In article <1995May4.171649.29042 at ucl.ac.uk>,
David Jones <jones at bsm.bioc.ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
>John Kuszewski (johnk at spasm.niddk.nih.gov) wrote:
>> I will not discuss the details of the work I heard about,
>> because it is not published and not my own work.
> <snip>
>> I will never post about unpublished work, interesting
>> or not, again.
>>No need to be sorry - in fact it's a shame that the nearest thing
>to a half-decent scientific discussion in molbio.proteins in a year
>got squelched so quickly. Of course you have a perfect right to
>say as little or as much as you deem appropriate on the subject.
>However, just in case there is anyone else out there who feels
>like spilling the cat out of the bean bag, if George Rose has
>presented work at a public meeting then it would be perfectly
>reasonable for someone attending the meeting to discuss what
>was presented. Let's not forget that the dissemination of ideas is
>the whole point of giving a talk. Now of course if this was all
>discussed privately or if the talk was say a departmental seminar -
>then of course you can and must say nothing.
>>Still if nothing else comes of this, it will certainly boost the
>readership of George Rose's paper when it does come out!
>
I've been following this thread with considerable interest since I have heard
Rose's talk and know John K. as well. John - I think you've handled things
just fine and hope you don't take the responses personally. I don't think they
were intended as flames.
I agree with John that details should wait until the paper is published, which
will be June or July in Proteins. I will say that the approach they're using
is a build-up procedure using Monte Carlo and a simplified potential function.
I was very impressed with what Rose showed and personally feel that John's
estimate of ten years is too conservative.
Unlike John, I'm not concerned with what the rest of us will do. To the extent
that Rose and co-workers "solve" the folding problem it will tell us what the
native structure will be given the sequence. It will not tell us whether that
structure will be stable under specified conditions nor will it tell us how
that structure is attained. These other aspects of the 'folding problem',
namely stability and mechanism, leave plenty of room for continued research.
Regards,
Kip
--
Dr. Kenneth P. Murphy e-mail: k-murphy at uiowa.edu
Department of Biochemistry office: (319)335-8910
University of Iowa lab: (319)335-7936
Iowa City, IA 52242 FAX: (319)335-9570
