apalazzo | September 8, 2006The greatest myth within religious communities is that religion is the basis of all morality. Unfortunately for them, science is catching up. Just as Chomsky argued that humans have a language instinct, Marc Hauser from the main campus (Harvard) is arguing that humans have a morality instinct. This idea is mighty dangerous. It underpins the entire culture war in the US. Now Hauser's new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, is making the rounds.
Last week his book was reviewed in the NY Times.
Unfortunately the review was written by a philosopher (…
apalazzo | September 7, 2006Here is the September Issue:
Besides the "What Makes you Sexy" feature, there is
- THE REDUCTION OF SEDUCTION
- EAT YOUR WAY TO BETTER DNA
- IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH (Making marriage work at the job can be challenging for couples as well as colleagues.)
What's next? "37 ways to turn on your PI" ???
(P.S. Just as I was about to post this "Geek" entry, I noticed that today's episode of ScienceBlogs was brought to you by the word "Nerd" ... WTF?)
apalazzo | September 7, 2006Yesterday:
- What happened to your blog?
- What do you mean?
- It was full of angst, I remember reading that Explorers and Crusaders entry. Venting about all the bullshit in science, where is that pissed off guy?
- Maybe because my work is just dominating my life, and I don't want to blog about my findings, this field is cut throat. At some point I promised that I would refocus my blog on real science.
- Yeah, but that entry was about science. It was about how we cope with the process. Finding, discovery, model building ... ego.
- OK I'll try something tomorrow.
OK explorers, crusaders,…
apalazzo | September 6, 2006and I don't mean Katherine Harris.
You probably read about the new Scripps Institute that is to be built in south Florida in the may edition of Science Mag. Now it looks like many other biomedical institutes are going to open branches there. The newest one? Torrey Pines. From the San Diego Union Tribune:
Torrey Pines is the third life-sciences lab from La Jolla to expand into the Sunshine State. Local and state officials there, eager to build a life-sciences industry essentially from scratch, have promised the institutes a total of nearly $1 billion in money, land and other incentives.
Two…
apalazzo | September 5, 2006Here is a link to an awesome animation (via Pure Pedantry). You have your membranes, actin and microtubule cytoskeleton, kinesin based vesicular transport, mRNA nuclear export, protein synthesis and coinsertional translocation into the ER, and membrane traffic from the Golgi to the plasma membrane. (Hey almost everything I've ever worked on!)
apalazzo | September 5, 2006I discovered this wonderful website: Peoples Archives. In it you'll find interviews with some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. I just finished listening to Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick and am now listening to Renato Dulbecco.
Dulbecco, a protege of Giuseppe Levi, moved to Salvador Luria's Lab at the University of Indiana in 1947. Like many of the founders of Molecular Biology, Dulbecco started off by studying phage. Phages are to bacteria what viruses are to our cells. Back then the greatest mystery of all was the nature of the unit of inheritance (i.e. genes). Phages were…
apalazzo | September 4, 2006(Again from the archives)
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 only other…
apalazzo | September 4, 2006From the archives, in honor of Labor Day.
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 all your work useless.
2 - Begging for money. When scientists are not working, eating, sleeping or at some seminar/conference, they are ... writing grants, fellowships ... aka begging. Their applications can be summarized as follows "I'm so great, my work is so important, look at how sexy my results are" but in reality they meant to say "if you don't give me this grant, my lab is going to sink into a deep…
apalazzo | September 2, 2006Just a quick lab advertisement, my bay mate Yoko and my boss Tom have a review article in Cell about how morphological differences between various regions of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) are representative of functional differences.
You can divide the ER into 3 morphological parts.
- The Nuclear Envelope (which can be further divided into an outer nuclear membrane and inner nuclear membrane)
- Peripheral ER sheets
- Peripheral ER tubes
As I've mentioned before, a main focus of our lab (the Rapoport lab) concerns the mechanism of how newly synthesized protein is translocated into the ER.…
apalazzo | September 1, 2006Ready for this week's mystery campus?
What could it be? A space ship?
Some things heard from it's interiors:
"It's not protein, it's some other filtrate that transforms them."
"Let's just fire a bunch of electrons at the cell and see what we get."
"The proteins must contain a signal."
Where is this? Who are these people? What are they talking about?
Leave your proposals in the comment section.
apalazzo | September 1, 2006See this entry for background on inositols. Inositol-6-phosphate (aka Inositol hexaphosphate, phytic acid, phytate) is a strange compound.
