But publishing costs money, and someone has to pay those costs. Administration of the peer review process, copyediting, typesetting and graphics work and, of course, printing all require costly manpower.

The traditional business model has been to load the cost onto institutions and individuals who pay subscription fees to the publishers. But since the advent of the internet wiped out the requirement for one of those major costs (printing), some publishers, new and old, have moved to different business models that allow open access to their articles.

The most common open access models are:

• Gold Open Access: All articles in the  journal are free access. This is most commonly funded by author fees (e.g. PLoS) or advertising (e.g. Biotechniques).
• Hybrid Open Access: Traditional subscription journals where individual articles can be made free either upon payment of a fee by the author or unilaterally by the journal editor (to help market the journal).
• Delayed Open Acess: Traditional subscription journals where all articles become open access after a specified period
• Green Open Access: Personal self-archiving of either the final copy or, to avoid copyright restrictions, the final peer-reviewed pre-print draft of a manuscript you have published elsewhere (click here fore more details on self-archiving).

Open Access is Not Free

All of these models (apart from green open access, which is actually not really a model) have one thing in common with the traditional subscription model: they cost. They are just different ways to obtain the money required to fund the publication process.  In the case of PLoS, for example, the burden of cost is placed on the author (it costs between $1350 and $2900 per author) and in many cases this money has to come from funds that would otherwise have been allocated to fund research. And in the hybrid open access journals the old journal elitism still reigns – the higher the impact factor, the higher the Open Access fee.

So while Open Access might eliminate subscription fees, instead it makes publishing expensive for the author. In a purely Open Access world it is easy to imagine a situation where researchers in a cash-strapped institution or small company are prevented from publishing their latest work in most journals because of the cost.

Is PLoS the way forward?

Now that articles are published on the internet, do we really need journals anyway? Perhaps all we need is a central body that acts as a repository for all literature and organiser and arbiter in the peer review process. This is what PLoS aims to be.

Having one huge, non-profit publisher like PLoS could make things a lot simpler, and less expensive, for authors and readers alike. An all-encompassing PLoS could presumably work hard to reduce author costs to a minimum through cost saving and negotiating grants from governments and others. And PLoS already waives author charges without question to those who say they can’t afford it, so publishing, as well as reading, would be Open Access. Funding bodies too would have to catch up and realise that Open Access costs must be factored in and a centralised, uniform publication process could make this simpler.

Open Access is not perfect yet, but if we could reduce the burden on the author and streamline the publishing process, it could be pretty close.

Do you think PLoS is the way forward? Are there any disadvantages in having one, central publishing body? Let us know in the comments.

Non-fiction plods and trudges. However, ‘The Emperor Of Scent‘ by Chandler Burr is breathtakingly unique. It gallops. It has all the elements of a quintessential page turner. And it’s about science too.

It got me so electrified that I repeatedly found myself reading diagonally, reaching a point where I realised I’m not understanding anything because I’m going too fast, and taking a deep breath as I turned the pages back and re-read it.

The book is about Luca Turin’s (a biophysict for want for a better word, biophychemist to be exact) dramatic course of discovery of an alternative theory on how we smell.

I say ‘alternative’ because Wikipedia says so. But personally, I was thoroughly convinced that it is the theory on the mechanism of olfaction.

The theory is based on the bizarre idea that we smell using an electron spectroscope in our nose.

No, I’m not kidding. Yes, it is achievable using proteins. Yes, there are conclusive experiments for the same. No, he hasn’t yet got a Nobel. But you will be convinced that he deserves one when you turn the final page.

Isn’t it strange how we never give an iota of thought to how we smell?

Turin has a quirky, interesting character which absorbs one immediately. He’s passionate to the verge of obsessed. He’s restless. He’s intentionally oblivious to scientific protocol. He dabbles in everything, talks to everyone: Perfume, tracing submarines, electron tunneling, spectroscopy, insulin, transistors. He has thrillingly eloquent descriptions of scents.

And amazingly, it’s this rich soup of ideas, this intended scorning of the scientific boundaries (Physics, Chemistry, Biology), this compulsive desire to investigate just for the sake of investigating, that allows, and is absolutely essential for his theory to have been conceived.

The book also is scattered with all kinds of witticisms, concepts, and ideas that got my neurons tingling. I’m a sucker for scientific analogies. And Chandler Burr generates them as well as anyone.

He likens wave numbers to musical notes. He personifies electrons to explain electron tunneling in a way anyone can understand. Finally, the book also throws light on the myth we have about science and why it isn’t as perfect as we (or I especially) are wont to think of it.

