Ingeneue has been used in several graduate level courses for single lab periods, but in summer 2000 it received its first full-scale test with outside users. This happened in a course on the evolvability of developmental mechanisms organized by George von Dassow at Friday Harbor Laboratories. The first week involved lectures from a number of scientists that spanned the range of evolutionary and developmental biology. The second week introduced the students to Ingeneue and modeling of genetic networks in general. The course worked much better than we expected, and to our surprise students were able to build their own networks within Ingeneue after only a couple of days of training. While Ingeneue has a long way to go until it is user-friendly, this was quite encouraging.

Here's a few random quotes from the course, put together by Airlie Sattler from Duke:

"That is the universe, thank you" - Gunter Eble in response to self-organization of anchor cells in C. elegans.

Q: How do you define a body plan?
A: Something that arose in the Cambrian.
<Exchange in a discussion about whether new body plans might have arisen since the Cambrian>

"You wouldn't want a nematocyst in your gonad"
End to the horizontal transfer by endosymbiosis discussion

"Elegance is bad because it usually isn't robust"

"Time is continuous, so presumably the gap is in our understanding". - Colin

"Does the landscape twinkle or does it rock like the San Francisco earthquake?" - Gavin

Redundancy fosters opportunity or a "hyperdimensional bypass"

"These papers are frosted min-wheats...the nutty wheat of biological realism and the frosting of elegant theory"-George

"Teh cell is unaware of this entire discussion". - Garry

"If you will all just sit there like bored sheep, we'll get there..." - Garry

"Models are irritants to provoke experimenters".

"Conspiracies of genes which do something". - George's definition of a gene network.

"Let there be a dim glow!"-Gary on the state of Genesis in the lab.