apalazzo | April 19, 2006Remember that Open Letter to Canadian PM on Climate Control? Well there is a counter-letter out. From the CBC:
A group of 90 of Canada's most senior climate scientists have sent an open letter to the prime minister, warning that global warming is happening now and the federal government needs to do more about the problem.
...
A who's who of the country's atmospheric scientists from the government, the private sector and universities have written to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to say the federal government isn't doing enough about climate change.
...
"We urge you and your government to…
apalazzo | April 18, 2006Well remeber the entry about the Templeton Prize Winner John Barrow?
If you missed it here it is:When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
For Barrow, biology is little more than a branch of natural history. "Biologists have a limited, intuitive understanding of complexity. They're stuck with an inherited conflict…
apalazzo | April 18, 2006OK I haven't been writing anything on papers I've read recently, to make up for this here is a brief summary of a neat paper on Sad1:
1- Sad1 is a homologue of the SUN proteins in S. pombe (fission yeast). In higher eukaryotes the SUNs are inner-nuclear membrane proteins that link to KASH domain containing proteins that reside in the outer nuclear envelope. These KASH containing proteins, such as Nesprins, then link to cytoskeletal elements in the cytoplasmic space and are involved in moving the nucleus to various intracellular spaces.
So what is Sad1 doing in pombe? During Meiosis the ends…
apalazzo | April 18, 2006There is an OpEd on Stem Cell Research Support in today's Boston Globe by Christopher Thomas Scott and Jennifer McCormick.
From the OpEd:
The consequences of the Bush policy [on stem cell research] are profound and unambiguous. NIH officials admit the agency has ceded leadership in the field. Scientists no longer undertake hegiras to Washington to learn about important advances in stem- cell biology. Instead, countries where the research is encouraged have stepped into the breach, making new lines at an astonishing rate.
...
In 2002, roughly one-third of the papers were from US research…
apalazzo | April 16, 2006There is a review in this week's NY Times book section: The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite,' by Ann Finkbeiner.
I had never heard of The Jasons. From the review:
Jason (the term refers both to the group as a whole and to individual members) was conceived in the late 1950's, when the physicist John Wheeler proposed assembling a few dozen top academic scientists to give the government no-holds-barred advice. In 1960 the group began gathering each June and July in various locations. Physics was still riding the wave of prestige generated by the Manhattan Project, and all…
apalazzo | April 16, 2006Yesterday we made a quick stop in central park with our photoblogger friend.
To see the result of these action photos click here.
We then went to the Whitney for the Biennial. The main theme for most exhibits - anti-war. Overall it was weaker than the last show.
Some photos we managed to take when the guards weren't looking:
Speaking of photos, Stochastic has nice ones from the recent Seed gathering.
apalazzo | April 15, 2006After the death of my computer I decided to take the Chinatown express (15$ buys you a ticket from Boston to Chinatown NYC) and visit some old friends. Last night, what we call the Portuguese Mafia (aka the Federation of Portuguese Scientists living in New York) came over for drinks (and it's was Claudia's 30th).
With my veins acquiring the right level of Alcohol I asked several individuals the question. "WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?"
Here is what Edgar told me:
Reproducibility. "When I wake tomorrow morning and jump, I will fall back towards the ground." We…
apalazzo | April 14, 2006Sorry I promised you all some thoughts on "WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?". Last night my laptop was disintegrating, and now it's on the verge of a coma. Having said that let's see what some notable thinkers answered:
[Short aside - this type of Q&A was initiated by John Brockman who asks the 100 most important thinkers (as defined by ... well we're not too sure) to ask each other the questions they ask themselves. So every year, one thinker asks one question, and all 99 others give answers. This project has been going on for a while and a compendium of each…
apalazzo | April 13, 2006Talking to some people about Dyson, I was told to take a look at this open letter in the National Post (the conservative national newspaper in Canada): Open Kyoto to debate
Sixty scientists call on Harper to revisit the science of global warming.
From the article:
As accredited experts in climate and related scientific disciplines, we are writing to propose that balanced, comprehensive public-consultation sessions be held so as to examine the scientific foundation of the federal government's climate-change plans. This would be entirely consistent with your recent commitment to conduct a…
apalazzo | April 13, 2006Yesterday I attended Seed/Harvard Bookstore/The Edge's sponsored event: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it. The discussion narrowed down to key topics ... consciousness, free will ... etc.
Here's a link to a Harvard Crimson article about the whole affair: Profs Debate Consciousness.
(I'll write a longer entry on the whole "What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove" lecture later today.)
One tidbit that came out: apparently Freeman Dyson (noted cosmologist and member of the faithful) had some nasty things to say about Daniel Dennett. When I find…
apalazzo | April 12, 2006Spurred on by some comments left by Coturnix on the Three Types of Experiments entry, and by the Microparadigm paper (see my entry, and another discussion of this paper at In the Pipeline), I now present to you ... the significance of negative data.
