The Charles F. Prentice Award Lecture 2009: Crystalline Lens Research and Serendipity in Science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whether it is called serendipity or creativity, the process of scientific discovery is not one that lends itself to advance planning or programming, nor does it lend itself to an emphasis solely on applied research, research with industrial partners, or large teams of researchers because researchers must rely on intuition and the capacity to move quickly in new directions. Studies in my laboratory began with efforts to relate lens embryonic development to lens optical performance in a variety of vertebrate species. The initial direction concerned the optics of the fish eye, a system in which a spherical lens is essentially the only refractive component of the eye and one in which accommodation takes place by means of lens movement. This in turn led to an interest in how amphibious animals cope with the refractive transition that takes place when moving from air to water and vice versa. The development of a super accommodative ability in some diving birds is one adaptation that was explored. These curiosity-driven efforts led in turn to the development of a scanning laser system that provided a tool that can be used to evaluate the process of cataract development, either on the basis of in vivo exposure to chemicals or electromagnetic radiation and subsequent analysis of the excised lens or to the in vitro study of the lens in long-term whole lens culture experiments. The same approach has also been used as an in vitro ocular toxicology assay to develop sensitive in vitro methods to reduce regulatory dependence on the use of live animals. Finally, these applied directions in turn created new basic knowledge concerning the morphology and physiology of eye tissue organelles, particularly the morphology, distribution, and dynamic properties of the mitochondria found in the lens and in the retinal pigment epithelium.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.014 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".