apalazzo
Posts by this author
March 21, 2008
Last time I told you about how the view of cancer switched from the perspective of metabolism to oncogenes. Today we'll see how recent developments have placed the spotlight back on metabolic pathways.
I'll begin this tale with a quote from a review written by Andrew M Arshama and Thomas P Neufeld…
March 18, 2008
Earlier in the month he'd even spoken to a bespectacled blackgirl on a bus, said, "So, you're into photosynthesis", and she'd actually lowered her issue of Cell and said, "Yes, I am." -Junot Diaz, from his latest book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
March 17, 2008
One of the biggest stories over the last decade was how metabolism taught researchers new lessons on cancer.
Say what?
Here is a brief history lesson on how cancer was viewed by cell biologists over the last hundred years. Today I'll talk about how our views changed from metabolism to oncogenes,…
March 16, 2008
OK I've been silent too long. But with every political pundit I hear, with every column or blog post I read, I've become more and more upset. I'm distiurbed by all the frivolousness out there when it comes to politics and the current slate of candidates.
Seven and a half years ago, we suffered an…
March 12, 2008
Sorry about the paucity of posts. I've been running around lately. Friday right after the Origin of Life Symposia we took off for NYC. After a day of mental stimulation, including stops at the Whitney and the Met to hear Janine Jansen play Bach and an incredible Schnittke String Trio, we raced back…
March 12, 2008
We've got a great line up this week including one of the coolest findings of the year. The email is below the fold:
Hello All,
The next meeting of the New England RNA Club will take place Thursday, March 20th, a week from tomorrow. We will have beverages starting at 5:30PM and talks from 6:00-7:…
March 11, 2008
From the HHMI website:
Through a national competition that opens today, HHMI plans to select as many as 70 early career scientists from a wide range of scientific disciplines relevant to biological and medical inquiry. These scientists, most of whom will be assistant professors at the time of the…
March 9, 2008
Friday night we came down to the city to get our regular dose of stimulation. Yesterday we were at the Whitney Museum for the Biennial. This year we were also able to catch the extra exhibits at the Park Ave Armory. For the first time at the Biennial, I was swallowed up by the video installations.…
March 8, 2008
From Lucy M. Ziurys, professor of astronomy and chemistry, University of Arizona.
1) There is an incredible amount of interesting organic chemistry happening n the vacuum of space.
2) When the earth formed, it is likely that it had no carbon. Over its lifetime, the earth acquired carbon from…
March 6, 2008
According to the latest issue of The Scientist.
Rankings for American institutions:
1 The J. David Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco, CA
2 National Jewish Medical and Research Center, Denver, CO
3 Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM
4 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA…
March 5, 2008
Each row of colonies represents one yeast strain lacking one gene from the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome. There are 8 rows per dish, and 550 dishes, resulting in 4400 strains. Saccharomyces cerevisiae has about 6000 coding genes. Strains lacking essential genes are not included for obvious…
March 5, 2008
I'm excited, baymate and I will be off to Radcliffe to attend a symposium entitled, The Origins of Life: The Earth, the Solar System, and Beyond.
In related news I learned from Corie that over the next year, Craig Venter will be a visiting scholar with Harvard's Origins of Life initiative.
March 4, 2008
So in previous posts I've written:
How to think about biology, Life is full of machines and Life and information. I guess I'm on some philosophy of Biological study kick.
Now I'll put the pieces of the puzzle and talk about what those proteins encode in the typical mammalian organism. This will go…
March 3, 2008
Well this year will be known as the year that the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN was turned on. Will we find the Higgs Boson? Will we finally have data that supports Supersymmetry? For now enjoy these videos on the ATLAS detector:
ATLAS, A New HopeATLAS, The Particle Strikes Back (Part I)…
February 29, 2008
As we correct for the earth's rotation by adding a leap day, I'll add an extra campus to this week's edition of Map That Campus. (Yes two for the price of one!)
Here's the first mystery campus:
And below the fold is the second mystery campus:
hint:Even
Possibilities unseen require
Some…
February 27, 2008
It's been a while ...
We'll start off with Science and Art: Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA (NY Times article)
RPM at evolgen ponders about faculty members that blog. And now there are even journal editors that blog. In another post, RPM discusses the various phenotypes found in the typical…
February 26, 2008
I'll try to be there this time. From Corie:
Hi everyone,
The next Nature Network Boston-hosted pub night for local
scientists/researchers will be:
Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 6:30pm
Location:
Middlesex Lounge, 315 Mass. Ave, near Central Square on the Red Line
(also on the route of the M2…
February 25, 2008
John Wilikins has a post on my last couple of entries:
In a couple of posts, Scibling Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript has given two quite distinct views of what biology is about: information, and mechanism. In the first he argues that what is needed to build organisms is information, and in…
February 24, 2008
Ken Miller thinks that life scientists should reclaim the word design.
I was going to write the followup to "How to think about biology" post, but instead I'll pick up on the ideas being floated by Miller that scientists should take back the word design from pseudoscientists (discussed at…
February 22, 2008
Time for another mystery campus:
hint: Powering all life
I'll confirm that what must be shown over the weekend.
February 21, 2008
Fundamentaly biology is about information. An evolving entity must be able to copy itself - it needs the information on how to make a copying machine and it needs to copy this information to its progenitors. Already you can see how this works.
INFORMATION => COPYING MACHINE => COPY…
February 20, 2008
Last night I rediscovered James Burke's Connections. Here is episode one.
(PS Yes there is a strange inadvertent 9/11 subtext - from the Twin Towers, danger in NYC, technology traps, the end of civilization, to even a potential airliner crash, which incidentally is flight 911, what else???? But…
February 17, 2008
As an outsider, I'm glad to hear all the new developments coming from those who study human behavior. It would seem from my ignorant, non-expert, outside-of-the-field perspective that there is a revolution going on. Many have abandoned the platonic view of thought, the juvenile Freudian view of…
February 15, 2008
(Yes I'm 2 days late, but I had to give journal club - which I postponed due to the grant - I finally presented this afternoon - the topic was all these paper describing transcrition profiles of the whole genome, I'll blog about the wonderful chaos in the transcription field some time soon)
Yes,…
February 13, 2008
Great posts by DrugMonkey and Dr. Free-Ride (part I and II).
It reminds me of a bit of advice given to a fellow postdoc by Dr. Richard Hynes - try to attend every seminar. I would also add that in my comparatively short science career I have found that conferences are great as well. You meet people…
February 12, 2008
Harvard is to spearhead an Open Access Portal? We'll see after today's vote. From the NYTimes:
Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish -- on the Web, at least -- free.…
February 12, 2008
What a great day. The grant is done and now I can get back to the bench after about one month of tapping away at the keyboard.
Writing a K99, which uses the same format as an R01 (or the main NIH grant) plus a wee-bit more, is quite an experience.
Putting together a scientific manuscript for a…
February 11, 2008
Oh man ... it feels so good. I'm off to the pub!
February 9, 2008
I'm almost done with my grant. Yesterday I sent out a 95% completed version of my proposal to SPA (Sponsored Programs Administration - an organization that vets grants to make sure that there are no conflicts of interests and that all the proposed protocols treat human and vertebrate animals…