While researching for a paper on systems biology for my compilers class, I came upon Y. Lazebnik's Can a Biologist Fix a Radio? — or, What I Learned while Studying Apoptosis I'm a little stressed for time at the moment (said paper not completed and all), but to summarize, it's awesome and worth reading for David Papermaster's (Lazebnik's Yoda) description of the rhythm of ups and downs of scientific research fields and how the long tail of the "down" curve populates the field with floods of papers that ultimately lead to the "paradox that the more facts we learn the less we understand the process we study". Lazebnik's paper gets better. It's awesome. Read it.