated pairs, and have plenty of time and space to asso­ciate and dis­so­ci­ate as they wish in their intra­cel­lu­lar envi­ron­ment. One that’s fun­da­men­tally no dif­fer­ent from a test tube of dilute pure mol­e­cules we study in the lab. That leads to the sup­po­si­tion that we can infer from lab­o­ra­tory mea­sure­ments of such pure test cases, where we actu­ally assign num­bers to prop­er­ties of pure dilute macro­mol­e­cules, what behav­ior that depends on K_D or K_I will be like inside a cell. We assume that because the nat­ural length scales of supramol­e­c­u­lar com­plexes are so much larger than those of chem­i­cal reac­tion and asso­ci­a­tion events, long-​​range struc­ture has lit­tle or no impli­ca­tion for what hap­pens on the scale of the event.

Which is pure bullshit.

Such a premise is tan­ta­mount to imag­in­ing that the con­tents of cells are per­fectly mixed. If this strikes you as a not-​​unreasonable mod­el­ing assump­tion, espe­cially for math­e­mat­i­cal tractabil­ity, I invite you to ran­dom­ize the con­tents of some of your cells and see how they do. A blender will do in a pinch.

I haven’t had the plea­sure of this rant in a few months, but I was about to start writ­ing about it in the con­text of Syn­thetic Biol­ogy and wrong-​​headed notions of design. And I will. But I needed a lit­tle jos­tle to jump-​​start me. So it is with plea­sure that I’m reminded of David Goodsell’s extra­or­di­nary work on this sub­ject, by way of a link from BioCu­ri­ous to “PDB Mol­e­cule of the Month: Cholera Toxin”.

If you want to make a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence in our lives, by under­min­ing incor­rect myths held by bio­med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers, send a friend to this stun­ning work of sci­ence and art (be sure to click the three-​​panel graphic to see it at mind-​​numbing size). Ask them how much water there is in between those mol­e­cules. Ask them how metab­o­lism works, in light of those net­works. Ask your bio­chem­istry (or gen­eral biol­ogy) grad stu­dent to point out where they would expect to find the Krebs cycle they draw in sim­pli­fied circles-​​and-​​arrows for­mat on the board in the first week of class — right there, on that map. [It may be a trick ques­tion, for that par­tic­u­lar pic­ture] Then, while they’re pon­der­ing, ask them quickly, “OK. This is eas­ier — how does the infor­ma­tion from the genome get from over there, to over here?”

I think that image, along with Dr. Goodsell’s other port­fo­lio on this theme, is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant work of sci­en­tific art for this cen­tury, and should be plas­tered up on the wall of any lab that’s doing any­thing in any set­ting that involves intra­cel­lu­lar mol­e­c­u­lar dynam­ics and cel­lu­lar physiology.

But that’s just me. What do you think?