lab life

(From PhD Comics) Well I've been preparing for labmeeting so instead of giving you another long diatribe about the significance of negative data I'll list some interesting current events: Today Harvey Lodish is giving a very interesting talk about how to set up a biotech company while staying in academia - I'll see if I can go to that. Thne talk is at 6:00 or 7:00 somewhere in the Longwood Medical Area - TMEC I think (I'll update this when I find out). Also today - The Royal Society webcasts biologist Steve Jones talking about the evidence for evolution. Tune in at 1:30 pm EDT! (from Daily…
Well just came back from the lab, after a day of failed experiments (on a Saturday no less) when I read this great commentary on Confessions of a Community College Dean. The post discusses an article in Inside Higher Ed that I don't agree with. (Whiny GenX faculty?? Please.) And scrolling down the IHE article it got worse and worse until I ended up in crapville in the comment section: "Having a life" may be fine for humanities faculty. It would be dangerous for our country if that culture became the norm in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering faculties. In those fields we have to…
I had one interesting thought about the Seed dinner that I've been wanting write about for a while - the isolation of biomedical sciences from the rest of the scientific academic community. This fact was apparent at the Seed dinner - of the dozen people from Harvard or MIT, I was the sole representative from the Longwood campus. For those of you that are not familiar with Harvard, the Biomedical Sciences are all located in Boston's Longwood area, which is a stone throw away from Fenway Park. With all its hospitals and research centers, the Longwood campus is about the size of Harvard main…
No this is not an entry on shmooing, but on practical tips on working with Saccharomyces cerevisiae. (OK confession, I have worked on yeast briefly as a rotating student in Liza Pon's Lab at Columbia.) Much of modern cell biology is based on Yeast genetic screens, the most famous are those performed by Leland H. Hartwell and Paul Nurse to determine genes necessary for cells to divide properly (the CDC, or cell division cycle, mutants). The only tip I can give you is to pay attention to what is done in yeast, the rule of thumb is that the yeast field is 1-2 years ahead of the rest. That…
I'm not sure about the history of "the three types of experiments" (3tes), but they are referred to quite often in the labs I've been in. So what exactly are they? Here goes ... Type A Experiment: every possible result is informative. Type B Experiment: some possible results are informative, other results are uninformative. Type C Experiment: every possible result is uninformative. There is even a little saying that accompanies this ... The goal is to maximize type A and minimize type C. There are some that even name the 3tes 1 through 3 instead of A, B and C. I have a few comments about the…
So a couple of weeks ago, I wrote an entry about gender and science. I encourage you not only to read the post but also the comments. In that post I mentioned a 2003 Caltech postdoc survey that parsed some of the data by gender. Again I strongly recommend that you examine the raw data. Here are some interesting differences between Female and Male Postdocs from this 2003 survey: - Male postdocs are more likely to have children. - Male postdocs with children have their wives take care of the kids, female postdocs with children rely more on daycare. As a result, female postdocs spend more on…
Last night I was at another party in Cambridge, a good friend of mine is leaving Boston to go work for Pfizer in NYC. (Aside - why does it seem like anyone in Cambridge who is not a student or a professor, works for Biotech, Pharma or an IT start up?) In any case I had an interesting conversation with XXXX who works for a Venture Capital Firm that specializes in funding new biotech startups. We got into an interesting conversation about the current status of the pharmaceutical industry in the US and overseas. Apparently the pharmaceutical market is in a weird state. Venture Capitalists are…
Well after that mRNA song, I got wind that there is an x-ray crystallography poem floating out there. So we searched, and searched. Finally undercover agents from the Steitz lab emailed the sought-out credo to our contacts. Allegedly, this poem was composed by Bernard Rupp, who teaches a famed crystallography course. So without further ado, here it is: This is my x-ray machine. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My x-ray machine is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my x-ray machine is useless. Without my x-ray machine, I am…
We've noticed that our cumulative knowledge of any individual process is inversely proportional to the number of researchers striving (i.e. contaminating) to gather data. Take APC, no not that APC, but the Adenomatous Polyposis Coli ... too many people study the damn thing and ... who knows what it does. And the Golgi? Who knows where it goes in Mitosis? (and frankly who cares) But if our theory is correct, we're in big trouble. From the not so latest Molecular Cell: The biomedical literature is growing at a double-exponential pace; over the last 20 years, the total size of MEDLINE (the…
