basic science
scientificactivist | May 14, 2008On Monday, I attended an interesting lecture sponsored by the 21st Century School here in Oxford entitled "What Is Science For?". You can see a discussion on the event here and read a pdf summary of it here. The lecture was co-presented by scientist John Sulston and philosopher John Harris, and it was introduced by Richard Dawkins, who also moderated the Q&A afterward. As the summary focuses on, the event was partially a debate on the purpose of science, with Harris proposing a utilitarian view and Sulston defending a focus more on the intrinsic value of inquiry and discovery (and…
scientificactivist | April 25, 2008Molecule of the Day has a post up about isotopically-enriched food that caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the idea is wildly outrageous, and, secondly, this is something that actually gets joked about quite a bit in an NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) lab.
Any given element can come in various isotopes, which differ in the composition of their nuclei. The nuclei of different isotopes of the same element have the same number of protons, but they vary in their number of neutrons. Because the number of neutrons in a nucleus does not significantly affect the chemical properties…
scientificactivist | April 17, 2008When someone asks the question "why are veins blue?" a likely response is that they're blue because the blood in veins is deoxygenated. While it's true that venous blood vessels carry a lower concentration of oxygen than their arterial counterparts, this isn't the reason for their blue appearance in your skin. Still, when someone invariably responds to the veins-are-blue-because-they're-deoxygenated argument with the observation that "I've never seen blue blood before" one might then hear the slightly more sophisticated-sounding but increasingly far-fetched claim that we don't ever observe…
scientificactivist | February 11, 2008The New York Times reported yesterday that "scientists find new receptor for HIV," referring to a paper published online in Nature Immunology on Sunday by Arthos et al. This is basically correct, although it would be more accurate to call the new receptor a co-receptor, since the infection of a cell with HIV still depends on the primary receptor, CD4, in combination with either CCR5 or CXCR4. The newly-identified co-receptor, just like the other HIV receptors, is a protein located on the surface of white blood cells (T-cells, specifically). HIV, like any other virus, can only replicate…
scientificactivist | December 31, 2007An individual cell inside the human body is in a dynamic environment: it not only has to anchor itself to its surroundings but also be able to communicate with them and respond as appropriate. One group of proteins--the integrins--play a central role in all of these tasks. The integrins are large (about 200,000 Da) membrane-spanning proteins, and each integrin consists of two subunits (alpha and beta). The vast majority of the integrin is located on the exterior of the cell, where it anchors the cell to the extracellular matrix. Each subunit has a short tail inside of the cell, and the…
scientificactivist | November 29, 2007Two weeks ago, on November 15th, researchers reported in the Journal of Translational Medicine (see citation below) that they had successfully isolated and characterized stem cells from menstrual blood. The researchers, Meng et al., were able to differentiate these cells--called Endometrial Regenerative Cells (ERCs)--into nine distinct cell types, and the stem cells displayed other encouraging characteristics (including rapid proliferation, unique expression of an embryonic stem cell marker, and particularly high production of certain growth factors and matrix metalloproteinases). These…
scientificactivist | November 21, 2007That could easily have been the shared title of a pair of articles in today's New York Times discussing the science and political implications of two very significant stem cell papers published online yesterday. The biggest offender was Sheryl Stolberg:
It has been more than six years since President Bush, in the first major televised address of his presidency, drew a stark moral line against the destruction of human embryos in medical research.
Since then, he has steadfastly maintained that scientists would come up with an alternative method of developing embryonic stem cells, one that did…
scientificactivist | October 8, 2007The winners of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine were announced this morning. The prize went to Mario R. Capecchi (University of Utah), Martin J. Evans (Cardiff University), and Oliver Smithies (UNC), all for their work contributing to knockout (and knock-in) mice becoming one of the most powerful scientific tools available to biologists today. Or, in the less inspiring Nobel-speak, "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells."
From the official press release:
This year's Nobel Laureates have made a…
scientificactivist | June 19, 2007For this round of Ask a ScienceBlogger, the question is "Is sunshine good for you?"
It's a beautiful sunny day outside. And, of course, you're stuck in the lab (or the office, classroom, or daily holding tank of your choice). Although you may thumb your nose at those who seem to have nothing better to do than have fun in the sun, don't be so quick to judge. In fact, your lack of sun exposure might be partially to blame for that not-so-sunny disposition of yours. Or worse.
Your body operates on a 24-hour circadian rhythm, and regular daily exposure to sunlight keeps it running smoothly. So,…
scientificactivist | January 12, 2007The U.S. Office of Research Integrity announced this week that it has found a former postdoc in Gerald Schatten's lab, Park Jong Hyuk, guilty of research misconduct for falsifying images in a manuscript on deriving embryonic stem cells from cloned rhesus monkeys. Although the paper had not yet been submitted for peer review, this is more bad news for Schatten, who has been dealing with the fallout from being a senior author on one of the papers later determined to have been fabricated by discredited South Korean researcher Hwang Woo Suk.
