biotechnology
sporte | June 1, 2008In part I, I wrote about my first semester of teaching on-line and talked about our challenges with technology. Blackboard had a database corruption event during finals week and I had all kinds of struggles with the Windows version of Microsoft Excel. Mike wrote and asked if I thought students should be working more with non-Microsoft software and what I thought the challenges would be in doing so.
I can answer with a totally unqualified "it depends."
First, I think knowing how to use a spread-sheet program is an advantage in many different kinds of fields and even in real-life, outside of…
sporte | May 29, 2008"Why won't biotech companies hire people with Ph.D.s to be technicians?"
"I already have a Ph.D., how do I find a job?"
These were some of the questions that commenters left after my earlier posts (here, here and here) on biotechnology workforce shortages.
Unfortunately, for these students and post-docs, the shortfall of employees in the biotech industry is largely a shortfall of technicians. It is a sad thing that promoting science careers can have the unintended consequence of creating a surplus of unhappy post-docs and even more unhappy graduate students. Perversely, many of the…
sporte | May 28, 2008Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where do all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where do all the flowers gone?
Young girls picked them everyone,
When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
-Pete Seeger
Where do graduate students and post-docs go when they decide it's time to leave the pipeline? And, if they're thinking about going, how do they find a path into something new?
These questions are especially timely given all the current NIH funding issues. It's odd, too, that we probably have the data, that is, I think we can count the number of people who've gotten…
sporte | May 27, 2008In part I, I wrote about the shortage of technicians in the biotechnology industry and the general awareness that this problem is getting worse. This part will address the challenge of getting more students into programs that will prepare them for jobs in the biotech field. I've also been asked to write a bit more about finding jobs in companies, that post will be a bit later. Before proceeding, there are two points that need a bit of discussion. The first point is the whether there's a shortage at all and the second applies to the kind of shortage.
It's hard to see the forest when you're…
sporte | May 27, 2008Students, teachers and scientists converge tommorrow morning from all around the Puget Sound region and elsewhere in Washington to share their experiences and talk about science. The students will present posters, science-themed music, art, drama, and many different types of projects that involved first-hand research and investigation. Scientists from the local biotech companies and research institutions talk with the students and judge the projects.
The public viewing time is tomorrow, May 28th, between 9 am-12 noon at the Meydenbauer Center. More information can be found here.
This…
sporte | May 9, 2008Workforce shortages are a growing problem in the biotech industry. Communities are concerned that a lack of trained workers will either keep companies away or cause companies to move. If companies do have to move, it's likely those jobs might be lost forever, never to return. According to Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, now a professor at UC-Berkeley, biotech companies that can't hire in the U.S. will recruit foreign workers or open research centers overseas (Luke Timmerman, Seattle PI).
The reason for concern is that biotech jobs, in general, are pretty good. They pay well…
sporte | April 22, 2008One of my favorite web 2.0 technologies is the webinar. When you work at a company and not a University, with constant seminars, it gets a bit harder to hop on a bus and travel across town to learn about new things. Webinars are a good way to fill that gap. I grab my coffee cup, put on my headphones, and I get to listen to someone tell me about their work for an hour and show slides over the web. It's nice.
Our company is even going to be involved in two webinars in the next two months. One of us is giving an Illumina webinar tomorrow on managing Next Generation Sequencing data. A…
edyong | April 7, 2008Our bodies are serviced by a huge workforce of enzymes, which speed up the chemical reactions that rage within our cells. These enzymes have been crafted into a vast array of shapes and functions over millions of years of evolution but new ones can be generated on a microchip using the same principles.
Early attempts to design proteins from scratch resulted in fairly crude enzymes that were outperformed by nature's more elegant and finely-tuned efforts. Scientists have since developed more efficient artificial enzymes using the same evolutionary principles that generated naturally occurring…
terrasig | March 24, 2008Last week we spent some time discussing the shortcomings of the generic vs. brand name drug debate, focusing on an example of non-bioequivalence between the antidepressant Wellbutrin XL and its generic competitors.
Three days later, I then received an e-mail from one John Procter about a movement to get Washington to move forward on the approval of lower-priced generic biotechnology drugs now that original branded products are facing patent expiration. One source indicates that a $20 billion market value of biological products will be coming off patent by 2015. The US FDA has been reluctant…
sporte | March 19, 2008Have you ever wondered how to view and annotate molecular structures? At least digital versions?
It's surprisingly easy and lots of fun.
