I wasn’t sure for a while, but now I know there is another Molecular Biology and Food blogger in the world. His site is so much slicker and cleaner than mine, too.
[EDIT 10-2007] It was, while it was up.
Chris Rocks!
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We have no assay for a soul.
“We have no assay for a soul.” Nicely put, but Irving Weissman’s still wrong about adult stem cells.
The things I do for my health
As a (vain) young man, I try to identify the environmental factors that result in people growing older faster than others, in order to prevent that occurring to me. Particularly, I don’t ever want to become one of those guys who has to grunt and strain just to take a good piss. Thanks to this article in New Scientist, my worries are now relieved.
High-end animated illustrations of animations of nanobots attacking Staphylococcus aureus and platelet aggregation
Hybrid Medical Technologies makes high-end animated illustrations of animations of things such as nanobots attacking Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and platelet aggregation. I wonder if they’d let me use some of their sample images in my presentations. They’re beautiful.
Thanks to The Eyes Have It!
Online, real-time, science commentary
Derek Lowe is dipping into the debate on online science commentary at his site at Corante, In The Pipeline. From the perspective of a graduate student, it’s a fantastic idea. Instead of waiting for the few scientific meeting and conventions a year to interact with peers and senior researchers in our field, we could potentially receive and respond to comments daily. John Vu is criticizing Eagleman & Holcombe for failing to make any mention of blogging whatsoever, despite the obvious examples, such as Hubmed. I’ve written before about the neat feature of RSS feeds of literature queries.
Kofi Annan’s commencement speech at MIT in 1997
I recently came across the transcript of Kofi Annan’s commencement speech at MIT in 1997. It’s interesting to read his speech, especially this paragraph, in the context of current events. I liked reading this; I feel like it’s more candid than a public speech.
I begin with the struggle between reason and unreason. When the history of the twentieth century is written, this struggle will figure very prominently in it. On the plane of international affairs, the outbursts of unreason in this century surpass in horror and human tragedy any the world has seen in the entire modern era. From Flanders’ fields to the Holocaust and the aggressions that produced World War II; from the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; from the twenty-five million refugees who roam the world today to untold millions, many of them children, who die the slow death of starvation or are maimed for life by land-mines–our century, even this generation, has much to answer for.
Quite a nice summary, isn’t it? He toots his own horn and that of the UN quite a bit, but it’s interesting how he draws a parallel between international relations(“the project of international organization”) and the scientific process.
But you kill babies, right?
I was volunteering at a benefit banquet for a local charity, which meant that I stood there and occasionally served food to people in exchange for being able to eat and drink all I wanted. While I was trying to brew coffee with broken equipment that PJ’s delivered but didn’t staff, I was conversing with someone who was eagerly awaiting the first cup of that bitter brown elixir of awareness. “It’ll just be a minute more”, I kept telling him as the machine heated the water. To distract him I asked what he did for a living:
“I’m an artist”, he said, but did not elaborate, “what do you do?”
“Oh really? That’s cool. I’m a graduate student in molecular biology.”
“So do you study the genome project and all that stuff?”
“Not too much. Right now I’m working on a project studying differentiation signals of stem cells. Stem cells, as you may have heard in the news(yeah, right!), are cells that retain the ability to turn into any other cell in your body, so they could potentially be used to repair nerve injuries like spinal cord injuries, which would be great because nerves can’t regrow on their own, or treat Alzheimer’s, or any number of things. It’s been show that these cells will migrate to the site of an injury, and then turn into the specific type of cell needed to repair that injury. These cells eventually lose their ability to differentiate into different cell types as they grow, however, and no one really knows why, so we’re trying to study that process. We are looking for something, and have had a little success, in finding something that allows cells to retain their multipotentiality(I was really getting into it now, getting excited, using words like multipotentiality). It would also be great if we could somehow reset the state of differentiated cells. The problem is, though, the current administration has enacted anti-cloning laws that are so broad that they’re making even life-saving stem cell research illegal.”
“But you get those cells from babies, right?”
“We don’t have to, and unless we can study them, we can’t find out ways to get them from other sources and to use them to save lives. (trying to change the subject, because I knew where this was going) I once saw this artist who had a bunny engineered to glow green(not really, read the article). What do you think about that?”
“Kinda like playing God, isn’t it? That’s what worries me about this genetic technology, you don’t know what the effects are going to be.”
“I guess it is kinda like playing God, but if we can save lives, it’s worth it, right? We make a huge effort to study the potential effects of things, so I’m not really worried that stem cells are going to get out and take over the world.”
“But we don’t know what the consequences of these things will be, how they will affect the environment long term.”
“…and if we can’t study them, not only will we never know, but we’ll be denying sick people the development of live-saving therapies.”
Silence for about a minute.
“I’ll come back and check on that coffee in a little while.”
“Ok, I’m expecting it to be ready any time now.”