ABSTRACT
The history of our ideas is that, when a concept appears, it first gives a sense of
clarity to a rather diffuse set of observations. For some time following the
acceptance of the idea, new observations that support the hypothesis accumulate,
while for several very human reasons, ambiguities are denied, tortuously forced
into the hypothesis, or ruled exceptional or irrelevant. Finally, the exceptions
accumulate, their impact can no longer be denied, and the hypothesis is revised
to become a more tolerant, encompassing tenet-perhaps less elegant, but truer
to biology. Evolution has provided cells with redundancy, fail-safe, backup, and
far more options than we can imagine. If we are lucky, we can unravel the cell’s
secrets one step at a time.