Here's a movie I made that demonstrates how you can use Cn3D, a free structure-viewing program from the NCBI. Luckily, Cn3D behaves almost the same way on both Windows and Mac OS X.
Introduction to Cn3D from Sandra Porter on Vimeo.
sporte | March 17, 2008Bio-Link is accepting applications for this year's National Summer Fellows forum, June 2-6th, in Berkeley, CA.
You can get an application at www.bio-link.org
I'll be there, doing some kind of bioinformatics workshop. I'll probably be talking about either metagenomics or comparing protein structures and drug resistance, but if you have topic requests, feel free to submit them in the comments.
sporte | March 11, 2008The other day, I wrote that I wanted to make things easier for my students by using the kinds of software that they were likely to have on their computers and the kinds that they are likely to see in the business and biotech world when they graduate from college.
More than one person told me that I should have my students install an entirely different operating system and download OpenOffice to do something that looks a whole lot harder in Open Office than it is in Microsoft Excel.
I guess they missed the part where I said that I wanted to make the students work a little easier.
Before I go…
sporte | January 10, 2008We often see memorials written about famous scientists, but we rarely see them about the people who work in the background to help people learn the science in the first place. Ron was one of those people whose work inspired teachers and helped spark excitement in science students throughout the world.
I just learned last week that Ron passed away and I'm still in a state of shock.
I met Ron ten years ago at the first BIO teachers' conference. I was a conference volunteer, working on the teachers' program planning committee and representing Bio-Link. BIO 99 was the first time that the…
terrasig | December 14, 2007A couple of days ago I recommended a short information table that compared conventional small molecule drugs to biologics (antibody therapies and other peptides/proteins). It was quick and I recommended it for the average Terra Sig reader.
However, I was quick in writing the post, and should have been more critical of the information I was recommending. Quick and concise means nothing if the information isn't accurate. To be honest, I haven't gone back to look at the table since - that is, until my colleague Ian Musgrave (I hope he's not ashamed that I called him "my colleague") pointed…
sporte | December 13, 2007Reposted in honor of the "glow in the dark" kitty clones.
Last year, I wrote about photographs of jellyfish that were altered by newspapers, scientific publishers, science education companies, and me (for the purpose of the article) to make it look like the jellyfish glowed.
Those jellyfish do NOT glow. Those images lie or at least misrepresent the truth.
But that doesn't mean that glowing animals don't exist. These pictures were taken under natural light and came from GloFish®.
Normally zebrafish are white with black stripes, but these zebrafish were genetically engineered to…
sporte | December 12, 2007This is a-mewsing.
(Photo Credit: Gyeongsang National University)
When Genetic Savings and Clone shut their doors it looked like wishful cat owners were going to be out of luck and short of kittens.
Never fear, the South Korean scientists at Gyeongsang National University have come to the rescue. I couldn't find all the details in the news articles but it appears that they inserted a gene for red fluorescent protein into a somatic cell from a cat, transplanted the cell into an egg cell, put the egg into a female cat's womb and a few weeks later, voila!, lovely white Angora cats that…
terrasig | December 12, 2007[Retraction 14 December 2007: Following a consideration of comments by Prof Ian Musgrave (below), I must retract my recommendation of this table - upon re-examination, I should have been much more critical of the information provided.)
The Wall Street Journal online has a nice general information table comparing and contrasting small molecules vs. proteins used as drugs. Biotechnology products like insulin or erythropoeitin protein molecules whereas classic drugs like the statins or antiinflammatory drugs are termed "small molecules." In truth, both classes are pharmaceuticals so I would've…
grrlscientist | November 29, 2007tags: birds, bird sex chromosomes, ZZ, ZW, parrots, sex identification, molecular biology
Evolution of Avian and Mammalian sex chromosomes.
Image: E.R.S. Roldan and Montserrat Gomendio "The Y chromosome as a battle ground for sexual selection" Trends in Ecology & Evolution 1999, 14:58-62.
You all are probably curious to know what is happening with my birds these days, so I shall tell you about how sex is identified in birds, such as parrots, where the sexes look the same. But wait a minute, you ask, what does an update about my birds have to do with identifying sex in parrots?
You…
grrlscientist | November 18, 2007This story reminds me of those days not so long ago when I was teaching molecular biology to a small group of motivated and talented high school sophomores and juniors. Basically, a group of high school biotechnology seniors from Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, California, were invited to participate in the international Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM), hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. iGEM focuses on the hot new field of synthetic biology: this field genetically manipulates proteins and other molecules that are constructed by living cells…