apalazzo | May 11, 2008Friday I was supposed to meet up with Mike Springer from the Kirchner lab. At some point Mike and I had set up a collaboration in order to figure out what was so special about little regions of the genome that encode signal sequences. (To read more on my paper and what we did click here).
In any case Mike had emailed me that Alex van Oudenaarden was giving a Systems Biology "Theory Lunch" and that he had to postpone our lunch. Having heard Alex once before and being impressed, I decided to check it out.
It was one of the best seminars I've attended in quite a while.
Now I'm not going to give…
apalazzo | May 8, 2008The lack of posts has been epic. Sorry life has been just too hectic.
I'll give you a flavor:
Running around. Setting up experiments. Training young rotation students. Off to Microbiology seminar. Off to Cell Biology talk. Off to Montreal. Where next? Vacation? Need to lengthen those telomeres. Paris, Munich, Reykjavik.
Convoluta Roscoffensis.
Need to get data club speaker. Must find new microscope room. Need to get reagent. Try to find protocol. Must get results!
Time to take a break. Flip journal. APC and mRNA? Strange. Too many people study that protein. It does everything and nothing.…
apalazzo | May 5, 2008What a week. I spent half of it at University of Montreal's IRIC, or Institut de recherche en immunologie et en cancerologie. I was truly impressed.
This new center was the brain child of half a dozen University of Montreal professors. They wanted to build a state of the art facility to tackle cancer and immune disease. Within a few years they received a ton of money from several sources and had built the main edifice. Today the institute has 22 labs, many of which are headed by young investigators who are performing outstanding work.
Click here for a movie clip of the interior.
Highlights…
apalazzo | April 27, 2008It is interesting how different corners of the world are preoccupied by unique items of interest. Take Montreal, my "home town". There is a long history of hockey here and recently the whole town has gone Berzerk. You see unlike Boston and the Red Sox, Montreal not only has a historic team, but everyone here knows a hockey player. For example the great Mike Bossy went to my high school (note that he never graduated). After leaving the Montreal Suburbs, he played with the NY Islanders and won four consecutive Stanley Cups with them. Unfortunately he had to retire extremely early due to a bad…
apalazzo | April 24, 2008I'll be giving a short talk at the University of Montreal's Institute for Reasearch in Immunology and Cancer as part of their Young Investigators Research Symposium.
The title of the talk will be:Beyond the signal sequence hypothesis: nuclear export and endoplasmic reticulum targeting of mRNAs
Wish me luck!
apalazzo | April 20, 2008They announced rain today - instead it is sunny, warm and ... a perfect distraction. Since I haven't yet decamped for lab and am waiting for my wife to shower so that we can have a short picnic by the river before i head out to work, I'll just leave you a few links to some VERY interesting and insightful articles in Slate.The three part series was written by Daniel Engber and focus on how certain elements of our society (i.e. climate skeptics, the ID movement, and the tobacco industry) have cultivated this notion of super-skepticism in an attempt o discredit current scientific consensus.
The…
apalazzo | April 19, 2008I'll type something for you quickly as I have a couple of minutes.
This week has been a little crazy. I've been preparing my talk in Montreal and gearing up to perform a major experiment, some old school bucket biochemistry. Baymate performed a similar experiment using dog pancreas, and I need to repeat the protocol with a human cell line. I've already gone through the protocol twice and had to rethink some of the details. Right now the big experiment will start Sunday night continue through "Patriots' Day" and finish some time on Tuesday. So if you are wondering why you won't hear from me…
apalazzo | April 14, 2008Sorry, posts will be few and far between. I need to do some experiments.
Here's a nice giant cell with gobs of ER.
apalazzo | April 11, 2008OK I've been prodded into this.
Here's this week's campus:
hint: Where is it?
If you know what they are looking for and why they are looking here (and not ... let's say there), leave a comment.
apalazzo | April 9, 2008In the near future I can see that my blogging will slow down as my experiments become longer and more involved.
In the meantime, here's a few items to help pass the time away:
First off, yesterday the New NIH Public Access Policies were implemented:
The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after…
apalazzo | April 8, 2008I've been too busy being a postdoc. Here's a passage I just listened to on my iPod. It made me think about our current crop of president-wannabes.
The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator: the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them in a body, contrary to law, as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the only one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my vote against you…
apalazzo | April 6, 2008To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic.
- Matt Richtel in today's NYTimes
apalazzo | April 5, 2008Well I finaly synthesized and purified the magic protein.
Yesterday I used this protein in an experiment that was dictated to me by the ghost of Ockham. I should know the result this afternoon.
apalazzo | April 3, 2008Click here for more details.
Unfortunately I'll be in Montreal the week of April 27th giving talks at UofM's IRIC (I'll post details in the next couple of weeks), but I'll try to attend events on the first day of the festival.
apalazzo | April 2, 2008In the previous two parts I've described how cell biologists (and scientists in related fields) began to uncover the causes of cancer. Today I'll wrap things up with a recent discovery that goes full circle. But first lets have a recap and an expansion on some key points.
I started this series of posts by describing the Warburg effect. This was first described by Otto Warburg about 100 years ago and led to the golden age of research into metabolism. Here's a summary of the principle as described in one of the papers that I'll be covering today:
Otto Warburg noted that tumour cells, unlike…
apalazzo | April 1, 2008NCBI Core nucleotide # U41319.1.
Don't believe me? Click here.
For more info on this NCBI entry, check out Sandra Porter's post.
apalazzo | April 1, 2008Well it looks like the top honchos at Seed Media Group wanted to diversify their little empire known as ScienceBlogs to include "other view points".
"Other" meaning pseudoscientific.
Here is some info on William A. Dembski from Wikipedia:
After completing graduate school in 1996, Dembski was unable to secure a university position; from then until 1999 he received what he calls "a standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC). "I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess", says…
apalazzo | March 30, 2008OK there's been a whole story here at Scienceblogs that has been developing over the past two years. It started when PZ, Richard Dawkins and other prominent anti-ID critics were interviewed under false pretenses for a movie, first entitled Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion then renamed Expelled. And did I mention that the movie features Ben Stein, the former Nixon speech writer and cultural personality? PZ then tried to go see a pre-screening of the movie but was ironically expelled. Oh and did I mentioned that Richard Dawkins successfully attended the same pre-screening…