sporte | October 13, 2008Last week, while attending the ISB "DNA of Innovation" symposium in honor of Lee Hood's 70th birthday, I decided to try live-blogging for the first time. Unbeknownst to others in the audience, except my husband, I quietly typed away, collecting notes and uploading impressions.
But battery power has its limits, even when I have more notes to share. And despite all the fascinating speakers, I have notes enough to describe just one more.
The personal genome days have only just begun, but George Church is already looking into the future. In a true "Lee Hood style tour de force" Church talked…
sporte | October 10, 2008The second speaker was Eric Davidson who talked about gene regulatory networks.
He works on sea urchins and showed us this amazing diagram that looked like a computer chip. The diagram describes the inputs and outputs of 50 genes during the first 30 hours of development.
And, it convinced me that systems biologists are developing their own language.
I've never heard gene expression described in these ways before.
Here were some of the phrases that Davidson used:
a set of boolean switches
a combination of double-negative regulation gates
feed forward regulation
using "AND logic"
boolean…
sporte | October 10, 2008The first talk was by Irving Weissman, one of the pioneers in immunology and stem cell research. He talked about the stem cells that form blood, also known as HSCs or hematopoietic stem cells.
These cells are great because they can self-renew, and they can divide and differentiate. That is, they can form new kinds of cells. Weissman talked about experiments that were done at different companies, Systemix, Cellerant, Inc., and others with using stem cells to see if certain types of disease could be cured (in mice) by repopulating the mice with new stem cells.
Some interesting things -
-…
sporte | October 10, 2008Right now, I'm sitting in the audience at a symposium on Science, Engineering, and Business at the Leading edge. The symposium is sponsored by the Institute for Systems Biology and it's Lee Hood's 70th birthday. Every speaker is beginning with a wish for a happy birthday.
I'll have updates, as I can, throughout the day.
sporte | October 10, 2008Sometimes words fail me. Luckily, we have videos.
Many of you have probably read about Roger Tsien receiving the Nobel Prize this work for his work with the green fluorescent protein (GFP), but I bet some of you are wondering, why a jellyfish protein is worth a Noble Prize.
I think one of the best places to see why GFP is important, and also to see what some scientists do during the day, is JOVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments.
The wonderful video, that's shown in this image, describes a new method for investigating Parkinson's disease. This is the kind of biological work that we…
sporte | October 8, 2008Over the years, I've seen many biotechnology education programs at community colleges embrace outreach to high schools as part of their mission. This kind of enthusiasm for outreach seems unique to biotech. No other kind of science or engineering program seems to do this sort of thing, at least not on the nationwide basis that I've seen demonstrated in biotechnology.
And yet, even though I've always admired and often participated in these efforts, some aspects are a little puzzling.
How do the colleges reconcile the energy spent in outreach efforts with the energy spent towards educating…
sporte | October 6, 2008Okay, watching some of the other movies makes me realize that I've been very negligent in not uploading ours.
Without further ado, here it is.
Can you guess the age of the person who made the movie? I'll give you a hint. It wasn't me.
sporte | October 4, 2008Long Branch, NJ, is a lovely town on the Atlantic Ocean, with long beaches and brand new shops and condos. It is also part of an area in, central New Jersey, where biotechnology education is entering an exciting time thanks to efforts of NJBEC, Bio-1, and a WIRED grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
NJBEC, Bio-1, WIRED? What do all these acronyms mean?
I get these things confused all the time, so I'll take a quick moment and explain.
NJBEC is the New Jersey Biotechnology Educators Consortium. Bio-1 is a partnership between five counties and several schools in central New Jersey, that…
sporte | October 1, 2008ScienceBlogs and science bloggers, in general, have enthusiastically supported fund-raising efforts by DonorsChoose for the past two years, and we're doing it once again for 2008.
DonorsChoose works like this: teachers write descriptions of what they want and how they'll use it for teaching, and submit their proposals to DonorsChoose. We pick the projects we like and if you like them, too, you can help get these projects funded.
Donate to schools! Win a prize!
Last time I did this, we ended up funding three cool projects in biotechnology education. Students in Mrs. G's classroom in South…
sporte | September 30, 2008I learned via e-mail yesterday that the biotechnology program, that I taught with for ten years during the 90's, is ending due to low enrollments.
I also learned yesterday, via the Seattle Times, that a resurrected version of ICOS called CMC Icos Biologics is planning a $35M expansion of their biotech manufacturing plant in Bothell and talking about hiring lots of students with two-year degrees.
The irony isn't lost on me.
We struggled with variable enrollments too, when I was at Seattle Central Community College. A couple of years saw way too many students and troubles finding enough…
sporte | September 30, 2008HealthMap is a great site that could be an excellent resource when teaching a biology, microbiology, or health class. Not to mention, I can picture people using it before they travel somewhere or even just for fun.
