Only a handful of people ever become world experts in their field. The rest attain somewhere between a functional and world expert level of knowledge.

So what makes the best better than the rest? Are they born with greater knowledge? Intelligence? Inner strength?

Well, the latter is the more likely. Although some world experts are genuine geniuses, most are simply people of normal intelligence who happened to work harder than anyone else. If you want to be a world expert in your field, this is good news. The ability to work hard and efficiently at becoming an expert is much easier to attain than genius.

So how do you learn to become an expert? Read more »

It’s Friday again, and that means ‘around the blogs.’ Included are a few links to topics on personal development, science itself, and public understanding of science.

Google Maps meets bacterial genomes - I had missed this for my Around the Blogs post two weeks ago, and am making up for it here - Sandra introduces “Genome Projector,” a searchable database browser with zoomable user interface using Google Map API. Genome Projector currently contains 4 views: Genome map, Plasmid map, Pathway map, and DNA walk. Neat!
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For routine procedures involving cell lysis, it’s good for the lysis to be… routine. Of course there are many good and freely available lysis buffer recipes but for convenience and reproducibility you can’t beat pre-made lysis buffers.

Focusing on lysis for protein extraction, here are some of the reagents available for fast and efficient lysis of some of the most common cell types you might be using. Read more »

Do you remember how around ten years ago, gene therapy was supposed to cure various inheritable diseases? Or how various discoveries herald the expected development of new vaccines (AIDS being a notable example)?

Most scientists would agree that they try to ’sell’ their research to publishers and foundations by exaggerating the importance of findings or forthcoming studies, to advance their careers. And the media, doing their jobs by reporting the news and trying to sell advertising space, is accomplice to that. Those aside, there really is something to the tendency to optimistically search for the simple answer to a given problem, and to accept the simple solution unquestioningly. Or young researchers will jump into such a field that is going through a ‘fad,’ hoping to get carried away with the success of promised new advances.
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Injecting human DNA into a non-human egg is a “monstrous” undertaking, of “Frankenstein” proportions, according to the Catholic church. Next they’ll be telling us that The Earth is flat.

These comments, delivered in an Easter sermon by a high-ranking Cardinal, are part of the Catholic church’s recent campaign against The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, currently passing through the UK House of Commons. Read more »

Amid the misguided rhetoric of some who suggest that the science community cease trying to share their expertise and knowledge with the public, and the all-to-common response to expertise, I came across a thoughtful piece worth commenting on here.

Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young posts on the problem of expertise. He writes:

The problem of expertise is not that this special knowledge is undesirable. Special knowledge is both socially useful and personally satisfying. Rather the problem of expertise is a social problem, namely how those who know better should relate to those who don’t.

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Once again, we bring together the best of this weeks posts from around the science blogosphere for your delectation. This week: Stress-sensing bacteria, mad biologists and how beer could seriously affect your publication rate. Read more »

A minireview recently in Genomics caught my eye with the title Coexpression, coregulation, and cofunctionality of neighboring genes in eukaryotic genomes that sounded just like a passage that I recalled from Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene:

…the ‘environment’ of a gene consists largely of other genes, each of which is itself being selected for its ability to cooperate with its environment of other genes. (page 39) … Genes are selected, not as ‘good’ in isolation, but as good at working against the background of other genes in the gene pool. A good gene must be compatible with, and complementary to, the other genes with whom it has to share a long succession of bodies. (page 84)

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A while back, I wrote an article on 5 DNA ligation tips that could improve the efficiency of your cloning procedures. It proved to be quite a popular article so here are another 3 tips that might make your ligations even better! Read more »

Creationism isn’t the only form of pseudoscience. One form that specifically targets biomedical, and especially pre-clinical, research is that of animal rights activism. Often resorting to terrorism, they are not above arson, home invasion, and vandalism. Groups such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Animal Liberation Brigade (ALB) in Southern California and their counterparts in the UK have repeatedly and publicly advocated violence against researchers who use animals.

A couple weeks ago, David Gorski of Science-Based Medicine (which I linked to in last Friday’s “Around the Blogs”) took on the seemingly scientific arguments that some opponents of animal research and animal rights activists like to invoke, arguments increasingly used in addition to the moral arguments that extremists use to justify their actions. Here, I would like to draw attention to David’s article, as a means of sharing my concern. Read more »