lab life

Flipping through Nature, I stumbled onto this commentary: The good, the bad and the ugly. Here's a taste: To correctly capture images using a modern microscope, researchers must have a good grasp of optics, an awareness of the microscope's complexity and an obsession for detail. Such skills can take months or even years to master, and yet, owing to inexperience or the rush to publish, are all too often squeezed into hours or days. Popular methods such as fluorescence microscopy are particularly fraught with dangers. The problem? Here's more: It is now a routine part of many studies to…
Wow, yesterday was great! We had food, beer, wine and over a hundred people in attendance. There was plenty of conversation and I got a chance to talk to many people, although I wish we had more time to socialize. Thanks to everyone who came. And thanks to our sponsors Alnylam and NEB. Here is funny story for you. I started giving my power point presentation and everything seemed fine except that the room kept on getting hotter and hotter. It turns out that the thermostat was set to 85 degrees. So there I am in a long-sleeved shirt, drenched in sweat. By the end of my 30min talk (well closer…
Wow, what a week. I finally submitted my paper to PLoS Biology and we finally got our RNA Data Club up and going. This event/series was conceived in a drunken state at a happy hour about 1&1/2 months ago and now has become bigger then anyone of us originally imagined. When we pitched this idea around there was much enthusiasm followed by fears from some who were worried that many research groups would not want to share their data due to the fact that the RNA field (and RNAi in particular) is so competitive. Well after we sent out a call for prospective presenters (postdocs and grad…
From an email I just received: RNA Processing Group (RPG) is intended solely for the person(s) who genuinely believe that RNA research is the coolest thing in the world. To become a member, you have to openly claim that RNA research is cooler than music, money, history, sex, engineering, more money, travel around the world, or sushi. Yeah, that's right! - Anonymous RPG member.
From the Federation of American Scientists for Experimental Biology (for all you non-biologists who are wondering who FASEB is): Urge Congress to Support Research Increase for NIH and NSF Depends On It! ACTION REQUIRED NOW! The 2 Most Important Weeks for NIH and NSF Funding in FY2008 Dear FASEB Society Members: The next two weeks are the most important for determining the level of appropriations that can be attained in FY2008 for the research agencies we support (NIH, NSF, DOE, VA, USDA and NASA). The Budget Committees are meeting this week to finalize the level of discretionary spending…
But this is no time to rest ... Tuesday I'm giving the first talk of our inaugural New England RNA Data Club (yes we've renamed it to the New England RNA Data Club ... we're having folks from out of state). There will be a total of 3 talks in this first assembly, mine + two on miRNAs. I'll let you know how it goes. But now that the paper is out, perhaps I can compose all these little entries I've been wanting to write. 1) Gunnar von Heijne's paper in Science from way back in February/March on how membrane proteins evolved. (I should add that Dan wrote something about it.) 2) The new Hegde…
I once made an offer to this guy that I'd word for him if he offered me a permanent postdoc position with a 100% pay raise. Now everywhere I turn, I see his face. Open Nature, and there are back to back papers with his name as a co-first-author. Skimming through HMS's Focus magazine, and there is an article on his latest accomplishments. Flip open JCB, and there is a two page spread on the guy. And read to this comment (from that JCB article), from someone who has figured out big puzzles within the cell cycle field: What was your initial aim in your postdoc? I didn't like the cell cycle too…
We arrived in New York last night and we joined a friend for dinner in Williamsburg at a joint called Tacu Tacu, a Peruvian/Thai place (they had an excellent ceviche platter). Eventually talk drifted to biotechs. Apparently Bloomberg in collaboration with Alexandria Real Estate initiated a project to develop some land on the Island of Manhattan for biotech companies. It will be located on the east river near NYU. It's about time. In Boston, biotech and big Pharma are everywhere. Partnerships between academic institutions and private industry are plentiful, and researchers in both settings…
There's a little "Leading Edge" review by Laura Bonetta on scientists who blog. I spoke to her last week and some of our conversation is in the peice. Some other ScienceBlogs mentioned are A Blog Around the Clock, Pharyngula, Aetiology, and Framing Science. Larry Moran is also quoted. Go check it out. Ref:Laura Bonetta Scientists Enter the Blogosphere Cell (07) 129:443-445 doi:10.1016/j.cell.2007.04.032
One question that keeps popping up in conversations on and off the internet is the question of what is a blog? As bloggers, what rights do we have? How should we be treated? When do we keep our information private? What should we write about, and what is off limits? I was talking to someone at Cell about an upcoming article in that journal about science bloggers and we talked quite a bit on this subject. Personally I feel that science publications have a lot to gain when bloggers write about articles that are copyright protected by these journals. By including a couple of key figures, as I've…
The third instalment of this postdoc carnival is available here.
Want to manage all those scientific articles that you've downloaded over the years? Evil Gomez at ScienceSampler shows you how (link).
Support the What's Up, Postdoc? carnival by submitting a post on postdoc-hood or any other related subject. You've got just 2 days left so send it TODAY. Click here for details.
It looks like the paper that describes the FT mRNA as a messenger molecule that is transported between plant cells is fraudulent. FT mRNA is a transcript that regulates flowering in plants. Damn, that was a cool paper. Read about the whole thing here. Original Science article here. Also I noticed the title of another paper which cites the Huang paper: Dynamics of a Mobile RNA of Potato Involved in a Long-Distance Signaling Pathway. A. K. Banerjee, M. Chatterjee, Y. Yu, S.-G. Suh, W. A. Miller, and D. J. Hannapel (2006) PLANT CELL 18, 3443-3457 Is this real? Sadly the fraud committed in the…
(disclaimer: I am a foreign postdoc) Did any of you read this from the latest issue of Science: Huddled Masses on foreign postdocs? A recent paper by Harvard economist George J. Borjas shows, however, that even for doctorate-level researchers, "the supply-demand textbook model is correct after all." Unlike most economic analysts, Borjas focused not on what foreign-born scientists add to the scientific enterprise or society as a whole but on what their presence costs individual American scientists. For postdocs and other early-career Ph.D.s in a number of fields, unfortunately, the picture he…
We finally got this off the ground, email me if you are interested. Dear Colleagues, In an attempt to foster discussion within the local RNA community we are initiating a monthly informal data seminar, the Boston RNA data club. These meetings will consist of two 30min talks given by postdoctoral fellows or grad students. We are currently soliciting private sponsors and hope to provide food and beverages for each of these meetings. If you are interested please respond to this email so that we can gage how many labs and individuals are willing to participate. The list of the labs we are…
I have to admit this one is better than last week's post. Yo, TCA man, T-C-A. [HT:Dario]
from a stairway at Harvard Medical School. Interesting tags ... just like street graffiti, scientific graffiti is probably meaningless to the untrained eye. Here's a closeup: Notice the greek slang (lambda for microlitres), the violent use of base to strip off antibodies, the reference to blood sacrifice (IVT), and the malefic use of calcium. I'm guessing that these were the work of a former Rapoport lab member.
Yesterday I posted something on that great graphic of scientific literature and paradigm clustering, it reminded me of a serries of posts from last year on a taxonomy of scientists for the layman. I'll repost each entry and the author (below the fold): THE LIFE SCIENCES 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, gel exclusion chromatography .... Incidentally these techniques are just sophisticated ways of pushing and shoving…
Each lab is like a tribe, it has its own particular traditions and rituals. X is stored here, Y is stored there and Z is made up fresh. We share reagent A, we make our own reagent B, we buy a kit for reagent C. It's hard when you enter the tribe, you have to learn all of these unwritten rules. - A good friend (who just started working in a new lab).