"However, it required some years before the scientific community in general accepted that flexibility and disorder are very relevant molecular properties also in other systems"
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Scientific progress rarely fails because the data are missing; it fails because the gatekeepers can’t imagine the category. Robert Huber’s line is a quiet, slightly barbed reminder that “accepted” is often the real verb in science, and it conjugates slowly. He’s pointing to a familiar lag: discoveries about flexibility and disorder in molecules existed, but their legitimacy didn’t travel beyond the original niche until the community’s mental model expanded.
The intent is corrective. Huber isn’t merely praising an insight about molecular behavior; he’s marking the social labor required to make that insight count. “Required some years” signals that the obstacle wasn’t purely technical. It was conceptual inertia and disciplinary habit: the long-standing preference for tidy, stable structures (the crystallography-friendly world of well-ordered proteins) over messy, dynamic ones that don’t pose nicely for our instruments or our textbooks.
The subtext carries a gentle indictment of reductionist comfort. Disorder sounds like failure in a culture trained to equate understanding with crisp structure. Yet biology runs on motion, ensembles, and transient interactions; flexibility is not noise around the signal, it is the signal. Huber’s phrasing, “also in other systems,” hints at how ideas get quarantined: the community tolerates a property in one domain but treats it as an exception rather than a principle.
Contextually, this reads like a postwar, late-20th-century shift in the life sciences: from structure as destiny toward dynamics as function. It’s an admission that the frontier isn’t just in the lab. It’s in persuading the collective imagination to make room for complexity.
The intent is corrective. Huber isn’t merely praising an insight about molecular behavior; he’s marking the social labor required to make that insight count. “Required some years” signals that the obstacle wasn’t purely technical. It was conceptual inertia and disciplinary habit: the long-standing preference for tidy, stable structures (the crystallography-friendly world of well-ordered proteins) over messy, dynamic ones that don’t pose nicely for our instruments or our textbooks.
The subtext carries a gentle indictment of reductionist comfort. Disorder sounds like failure in a culture trained to equate understanding with crisp structure. Yet biology runs on motion, ensembles, and transient interactions; flexibility is not noise around the signal, it is the signal. Huber’s phrasing, “also in other systems,” hints at how ideas get quarantined: the community tolerates a property in one domain but treats it as an exception rather than a principle.
Contextually, this reads like a postwar, late-20th-century shift in the life sciences: from structure as destiny toward dynamics as function. It’s an admission that the frontier isn’t just in the lab. It’s in persuading the collective imagination to make room for complexity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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