Transcription and Translation

My Year in a Picture

Category: Misc

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 3:18 PM • 2 Comments

For those interested in the organization of trust in the scientific establishment

Category: Lab Life • Science & Society

Two great interviews with Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, two philosophers of science.

CBC Ideas - Interview with Simon Schaffer on Leviathan and the Air Pump

CBC Ideas - Interview with Steven Shapin on how science and truth are derived from social interactions within the scientific community

If you like these interviews, visit CBC Ideas - How to think about science although I must say that some shows are better than others.

Also for anyone who is interested in the history and philosophy of science and is ready to go beyond Kuhn and Popper, I highly recommend Leviathan and the Air Pump. It gives a great overview of how Boyle and the Royal Society laid the ground work for experimentalism and it provides a great case study of how scientific theories are generated by social interactions.

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 7:21 AM • 0 Comments

Trust & Influence - The Real Human Currency

Category: Science & Society

There's a battle going on out there. A battle for trust. Do you get the H1N1 vaccine? Is global warming true? Will you go to hell? Is the free market the best way to run an economy?

How to answer these questions? The conventional wisdom is that all members of our society should get informed. Many here at ScienceBlogs would like to convince you that the problem is anti-intellectualism. These evolution-disbelieving folk have been called deniers and the anti-science movement has been rebranded as denialism. But I think that this view of the world is not really representative of what is really happening. According to this line of thought the problem lies within the public indifference, or worse hostility, to the latest scientific advances. But is this what is going on? Reading "denialist" blogs, they use what they claim as "science" to counter claims of global warming. ID folk point to some hidden (i.e. non-existent) controversy within the life sciences to argue against evolution. The remedy to all this "denialism", we are told, is that each member of the community should get acquainted with mainstream scientific arguments and some of the data, and *poof* they will thus accept the basic theories that most scientists subscribe to. But to have everyone go over the raw data to the point that they can give you a good unassailable argument for evolution or global warming or the big bang is absurd. Very few people are experts in all of these areas. I'm sure that if you walked up to the average liberal, they would not be able to give a water-tight argument about how evolution explains the world we live in. Acceptance of evolution, contrary to conventional wisdom, has very little to do with the knowledge of the primary data. So how can the average citizen make up their mind? How do they navigate the world with all these competing theories?

Trust.

Read on »

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:49 AM • 14 Comments

Slicing a famous brain, streamed live on the web

Category: Science & Society

I'm siting at my breakfast table when I read this in the NY Times science section:

Dissection Begins on Famous Brain

The man who could not remember has left scientists a gift that will provide insights for generations to come: his brain, now being dissected and digitally mapped in exquisite detail.

The man, Henry Molaison -- known during his lifetime only as H.M., to protect his privacy -- lost the ability to form new memories after a brain operation in 1953, and over the next half century he became the most studied patient in brain science.

This dissection is being documented LIVE ON THE WEB. So here I am, watching a streaming video, dirrectly from "The Brain Observatory" of an embeded brain being shaved.

3:30 am: The brain marathon continues. The current crew of Paul Maechler, Natasha Thomas, and Dr. Annese are approaching the posterior end of the thalamus. The lesion persists in the left parahippocampal gyrus. The distance from the first tissue section is the bottom left green number on the console (plus 40,500 cut yesterday) in microns. (1 micron=0.001mm)

Click here to see for yourself.

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 6:55 AM • 0 Comments

NIH Grants by Age

Category: Lab Life

The graph is from Are there too many PhDs? at Mendeley Blog

In the U.S., we are constantly hearing about how the country is falling behind in science. We need more scientists to fill all of those jobs we want to create. And the cure to that is to fund more PhD programs! Yet, when you ask graduate students and postdoctoral scholars what their individual experiences are, a science career is a very tough road with low pay and few career prospects. It's such a tough path that an entire PhD comic strip was born to alleviate the situation with laughter. Why then, is there such a disconnect?

HT: Razib @ Gene Expression.