I will have to read the book thrice at least, to enjoy all those tiny subtleties I missed while I stormed through it. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves science.

To conclude, some excerpts:

(Opening lines): Start with the deepest mystery of smell. No one knows how we do it.

(On Turin’s eloquence with scents): Read here

(On biological theories): Biological theories are created by pretending to be God. Another way of saying this is you put together a biological theory by reverse engineering the human body. You build a theory by looking at what already is and then try to think up a good reason why it would be that way, and how it would work.

(On Phy, Chem, Bio): It is said that both chemists and physicists study the atom, but chemists mess around with the electrons and physicists pass their time on the nucleus. Biology has now metamorphosed into the study of the gene….This is the historical reason people still say “molecular biology” which is actually a name without any meaning, As if there were any other kind of biology anymore. (This had me giggling for a while)

If you have read this book or are interested in Luca Turin’s work, please drop me a comment.

And/or if you have read a great book that you’d like to review on Bitesize Bio, please drop us a line!

It’s no coincidence either — selective breeding and domestication of crops made civilization possible. And in an era when the capacity for cultivating the primary grain and vegetable crops of the world is being stretched to its limits by overpopulation, farmers are still innovating in their breeding schemes.

And today, the cutting-edge tools of innovation in biology lie in the hands of geneticists and the farmers they collaborate with. It’s in that spirit that the recent book Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food was written by Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchack (Amazon US/UK). Ronald, a plant geneticist at UC Davis, and Adamchack, and organic farmer, contribute several chapters each on their separate specialties in casual, friendly writing styles.

In it, they cover a wide breadth of the the subject matter (genetically-modified and organic agriculture) as it interacts with facets of the farm, the lab, consumers, the environment, patent law, and dinner itself. And they do so honestly, trying to represent alternative viewpoints rather fairly in the form of questions from their students, political issues being raised by people fearful of GMOs, and basic considerations relating to how and why growers and biologists alike use certain crop management strategies.

Their citations are also well-organized, connecting the reader to the source material (and especially scientific studies) wherever possible. Well-studied data is of course the best remedy for the politics of GMOs. For someone like myself reading Tomorrow’s Table for information content, that’s invaluable.

For others, maybe you’re looking for a more casual read. Ronald and Adamchack offer this as well, with their conversational writing styles. Or maybe you’re interested not in the science, but in the culinary uses of good agriculture. They’ve got that too, with a handful of recipes interspersed throughout the book.

Regardless, Ronald and Adamchack come across as making an effort to reach out to the average farmer as well as to the lay consumer. And in that, I think, they do an admirable job explaining the marriage between organic farming and genetic manipulation.

As per the reading part, I lately got around to reading Michael Conn and James Parker’s book, The Animal Research War.

In this book, Conn, with an analyst of animal rights (Parker), give a personal account of what it is like to be a medical researcher targeted by such a powerful movement.

It gives the reader a historical overview of animal rights activism, analyses their strategies via case studies, profiles leaders of the animal rights’ movement, corrects the “facts” of many activist’ accusations, and portrays the societal cost of intimidation by violence to animal researchers.

And, most importantly, it exposes the animal rights’ movement as lead by domestic terrorists and their supporters[1].

What Conn does not do is describe in detail the regulations and lengths to which animal researchers go to in order to conduct their research as humanely as possible (he does mention it however, and indicates where readers should go to learn more about this).

For this reason, I don’t think that this is a book meant to educate the general public of the value of animal research nor the actual way in which it is conducted.

It is, however, a wake-up call to the scientific community. Conn writes:

I had read a little bit about animal rights activities when I was in high school in the late 1960s. These activities were not front-page news. Mostly they were grumblings from “antivivisection” groups in the UK, distant and abstract… [page 5]

Over more than a decade I learned two important lessons. First is the fact that some animal rightists misrepresent animal research and do so with impunity… Second, institutions that don’t respond to misrepresentations and half-truths, attempting to hide legitimate and humane research as if it were a dirty little secret, play directly into the hands of animal rightists and extremists.

Were my harrassers terrorists? It’s your call, but remember that their actions were designed to coerce me by the threat of violence…[page 8]

Conn’s message is clear: institutions and communities must confront animal activism, not shrink away from it. They must stand up and communicate with the public.

In that interest, the call from the scientific community for authorities to confront animal activism is rising. One very good example is an editorial in a recent issue of the journal Nature.

