Scientific stardom

Over at FSP, there was a post about rockstars and scientists. And it reminded me about the Nobel Laureate I met.

A group of us from work went out to a bar after work, just for a farewell drink with one of our Ph.D. students. He's not leaving leaving, because he is still working in the same institute, but in a different lab.
Anyway, one young PI who joined us recognized a Nobel Laureate ordering food at the bar. He claimed that that scientist type guy standing at the bar was none other than John Sulston, recipient of the Physiology or Medicine prize in 2002.
Of course we didn't believe him, but the buzz was there. Is it him? Should we ask him? Should we dare to go up and ask him if he is THE John Sulston? (As you can guess, we don't know our Nobel Laureates that well...)

After much trepidation (and typing feverishly into our mobiles to find his photo on the internet) on our part, the Farmer went up to him to ask. And it was him! He turned around, looked at us, and waved!! We got him to come have a chat, and had a photo opportunity, which is where this photo comes from.
He was very nice, BTW, very friendly and down-to-earth (considering he was conversing with a group of young-ish, gaping scientists who were so awe struck that they couldn't form a sentence). The kind of person you would enjoy talking to in a pub after a conference session, for example.

We were wondering then if he ever had this - you know, some random person coming up to ask "Are you THE Nobel Laureate???!!!" in a bar or a pub. I guess that if you are a rock star, that would be a common occurance, but a scientist? I mean, that must make your day. Unless you are a Nobel Laureate, and you want to keep a low profile when ordering some food in a bar. He had a bowl of fat chips with whatever he was eating, by the way.

BTW, if there is one Nobel Laureate I would recognize, it would probably be Sir Paul Nurse. Only because I have actually seen him give a talk and all, so have a good idea of his physical appearance.

Surely not!!

The depth of human stupidity knows no bounds. Who would have thought that Viagra would make you see blue. Of course, such a startling discovery was published in that pinnacle of scientific journalism, the Daily Mail. *snigger*
I wonder if there is a medical condition that turns vision into a certain shade - I mean, I've heard of colour-blindedness, but blue-shadedness?
Shame the guy isn't into Arsenal or Man Utd. That would've been funny. Can you imagine supporting the Canaries?

It tastes good...part 2

I forgot in the previous post due to some late-night bloggage, but the reason I was wondering about de-ionized, double distilled, whateveryouwanttocallit very very pure water, is because I was wondering if the reduction in resistivity of pure water would have any effect on how the tongue recognizes the taste. What does an 18 megaohm-er taste like?
We all know that tap water tastes funny. London tap water is foul, the tap water from my house now is drinkable, my family home's tap water is yummy (it's in the countryside and the water is plentiful). So what does pure water taste like?

See, I don't write about random things all the time.
There is some scientific thought behind it.

It tastes good...

Reading this over at PropterDoc's, I was wondering. I was gonna comment, but thought it was off-topic over there, so here it is.

Has anyone drunk de-ionized water?
What does it taste like?
You know, that one that comes off the second still (it does go through a distillation step first, doesn't it, to get rid of most of the crap). You know, the one you use for enzymatic reactions. The one you can actually use for RNA work.

You know what? I have a 45ml aliquot of pure water I bought from Sigma (DNAse RNAse free) in my secret stash freezer at work. I might go get that one soon, so I can try it. It can't be that bad for you, right? I mean, it's water.

On a similar note, has anyone drunk/tasted PBS?
DMEM (that's Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium)?
RPMI?
(I'm assuming if it is okay for cells, it can't be that toxic for a human.)

Fruit fly video

Thanks to the Fly Boys, who introduced me to this video. I saw them watching it, and it kinda looked like they were looking at porn. At work. Anyway, that's them Fly Boys for you. Getting kicks outta science, and flies at that. But I never knew you could use a yellow tip as a straight jacket.

On a note, here is the site where you can watch experimental videos. I think this site, SciVee, is more famous, but it ain't got the Drosophila straight jacket vid...

About the media and scientific representation

I've been meaning to post about this post over at Post Doc ergo Propeter Doc. So now's the time.

As a chemist-turned-cell biologist, I hope I can appreciate both sides of the view. Anyway, here goes.

The reason why biologists (and that includes everyone, like molecular biologists, protein biochemists, geneticists although that's a stretch) love the media is because of money. More recognition from the media and lay people means that the charities that funds research get more recognition. That means they get more money through donations. What better PR is there than telling people that you pump money into a researcher who has found a cure for cancer?
(I guess this is the same for astrophysics, or particle physics, as they need very very large amounts of money not for funding, but to actually fund the instruments of research. If the tax-payers don't know what their money is being pumped into, they won't like funding the government that is)

There's a slant for biology in the media, because biology is so easy to justify to the lay person. Genetics of diseases concern everyone. When everyone has a relative affected by cancer, cancer is one big target. It's just so much easier to justify to the general public.
This touches on another aspect of current biological research funding in the UK (at least) - every little thing that people work on can be somehow related to a disease. So you have a cancer charity funding work on transcription factors, and stroke charities funding work on kinases. Weird, huh? I don't agree with this funding of basic science by disease charities (unfair really to the charities), but they fund my paycheck.

