Posts

March 22, 2013

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7:56 PM | Our People: In Memoriam: Frank Ruddle, Pioneer in Human Gene Mapping and Former ASCB President

Francis Hugh Ruddle, 1929-2013, Courtesy of Yale University, photo by Michael Marsland Francis Hugh Ruddle, a former ASCB President and a pioneer at Yale University in mapping the human genome and creating the first transgenic mouse, died March 10 in New Haven. He was 83. Ruddle coined the word “transgenic” in 1981, after startling the world the year before with a mouse born with heritable viral genetic material that had been inserted into newly fertilized mouse eggs. Working with […]

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2:23 PM | Right Turn: our new Friday feature

Signals Blog has given itself the green light to try something different. We’re launching a brand new feature, to appear on Fridays, which will showcase the “lighter” side of regenerative medicine. We will be bringing you cartoons, photos, videos and other content that may be just as thought provoking as the written submissions that you...Read more

March 21, 2013

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12:28 PM | Making Pretty, Meaty, Friendly Animals (on Scientific American)

Head on over to Scientific American to read our second guest blog post!

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7:42 AM | Following Planck's results today

For the people (new and old) who follow this blog and are interested in the Planck satellite's results, which are being announced today, here is a run-down of important things to know: Richard Easther will be live-blogging the data release at this location. If you can't watch the release yourself you should follow Richard's post. The first ESA event is a general-audience press conference, very soon, at 10:00 CET, which you can watch here. The second ESA event is a press conference […]

March 20, 2013

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5:32 PM | Help make colonoscopies more affordable as an effective screening tool

Patient advocacy is something I care about and spend time actively supporting two worthwhile causes, including the lovely folks at…

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12:28 PM | Converting weeds into flowers: artificial stem cells create a blood supply for bioengineered organs

Regenerating the human body by growing whole new organs or patching up damaged ones from just a few cells scraped from your own tissues is a fascinating area of science known as bioengineering. Every living cell in such an organ … Continue reading →

Margariti A, Winkler B, Karamariti E, Zampetaki A, Tsai TN, Baban D, Ragoussis J, Huang Y, Han JD, Zeng L & Hu Y (2012). Direct reprogramming of fibroblasts into endothelial cells capable of angiogenesis and reendothelialization in tissue-engineered vessels., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (34) 13793-8. PMID: 22869753

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2:05 AM | Planck rumours will soon become Planck results

On Thursday, the Planck satellite will be revealing its first cosmological results. In terms of fundamental physics, this will be the biggest event since the Higgs discovery last year. In the cosmology community it is the biggest event for the best part of a decade (possibly in both directions of time). If you don't follow cosmology too closely, you might wonder why this particular experiment might generate so much excitement. After all, aren't there all sorts of experiments, all of the time? […]

March 19, 2013

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8:41 PM | What is up with the "Dopamine Project"?

Someone is trying to make me eat my words.yum. (source)That someone is the Dopamine Project. I am on record as saying "It is better for the public to learn simplified bite-size science morsels than to learn nothing at all." And my specific example was that it's better for people to know that 'dopamine is a reward molecule' than to not even know the term dopamine.But sometimes things just go too far. The "Dopamine Project" is a website run by Charles Lyell with a stated 'self-help' purpose: "The […]

Shermer M (2011). What is pseudoscience?, Scientific American, 305 (3) 92. PMID: 21870452

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8:24 PM | Comment on In which I cling on by Richard Wintle

I recall "young investigator" type awards here in the past that had age limits - a requirement that the applicant had to be under 45 I think. Your comment above made me realize how discriminatory this is and wonder whether this is still the case - and it apparently isn't. The ones I found were as you describe in your response to Eva's comment: within five, or seven, years of first appointment, for example. I'm sure they used to have "real" age limits though.

