Real, unreal, surreal

“I don’t do drugs. I am drugs” ~ Salvador Dalí.

The photo, which dates from 1969, depicts the 65-year-old Catalan surrealist Salvador Dalí emerging from a Paris subway station led by his trusty giant anteater. Surrealism‘s aim was to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.” Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. [from Wikipedia, link above].

“Well summed up”

“Well summed up“, says Hélder Barbosa over Twitter about this cartoon (@HelSimao). I agree.  It’s quite easy to “translate” from apples to oranges. However, to do something really new, first requires know-how, a well-heeled technique, absolute reconnaissance of the state-of-the-art, and then the hardest – soul; … imagination and courage. As well as to test the new idea, indefinitely, during months if necessary, with great patience. At this point, ironically, science needs inner faith, or the courage to drop everything on the trash can if it’s not good enough, starting all over again. Not all scientists share these features, altogether. Some are doomed to produce low impact papers all their life, translating the work of others from apples to oranges.

[Cartoon is from VADLO, a growing search engine in Biology, as well as in all branches of life sciences, including Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, Structural Biology, Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Genomics, Proteomics, Botany, Zoology, Biochemistry, Biophysics, Biotechnology, Biostatistics, Pharmacology and Biomedical research.]