I am on a hot trail today, but there is no way I will be posting anything about my latest discovery until at least tomorrow or, possibly, day after tomorrow. No time to finish the research now.

Doing research is a bit like playing Scrabble. You look at your tiles (letters) and come up with a word, but then you find that the combinations left by other players on the board lead to other possibilities, better possibilities. So you think of other words. And all the time you are trying to find a really good seven letter word, like myeloma” 😉 , in order to get that 50 point bonus. I drive my sister and niece nuts when I play Scrabble with them, because I invent the most ludicrous-sounding words and insist that they look them up in the Scrabble dictionary. And, more often than not, those words exist. 🙂 I happen to like comical-sounding names. If you look on the right-hand side of my homepage, you will see that a lot of my research has had to do with words such as baicalein (Scutellaria baicalensis), guggulsterone and gossypin.

Well, in a way, research is like one huge Scrabble game, with one item leading to another (at times) more interesting item. And then another, and so on, almost ad infinitum. The stakes are higher here, much higher, of course, much more than a mere 50 point bonus. But now, after spending the morning on this new (for me) topic, I must devote the afternoon to preparing my classes for tomorrow. I will leave the Scrabble game to Piccolo (isn’t he adorable?), and have a look at my board again tomorrow when I get home from work.