And I think that is the unfortunate reason why Chemists get the cold shoulder - biology is easy to justify. Physics (I guess) is easy too, because it has to do with the "ultimate question" of the rules of nature. Chemists get short shifted, unless you work for a pharmaceutical company and can say "well, I'm working on something to cure ABC disease".
Personally, I think there is less of an emphasis in media coverage of Chemistry in the west, compared to Japan. It's probably because recent Japanese Nobel Laureates were in Chemistry, so the spotlight on good science is shining on Chemistry now.

The unfortunate thing nowadays, is that even the people who should know better - University chancellors (, provosts and presidents), government ministers - are so ill-informed about the importance of Chemistry. I think all biological sciences students should be taught at least 1st year undergraduate level Chemistry. If not for the knowledge, at least for the safety. Then you won't get developmental biologists buying a 500g tin of picric acid for one experiment.
So what do you need? A famous chemist would help, preferably someone high up in the ranks - ministers, profs, with a flair for the subject. The lack of media interest in chemistry is terrible, and all you need really is someone with character to turn it around.

Is there any hope? Well, if a geologist can have a tv programme about the pacific rim, talking about how the Japanese culture was shaped by volcanoes (which is utter bullshit, and my geologist friend was embarassed to know he was one of...them), I am sure there is scope for a chemist to tell us about...I don't know, the beauty of organic synthesis?

BTW, I don't personally think that it should be necessary to justify your work to the public. I don't think research should be run like that, at least at our (i.e. postodc) level. But it seems like the thing nowadays is that you have to, because you're spending their money. Whoever they are.



Oh, and talking about media outlets. I have a pet hate.
Emrbryonic stem cell (ESC) biologists.
Everytime something happens, they are there. Like flies to poo. Taking credit for everything - I have heard ESC biologists talking about cures to cancer, cure to stroke, sure to heart disease, cure to XYZ, from their cells. And the number of... problematic articles written by (E)SC biologists? They should really be ashamed of themselves. I've never known an area with so much controversy. If the system is so fragile and not robust, as I know SC biology is, they should at least govern themselves with a little more care. But hey, money talks.

Do it right

I went to a couple of talks by people (CheshireCat, Mr.Strauss, and BI) in my lab recently. They aren't in my group, and so I don't know exactly what they do. So I was quite intrigued by what they might say.
I enjoyed their talks, and the scientific content was interesting. But some of them just don't know how to give a good talk. I should know, I have been to hundreds of scientific presentations, from time wasters to Nobel Laureates. Here are some good and bad points about the three's talks.

Good
If English is not your first language, don't fret. Just go over your slides carefully. Remember to make
(1) a coherent, flowing presentation, with
(2) simple but informative slides,
(3) go slow with the speed of your talk and the time you spend on your slides,
And people will be happy. That was what BI did, and even though I didn't have the slightest clue as to what she was doing, after her talk I was well informed and interested.
I hate it when English speakers complain about the speaker's english, because they state that as an excuse for not trying to understand the talk. On the other hand, non-English speakers can help by polishing their presentation.

Bad
Oh I love dissing other people's talks. And I'm not talking about the scientific content.
(1) Don't talk to the screen, Cheshire Cat. Even more so if you have long-ish hair, so you flick it everytime you look at the audience - which was every three seconds. It's distracting.
(2) Don't talk too fast. I know you are English, English is your first language, but if you talk like a machine gun, people like me (who happens to speak English well) will miss bits out. And zone out. Zzzzzzz.
(3) Don't go back and forth on your slides. If you need to show slide number 4 after slide number 13, put slide 4 in again. Don't go back 10 slides again, Mr.Strauss. It's a time waster at best, stupid looking at worst.
(4) Always give enough credit to the person who helped you. I hope the CheshireCat understands that, because I wouldn't want to work with someone who sounded like they did all the work, when you know that's not true.

And the biggest thing I have against English speakers:
(5) there is a difference between honestly admitting to your mistakes or your inability to get a result, and sounding embarassed/anxious about it.
I once heard a talk in which the PI admitted that with a certain system, they had to do a concentration study of the inducer because they realised that for a long-term study, the drug remained in the fat of the animal (I can't remember whether it was the Tet system or the Dox stuff). So at the end of a year of trial and error, they found out that the concentration to use was one thousandth of what was commonly reported.
When I heard that, I was like "wow, he's happy to admit that".
That was a world leader in his field.