Against vicious activism: The US authorities need to strengthen their position on the use of animals in experiments.

Seven activists convicted of carrying out a campaign of intimidation against the animal-testing firm Huntingdon Life Sciences in Huntingdon, UK, were last month sentenced to between 4 and 11 years in prison. Hopefully, these sentences will stop future UK activists from using similar tactics, which included threats, hoax bombs, character assassination and property destruction.

Unfortunately, such tactics are increasingly being used by activists attacking scientists in California, where researchers who use animals are facing threats that include doorstep firebombs. The authorities trying to deal with this problem can find much in the UK authorities’ approach to emulate.

I couldn’t agree more.

Note1: Interesting Quotes from PETA Officials:

1. “Our ultimate goal is total animal liberation”
-Ingrid Newkirk (President and co-founder)

That means NO meat, milk, zoos, wool, pets…

2. â€?blowing stuff up and smashing windows” is â€?a great way to bring about animal liberation.”
-Bruce Friedrich (vegetarian campaign coordinator)

3.â€?even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we would be against it.”
-Ingrid Newkirk (President and co-founder)

4.”Until [your mommy stops wearing fur], keep your doggie or kitty friends away from mommy-she’s an animal killer!”
-PETA comic book geared towards kids

5.”Arson, property destruction, burglary and theft are ‘acceptable crimes’ when used for the animal cause.”
-Alex Pacheco, Director, PETA

6.”Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.” -Ingrid Newkirk (Washington Post, November, 13, 1983)

7. “There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all mammals.”

- Ingrid Newkirk (Vogue, September 1989; where she also said  “Even if animals research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.”)

Note2: There is a difference between supporting animal welfare and animal rights.

Dawkins coined the term selfish gene as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution, which holds that evolution is best viewed as acting on genes and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection based on genes. In chapter three, he explains:

“Genes are competing directly with their alleles for survival, since their alleles in the gene pool are rivals for their slot on the chromosomes of future generations. Any gene that behaves in such a way as to increase its own survival chances in the gene pool at the expense of its alleles will, by definition, tautologously, tend to survive. The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.”

This way of looking at selection, from the perspective of the gene, gets extended to such emergent behaviors as kin selection, eusociality, and altruism, by way of the fact that an allele not only gets propogated through the gene pool by helping the immediate organism survive, it also helps other copies of itself survive in other members of its species. Meaning, altruistic behavior is a natural outcome of selection, even if it is bad for the individual organism, because the genes themselves are acting selfishly by protecting other copies of themselves. Of course most genes don’t directly influence behavior, meaning that most genes are, at best, indirectly selfish – but in the case of parochial altruism (within a family or other inbreeding group), most organisms benefiting from altruism likely carry copies of the same non-behavioral genes anyway.

At a time when the idea of group selection was being shown not to be a stable evolutionary strategy, this model provided one way of explaining why kin selection was a much better description of sociality in animals.

For these reasons, The Selfish Gene has rightfully received wide acclaim. But, it is just a metaphor, and no gene is an island. Each gene must act in concert with the rest of an organisms’ genome, which in turn must act to cooperate and compete with other members of its species and within a given ecosystem. As a result, tradeoffs get made. Many times, it is not the allele that is most effective at performing its usual task that is propogated in the gene pool, but the allele that works best with the rest of its genome to generate a successful phenotype that survives.

As a result, one of the primary scientific criticisms of The Selfish Gene has been on the idea that the gene is the unit of selection. Most even criticize the idea that the genome is the unit of selection, instead arguing that the phenotype is what is being selected. Instead, the gene is the unit of evolution, some argue, viewing evolution as the long-term trend of shifting allele frequencies.

Being a molecular biologist and not having studied evolutionary biology formally, my first reaction was to take these two perspectives at face value. After a thrashing from Larry Moran (see the comments), my conclusion that macroevolution is just a “very long-term trend of shifting allele frequencies” was blown apart. As a result, I’ve since come around to be very critical of the view that the gene is the unit of evolution.

Instead, the population appears to be the best candidate as the unit of evolution, with phyletic change (shifting allele frequencies) of a single population over time being “microevolution”, and isolation/divergence of two or more populations representing “macroevolution”.

All of this means that the impact of The Selfish Gene is very restricted as a metaphor of how evolution occurs, being successful at solving a very specific set of problems relating to social animal behavior, and is limited to discussions of phyletic change.

