Tract Tracing for the 1990s

Abstract

The development of new techniques can be a straining and sometimes frustrating experience; it is time consuming and not necessarily the kind of activity that can be planned in sufficient detail to attract the attention of grant-awarding agencies. Tinkering with techniques, however, is often instrumental in fostering exciting advancements, because the tinker-and-toil process leads to the development of new experimental procedures that pave the way for enlightened vistas and conceptual breakthroughs. When new protocols have been successfully applied to a variety of experimental subjects and the variable parameters have been critically evaluated, the methods usually become widely applied across laboratories. “How-to-do” handbooks are the catalysts in this process, and it is a tribute to the ingenuity of the investigators when the interval between the publication of successive handbooks shortens and the set of available handbooks thickens.