Well lets see where are budding endeavour has gone. 4 Scienceblog bloggers are heading this joint project. So far we have collected a measily 4 entries, a ton of comments/emails from disgruntled scientists, and a rusty can openner. My favorite comment (so far) comes from a lab blog (Wow! I didn't know that some labs blog about freezer space journal clubs and other lab business). Here is what this self described molecular biologist has to say: biochemists are friends of mine...and you can tell that Alex Palazzo at the Daily Transcript isn't a biochemist. Consider his biochemist entry in his…
Evolution biologists, ecologists, epidemiologists, earth scientists, herpetologists ... I obviously didn't know what I was getting into when I posted the first of many Geek Taxonomy entries. This led to many disgruntled comments and emails from all the non-bench biologists. People wanted to know why I omitted their particular specialty. Look I can only make fun of those I know. Others complained "I'm a geneticist studying biomechanics of Xenopus eye deformation, with an interest in evo-devo". (more below the fold) Very nice, but you used the word "geneticist" - that term implies a certain…
I have been often asked what the differences are between the various subdisciplines of the biomedical (or "life") sciences. That's a tough question - but I'll give it a try ... Biochemist: Basically biochemists play with proteins. Usually this involves fancy machines that cost a ton of money. Proteins are subjected to centrifugation, electrophoresis, fast protein liquid chromatography .... Incidentally these techniques are just sophisticated ways of pushing and shoving proteins around. If enough proteins clump together, biochemists get excited and call the clump a complex. If the complex is…
I got this email about the ribosome waltz, click here to listen to the mp3. And there's a lot more from where that came from, like this sweet song. These ditties were composed and performed by Greg Crowther from the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle and member of the band Science Groove. And they say that scientists are boring ...
(From a previous entry on my old blog) After having written about the worst, why not write about the best things about science? Here goes: 1 - Discovery. One of the greatest feelings I've ever had as a researcher was peering down at the microscope and seeing something that I know has never been seen in the history of mankind. It's funny, the first thing you want to do is ... tell somebody. When my thesis advisor discovered that cells have different types of microtubules (a truly unexpected finding) it was the middle of the night. Apparently, he rushed off to explain the big discovery to the…
The lack of posts in the past 3 days was caused by our departmental retreat, that takes place on the cape (i.e. Cape Cod) in March ... we usually aim to have the retreat during a blizzard, however this year we only had mild rain. All the talking and drinking with my peers in the Cell Biology department, made me think of a couple of posts that appeared in my previous blog ... The Worst Things About Science. So here they are (in no particular order): 1 - Being scooped. There is nothing worse than working your ass off for 4 years (much of it in the coldroom) when BANG! a paper comes out making…
BC has a new video (it took me a whole freakin week to notice!) Check it out at the Bartholomew Cubbins on RNA blog.
You can clearly divide scientists into two categories, those who build new models and those who prove old models. The explorers and the crusaders. Usually the former are seeking the truth, or something close to it, while the latter are trying to confirm their own theories as if the idea was more important than reality. As you can guess, I do not have a high regard for the latter group. Unfortunately there are a lot of crusaders around. In some way we all are part of this second group to some extent, but inevitably it's always the first group, the explorers, who win in the end. The problem…
This topic is discussed in a recent article in Science. And why would postdocs want to Unionize? Here's a survey of postdoctoral fellows done by the Sigma Xi Society (and my summary). And from my "Worst Things about Science" (also see Part II). Why do we tolerate the low pay, the long hours, the pain? (OK it's not that bad.) The reply goes like this "Dear student/postdoc/underling, one day you'll be a great PI (principal investigator, i.e. professor) and all your hard work will have paid off. I went through this, we all have to go through this stage, so now it's your turn to go through…
Well I am trying to decide whether to attend this year's RNA Society Conference. As I'm a neophyte to the field (my PhD thesis was on microtubules in migrating cells), I learned quite a bit at last year's meeting. But it's going to be a hectic spring and summer for me. What to do? As I'm flipping through the RNA Society newsletter, what do I see ... the mRNA song. Apparently this first appeared in Scott Gilbert's Developmental Biology. The mRNA Song Tune: YMCA Student! I was once in your shoes; Got no staining On my Coomassie Blues, All my training Was just paying my dues; I could not get…