The implications for social behavior coming out of The Selfish Gene has also directed much of Richard Dawkins’ career since its publication. His follow-up book, The Extended Phenotype, subtitled “The Gene as the Unit of Selection”, and later, “The Long Reach of the Gene”, argued that a gene may effect an organism’s environment through that organism’s behaviour, citing as examples caddis houses and beaver dams.

He also coined the term “meme” (the cultural equivalent of a gene) to describe how Darwinian principles might be extended to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena, an idea that has been developed into a new area of study principally by Susan Blackmore. Dawkins used the word meme to refer to any cultural entity which an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as capable of such replication, generally through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (although not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Most notably in his more recent book, The God Delusion, he argues that religions are basically memes (among other things).

I don’t know if his arguments about religions as memes are all that great, but he sparks discussion either way about how it is useful to view the origins of social behaviors. But that’s a story for another post, some other time.

Some of his articles have been boons for high school teachers trying to relate to their students, such as an article on the evolution of Mickey Mouse, which was republished in The Panda’s Thumb. Other essays had different impacts, including things on punctuated equilibria, spandrels, and the false appearance of progress in evolution. Still other times, he took direct issue with Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene, and to a lesser degree, E.O. Wilson and Sociobiology.

The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Amazon US/UK) is sort of a posthumous “highlight reel”.

I’ve never been quite sure if this style of book, a “greatest hits” if you will, is the way to go, as it cuts so much out. On the other hand, the number of essays and books that Gould authored are probably intimidating to most potential readers. Maybe only the most dedicated fans would be willing to go that far. Heck, I know that I had only read Full House, The Mismeasure of Man, and The Lying Stones of Marrekeck, although I’ve heard many of his essays described to me by teachers and professors in high school and college.

So I think that The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould was a great book for me.

The review from Publisher’s Weekly:

Harvard professor and National Book Award winner Gould was one of science’s best ambassadors to the general public until his death at 60 in 2002. These 44 essays represent his best-known pieces from his books and from essays for Natural History magazine, as well as never before published speeches. The editors have selected pieces on a wide range of subjects—from the ever-shrinking Hershey Bar, to his and Niles Eldredge’s theory of punctuated evolution and Freud’s adaptation of the (now abandoned) biological notion of recapitulation—which showcase Gould’s immense curiosity as well as his skill at explaining even the most obscure topics with clear and vivid language. Autobiographical essays are followed by scientific ruminations on evolutionary theory and how it has been understood, misunderstood and misused, ever since Darwin put pen to paper. This collection demonstrates Gould’s passion for life as well as his enthusiasm for, and awe at, the “majesty” of “the continuity of the tree of life for 3.5 billion years.” Gould’s many fans, as well as new readers, should find this collection intriguing as well as entertaining, an eminently suitable last hurrah for an amazing thinker.

So, psyching myself up for a new postdoc position, I went out and got a copy of Paul J. Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, wondering if writing experts had any helpful suggestions.

Reading through Silvia’s book, it occurred to me that while building a set of habits is much needed for academic writing (which the book does rather well), writing for science-related reasons really shouldn’t be as frightening as some might make it out to be. One passage from the book echoed this impression of mine:

When people tell me they have writer’s block, I ask, “What on earth are you trying to write?” Academic writers cannot get writers block. Don’t confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department. You’re not crafting a deep narrative or composing metaphors that expose mysteries of the human heart. The subtlety of your analysis of variance will not move readers to tears, although the tediousness of it might.

What’s more, this tedious analysis is tied to just the thing that makes you a good scientist or not: your ability to choose and plan good experiments. That’s an important thing that you have to write about — the experiments you have done and those that you want to do. And sure enough, Silvia spends a lot of time in the book talking about writing for journals and for books.

But that’s only half the story of course. You have to sell your research, especially when writing grant proposals. Grantsmanship is a skill, no doubt about it, and it’s perhaps the most difficult and stressful aspect of academic writing. You need to be shrewd in selecting a title, a popular subject, and a solid body of data to draw from. And even then, not having the most sympathetic refereeing group can really hurt.

The worst part of it is that these issues of grantsmanship aren’t so much a skill that you can teach, or learn from a book.

Some scientists have it, and others don’t.

Unlike in evolutionary biology, where there are many current issues informed by historical research and which has a fair amount of engagement between practicing scientists and historians, much of the story of molecular biology has been told sporadically and unevenly, often in the memoirs of scientists or by science journalists.

Navigating through these numerous popular histories of molecular and cell biology can be challenging.

