Science twitter thread/rant: Is discovery science dying? Is novelty being replaced by high quality/high volume megascience that values quantity and quality over novelty? I’ll make some enemies with this thread. Two neuroscience papers were published in Nature last week: 1/n

Both studied the thalamic reticular nucleus, which not only provides the beam for Frances Crick’s famous attentional searchlight, it also generates spindle rhythms in sleep, and is increasingly implicated in neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. 2/n

Both papers (PMIDs: 32699411, 32699410) are beautiful tours-de-force (tour-de-forces?), using various combinations of cre/lox cell specific labeling, immunohistochemistry, single cell transcriptomics, electrophysiology, optogenetics, tract tracing, and behavior. 3/n

Both papers take extensive, high quality data sets and then provide some evidence of functional significance, either in terms of high order, integrative thalamic function, vs. primary sensory function, or in generation of sleep spindles. 4/n

Together they provide some new information about the reticular nucleus, especially perhaps the new information on heterogenous transcription profiles in mouse and a new marker, calbindin for a subset of reticular cells. 5/n

But my question is this: How much is really new, especially regarding function(!), as expected from what might be arguably the premier journal of fundamental scientific discoveries? 6/n

Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of prior art for this topic. Work from (listed here and below by first authors) Charles Lee Cox, Roberto Spreafico, Ted Jones, Alexandra Clemente-Perez and others 7/n

has already demonstrated significant morphological and electrophysiological heterogeneity and zones of higher order vs. first order, which was confirmed in part in the current study. 8/n

The principal regarding integrative vs. primary sensory portions of the reticular nucleus are well established by John Crabtree, Ray Guillery, Michael Conley, Ying-Wan Lam, Didier Pinault, and this is just a partial list. 9/n

The idea that different parts of the reticular nucleus contribute to spindle heterogeneity and function is well established by recent work from Laura Fernandez and Gil Ventomme. 10/n

Scientists in the field with whom I have discussed these papers generally are unclear on the particular novel advances. So my big question is this. Have all the most fundamental questions in neuroscience been already answered? I don't think so. 11/n

Is industrial scale science the only way forward? I hope not, as such big science has the risk of minimizing important individual contributions, is costly, and proper analytic methods for such data are, in my view, not yet fully available. 12/n

How much optimism do scientists have regarding big data sets leading to fundamental new discoveries? Is there still a place for publication of simple, elegant, and important results? 13/n. fin.

In case you are wondering, my profile background is the reticular nucleus of rat in parasagittal plane stained with parvalbumin IR ... I am not a disinterested party

To @cmotpow, my argument, indirectly made, was that the journal promoted publication of these two papers presumably because they provided complementary new insights regarding reticular thalamus function -- the new functional data/functional insights are not the papers' strength