Now most of the older (and well read) philosophers of data such as Kuhn, Popper and Feyerabend were obsessed with the physical sciences, and as Ernst Mayr has pointed out in several books, they're ideas are less applicable to the life sciences. Even the principle of Occam's Razor often fails biology. The main mechanisms that operate within a…
apalazzo | April 11, 2006What a great title for a book. Here's a review of Nick Lane's latest from the March 31st edition of Science (subscription required). From the review:
Lane [a science writer whose previous book Oxygen (1) was well received and whose doctoral research involved free radicals and mitochondrial function in organ transplants] is clearly fascinated with the origin of the eukaryotic cell. He devotes considerable attention to (frequently controversial) theories for that origin as well as to the beginnings of life itself and to the ways in which mitochondria have subsequently evolved within the cell.…
apalazzo | April 11, 2006
(From PhD Comics)
Well I've been preparing for labmeeting so instead of giving you another long diatribe about the significance of negative data I'll list some interesting current events:
Today Harvey Lodish is giving a very interesting talk about how to set up a biotech company while staying in academia - I'll see if I can go to that. Thne talk is at 6:00 or 7:00 somewhere in the Longwood Medical Area - TMEC I think (I'll update this when I find out).
Also today - The Royal Society webcasts biologist Steve Jones talking about the evidence for evolution. Tune in at 1:30 pm EDT! (from Daily…
apalazzo | April 10, 2006
I just came back from a Wade Harper talk where we were subjected to an obscene amount of ubiquitin biology and even more ubiquitin nomenclature. This blasting of your brain with technical terms is becoming more and more common with big Biology talks.
But to be honest Prof Harper gave a good talk about an RNAi screen to identify new cell cycle regulators. He's a pretty smart guy (although he needs to take a little more caffeine). A major focus of the talk was on the modulation of Ubiquitination by E3s.
Ubiquitin as you know, is that small peptide that gets conjugated to proteins that are…
apalazzo | April 9, 2006Just saw a glowing review in the NY Times' Suday Book Section on Eric Kandel's new autobiography: In Search of Memory.
Prof Kandel is one of the nicest people in science (and one of the most enjoyable lecturers). And this book seems to convey his love of work and of life. From the Ny Times review:
Kandel's early studies were done using the simplest of neural circuits: a single sensory cell connected via a synapse to a single motor cell mediating the gill withdrawal reflex of the giant marine snail, Aplysia. This experimental preparation provided a complete biological system in which to…
apalazzo | April 8, 2006Well just came back from the lab, after a day of failed experiments (on a Saturday no less) when I read this great commentary on Confessions of a Community College Dean.
The post discusses an article in Inside Higher Ed that I don't agree with. (Whiny GenX faculty?? Please.) And scrolling down the IHE article it got worse and worse until I ended up in crapville in the comment section:
"Having a life" may be fine for humanities faculty. It would be dangerous for our country if that culture became the norm in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering faculties. In those fields we have to…
apalazzo | April 8, 2006There is an interesting entry over at In the Pipeline about a recent paper in PNAS: Microparadigms: Chains of collective reasoning in publications about molecular interactions.
In this paper, the authors analyzed summaries of papers as processed by Geneways - a fancy database of factual statements derived from published papers.
From the paper:
In this study, we focused on chronologically ordered chains of statements about published molecular interactions, such as ''protein A activates gene B'' or ''small molecule C binds protein D.'' Each chain comprises chronologically ordered positive and/…
apalazzo | April 7, 2006So one of the most important stories over the past week (besides the immigration bill in congress), was the health insurance bill in Massachusetts.
I won't give you a summary of what's been going on but instead give you some links to articles & opinions on the whole topic. Then I'll give you some interesting links to Malcolm Gladwell's view on American style Healthcare vs. the Canadian Healthcare system.
So about the Mass plan:
Boston Globe: Mass. bill requires health insurance
Legislative leaders say their plan would:
Cover 92,500 people by bringing more people onto MassHealth, the…
apalazzo | April 7, 2006If you've ever read or saw The Last Temptation of Christ, you'll somehow recognize some of the passages from the newly discovered Gospel according to Judas. From the NY Times article:
In this text, scholars reported yesterday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four gospels in the New Testament. Here Jesus is said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to the Roman authorities. By doing so, he tells Judas, "you will exceed" the other disciples.
"You will be cursed by the other generations, and you will come to rule over them,"…
apalazzo | April 6, 2006I had one interesting thought about the Seed dinner that I've been wanting write about for a while - the isolation of biomedical sciences from the rest of the scientific academic community. This fact was apparent at the Seed dinner - of the dozen people from Harvard or MIT, I was the sole representative from the Longwood campus. For those of you that are not familiar with Harvard, the Biomedical Sciences are all located in Boston's Longwood area, which is a stone throw away from Fenway Park. With all its hospitals and research centers, the Longwood campus is about the size of Harvard main…