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7:44 PM | Comment on In which I cling on by Jennifer Rohn

Thanks for your comments, Jenny. I don't, however, see short-termism in science as a knock to a researcher's self-confidence or self-efficacy - it could hardly be that since the vast majority of all academic research jobs (96% in the UK) are temporary. What it does do is make it very difficult for scientists to plan for the future - chasing the contracts, they move from city to city and country to country, which often means they have no meaningful pension, are unable to get on the […]

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6:12 PM | Comment on In which I cling on by Jenny Koenig

I think the impact of short-termism on a scientist's self-efficacy is really important but I'm not sure it's that well recognised. When I was a contract researcher, long-enough ago for me to be able to look upon it with some distance, I instinctively saw the lack of renewal of a contract as some judgement upon my intrinsic ability or value as a scientist. In contrast, I moved from academic research to consultancy and was then pitching for pieces of work. When a proposal was not […]

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1:25 PM | Comment on In which I cling on by Jennifer Rohn

Thanks Winty. I keep hoping for a miracle.

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1:22 PM | Comment on In which I cling on by Richard Wintle

Eva - you need to read the back catalogue here at Jenny's blog. Jenny - congrats on the one year, the forthcoming papers, and the new grant. :)

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1:21 PM | Comment on In which I cling on by Jennifer Rohn

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Age as in how long you've aged after your PhD, not absolute age generally. Though I have in the past seen a few with concrete age limits listed, but I think this might now be illegal in the EU.

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1:17 PM | Comment on In which I cling on by Eva

Wait, independent fellowships have age restrictions?! I had no idea, and that's rather harsh. Why is that? What if people start their science studies at a later age?

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10:07 AM | Clinical trials: a valid or fallacious metric of industry progress?

. Part 5 in Cell Therapy Industry 2027 series A short time ago, I had the immense pleasure of driving through the Napa Valley bathed in a warm pastel sunset. The view was accompanied by a two-chord soundtrack: the reassuring chinking of several bottles of the region’s finest and an American radio show discussing scientific...Read more

March 18, 2013

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9:03 PM | CellTweets #8 Enzymes Cross Membrane Bridge to Assemble Synthesis Machinery on Lipid Droplets

CellTweets #8 Enzymes Cross Membrane Bridge to Assemble Synthesis Machinery on Lipid Droplets Wilfling F, Wang H, Haas JT, Krahmer N, Gould TJ, Uchida A, Cheng JX, Graham M, Christiano R, Fröhlich F, Liu X, Buhman KK, Coleman RA, Bewersdorf J, Farese RV Jr, Walther TC. (2013). Triacylglycerol Synthesis Enzymes Mediate Lipid Droplet Growth by Relocalizing from the ER to Lipid Droplets. Dev Cell Feb 13. Lipid droplets have suffered from an image problem, […]

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9:03 PM | Sister Chromatid Act To Play Times Square

A metaphase epithelial cell stained for microtubules (red), kinetochores (green) and DNA (blue). Image courtesy of Light Microscopy Imaging Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. Cell biology has long prided itself on being the most visual of all the basic sciences yet each year some of its most basic concepts are described for students in vast clouds of words (and many PowerPoint slides). Oh, for that one picture (or short video) that says it all about one thing. This is that one […]

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9:03 PM | Public Access to Public Research: A Radical Idea Grows Respectable

Historic monument: The November 1999 Molecular Biology of the Cell was the first complete issue of a scholarly journal placed into PubMed Central for online public access. In Washington, DC, they broke out the bubbly February 22 at the Dupont Circle offices of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishers and Academic Resources Coalition. “A magnum of prosecco in the office,” laughs SPARC executive director Heather Joseph. “It was kind of fun.” The occasion for celebration was a directive […]

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9:03 PM | CellTweets #7 Demystifying Real-World Science, Grants and All, for First-Year Undergraduates

CellTweets #7 Demystifying Real-World Science, Grants and All, for First-Year Undergraduates CREATE Cornerstone: Introduction to Scientific Thinking, a New Course for STEM-Interested Freshmen, Demystifies Scientific Thinking through Analysis of Scientific Literature. Gottesman AJ, Hoskins SG (2013). CBE Life Sci Educ 12(1), 59-72 doi: 10.1187/cbe.12-11-0201. Most first year undergrads think that science is fixed, lives in textbooks, and is only […]

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9:03 PM | Our People: In Memoriam: John Charles Hutton

