lab life

Wow, last week was memorable. Not only did I sign my contract with the University of Toronto, but it appears as if my super duper theory that I thought I had killed, might have been resuscitated. To remind you, the last time I wrote about my trials and tribulations, I thought that I had ruled out my super duper theory because of a simple straight forward experiment. The experiment involved microinjecting a dominant negative protein that blocks a complex from working. What I failed to tell you is that I was waiting for my positive control, a protein whose distribution would be altered if that…
Yes, now that I've received the contract and signed it, I'll officially announce what some of you already know - effective July 1st 2009, I will be a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. One of my "first acts" will be to collect a little payment from Larry Moran.
From the AAAS: The three agencies highlighted in the America COMPETES Act of 2007 and President Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) would do extremely well in the stimulus appropriations bill. The National Science Foundation (NSF) would receive $3.0 billion; the Department of Energy's Office of Science (DOE OS) would receive $2.0 billion; and Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) would receive $520 million; nearly all of these supplementals are for R&D activities. The $5.5 billion allocated to these three agencies would finally put all three budgets…
So this week I tried to gain evidence that supports my supper dupper theory, based on my unexpectedly amazing mass spec results I told you about a few weeks ago. Fortunately I had a staight forward way of testing the implications of these initial findings. And my experiments conclusively demonstrated that this new theory was not right. I forgot about Murphy's laws. So after having busted my own new theory, the question to ask would be am I upset? No way. Although some of the proteins in my unexpectedly amazing mass spec results had nothing to do with the process I am studying (the nuclear…
Yes it looks like I've abandoned my blog, but to be honest in the past few weeks my world has been rocked, scientifically. You see to be a scientist is to be obsessed. Now like some crazed psychotic individual I will try to explain the nature of this infatuation with my work. This desire to obtain the precious insight into the small part of the natural world that remains the foccus of my studies. It starts about one and a half years ago. You see I had a couple of findings that looked good and I sat on them for a while as I attempted to tackle other problems. This set of data, and the model…
George Emil Palade, universally hailed as the founder of modern cell biology for his many discoveries and insights into the structure and function of eukaryotic cells, died on 7 October at the age of 95. He was pre-eminent among a small group of scientists who, in the mid-twentieth century, first used the electron microscope to study cell structure, developed and refined techniques necessary to observe cells, and introduced methods that permitted the isolation and biochemical characterization of many cell structures. ... Palade was a formidable scientist and a rigorous scholar. He was a man…
I don't have much time today so I'll tell you a quick story and give you a collection of links. Harvard's big endowment loss has been the main topic of conversation around the campus for the past week. For example, last Friday, my wife and I were fortunate to get two tickets to see the Emerson Quartet perform at the NEC. Next to us one of our companions for the night, a professor who gave us his extra tickets, was joking about how Harvard could save money by firing certain individuals and turning the Harvard owned Alston property into a theme park. At that moment a lady sitting right in front…
The Journal of Cell Biology is one of my usual reads. Recently they've been adding extra features to their site that I really appreciate. A few months back they started a podcast, Biobytes, and now recently they have launched Biosights, a series of on online videos about research published in JCB. Incidentally the first clip from Biosights is on Allan Hall's latest paper describing how Cdc42, one of the coolest G-proteins in the cell, controls the axis of the mitotic spindle. (Yes Polarity - that same topic that I was telling you about a couple of days back.) Here is the first eddition of…
If you like to tinker you might think that the career for you would be engineering, computer science or even an academic career in the physical sciences. However one option that may have not crossed your mind if the life sciences. Every day in the lab we try to dream up of innovative ways inorder to tease apart the molecular components of life, whether it be "bucket biochemistry", microinjecting cells, or constructing new genes inorder to test our current hypothesis. We tinker with life. So what type of activities do we enjoy we don't play around in the lab? Well the following video was taken…
This was just sent to me by an unnamed source at UCSF:
If you were flipping through the latest issue of Cell, you may have noticed an article entitled Tough Challenges for the Next NIH Director. Yes, way at the bottom that's yours truly making some remarks about the problems of postdoc-hood and how the next NIH director may have to rethink the academic pipeline. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment section.
After a hiatus, Nature has relaunch its Pub Nights, but this time there's a twist. Here's the email that I just got from my good fiend Anna Kushnir: What would your dream project in science be? Corie Lok, the editor of NNB and I would like to invite you to an informal evening of drinks and conversation about what science would be like if unconstrained by reality. Two speakers will address this question: Antoine van Oijen - Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School - Visualizing life at the molecular scale and Andreas Mershin - Center for Biomedical…
From confidential sources I have heard of at least two academic institutions, one in the Boston area and one on the West Coast, that have canceled their new faculty searches due to the current financial crisis. How widespread is the problem? We'll have to wait and see.
C'mon you've all seen them. Here's one I just spotted in the most recent issue of Molecular Cell: Methed-Up FOXOs Can't In-Akt-ivate
Last week was a big one for the Rapoport lab. Throughout my years here, I've come to realy apreciate how structure biology can realy lead to insight. In the latest issue of Nature, two papers describe how proteins are pumped out of cells by the SecA secretory protein. Background: You can divide proteins into three classes, those that stay inside the cell, those that are pumped out of the cell and those that must be incorporated into the membrane. The problem with the last two classes of proteins is that they must cross a membrane. This is accomplished by the translocon, a protein conducting…
Over the past two days, many have pointed out that the one person left out of the Nobel Prize was Douglas Prasher, researcher who cloned GFP from jellyfish, Aequorea victoria. Sadly, Prasher lost his funding and his lab just after he performed the ground work that led to Chalfie and (some of) Tsien's Nobel Prize winning work. It turns out that NPR recently found Prasher - he's now driving a bus in Huntsville, Alabama. Listen to the interview here. As one former colleague states, his case is an example of "a staggering waste of talent". (ht: Abel) For more on GFP, visit Marc Zimmer's History…
(Fresh water rotifer feeding among debris (200x). First prize 2001, Harold Taylor - Kensworth, UK) Now in it's 35th year, Nikon's Small World Photomicrography Competition is one of the biggest events in the microscopy world. The finalists of this year's competition are up at http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/. You have until October 10th to vote for your favorite.
Elias A. Zerhouni, is stepping down as head of the National Institutes of Health. I heard about the announcement last night at the NERD meeting. Many were happy. Many blog commentators have added their two cents. Here are mine: 1) He's stepping down real soon (the end of October). Why so quickly? Did something happen? And why is this happening just before the elections and not closer to January when the next administration takes over? 2) Zerhouni is an MD, and under his direction there has been more of an emphasis on translational-research and less on basic research. (Read all about it at the…
I'm back from Toronto. And now I'm just trying to keep up with all the crap I haven't dealt with in the last few days. Tomorrow we have an RNA Data club meeting (info here) and then I got this interesting email about some terrible legislation that might actually come to a vote tomorrow: On September 11, 2008, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (Rep. John Conyers, D-MI) introduced a bill that would effectively reverse the NIH Public Access Policy, as well as make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place. The legislation is HR6845: "Fair Copyright…
WOW! This website is order of magnitude better then Pubmed. I am totally converted! And check this out, on the top right hand corner of Pubget are direct links to all the top journals: (here's a close up) With one click, BAM! You can browse through Science! To try out Pubget, click here. And while you're at it, visit the facebook page here.