Apparently plants make loads of it, and it is thought that they use this molecule to store phosphate. Also it would seem that lots of cancer researchers have been throwing this compound onto oncogenic cell lines. Apparently IP6 works to inhibit cell growth ... but as to it's effectiveness in vivo, I don't know. Phytate is also sold as a dietary supplement. But lets talk about its known cellular functions. Now it turns out that IP6 is a co-factor required…
apalazzo | August 31, 2006A couple of days ago I wrote a rant about how painful it was to deal with the Massachusetts and the federal government. In contrast, civil servants in the Quebec and Canadian governments have often gone out of their way to help me out ... and boy did I ever need their help (maybe someday I'll write about it). T. Price, an American Postdoc living in Montreal, then left his own story in the comment section. It got labeled as junk by TypePad and I just "unjunked it". It illustrates much of my rant and I would like to share it with you:
Your rant is spot on. I don't even speak the language of the…
apalazzo | August 30, 2006I have mixed feelings about Dennett. I really liked his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, but in public appearances he tends to give off a patronizing air. But earlier today I heard him on WBUR (NPR in Boston) and he did an excellent job of explainning why we, the science community, must begin to study the biological roots of religious beliefs. I also want to add that Dennett did a much better job than Dawkins who in "The Root of all Evil?" (Parts I and II) acted mostly as a cheerleader for one side of the science/religious divide. Click here to listen to the interview.
apalazzo | August 29, 2006
A couple of comments.
I totally agree with Richard Dawkins, but I feel that in many instances he confronts the interviewee too abrasively, in an unproductive way. On the other hand I enjoyed Ian McEwan's two minutes and Dawkins' monologue at the end.
All this battle of Science and Religion ... it's a mask, a mask for the REAL issue, the issue that any religious person will eventually tell you is the prime reason that they are religious ... morality. I can hear them now "if you don't believe what prevents you from stealing, killing, and raping?" Dawkins heard them too, is puzzled by it,…
apalazzo | August 29, 2006Well I was reading BK's excellent blog Life of a Lab Rat (an opinion piece from the Guardian "Only biology is safe and, as everybody knows, biology is science for girls." WTF?)
When I came upon a link to this great entry on x-ray crystallography (here is some background on what the hell x-ray crystallography is). My current lab is a remarkable mix of various disciplines in the life sciences ... we have biochemists, cell biologists and x-ray crystallographers. We non-crystallographers have had many discussions about that last group. They are a curious breed of biologists ... well really…
apalazzo | August 28, 2006(This is an intro to a n upcoming entry.)
When I was an undergrad, working in a lab at McGill, my then boss Morag Park would joke that Phosphoinositides were at the center of the universe.
What did she mean by that? Well inositol metabolism seemed to be involved in everything, including oncogenesis and cell migration the only two important cellular activities.
So what the hell is inositol, phosphoinositides and all those inositol metabolites? I'll make this simple and then overload your neocortex. Inositol is a sugar polyalcoholcyclohexane molecule. It's hydroxyl groups can be phosphorylated…
apalazzo | August 28, 2006Yesterday's video clip was taken from "The Root of all Evil". So without further ado, here's the whole show (I'll post part II tomorrow).
[HT: Simon]
apalazzo | August 27, 2006This is the newest from the Blobel lab.
Note to all "they've discovered everything" types: this finding shows how much we know about how cells operate.
Background: As I've described before the nucleus and the cytoplasm are two cellular compartments that are kept apart by the Nuclear Pore Complex (NPC). This mega-assembly of proteins is the gate (or the bouncer) of the nucleus - pass it and you can gain access to the nucleus from the cytoplasm (or vice versa). NPCs sit in the nuclear envelope, an extension of the ER that covers the chromosomes.
Nuclear proteins are synthesized in the…
apalazzo | August 25, 2006OK I live 30min away from the Longwood Medical Center by foot. Most days I walk to and from work but on rainy/blizzard days I take the M2 Shuttle, a free service provided by Harvard to ship people between the Medical Campus here at Longwood and the Main Campus in Cambridge. It's dependable and well used.
Now to save a couple of bucks, they're going to charge postdocs 2$ a ride. That's more than the cost of a T fare (T=subway in Boston)!
Why?
Doesn't Harvard want to help us get to work and be efficient? No way. After all, it's OK to crap on postdocs.
And to make matters worse it's not all…