Don’t Get Stuck

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The term nerd has 2 meanings: someone devoted to intellectual pursuits and someone who is socially awkward. Both meanings do not necessarily apply to all nerds, but they both do apply to me.

For fun, I watched a webcast the other night on the chemical and biophysical mechanisms that underpinned the creation of life.¹ The program was given by 2 professors at my alma mater as part of the University of Chicago’s origins of life initiative. The first professor described research into the formation of planets from stardust and how molecules like nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and water would be found in the icy dust far from a star and would accumulate in the process of forming a planet. The second professor, Nobel Prize- winning biochemist Jack Szostak, described how RNA may have replicated without the help of protein-based enzymes.

You may recall from medical school biochemistry that RNA is formed by enzymatic addition of single nucleotides to the growing RNA chain. Szostak described how the binding of nucleotide dimers could facilitate the RNA replication process in the absence of enzymes. He said it took 30 years before anyone considered this possibility because people were so set in their thinking that replication would require the addition of RNA monomers. This way of thinking was so deeply entrenched in the way current biology works that it was hard for anyone to imagine it happening any other way. People, even Nobel-prize winning biochemists, often get stuck in a line of thinking.

In this issue, Dr Nahid Y. Vidal, chair of the division of dermatologic surgery at the Mayo Clinic, shares findings from her recent systematic review of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in frozen section histopathology. Will AI replace pathologists, and even dermatologists, in the near or distant future? Dr Vidal suggests there is a place for an augmented model to help “make us more accurate” and “understand how to individualize care and ultimately get the best outcomes for our patients.” However, she notes that “ensuring our published datasets are diverse so people are not making conclusions based on bad data is imperative to avoid bias” and cautions that AI can be “dangerous when not used in a patient-centric way.” Food for thought for a nerd like me.

Reference:

1. PSD Immersion Series–Origins of Life. UChicago Physical Sciences Division. April 21, 2023. Accessed December 13, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy8OblCYgwo