I'm reading an excellent book right now called Cells, Embryos and Evolution, in which one topic is the exploratory nature of certain biological processes. One of the processes described is the dynamic instability of microtubule growth.
Microtubules randomly grow and shrink from an anchor in the cell until they hit something that stabilizes them. Through their random growth they explore the cell, which means that processes depending on microtubules are robust against changes in size and shape of both the containing cell and the target object that needs the microtubules. The author explains that we still don't know how microtubules are stabilized, which I thought was fascinating.
Except that the book was written twenty years ago, and now we DO know how they are stabilized. It turns out that the author was the person who discovered microtubule instability, and since then we have not only figured out what stabilizes them, but have developed numerous cancer drugs based on those molecules: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9932/#_A1831_
Microtubules randomly grow and shrink from an anchor in the cell until they hit something that stabilizes them. Through their random growth they explore the cell, which means that processes depending on microtubules are robust against changes in size and shape of both the containing cell and the target object that needs the microtubules. The author explains that we still don't know how microtubules are stabilized, which I thought was fascinating.
Except that the book was written twenty years ago, and now we DO know how they are stabilized. It turns out that the author was the person who discovered microtubule instability, and since then we have not only figured out what stabilizes them, but have developed numerous cancer drugs based on those molecules: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9932/#_A1831_
The progress of science is really incredible.