Today’s issue of the Biotechniques journal is well worth a read. The journal celebrates 25 years of existence with a series of retrospective articles covering developments in various fields over the same period.

Among the picks are:

Twenty-five years of quantitative PCR for gene expression analysis

Bacterial genetics: past achievements, present state of the field, and future challenges

Over the rainbow: 25 years of confocal imaging

Mass spectrometry: m/z 1983–2008

Kits and their unique role in molecular biology: a brief retrospective

Remember that access to Biotechniques is free, but registration is required.

Do you remember where you were 25 years ago?

Here’s the context: “Eighty years after Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin on a moldy culture dish, the battle against killer bugs is faltering. More and more bacteria - including insidious tuberculosis strains that have cropped up² - now shrug off almost all antibiotics. Meanwhile, few new antibiotics are reaching the clinic. Medicine is on the defensive, says microbiologist and physician Stuart Levy of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. ‘We are not keeping up with the bacteria.’” Antibiotic resistance has been a remarkable instance of natural selection in progress.

Now there is something even more remarkable concerning the seemingly endless capacity for microbes to do just about anything biochemically. They can even bacteria that can survive with nothing to eat but antibiotics. It’s not clear why the soil bacteria examined by Geneticist George Church and team appear particularly skilled at converting cytotoxic antibiotics into a carbon source, nor whether this is connected to the development of antibiotic resistance in human-specific pathogens - it’s just plain surprising.
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Following up on my post last week about Emerging Biomedical Technologies and their Promise, Nature had a timely editorial in last week’s issue. In Broken Promises, the article describes precisely the phenomenon that I was referring to:

Intense public support for clinical research can be a mixed blessing — and the hunt for a vaccine against AIDS offers an important lesson for many biomedical initiatives on what can go wrong.

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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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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 »

The Howard Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has announced a $300 million competition to support the USA’s best early career scientists in biological and medical disciplines.

The recipients of the seventy available awards will be selected from researchers who have led independent laboratories for two to six years at one of the 200 eligible U.S. medical schools, universities and research institutes. They will receive a six year, non-renewable funding award, which includes full salary and research support and will remain affiliated with their home institutes.

The initiative is designed to plug the funding gap for scientists who are nearing the end of the institutional start-up funds awarded with their first faculty position, and are therefore coming under pressure to apply for federal research grants.

“We know there is a tremendous need for flexible funding to support scientists who are two to six years into their independent research careers. This is a critical time for these scientists because many have not yet been able to obtain the kind of stable funding that would permit them to move their own research in creative new directions,” said Jack Dixon, HHMI vice president and chief scientific officer.

HHMI plans to choose the recipients on the basis of “people, not projects” and hopes that the funding awards will allow these early career scientists the freedom to explore and, if necessary, to change the direction of their research.

More information on the competition, it’s eligibility requirements and how to apply can be found by clicking here.

The problem with being the big kid in the playground is that there will always want to be someone who wants to bring you down. And in the playground of stem cells and cloning, few come bigger than Professor Sir Ian Wilmut.

In recent years, Prof. Wilmut has been hounded through the courts and in the press by some former classmates with a grudge.

Now they have pulled an audacious prank - raising a petition asking to have Prof Wilmut’s recently awarded knighthood quashed. The full petition can be read here (you will have to scroll down through a fair amount of rambling accusations before you reach it).

Quite frankly, this is an embarrassment to science. The campaign to bring this giant down is based on nothing but false logic and heresy. Read more »

The big biotech news of the week has been the successful construction of an artificial bacterial genome by J. Craig Venter et al., chemically assembled from scratch. While the genome is little more than a watermarked version of the wild bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, it is now technologically feasible to construct custom genomes for bacteria of our choosing. Jorge Cham of PHD Comics has the appropriate levity for the situation:

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