3/ Narrative structure helps communicate science, but requiring mechanistic completeness has real costs: it delays important findings, pushes researchers to cherry-pick data that fit the narrative, and excludes the unexpected observations that have historically opened new fields.
6/ Discussions should change too. Instead of closing arguments for a resolved model, they should map the open questions a paper leaves behind, identifying the frontier between what's established and what remains unknown. This goes beyond a defensive Limitations section.
7/ Unfinished stories are not a failure of the scientific process. They are its most natural product. Thanks to @cp-trendsbiochem.bsky.social for giving me the opportunity to make this argument.
4/ A paper that ends with "we do not yet know why" is harder to publish than one offering a clean explanation, even when the data don't fully support it. The result: literature that looks more conclusive than it is, and early-career labs that get scooped or abandon the work.
5/ Reviewers can help by accepting that science is a cumulative process, not a series of closed chapters. A more useful question than "is the story complete?" might be: would publishing this now accelerate the field more than waiting for the authors to close the loop?
2/ Griffith's transforming principle (1928), split genes (1977), CRISPR repeats (1987): all published as rigorous observations without mechanism. They opened entire fields anyway. By today's standards, those papers would struggle in top journals.
1/ Sharing my article in TIBS:
"Science is always unfinished: rethinking the demand for complete stories."
The cost of that demand: delayed dissemination, cherry-picked data, and an endless "one more experiment" loop.
authors.elsevier.com/a/1n0XU3S6Gf...
With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268
Advances in CLIP-derived methods have enabled high-resolution mapping of individual RNA binding protein-RNA interactions as well as RNA binding protein-associated RNA–RNA interactions #RNA #CLIP @evannostrandlab.bsky.social bit.ly/4bYjAsg
How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller?
Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase.
1/n
The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...