The AP reports:
The latest university probe showed…
scientificactivist | December 19, 2006The second paper from my undergraduate work at Texas A&M University was recently published in Molecular Cancer. The abstract can be found here, and the pdf of the full paper here. Molecular Cancer is an open access journal, so a subscription is not required to read the paper. It's also an online-only journal that publishes manuscripts immediately upon acceptance, so the version of the paper currently available is not the final (nicely-formatted) version. (Update: this now links to the final version of the paper.)
As with my first paper, which was published in October of this year, I'…
scientificactivist | December 18, 2006Last month, I wrote a post about a research group at Texas A&M University that reported genetically engineering "edible cotton seeds" by using RNAi technology to stably and specifically knock out production of the gossypol toxin in the seeds of the plant. I thought that the paper was interesting for a variety of reasons, including the use of RNAi and the fact that this was a novel usage of transgenic crop biotechnology coming from an academic group. I recently contacted the study's leader, Dr. Keerti Rathore, to ask him a couple of questions in hopes of further understanding the…
scientificactivist | December 3, 2006Via A Blog Around the Clock comes news that Daniel Rhoads, who writes the informative blog Migrations (and formerly A Concerned Scientist), has successfully defended his dissertation. So, after a few minor revisions, it looks like it won't be too long before we'll have to call him Dr. Rhoads.
In good blogger form, Daniel has published the first chapter of his dissertation online. The title of the chapter is "Integrin receptors and determinants of polarity in directed cell migration," and it looks like a nice overview of the subject. As someone who used to study cell migration in blood…
scientificactivist | November 29, 2006In this week's edition of PNAS, crop scientists at Texas A&M University report the engineering of cotton strains with edible seeds. Now, when I think of cotton, I generally think of clothes, especially the kind that really seem to like getting wrinkled in the drier. Not counting the unrelated--but still delicious--exception of cotton candy, food generally doesn't come to mind. However, the new PNAS paper from the lab of Keerti Rathore may mean that it's time to think outside of the (clothes) box when it comes to cotton, especially in addressing world hunger.
According to the paper, for…
scientificactivist | November 22, 2006Back in August, I and several others in the scientific community expressed skepticism over Nature paper (subscription required) describing a new technique billed by the media as generating "ethically sound" stem cells. The technique involved removing a single cell from an eight-cell blastula and using this cell to derive a line of stem cells while allowing the remaining cells to grow and develop normally, without any apparent damage to the embryo. This "watered down" approach to generating stem cells didn't seem to convince other scientists, and it apparently (although not surprisingly)…
scientificactivist | November 17, 2006There really aren't that many blogs out their written by scientists about the science that they do, and this seems particularly true in my area of study, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance). I have been able to find a few, although none of them focus specifically on biological or macromolecular NMR. The following list is, of course, not meant to be comprehensive, and if anyone knows of any other NMR blogs, I would love to hear about them.
Stan's NMR Blog: This blog, run by Italian physicist Stanislav Sykora, seems to be the most comprehensive and regularly updated of the NMR blogs I've come…
scientificactivist | November 16, 2006Living successfully with other people demands sacrifice. From going out of your way to pick your little brother up from school to paying taxes toward government health care programs, there is an expectation in any society that its members will sacrifice some personal gain for the greater good. This cooperation, in turn, contributes to a stronger and more successful society, the benefits of which should be felt by all of its members. This is true not just for humans, but for some other animals and, most notably, colony-forming insects. Even there, though, the picture isn't so simple, and a…
scientificactivist | October 17, 2006One of the goals of modern structural biology is to integrate the two traditionally distinct subfields of structural molecular biology (determination of the structures of macromolecules at atomic resolution) and structural cell biology (general architecture of of the cell and the localization of subcellular structures within it). The end result--as my research advisor at Oxford, Prof. Iain Campbell, often points out--is to be able to make a "molecular movie", at atomic resolution, of the whole cell. (Such a video might look something like this video from XVIVO and Harvard University--…
scientificactivist | October 16, 2006I think I can finally call myself a legitimate scientist (whatever that means), since last week one of the papers I worked on during my undergrad at Texas A&M University was published in The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB). I'm the fourth author on the paper, meaning that I was only peripherally involved (and made a much smaller contribution than the first author, Dr. Brian Saunders, and my advisor, Dr. George Davis, among others). Regardless, this is my first appearance in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and since I (not surprisingly) find the subject of this paper incredibly…
scientificactivist | October 4, 2006After Monday's announcement of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, followed yesterday by the announcement of the Prize in Physics, the Oscars of the sciences continue today with the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Roger Kornberg for his work on elucidating the molecular basis of transcription in eukaryotes. This decision is interesting for several reasons. First of all, Kornberg received the full Nobel Prize, not shared with any others, something that is fairly rare and further indicates the importance and breadth of the work he has done. Interestingly,…