Half the cup was full when my urologist told me the only medicine that can acidify urine was no longer paid by german health insurance, due to missing evidence of its activity, despite all urologists knowing about it. However, I do not complain about this decision, as it is in line with refusal to pay for quack homeopathics and other nonsense. The second half of the cup filled when I researched physiology data about fatty acid synthesis and found an apparently unrecognized problem. As this is not the first (or even the dozenth) time I find a hole in our physiological knowledge about humans, it finally got me started for a collection of such knowledge holes, as there is no database I could contribute these to.
Now you know what to expect. I am a private biocurator who normally reads papers about the tuberculosis bacterium to create a database that contains physiology knowledge about this organism. Such databases are used by laboratory researchers to make sense of experimental data from microarrays and other high-throughput experiments. So you can say I have an overview. And I see that, frequently, not all experiments are done that would be necessary to elucidate a pathway or process because, admit it, it's just sexier to find something unexpected. This means, however, that researchers rely on others to do the work. This expectation is rarely fulfilled. Which leaves us with knowledge holes. Which ones? Read this blog.
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