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Hypothesis-Free? No Such Thing
Beginning of article
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.
I was too polite to point out that …