Some suffer from a  bias toward the achievements of the English-speaking research community, or often the tell only the story of a single research group; others are so popular as to sound condescending to the scientifically literate.  (Many fun books are autobiographical rather than historical, from Watson’s The Double Helix to Francois Jacob’s meditative and literary The Statue Within, as much war memoir as a scientific tale).

I recently reread Michel Morange’s A History of Molecular Biology, and think it avoids these pitfalls well, and makes a great first read for those who are curious about the history their field.

Morange, a molecular biologist at the Ecole Normale Superieure, is at his best chronicling the early days of molecular biology.

Almost everyone agrees that Post-War molecular biology was shaped – to some extent – by the contributions of physicists who joined many labs in biochemistry and genetics.

But there is a fair amount of debate regarding how influential they were.

Morange argues that the reductionism of, and sometimes bewilderment at biochemical complexity which many physicists brought to their newly adopted field led them toward a “unifying vision,” simplifying things as much as possible, and this greatly accelerated the pace of research.

Salvador Luria, for instance, was influenced by the reasoning of physicists to break with the experimental models of classical genetics and develop new calculation methods for phenomena such as mutation rates. He drew from statistical physics in demonstrating Darwinian inheritance among bacteria.

Morange makes a good case that the technical and procedural emphasis in molecular biology has been enhanced, if not created, by the influence of twentieth-century physics.  He writes:

“The development of the techniques of genetic engineering shows that the molecular understanding of biology, acquired between 1940 and 1965, was an operational understanding. Today both molecular biologists and physicists share a scientific world view in which knowledge and action are intimately linked.

Physicists played an important role in this change in the form of biological knowledge, by the way they conceived and carried out their     experiments.  In following Delbruck and asking simple questions of biological objects, they     obliged these objects to reply in the same language.” (p101)

For readers who’ve not encountered the classic works of Fran?§ois Jacob and others, Morange introduces  “The “French School,” recounting how what initially were enzymology  research groups engendered some intrinsic priorities of molecular biology.

On the question of  how France, whose post-war institutions lagged behind in classical genetics and even biochemistry, managed to accomplish so much in molecular biology, the institutional history is instructive.  Morange points to the scientists at The Pasteur Institute, which was the autonomous center of the most crucial French research in the 1960s, including the development of the allosteric model.

It’s  impressive to see how far they made their resources stretch and how vast their collaboration was.

After a more than a decade, this book holds up well. Some readers may disagree with the definition that starts the book:  molecular biology “consists of all those techniques and discoveries that make it possible to carry out a molecular analysis of the most fundamental biological processes – those involved in the stability, survival, and reproduction of genes.”

Much more dated and tendentious (early 1990s) is Morange’s claim that molecular biology has yet to make a significant impact on evolutionary biology.  Evo-devo’s meteoric rise complicates this considerably.

One chapter, “Molecular Biology in the Life Sciences,” makes the claim that nothing of value has come from strictly molecular approaches to evolutionary biology or population genetics (p249), and speculates if Ernst Mayr’s distinction between “individual” and “population” biologies will disappear, to the detriment of one or both fields.

As our understanding of regulatory genes and developmental biology increases, it seems less likely that this is less likely to be the case.

Finally, Morange contrasts the difference between our current gene-centered molecular biology, and it’s precursor, which focused on proteins via enzymology.

This distinction is crucial, because before the working out of the genetic code, and the development of molecular genetics, separating molecular biology from its precursor disciplines (such as genetics and biochemistry) was difficult: so was figuring out when the newer discipline emerged.

The contemporary molecular biology began when it became less defined by study of structures and more concerned with information:

“The new molecular biology has become a way of “reading” life. “Classical” molecular biology had shown the importance of genetic code, of information linked to nucleotide sequences. Sanger, followed by many others, sequenced proteins and substituted the linear sequence of their amino acids for their structural complexity.

But this classical molecular biology was centered on proteins. In experimental terms, studies of the structure, function, and specificity of proteins came before studies of their amino acid sequence, anticipating the study of the nucleotide sequence in the genes that coded for these proteins.”  (215)

If the development of molecular biology was directed historically by physics, its current boundaries have been shaped by technology more than any field of “pure” science.

Morange writes that the technological discoveries like gene cloning, DNA polymerase, and PCR made the “new molecular biology,” which is a field defined by its techniques of  “reading” biological information.

Putting aside the metaphor of “reading”life – which has a fascinating but very off-topic history, I’m not certain I find the science/technology distinction useful in this context.

