Biological knowledge is concentrated in a few areas separated by large swaths of ignorance. There are many different reasons why. Some of this stems from a few schools churning out a disproportionate number of scientists in a particular field. Anyone know the story of Yale graduates and their influence on cell biology research? George Palade, a Nobel Prize winner, started a graduate program in cell biology at Yale in the early 1970s. This program generated over 100 PhDs mostly focused on intracellular organelle biogenesis, which thus became a dominant theme in the field. Technology is also a prominent reason for the heterogeneity of biological knowledge, because a new technology can tell us a lot about specific processes while leaving others obscure. For example, anti-phosphotyrosine antibodies have allowed us to easily follow tyrosine kinase signaling pathways, but downstream signaling events mediated by other activated enzymes remain a mystery. There are ways to bridge these gaps. Take new technologies - for example, microRNAs, which were discovered using genomics technologies, could fill many holes in our knowledge of mechanisms of post-transcriptional gene regulation and signal transduction. I do have a fear, however, that microRNAs will also become a specialized field, as has happened so many times before. Why? Because biologists are typically reductionists, who tend to pursue a general observation down to its most fundamental level. Reductionism is driven by basic human nature and our difficulty in comprehending complex processes. Reductionism in biology is also strongly driven by journal reviewers. I can’t count the number of times that I have submitted a paper only to have some reviewer ask for more details, extra experiments and clarification of some arcane mechanism that was beside the point. Eventually, reviewer expectations become our own when we have the opportunity to review our colleagues’ papers. However, it is not realistic to expect that details will eventually add up to comprehensive knowledge. Biological systems are simply too complex, and we will end up knowing a lot about trees and being clueless about the forest.