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:28 AM • 4 Comments

A small sense of accomplishment

Category: Lab Life

Last week was demo week here at the Palazzo lab. Both Zeiss and Nikon dropped off their latest equipment and we had the chance to image some RNA. In addition we finally completed some badly needed lab renovations and as a result had an operation tissue culture area. I went ahead and transfected COS7 cells with a plasmid that we just received from Open Biosystems that contains a gene of interest (a membrane bound protein whose RNA did not contain an SSCR, for those keeping track) and tried out a new FISH probe. Of course we were missing forceps and those great porcelain coverslip racks from Coorstek and I had to steal cells from our neighbouring lab (thanks Angus) but over the weekend I did some great imaging of the newly expressed mRNA.

The result:

Oh yeah! It was the first time I was on the 'scope since early summer, and
I have to say that It felt good to be "doing science" again.

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 5:28 PM • 4 Comments

Map that Campus L

Category: Map that Campus

This week we have a special edition of Map that Campus.

A few weeks ago I I wrote about my new voyage on the HMS Palazzo Lab. Well the resident of this campus had some advice on this topic:

In a moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humoured patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence. In short, he ought to partake of the characteristic qualities of most sailors. Travelling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance.

Leave all your answers, thoughts, quotes and eulogies in the comments.

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 8:13 AM • 4 Comments

Fourty two* and still in need of mentoring?

Category: Lab Life

After a frantic couple of weeks, the lab seems to be finally coming together. This afternoon I sat down and started to peruse the past few issues of Cell Science, Nature, JCB, PLoS etc. and a few of the blogs that I like to check out.

And then I read this strange article in the latest issue of Science: A SMART Plan for New Investigators

The premise is ... that the NIH should not give young investigators a break ... because they are full of crap?!?!!! As a solution the author writes:

Instead of providing special funding directly to new faculty, we should make sure that they receive sufficient mentoring as they work on the projects of more experienced investigators. I propose a new type of grant: the Senior Mentor-initiated Academic Research Training (SMART) award. To obtain this funding, senior faculty must apply to recruit junior faculty or new investigators and groom them for future independent work.

As Physioprof writes:

BRILLIANT!!!!!!!! Let's create yet another way for senior faculty to build empires on the backs of junior faculty, and further delay their genuine independence. Forty-two motherfucking years old as the average age of award of the first R01 is way too young! These whippersnappers need more "mentoring" from senior faculty! And what better way to get it than to work on the senior faculty's own projects!!!!

One reason I chose to move back to Canada is that it is much easier for junior faculty to get funding for their labs up here. Hopefully things will improve for my friends south of the border.

(*for the record I am not 42 years old.)

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 5:54 PM • 5 Comments

Scientific Careers and Job Security

Category: Lab Life

From Study Finds Science Pipeline Strong, But Losing Top Students, Science 30 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5953, p. 654

A new study finds little evidence for leaks in the U.S. pipeline for producing native-born scientists except for a steep drop in the percentage of the highest performing students taking science and engineering jobs. The findings suggest that the United States risks losing its economic competitiveness not because of a work force inadequately trained in science, as conventional wisdom holds, but because of a lack of social and economic incentives to pursue careers in science and technology.

Yes that's what I've been ranting about for the past 5 years.

Then towards the end,

Lisa Frehill, executive director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, thinks the key to keeping talented [science, technology, engineering, or mathematics] majors in science is to emphasize the opportunities that exist to solve society's problems. "Really good people will be less concerned about money if they can do work that is meaningful to them," she says.

No, really good people will stay in science and do work that is meaningful to them if this line of work came with a higher level of job security. The only way to attract more talented students, is to make a scientific career more compatible with living a decent life.

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 5:16 PM • 6 Comments

Olympus BioScapes 2009 Winners

Category: Science & Society

Like Nikon, microscopes manufacturer Olympus has a yearly microscopy photo competition, this years winners are up.

Posted by Alex Palazzo at 9:07 AM • 1 Comments