I heard another PI say "well, it's boring to talk about all the success stories when you know that's not what happens, so I'll tell you that this method failed. And (other tack) failed too". That was also refreshing, not just of honesty, but because his tone was casual, informative, but still confident and was telling a good story.

Just don't say things like "well, this is all speculation...(laughs)" or "I didn't have time to analyse this data because I just did it last week...(laughs)" in that not-so-very-confident tone of voice with the laughing at the end. It just sounds like an excuse.

I think this English humbleness, or the English sense of humour (self-deprecating? maybe) doesn't go down well at presentations of science.

I remember once hearing on the radio that "people think making a snide remark is a show of intelligence. It's not. It is just being mean". And I agree. Nothing sucks that fake humbleness. You might as well admit it.

Move over DSRed

For those fans of GFP but want something on the red side of the spectrum, a paper in Nature Methods which describes a monomeric DSRed alternative which actually fluoresces brighter.

My colleague works with DSRed tagged protein, and reading this paper I learn more about the possibles cons of the protein. The pros, one obviously being it gives a different emission spectra. I wonder how the DSRed and this new TagRFP compares in size to GFP, and the properties of the tragged proteins. As far as the paper goes, TagRFP definitely seem to not interfere with the protein itself - however, I have heard of proteins whereby the cellular distribution (or was it function?) was altered due to GFP.

Some science

Okay, I'm going to try and talk science. I hope you all don't laugh. My memory is not that good, and my intelligence...well, that's best not talked about!

A while ago I went to a very good talk, during which they highlighted this peculiar technique. Peculiar, because I don't associate (streptavidin -) biotin interactions in live cells, only fixed ones. Anyway, the speaker was trying to follow a cell-surface receptor once it was cleaved, and this seemed to be the technique of choice.
As the research highlights article states, GFP is big and cumbersome (I should know, I have done westerns on native and GFP-tagged protein - and they really move on the gel). While AP, the peptide tag they put on the protein of choice, is only 15 a.a. long. I can't remember the details of the talk, but I think they were trying to use the biotinylation with streptavidin or an antibody. Or both. Or was there a fluorophore? Anyway, what they wanted to do was to see where the cleaved receptor was going. Pretty hard stuff when the cleaved receptor goes to the nucleus, to other cellular compartments, etc.
Anyway, I thought it was a cool technique and was impressed.

And you know what? The PI from the original paper (A.Ting) is pretty hot too! I love her cool gaze to the camera...

A historical creature of the laboratory

I went to a couple of seminars recently, which had a strong slant in development and brains (not two together). Can I boast? Well, despite my CV not saying a word about it, I know what the dentate gyrus is. I know where a mouse hippocampus is. Surprised?

Thanks to my Ph.D., I was sharing a lab with a neurobiologist, who used to stain the hippocampal regions regularly. And you know, even if you are as thick as me, after seeing presentations after presentations after presentations of mouse brain slices, you remember what a mouse hippocampus looks like. Hell, I can point out to you the CA1, CA2 and CA3 regions.
I also happen to have studied apoptosis when apoptosis was all the rage. And I can synthesize GSNO (that's S-nitrosoglutathione) for you. Although that's not something to boast about. It's easy peasy. But I reckon most people in my lab can't do it.

Which makes me proud. There's something to be said about growing old. And going to seminars even if you don't want to. If I wasn't (literally) forced to go to some of the seminars, I would have never learned all that.

Which makes me think. Isn't that what science is all about? Curiosity? Shouldn't students be forced to go to departmental seminars, so they learn something other than what they are working on?

Anyway, this is coming from an old lab rat, who loves reading the TOCs of journals as her hobby...

Your research on a table

My friend is going to the AACR meeting in LA, and she told me about this brand new method of poster presentation.

Print it on fabric.

No kidding.

Apparently, due to the high security of some (ahem, American) airports, it is getting more and more usual for the innocuous poster tube to be put in the cargo hold. Well, it does look faintly like a bazooka, doesn't it. But anyway, yes, that means a higher chance of getting your life's work lost in an airport, never to make it to the intended destination.
So, if the airlines aren't going to allow poster tubes to be carried as cabin baggage, why not just print it on fabric? Isn't that an amazing insight? I mean, you can "fold it and then iron it out at your hotel before the poster session" (quote from the poster printing guy). It's so cool.

