Abundance

by Ezra Klein

In 2012, Gregory Petsko, a biochemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a satirical essay in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain mock Christopher Columbus for not collecting preliminary data about the voyage across the Atlantic. When King Ferdinand suggests that the explorer try a shorter trip—say, to Portugal—Columbus exclaims, “Everybody knows that Portugal is immediately west of Spain.… What will you learn from that?” “Not much, if anything,” Queen Isabella responds. “But it can’t fail, now, can it? Besides, you’ve sailed to Portugal before, so the Study Section would know you can do it.”58 This satire didn’t appear in a personal blog. It ran in Genome Biology, one of the most prestigious journals in the field of genetics.