New Revelations about the Biodiversity of Belly Buttons

One of the best science guest blogs I've read in a long time: science from a personal perspective, not just facts but hopes and fears. Enjoy!

New Revelations about the Biodiversity of Belly Buttons
By Rob Dunn | September 9, 2013 |

When it comes to science, I have the patience of a rabid fox, trapped in a cage, in front of which a wounded rabbit is standing. My family, the folks in my lab and the need for sleep balance this nascent madness.

Belly buttons are ridiculous and yet the life we study in them is not; it includes both dangerous and life saving species though in just what mix and why, well, that is what we’d like to know. As a result we have, over the last few years, worked with more than 500 people to sample the life in their belly buttons. It has not always been pretty (Imagine emails from concerned and infected citizens that include photos. Yes, we see those. No, please don’t send them.)

This is what we found, but here is where I tell you about a thing scientists know but don’t share with the public. I think the formal term for it is soul-crushing self-doubt. Scientists are taught to be skeptical. They are taught that most of what they learn about the world, most of what we know about the world, is wrong. They are taught to poke relentlessly at our existing knowledge, to look for weakness, errors, things into which the finger sinks deeply. What wakes them up at night is the sense that the thing they have just discovered will be found out to be the thing that is wrong.

The only recourse for this crushing, scientific self-doubt is, of course, to repeat observations and experiments, or to cry. So in the mornings after sleepless nights, we do more science to check, again and again, our ideas hoping that if something is wrong or not quite right that we will find it out before our peers do. The only thing worse than realizing you have totally misunderstood the gears behind the clock of life is having one of your colleagues realize it for you. Colleagues are, of course, not the same as friends.

Read more at the link to find out if the wounded rabbit bested the fox or if the fox is sated and looking for its next meal.