domestic animals and progress of modern science
Time to continue my pseudo-scientific pseudo-humor category.
Scientists are (usually) very polite people. So, it is not uncommon to find in the end of most scientific papers the section with acknowledgements. In this section people:
1) Express their deepest and most profound gratitude to funding agencies that so graciously dispensed money (so we can satisfy our curiosity for their expense)
2) Praise esteemed colleagues who provided reagents, advises, beer and encouragement during writing but not quite enough to actually make it into the author’s list
3) Express their appreciation and love to their spouses, lovers, domestic partners, children and any other people who supported the authors in their endeavors and provided sturdy shoulder to cry on when entities from (1) become stingy and unappreciative
4) Apologies to countless others who cannot be cited in MY paper due to space limitation (or because we believe that THEY simply don’t deserve to breathe the same air as US)
Anyway, some years ago we were invited to publish a review on some cancer related genes in a thematic journal with about a dozen of other people. Below is an acknowledgements section from one of those reviews. In my book this is the best I ever had an honor to read