lab life

7AM, up out of bed. I prepare breakfast, two slices of focaccia with salmon and olive spread with an espresso to wash it all down. I quickly flip through the paper. For once the NY Times Science section has an article on some basic molecular biology (it must have been the evolution angle). After jumping in and out of the shower, I throw some clothes on and walk to the lab listening to the latest Nature podcast. 8AM, I prepare my tissue culture cells for the final round of experiments and spin down several samples of DNA for microinjections. 9AM-2PM, five hours of brain numbing microinjection…
I just sent out this email: Hello All, We are soliciting speakers for the November and December meetings. If you are a postdoc or grad student, and would like to present your work in a 20-25 min talk, please let us know and we will add you to the roster. The next meeting of the New England RNA Data Club will take place September 11th starting at 5:30 in the Cannon Room of Building C at Harvard Medical School. Our speakers will be -Chris Hammell, from the Ambrose Lab, Darthmouth Dartmouth Medical School -Natalie Gilks Farny, from the Silver Lab, HMS -Sebastian Kadener, from the Rosbash Lab,…
A big topic of conversation at Scifoo seems to be the future of scientific communication. I have renounced using the term Open Access, this term has been applied to so many different aspects of scientific publishing that it is utterly worthless. It's a buzz word. It's cool. But what does it mean? And instead of talking about the practicalities, much of the conversation is ethereal. We need to define the real issues. What scientists want. What scientists need. How does science publishing impact the lives of scientists, both as a producer of scientific data and as a consumer. After a session on…
Postdoctoral fellows of the world Unite and take over - The Anonymous Postdocs Before we get started I need to make this special announcement: If you would like to host a future edition of What's Up Postdoc? please email Propter Doc. Now on to the main event ... Welcome to edition number 6 of What's Up Postdoc?, the carnival of postdoc-hood and all related matters. Starting off. In the US there seems to be a crisis (so they say) - not enough young Americans are choosing scientific careers. Is this so? And why? You can join the discussion over at Eye on Science. Lou over at A Scientist's Life…
Warning: the following may not be comprehensible for those not working in a lab. So the other day, baymate and I were discussing how we use up our pipette tips. Not in terms of experimental procedures or in the types of orifices we jam them in, but in the order we remove our pipette tips from the pipette tip-box. I tend to start off in one corner and work my way diagonally through to the other end: In contrast my baymate likes to cut right through the middle of the box to form a horse-shoe pattern. (Quite a bold strategy) In order to investigate this further we went around the lab and asked…
Yesterday's lab meeting went fine. Afterwards I got a chance to flip through some journals that I've ignored for the past 2-3 weeks. Among other items, I came across a commentary by Mike Rossner and Ira Mellman, the two big guys at the Journal of Cell Biology. The commentary concerns the resolution of a year long fight between the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Elsevier. To force the hand of the publishers and to support open access, HHMI instituted a new policy - they would evaluate prospective and continuing HHMI investigators based on published manuscripts that were freely accessible…
If you haven't heard, on July 2nd the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency placed a hold on visas for highly skilled foreign workers. Yes the US government is so crippled, it can't even manage to process the paper work for foreigners it wants to keep in the country. Over lunch I learned that the government maxed out its quota for this year. Why did the government let this happen? I thought that they needed highly skilled foreigners. Link to the USCIS press-room. Link to the press release. The state of affairs is so bad, Microsoft is planning to open a software development center…
Yes, a new home for the NERD club. I just finished it last night: http://www.newenglandrna.org/ Any suggestions?
