I had always thought this orginated with Newton, and thought it a bit odd as he was notoriously argumentative and touchy about receiving what he thought was the proper credit for his work. But according to the mighty Wikipedia it orginated with a chap called Bernard of Chartres. Newton did however say it as well. He was a 12th century French philosopher, and the quote was originally in Latin. I just coughed up £50 to the latest Wikipedia appeal, so I guess I am getting my money’s worth.

I figured I should contribute to Wikipedia both for me, and also some for the students I teach, as they clearly use it a lot but don’t have my salary so can’t as easily afford to contribute. I hope when they graduate and are earning, they look back and cough up some money to Wikipedia.

Anyway, all scientists (and engineers, and mathematicians,…, not sure about politicians) stand on the shoulders of giants. If an astronomer wants to model the orbit of Jupiter they don’t need to invent laws of motion and gravity, they can just use Newton’s. This is pretty essential to how all science, engineering and maths works. We would not get very far if engineers continually had to reinvent the wheel every time they wanted to design a new car.

I am currently doing my bit of standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants, or at least on the shoulders of a quite tall professor at the University of Minnesota, David Odde, and his postdoc, Clarence Chan. I have not met the postdoc so I don’t know how tall he is.

I am trying to understand how a protein in a muscle cells called Dystrophin may be able to sense, i.e., measure forces. For this I want a model, and I don’t want to invent one from scratch. That is too hard, and I would like a model that has already been tested and found to agree with at least some experimental data.

Chan and Odde’s model fits the bill. It was published a couple of years ago in Science. It is simple and physically reasonable. It was developed for growing bits of nerve cells not muscle cells but hopefully I can use it in muscle cells. We’ll see, but by adapting an existing model I can take advantage of the model’s developers, and know that it at least works in one type of cells.