In Lethem’s essay, he refers to “undiscovered public knowledge” as a problem with research efforts today. I found the source of this idea in an essay titled “Undiscovered Public Knowledge: A Ten-Year Update” in which Don Swanson lists examples of how the association of two unrelated topics resulted in many biomedical discoveries, one of which that Lethem highlights is the cure of Raynaud’s Syndrome being fish oil. Swanson discovered these relationships by simply matching up keywords in the titles of journal articles and synthesizing information found in articles with similar names. Swanson hopes that this method would produce “literature-based scientific discovery.” Swanson is very friendly yet serious with the topic; he does not completely debunk the process of scientific research. He instead seems to offer a different way to approach research and respects the classical method of research. The facts are expressed and interpreted in ways that an audience that does not know much about the topic can understand them and their significance. One area where I can see that the audience can get interested in is how the examples presented are applicable to most people’s daily lives, relating to medical applications such as Alzheimer’s, migraines, and sleep. Furthermore, Swanson still keeps the professionalism required of a scholarly paper by including few, if any opinionated or subjective thoughts, and basing all of his claims in fact.
Swanson, Don R., and Neil R. Smalheiser. "Undiscovered Public Knowledge: A Ten-Year
Update." Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Web.
<https://www.aaai.org/Papers/KDD/1996/KDD96-051.pdf.>.
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