Last October, Nobel laureate and biochemist Arthur Kornberg passed away, and I’ve finally gotten around to reading his book For the Love of Enzymes.

While there’s a lot in the book to talk about, for this post I’m focusing on just one passing reference that Kornberg makes (pages 129-134) on NIH and the use of English as the language of science. In it, Kornberg is describing the factors that made NIH a huge success, including 7 major policy decisions, the first four of which I think are most profound: Read more »

It’s Friday, so let’s take a glance Around the Blogs and see what’s happening.

Science and Society
Banned Performance Enhancing Drug Classes
Basic Concepts: Crop Genetic Engineering

Publishing Science
Reed Elsevier Caught Copying My Content Without My Permission
Bring Me Your Huddled Manuscripts

Lab Life
Postdoc Personalities

The Science Itself
Solving the Cell: Will the Future of Biology be Boring?
Gene Transfer in Bacterial Arms Races

Last Thursday’s post on the animal rights firebombing in Santa Cruz earned me a couple outraged comments, so I suppose I did something right. I’m sure they don’t realize it, but they’re comments reflect what I was saying.

That is, commenter Connee said, “[Animal Rights] people value ALL life but have NO problem with destroying the property of people who commit acts of violence against sentient beings.” That would be the words from a supporter of terrorism - “I will hurt you if you get in the way of my extremist ideology.”
Read more »

At the end of the day, all you want to know from a restriction screen is whether your insert is in the vector. But while the standard “chop out a fragment” approach favored by most researchers provides good information about the presence of the insert and its orientation, it only uses a portion of the potential power of a restriction screen.

It doesn’t take much more work to set up a restriction screen that is more informative, allowing you to confirm a negative result and the identity of your vector, at the same time as checking for your insert. Here’s a few ways you can soup-up your restriction digest. Read more »

Two recent articles that I came across clearly illustrate ways in which cellular asymmetry is both easily established by basic factors, and provide the basis for processes like cellular polarity and aging. One cannot claim with certainty what these findings in mathematical models and yeast, respectively, impart to our understanding of human health. But they do allow us to generally describe very basic rules for the operation of eukaryotic life.
Read more »

In this week’s round-up of bio-related blogs: The smell of the sea breeze, corporal punishment in the lab and a surprising side-dish that comes with your sushi.

Read more »

It would seem that animal rights’ terrorists are at it again, this time with a spate of firebombings in SouthernNorthern California.

One might be sympathetic to the child-like adoration of animals, without a doubt. You might even naively think that researchers using animal test subjects are some kind of torturers. Then you find out that there are protections for the ethical treatment of animals for research, like the Animal Welfare Act. And then you find out that this research saves lives in the long run. Read more »

We’ve talked before about ways to use technology to help you with the vital job of keeping up with the literature (see here and here). Now here is another one to add to the list.

This approach was first flagged up by Eric (thanks Eric!) in a comment on Carrie’s article about improving your Pubmed searches. The idea is to use the combined power of Pubmed, RSS feeds and iGoogle to create a page of RSS feed boxes that will keep you continually updated on articles containing your keywords of interest, or from specific authors or journals. It is nice and simple, but I find it an incredibly powerful and fast method of literature scanning compared to email updates or browsing each journal individually.

So here’s how to set it up. Read more »

I finally got around to purchasing and reading a copy of Carl Zimmer’s Microcosm: E.coli and the New Science of Life, and I have to chastise myself for not reading it sooner.

In Microcosm, Zimmer has eloquently condensed a century of scientific study surrounding Eschericia coli into an accurate and flowing story readable by anyone with even just a modest understanding of biology.
Read more »

Restriction digests are simple. But underestimate them at your peril. Restriction digests and screens are the cornerstone of many procedures in molecular biology so getting them right, and knowing how to tell if they are going wrong, is an essential skill.

This quick guide to setting up and troubleshooting restriction screens will tell you what you need to know. Read more »