Knowing what I don't know

[K.S. Bhaskar]

In high school biology, I was expert at dissection. In the late 1960s,
I was impressed by the pioneering heart transplant work of Drs.
Christiaan Barnard, Denton Cooley and Michael Debakey. Since the
mechanics of transplanting hearts seemed simple, since I was so handy
with the scalpel, and since frog hearts keep beating for an impressively
long time on their own in Ringers solution, one evening I attempted side
by side frog heart transplants, exchanging the hearts of two frogs I
caught in my back yard. Neither of my victims awoke from surgery, and
the most important thing I learned was how much there was that I didn't
know. It wasn't that I couldn't learn enough to be a heart surgeon -
the fact was that I didn't know enough to be a heart surgeon.

Regards
-- Bhaskar

P.S. I write this stuck in a hotel near Los Angeles International
airport. My Friday night flight
to Philadelphia was canceled because of the weather, and the earliest
alternative I have been able to get is to travel Monday evening. It
occurs to me that just as knowing how to dissect frogs doesn't mean you
can perform surgery, knowing how to fly planes doesn't mean US Airways
can run an airline...

[cmd]

Yeh like I always say, having a piece of paper doesn't mean that you
know what you're doing =)

[Greg Woodhouse]

Thanks, Bhaskar. your reflections here are both insightful and
(strangely) reassuring. We live in a world where no one of us can
possibly have the expertise to be able to everything we might want to.
I frequently find myself feeling rather overwhelmed by the complexity
of the products and projects I work on on a daily basis. It would be
nice to think that we could all be brilliant clinicians, database
experts, masters of all the complex standards and regulations that
apply to healthcare applications, expert programmers, informaticists,
and who knows what else. But it just isn't possible. Fortunately, none
of us has to "go it alone".