The worm's turn

A few readers of my last two columns may have suspected that something was afoot. Well the explanation is quite simple. I wanted to set the record straight. After seven years of labour in the field, 84 columns, I go on to a well-deserved rest. I find it hard to believe, but there must be some graduate students who began reading me when they started research and who have got their PhDs by now. I considered signing off with a farewell letter from Uncle Syd to Willy, but I realised that Willy, who had lived in an accelerated universe, must by now be too old and doddering to need advice. As for Uncle Syd, even he could not find enough momentary clearings in his Alzheimerian haze to give any. Somebody — I think it was John Maddox — once called me the enfant terrible of molecular biology, but that image could not last forever and I was rather pleased that I was able to replace it with Uncle Syd, that wise and wily old bird. I do like the way he spoke with complete authority on matters he knew very little about and I find his emphasis on form rather than exact content a most congenial way to view the world. Uncle Syd could always be relied upon to provide the advice that everybody wants to have and to discover spurious and convincing reasons for avoiding doing all the things he was supposed to do. He knew all the ropes and especially the nooses that can be used to hang someone. Before we take leave of him, I thought you might be interested to hear his pre-Alzheimer views of data-mining, an activity that seems to be gripping everybody's attention. Apparently, he'd gathered, there is so much to glean from existing data that those miners who miss the gold rush can still find a few grains, and even some nuggets, by re-sieving the tailings. This is done by sending software agents to the databases to perform the dirty work, while their masters luxuriate near the pool. Uncle Syd also observed these scavengers hovering around the public databases and the organisations that put data into the public domain, and getting the gold, so to speak, before the race had been run. Some agents, he noticed, convert their findings into cheap trinkets that can be sold to the natives, who are not familiar …