And can you imagine what you can do with them?
You can use it as an emergency tablecloth. You can take it to a picnic with you, and have your spread on top of it. It it's unsightly, like having photos of rat brain, you can turn it over.
Maybe you can patch it up and have a "My science career patchwork quilt"! If you keep all the fabric posters you made, from the first time you make them, to the end of your postdoc career...just imagine. You can sew the posters together to make a quilt. No, even better, a bed spread. If you were keen on going to conferences, and have a lot of them, you can make a duvet cover! Why not just have a whole room's soft furnishings dedicated to your (and maybe your spouse's) scientific career?
For the chemists out there, you can make your sofa cover from your favouriate reaction. Wow. For the biochemists, a throw with the Kreb's cycle. For cell biologists, how about a tablecloth with your favourite cell line up close? The list is endless.
(On a more serious note, I remember looking at my neuroscientist friend's work and commenting on how some of the immunofluorescence photos looked great. She told me it was out of focus and unusable in any publication. But the blurring added to the whole colour, with the dark background. It was stunning with the blurred neurons, with their dendrites.
Well, if you have a photo like that, if you print it out A0 size, it will make a great decoration for the living room - and people won't guess what it is!)

I've touched the fabric, and it's like those materials that window blinds are made out of. They probably won't survive the washing machine, but you can still fold it and put it in your hand luggage. And the print quality is good. It's just like a normal poster, but it's....fabric!

So if you are at the AACR, watch out for those fabric posters. They are the next in thing, I tell you.

From pest to reagent

Two years ago in Japan, there was a big problem of too much jellyfish in the Japan sea. They were posing problems since the early '90s, but are now making headlines more often. Of course, one way of getting rid of them is to eat them, but there are only limited numbers of mouth to feed - and Japanese aren't as much into eating jellyfish as the Chinese, where they serve it as an appetizer.
So a company in Osaka which makes ingredients for cosmetics have come up with a way to purify collagen from these pests (Japanese only - couldn't find English version). Apparently they started researching into this in the autumn of 2005. The jellyfish in question are mostly water (90 %), but about 0.1 ~ 0.2 % is collagen - and in a purer form than collagen of animal or fish origin. The creams and lotions made from this collagen is apparently more moisturising. What they now have is an experimental factory set up since January, where the jellyfish caught in nets of the Fukui prefecture fisheries union are transported (cut and frozen). They obviously don't go into the specifics of the method, but apparently they use centrifugation (I guess that's obvious really).
They can't say really how much collagen they can extract from the jellyfish (as the size varies a lot), but expect to extract around 200 grams of collagen from around a few tens of jellyfish. With an expected output of 10 tonnes per year, they estimate the price of these jellyfish collagen to be similar to the current prices for collagen.

Way to go. That's the kind of science news I want to hear...

Hmm

Last week has been a bit hellish, only because I had a journal club paper to do, a presentation, and the meeting with my co-supervisors all in the same week, the week after which I came back from holiday. I thought, well, better get it over and done with rather than having it spread out, and as it turned out it was stressful but okay. I managed to get through it.

So I'm in the final year of my contract, and now my boss is getting a bit antsy about the fact that my project doesn't work that well. He's putting a bit more pressure on me now, and I guess I couldn't say anything, but I don't mind. I need to do a bit more.

The journal club, well, I did two papers because I really liked this nice little paper from the European guru of mass spec, Matthias Mann. It's only three pages long, but the technique is elegant to say the least. If we had a half decent mass spec facility, I would have pushed this method - alas, our mass spec facility is so shit that they can't even make up buffers properly (happened to a student I know, she prepared her sample and gel and stained it and was perfect, for the technician in the facility to fuck it up by not preparing the buffers correctly. I mean, these people get PAID to provide a service...).
However, my wonderful choice was shattered when little Miss Bossy stated how she didn't understand what the point of the paper was - why not just do normal IPs, why use isotopes, etc.etc., to which I was so flabbergasted by her aggressive attack, that I was lost for words. She is a postdoc, and a postdoc who doesn't understand the point of this work? I'm sorry, but that's pathetic.

The thing is, it made me think that she is no scientist, as she has no respect or understanding, or interest in such a technique. Doing research shouldn't be just about working on your own protein. Surely, you should be keeping your eyes and ears open for modern techniques and progress in science.

It frustrates me immensely that in my current workplace, there may just be one of two people (out of, say, thirty) who understand this. I feel out of place because I am thinking about the "welfare" of science research. I did end up drinking with and discussing (bitterly) about this with J, whom I can have these kind of conversations with. 'Tis a shame such people are rare.

I think some Ph.D. students I speak to understand where I am coming from, and I hope they learn or take something from what I say. That research is not just about what you study, a Ph.D. is supposed to be a doctorate on the philosophy of your subject.

Anyway, my post-holiday time is taken up by playing LocoRoco on my new toy, the PSP. For those of you who are curious to what the cute LocoRocos are singing, here are the lyrics...