By Steven Wiley
Hypothesis-Free? No Such Thing
Even so-called "discovery-driven research" needs a hypothesis to make any
sense.
Following a recent computational biology meeting, a group of us got
together for dinner, during which the subject of our individual research
projects came up. After I described my efforts to model signaling pathways,
the young scientist next to me shrugged and said that models were of no use to
him because he did "discovery-driven research". He then went on to state
that discovery-driven research is hypothesis-free, and thus independent
of the preexisting bias of traditional biology. I listened patiently,
because I have heard this argument many times before.