Last night was nice. I dragged some buddies to Tavern at Central to hang out with the folks at NatureNetworks Boston. There we chatted with a few bloggers and some of the individuals responsible for NatureNetworks Boston (like Corie Lok.) One interesting tid bit I'd like to share with you - I had a nice conversation with Kathrine (didn't catch her last name) who helps maintain the NatureNetworks site. We talked about recent successes and failures of scientific publishers and web2.0. Right now scientific publishing is in a state of flux, it is not clear how science communication will be…
Is the question asked by Jack Parker. So are we really taken advantage of, or are we just a bunch of whiners? A study from 2002 says it all. (Keep in mind that the study is 5 years old and that postdoc salaries have gone up.) First off, some comparisons: Compared with their peers in engineering, law, medicine or business administration, natural scientists languish at the bottom of the salary league. In 1999, the median annual income of those working in the natural sciences in the USA was almost US$10 000 less than that of mathematical and computer scientists. This imbalance was even higher…
Yeah it's been a while since my last entry, but in my defence, my thinkpad died and I simultaneously got back the reviewers comments from my submitted manuscript. Although my boss was a tad disappointed, I'm quite pleased. I have to say that writing this post is kinda strange, are my reviewers out there reading my daily diatribes? Should I censure myself? And so ... all I will say about the comments is that I spent the last month collecting data to bolster the key findings of my paper - mostly control experiments, but it looks like the reviewers believe the main concept and did not ask for…
From Thomson Scientific's ISI Web of Knowledge ... the latest impact factors for most of the journals I read, i.e. those that publish cell biology & molecular biology manuscripts. Note that the list does not contain neuroscience or review journals. (Inspired by Coturnix' entry.)
Nature has been busy diving into the "web 2.0". Now it looks as if the folks at Natiure have two new projects for the science masses: - Nature Precedings, a website where people can dump all their spare data, unpublished manuscripts, powerpoint slides, posters, images and where readers can leave comments and even vote on a submission (I think the voting sounds too corny). It looks as if there is minimal peer review. From the site: Submissions are screened by our professional curation team for relevance and quality... The focus is on biology, medicine, chemistry and earth sciences. As an…
We'll be having talks by Hong Cheng from the Reed lab (click here for my summary of her recent paper), Changchun Xiao from the Rajewski lab on miRNAs and B cell differentiation, and Peter Boag from the Blackwell lab on P-bodies and development. The talks will be held in the Cannon Room in building C of the Harvard Medical School quad. They begin at 5:30 and end by about 7:00PM. Food and drinks will follow.
For once I got home early, but I'm too tired to realy blog (instead go read this fine synopsis of the Stem Cell Papers at denialsim). So instead I'll offer this quote that I heard the other night at the pub: Researcher #1: Life is more important than science.Researcher #2: What made you say that?Researcher #1: My life is science.
(via biocurious) I don't know if you remember the news item that Reed Elsevier, publisher of many scientific journals, was funding arms trade shows. It got to the point that the editorial board of the Lancet, which is owned by Elsevier, agreed with researchers who wanted to boycott their own publication. Well it looks like Reed Elsevier has changed its policies: Reed Elsevier announced today that it is to exit the defence exhibitions sector. This portfolio of five shows is part of Reed Elsevier's global Business division and represents around 0.5% of group annual turnover. Sir Crispin Davis,…
Rumour has it that last week a junior faculty here at Harvard Medical School showed up to his lab and with no prior warning announced that he was leaving academic science. The next day he was gone. All of his students were absorbed into neighboring labs. Apparently he took some lucrative position in a local biotech. Just another day in academia ...
After picking colonies, preparing DNA samples from them, digesting a small aliquot of the plasmid prep with the appropriate restriction enzymes and preparing an agarose gel ... you end up loading your minipreps instead of your restriction digests. Damn.
Overheard in the hallway: First postdoc: I have basically wasted a year.Second postdoc (muttering to himself): I wasted a decade.
Over coffee we were flipping through the May edition of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Newsletter when we saw an article on riboswitches, RNA aptamers and the RNA World. The piece features Ron Breaker from Yale, who is most known for describing riboswitches. These RNA elements usually sit on the 5' end of an mRNA and can change conformation when they bind to various small molecules, such as metabolites. These structural changes can affect whether the downstream message on the transcript is translated into protein. So riboswitches are sophisticated versions of aptamers which are RNA…