Kenni Judd wrote:

On the "agar and all method" -- Rob may've been doing it longer, but he's
neither of the 2 sources I relied on when I decided to try it. And it
definitely does work for what I grow.



Didn't mean to imply that I invented it, or that I am even the one
to popularize it. It wasn't a grab for credit (I have plenty, see rule
3). I _did_ want to imply that the person I learned it from has since
decided it is a bad idea, just because that is interesting information.
But, the reason I brought up who I learned it from was because I was
struck by a curious question. How do ideas (any ideas) circulate?
I'm pretty sure I was the first to bring this deflasking thing up on
RGO, because we had a bit of discussion about it back in the stone age
(before AOL got onto usenet?, ah, those were the days). In science
there is a concept of 'chain of authorship' (for lack of a better
phrase), in that one person publishes an idea, and then, if the system
works, that person is cited. New works then cite the previous work (if
they are good, going back to the original citation, but this doesn't
always happen). So we can build a little tree of how an idea
circulates. On the internet, this gets blown away. Ideas circulate in
a less restrictive fashion.
I'm curious about this particular one (the deflasking method),
mainly because I don't know who came up with it originally. I can trace
its lineage in relation to me back one generation, and (possibly)
forward a few generations. But I have no idea who first thought this
would be a good idea. It was pretty controversial at the time I first
heard about it, but now it is a fairly accepted practice. Accepted
enough that Kenni and I both gave the same answer, and it was pretty
much the only answer given. I'm pretty sure it is the right answer, at
that. Regardless of where we both got the information, we got it from
somewhere, and presumably there is a single point source who came up
with it originally. A second explanation is that this method was
derived independently by several persons. Sometimes that happens too.
So, is this a research project? Just who should be assigned credit
for this 'agar and all' method? It might be interesting to build a tree
of who told what to whom. I guess that is more sociology than science.

Rob

--
Rob's Rules: http://www.msu.edu/~halgren
1) There is always room for one more orchid
2) There is always room for two more orchids
2a. See rule 1
3) When one has insufficient credit to purchase
more orchids, obtain more credit