I learned about HealthMap awhile ago from Mike the Mad Biologist, but I didn't get time to play with the site until today.
Here's an example to see how it works.
How do I use HealthMap?
I begin using HealthMap by changing the number of diseases selected to "none."
Then I scrolled through the list until I found something interesting. I chose "Poisoning." The number of…
sporte | September 30, 2008One time, I suggested in a list-serve that science teachers make more use of primary scientific literature. Naturally, I learned all the reasons why teachers don't do this-lack of access being one of the biggies- but I also learned something surprising.
One teacher wrote that she re-writes a lot of research articles to make them easier for her students to read. I can understand that notion, in principle. My students struggle with scientific language, too, even those that have bachelor's degrees in biology.
What surprised me was thinking about the amount of time that activity would take!…
sporte | September 29, 2008This First Annual Conference for New Jersey Biotechnology Educators will be held on Saturday, Oct. 4th at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey.
I'm excited about attending this conference, not only because of the biotechnology part, but because I've reading Sarah Vowel's book Assassination vacation and I'm looking forward to seeing the last resting place of President James Garfield. Sarah Vowel is an incredibly funny commentator on NPR's "This American Life" and so, even though I don't usually read about people making pilgrimages to famous presidential sites, I had to read…
sporte | September 29, 2008Calling all scientists and science-fans: you can help with science education by letting students know you're interested. How? Go and comment on classroom blogs and wikis.
I've been gradually collecting some blogs from different classes and I've even had some brave volunteers offer theirs for review.
So here goes:
www.missbakersbiologyclass.com/blog
Ms. Hoffman's AP class blog
Tomorrow's table from Pamela Ronald. This is going to be used for two months by students in a Genetics and Society class.
Biology in Action
Evolution and Diversity (Biol 124) at http://darwinslegacy.blogspot.com…
sporte | September 28, 2008Ozzie's will never be the same.
The sun shone so brightly yesterday afternoon that it left us with no choice. We had to go outdoors. Luckily, Ozzie's has a wonderful upper deck in full view of the daylight and well-equipped with chairs.
Photo footage below.
The scene of the crime.
Where do we hang the banner?
Bloggers and readers enjoy the Seattle sun.
Dave confesses some uncertainty about the fate of Schrodinger's cat.
That's all for now!
But our readers say they want to do this more often!
UPDATE: GrrlScientist has more pictures here.
sporte | September 27, 2008Then you need to head over to The Oyster's Garter and read Miriam Goldstein's incredibly funny post about the problems of male sea squirts.
Apparently, if you're a sea squirt, the size of your sperm is related to your environment and mostly the number of other sea squirts in your environment.
Usually, I'm not attuned to the issues of broadcasting spawn or the lives of those who live under a dock, but Ms. Goldstein channels Dr. Tatiana so well, I found myself sympathizing and laughing out loud at the struggles of the tunicates.
Sometimes extremely handsome pleats just aren't enough.
sporte | September 27, 2008One of the holy grails of modern medicine is the development of a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDs. An obstacle to attaining this goal has been the difficulty in stimulating the immune system to make it produce the right kinds of antibodies. A recent finding in Science describes a gene that controls production of these antibodies and may provide insights to the development of an effective vaccine. (1).
Antibodies are special kinds of proteins that bind to things, often very tightly. If they bind to the right molecules, they can prevent viruses from infecting cells and target…
sporte | September 26, 2008Let's play anomaly!
Most of this week, I've written about the fun time I had playing around with NCBI's Blink database and finding evidence that at least one mosquito, Aedes aegypti, seems to have been infected at some point with a plant paramyxovirus and that the paramyxovirus left one of its genes behind, stuck in the mosquito genome.
During this process, I realized that the method I used works with other viruses, too. I tried it with a few random viruses and sure enough, I found some interesting things.
You've got a week to give it a try. Let's see what you find! The method is…
sporte | September 25, 2008Lots of bloggers in the DNA network have been busy these past few days writing about Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, his blog, his wife's company (23andme), and his mutation in the LRRK2 gene.
I was a little surprised to see that while other bloggers (here, here, here, and here) have been arguing about whether or not the mutation really increases the risk to the degree (20-80%) mentioned by Brin, no one has really looked into the structure and biochemistry of the LRRK2 protein to see if there's a biochemical explanation for Parkinson's risk. I guess that task is up to me.
Let's begin at…
sporte | September 25, 2008Dave, Maria, Grrl, and I will all be at Ozzie's in Lower Queen Anne on Saturday afternoon.
I've never met the other three bloggers but after checking out Maria's wedding pictures and the liquid nitrogen, I'm really looking forward to this. We'll be upstairs in the mezzanine and we'll have a ScienceBlogs poster.
Relevant details:
Saturday, Sept. 27th at 4 pm in the upstairs mezzanine at Ozzie's.
Address: 105 W. Mercer St., Seattle, WA 98119