John Charles Hutton John Charles Hutton, Professor of Pediatrics and Cellular & Developmental Biology and Research Director of the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes, died December 18 in Denver. He was 64. Hutton, who joined the ASCB in 1997, was born in Australia. He earned a BSc in Biochemistry and Physiology in 1969 and his PhD in 1974 at the University of New South Wales. After postdocs in Bolivia and Belgium, Hutton established his own laboratory in the Department […]

March 16, 2013

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6:26 PM | Update: $600M insider trading fine is largest ever

. As a follow up to last month’s post describing how leaked information about an Alzheimer’s drug clinical trial led to the largest ever case of insider trading and destroyed the careers of Dr. Sidney Gilman, a well-respected clinician, and Matthew Martoma, a young stock trader, the Securities and Exchange Commission has just levied the...Read more

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4:06 PM | Hybrid business model vigor

In these Malthusian times of decreasing grant resources, the once character-building exercise of shaping hypotheses and insights into experimental aims...

March 15, 2013

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9:03 PM | Majority Loses? NIH Budget Increase Latest Victim of Congressional Gridlock

Tom Harkin Yesterday (March 15, 2013) in the U.S. Senate, a clear majority—54 of its 100 members—voted for an amendment to increase the fiscal year 2013 budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by $211 million. Unfortunately, a previous agreement between Senate Democrats and Republicans required that amendments receive 60 votes in order to pass. This makes NIH funding the most recent victim of congressional gridlock. The sponsor of the amendment, longtime NIH champion […]

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5:26 PM | Is it 'Important' or is it 'valuable'?

We've recently discussed dopamine as a reward prediction signal. But that is really just the start of the complicated dopamine story. Dopamine's role in reward and punishment (by the hiking artist)Some research groups have also found that dopamine neurons respond to aversive stimuli, like an air puff to the face or an electric shock. This finding seems to be be completely incompatible with the idea that dopamine is a signal for reward. Luckily some scientists took the time to try to resolve […]

Bromberg-Martin ES, Matsumoto M & Hikosaka O (2010). Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting., Neuron, 68 (5) 815-34. PMID: 21144997

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March 14, 2013

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8:14 PM | The π-Day Challenge

Charles Darwin's birthday is fine for a serious celebration, but can cell biologists come up with something with the popular if geeky charm of π-Day? March 14 has now become established as π-Day, that is 3.14, at least in the American way of writing the date. (It is never π-Day in Europe, for example, where it’s merely 14 March. Sorry.) The spread of π-Day is largely the work of physics and math teachers who took a mathematical pun and ran with it. Biologists can only […]

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8:14 PM | Our People: Dan Kiehart, New Dean of Natural Science for Duke’s Liberal Arts School

Dan Kiehart In July, Dan Kiehart, chair of the Biology Department at Duke University, will become the dean of the Natural Sciences Division within Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke’s undergraduate liberal arts school. Kiehart, a Society member since 1980, currently serves on the ASCB Council.

March 13, 2013

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3:44 PM | Sequestration: The NIH Bookmark You Need Now

Sally Rockey If you are among those in the scientific world whose heart goes pitty-pat whenever you see an NIH address in your inbox or in the upper left hand corner of an envelope, you might want to add this bookmark to your browser. It’s where NIH will announce the gruesome details of how it will carry out the long threatened federal budget sequestration. Actually you should have this as an all-weather bookmark as it’s the "Rock Talk" blog of Sally Rockey, Deputy […]

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1:16 PM | BioTime: A new Geron, without a decade of baggage

Avid watchers of the stem cell and regenerative medicine market have no doubt heard of Geron selling its stem cell assets to BioTime. Nature covered it in some detail last month, and the transaction itself follows a Letter of Intent announced last November, which valued it at approximately $71 million. The transaction leaves Geron to...Read more

March 12, 2013

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1:55 PM | Should reviewers be required to cite their sources?

When I got back from the IBAGS conference, I was greeted by an 'paper rejection email'.Failure with a capital F (source)I was disappointed of course, but I slept off my jetlag and then built my self-confidence back up by saving the universe. I will retool the paper and submit it somewhere else.However, the reviews for this paper were particularly infuriating (aren't they always?). Here's a summary:I say: "Thing X is true (citation, citation), so we did thing Y which uses thing X."Reviewer says: […]

March 22, 2013

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