But I think readers will find these latter chapters raise interesting questions about whether to view molecular biology as a foremost as a scientific field or collection of experimental approaches which are useful in other biological and biomedical disciplines.

Check it out in our bookstore, and if you read it, let us know what you think.

Russell Korobkin’s book Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology is the first book to address not just embryo destruction but the full range of important policy questions raised by stem cell research and regenerative medicine.

The book description available on the book’s website is as follows:

“The explosion of interest in stem cell research raises a raft of controversial policy questions. When should human embryos be used to create stem cells? Should cloning be outlawed? Should egg and tissue donors be paid? Should we allow scientists to patent stem cells? Is the government entitled to a portion of the revenue from stem cell technology created with public funds? How should the regulators and courts balance the competing goals of access to revolutionary treatments and protection of the public from unknown risks?

“Russell Korobkin, with contributions from Stephen R. Munzer, provides the first thorough discussion and analysis of these and other unsettled questions of law, policy, and ethics that surround stem cell science. His clear and concise description of complex problems coupled with logical and well-balanced conclusions makes this volume essential reading for all Americans, general readers and experts alike, interested in the promise of stem cell research and the future of regenerative medicine.”

The chapter descriptions are pretty helpful as well.

I’m no expert of law, but it appeared like a very comprehensive and well-researched book. To someone looking for a book that delves into the science of stem cell research, this isn’t the book for you though. Oh, it provides several-page descriptions of the relevant science that are accurate, for non-scientists, but this is a book about law and legislation.

If that’s what you’re looking for, then by all means, check this book out.

I’ve identified these key gizmos – books, lectures and software tools – along the path of my career transition from lab rat molecular geneticist to computational biologist slash programmer slash software engineer,  – I think, once you’ve tried them, you won’t be able to live without them either.

Presentation Fever. This one is so essential it belongs on the top of the list.

If you’re like me, you spend a large amount of time either in seminars, preparing to give a seminar, or
running from seminar to seminar. So my first essential gizmo in the toolbox is a book… about
how to prepare the most awesome Powerpoint presentation ever. This book, “Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck” by Rick Altman, has become my bible.

If you read it you will be able to identify the deadliest of sins committed in every seminar you attend, or give.

It is the BEST book for telling you what to do AND what NOT to do while presenting yourself. For example,
have you ever been in a seminar while the presenter was nervously making circles upon circles on the screen with a laser pointer until the audience is heaving in synchrony?

Rick Altman exposes the most annoying habits of distraction, and how to avoid them. Do us all a favor and give a copy of this book to every science grad student you know.

Time management. Speaking of grad school, another essential for every grad student is an academic lecture on time management by Randy Pausch. Okay, this is not really a gizmo any more than a book is, but this lecture should be required learning material for every incoming graduate student. Take Randy’s wonderful free advice and run with it. You can view the lecture online by clicking here.

Now, onto the software gizmos…

Convert doc2pdf. Ever need to convert just one or two Word documents to pdf format?  What can I say but WOW! Go online and convert your resume or other Word document to PDF in an instant… and your Done!

Snagit. I use this little tool almost every day of my life. I never thought I’d do this, but I snap bitmap images of everything from web results pages to gnuplot graphs (see below) while documenting my research electronically. It is even faster to do this than to write a description of what I did today. I can’t live
without it.

ThumbsPlus. Hands-down the most useful picture editor and organizer there is.

PhotoGadget. I shudder to think you bought one of those high-end, high-price, space-hogging photo editors. Check out my avatar built using this exceptional right-click gadget.

BioVenn. This is a very cool way to create and display overlapping sets of data. John would be proud.

eTBlast Website. PubMed on steroids. Nuff said.

Norton Ghost. I can’t count the number of times this program has saved my ARtichokeS. Not free, but it sometimes will be bundled free with a new external hard drive. Scout out the HD specials online.

SpySweeper. If you don’t get in the habit of cleaning house, you will just end up eventually re-installing your system with Norton Ghost. Just be careful out there.

Gnuplot for windows (wgnuplot). I am sooo sick of those Excel-generated blue diamonds and pink squares! Those of you who churn out these plots know who you are. You should be ashamed of yourself. Learn some new tricks and buy that book I was talking about up top.

So those are the gizmos I would consider to be my essential basics I have in my toolbox. Stay tuned and I will delve deeper to bring you more gems that I use in my work, and that you will hopefully find useful too.

What gizmos could you not live without?