In my strictly rationed free time, I liked to visit Natural History Museums, and it being Darwin Year and all, I have in the last month or so visited two Darwin-themed exhibits. [I do realise that the preceding statement may be one of the least surprising revelations that has ever been divulged in the long history of this blog.] I feel that I am starting to get a general feeling for the man, and what drove him. One thing that I find interesting is how he never intended to revolutionize biology, and paradoxically why that made him the perfect man to do so.
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Archive for March, 2009
On Becoming The Man You Want To Be
Monday, March 30th, 2009On Worm Music
Friday, March 20th, 2009A bit of advice, reader: it is worth getting up early every now and again. Yesterday, some arcane alignment of celestial spheres was achieved, and I found myself awake and dressed at an oddly early hour, with swathes of time before I needed to catch the bus. So, I decided to read up on the News and Features Feed of my academic bankroller, to pass the time and to enrich my connection to the world of Biomedical Somethings. The WTNF often has strange and wonderful information on some of the more left-field things they fund, and I can highly recommend browsing it yourself sometime (perhaps you‘ll learn about a live-action film on sperm, or textiles inspired by mutilation).
One thing of interest that I learned was that a composer named Keith Johnson has just finished a 6-month stint as the resident artist (funded by the Wellcome Trust) in the Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biologyat University College London. Keith had composed various musics inspired by Stephen Nurrish’s work on the effect of serotonin on the brain of nematode worms, and they (the music, not the worms, though they got a look in too) were to be performed yesterday night at the Dana Centre in London. The event was called ‘Music from the Worm Farm’, and promised piano and ensemble music, and talks on composing the music and the science that it was inspired by. I was there faster than you can say ‘Worm Music!’.
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On The Digital Embryo and Some Very Cool Videos
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
Reader, I have a bit of a visual treat for you today. A group at the Heidelberg branch of the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) published a paper in Science a few months ago, detailing a full microscopic scan of the first 24 hours in the development of the zebrafish embryo, from a handful of cells to when the first structuring starts to occur. And, in doing so, they produced some startlingly beautiful videos of the first moments of life.
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On Excel-Damaged Genes
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Hello again, it has been a while. In the half an hour I have before an afternoon seminar, I thought I’d share an interesting and amusing paper that came out a few years back. It is entitled Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics. It is available for free on PubMed Central (three cheers for Open Access!).
The paper is about a distressing clash between the sublime and the mundane. The first element of the two is the DNA microarray, a technology that allows you to measure the expression of a very large number of genes (a technology that is now reaching the end of it’s lifespan, a point that I may discuss another day). The output of these experiments tends to be large text tables, in which rows correspond to genes and columns correspond to different individuals, which each entry giving an indicated of the level of gene expression. Often, this data will be processed and analysed with a variety of high tech algorithms to discover genes that differ among classes of people (say diseased and healthy), or to model the expression mathematically, or to reconstruct the networks that underly expression.