An example of an analogy used in public science discourse
"In archaeological science, ancient DNA is the big suck-see thing, right. But to me DNA is like the Encyclopaedia Britannica; proteins are like your daily news feed, they are telling you what is happening today, like a broadsheet if you like, but metabolites are like a twitter feed, what's happening right now. So metabolites can be really interesting to study decay, because they are released in breakdown processes. Maybe we can even get a sense of what someone died of, if those things are preserved."
Ally Morton-Hayward (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford)
was talking on an episode of Science in Action.
n.b. I checked the phrase 'the big suck-see thing' several times in case I misheard as I was not familiar with this term. (This is what it sounds like to me: I could still be mishearing). I am familiar with the idiom 'suck it and see' – which was used in my school chemistry to mean try out an organic reaction to see if the desired product is actually produced, i.e. 'try it out'.
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