Moore's (1) editorial in the September 2009 issue of Bioessays has very appropriately drawn attention to the serious issue of ''how insufficient study of methods confounds the study of biology itself.'' Researches in the so-called ''modern biology'' are acutely suffering from this syndrome. With increasing commercial interests in biological research in the wake of modern biotechnology, newer methods and machines continue to be developed, relying more and more on automation and computerized data processing. Furthermore, these machines and methods are aggressively marketed. This has brought us to a stage where a research project is formulated around a question which requires acquisition of ''latest'' technology rather than formulating a research plan around a question which is intuitively driven by curiosity and which may require developing a new method/ technology to get the answer. Besides the hubris of such ''technological innovations,'' the editors and reviewers also place direct or indirect pressure on authors for their use: manuscripts which include data derived from some fancy and expensive automated systems -irrespective of whether these were logically required or not -appear more attractive compared with those which may have logically used ''classical'' methods and may actually have derived significant inferences because of good hypothesis building, clear data and intuitive interpretations.
Quantitation in biological research is important. This has become more popular in recent decades because more and more automated machines and analysis software have become available so that the machines provide quantitation in a jiffy to the scientist. However, the user scientist often does not understand the basis of such analyses. More importantly, such users often fail to appreciate that precise quantitation requires good controls, and that any quantitative comparison between samples requires, as a primary factor, that none of the data points has gone to a saturation limit. The automated outputs of these machines, in the form of complex but colorful graphs or other images, are blindly accepted because the data are generated following computerized processing! Intuitive reasoning is completely lost in the process. For example, unless one has used an expensive RT-PCR machine, any data on RNA analysis are often not acceptable today, though the quantitative and qualitative differences in levels of specific RNA in different samples may be obvious to the naked human eye. In the wake of PCR, northern-blotting has become almost extinct,not with standing the fact that northern analysis can provide