Update

What is this post all about? Update?

Updating someone's else status or author's one?

Actually just writing down some of the stuffs I've been doing lately.

I'm listening to River Flows In You in all forms of musics, with piano accompaniment, lyrics, remix.

Most of the stocks are going down. Apple (AAPL) drops heavily from ~ $390 to 381.02. Bank of America (BAC) stocks are going down like crazy from 5.74 to 5.20. Can you imagine I just bombed my investment in this? If I have the capability to know in advance with some kind of prescient power, I'll definitely invest in 'put' option trading. But then..it will be another story.

Last week a photo of aircraft carrier sailing or testing in south china sea was making news. That carrier was the remnant of Cold War. What Ukraine had is just the hull from Russia and as usual China bought that piece of iron floating in water from Ukraine. China, with a bit of brush and painting, make this giant carrier into operational carrier and seems to be testing in its own waters. They claim the carrier will be fully operational at the end of next year 2012. One week later that news, US announced that they expect to base their military aircrafts in Singapore. All kind of political display or strategic diplomatic war between established giant, US and sleeping giant, China?

Cell press = Victorian Literature

Title explains it, doesn't it?

You picked up "Great Expectations" or "Wuthering Heights". You know Pip has expectation, of course it is the "great" one, and Heathcliff has some personalities you can imagine nowadays, but surely you wouldn't figure it out in Victorian age. But writers will drag you reading and reading with their clear illustration of characters' feelings at every single moment. But you know what it's gonna be.

With that in your mind and expectation, you'll be able to go through the Cell. 

Analysis on Biggest Gathering

It has been a week after my conference attending. I have been meaning to post what I found from this annual biggest gathering and how I reflected upon myself for what scientific research is all about.

Floor plan

The convention center has 3 floors; each floor holding lecture sessions and obviously the ground floor has more sessions and packed with seemingly seasonal opening of coffee shop, food court, and shoe shiners in the last few days. Although each lecture room can accommodate at least 300 science enthusiasts, they are more likely filled with pockets of attendees who usually come with AACR program books and plan their next lecture visits in the lecture room. If you still don’t get it, here’s why: the lecture room is for next lecture planning room. Needless to say, some tech savvy well-suited guys or ladies come with their iPad and apparently enjoying touching or slashing the screen. I can’t say if they enjoyed the lecture though.

Lecture

I’d be belittling the conference if I say it brings nothing but the big shot. Regardless of whether the conference sparks scientific interest, I myself happened to ask what the purpose of conference is (rather than usual grandiloquent objective and potentially beneficial lectures by leading experts).  

Analysis

Did I get core element of the conference? Be it scientific interest, research theme, any inspiring speech, well-planned experiments?

The short answer is “NO”, followed by a long analysis of why:

For my level of fresh graduate, it is more like potential F1 driver driving in the streets of metropolitan area. He has a potential to become F1 driver someday. But in the streets of twists and turns, he can’t drive fast; the rules are different; the street is not track; he is not known; nobody gives a damn. Everything is totally different if he ever wonders how fast he would have driven and what else he could have learnt from the street vendors. 

I first start with Lecture. While it’s worth praising that every angle of research theme is available to attend during the day, I found most of the time the rooms were not well attended. The entire purpose of conference is to put some leading authors in the limelight and let them speak in front of those who would ever sit and enjoy seeing the leading author lips moving. That’s the first impression I got attending the lecture. Considering the availability of their works from internet, I found nothing more different than presentation from their published works. Who would else present their essential data before they get them published? As a grad student, could I approach those leading experts and ask their advice on my project? How many of audiences usually approach the speaker after the talk? The talk is more like “This is what we did, This is what we got, That’s why I presented that”. Asking questions and answering is more like each party threading on a battle ground with cautious motion. You will never get an answer “Yikes, you nailed me. We forgot to use that one too.” If you ever get such an answer, it will inevitably lower the speaker’s reputation and his/her spongy brains in the limelight, obviously in a bad way. So the entire presentation, asking questions, and answering events eventually become like a political play or a pre-defined show of “We’ve done that, We’ve found that.” The second impression I got from the lecture (not only from here the conference, but from others as well) was “Presentation or seminars are just a show” unless (1) it is a small group of like-minded scientists discussing deep into the core problem of the projects in hand or (2) the speakers provoke some idea or spark some interest. Other than that, it’s just a show where everybody goes if it would ever produce some excitement. In reality, 99% would never.    

I’m planning to write my musing on Impact Factor as well. And yes, it’s all about the Journals and perception. 

AACR Annual Conference

Well I have been having this thought about how far the scientific endeavor in research has become disjointed. No more day could prove this right than attending the annual biggest gathering of like-minded scientists packing isolatedly (oxymorons) and appearing smartpants in their truck pants.

Anyway with a mere connection speed available here, I will relegate my detailed post about the conference in the later post.

And my manuscript changed to "under editorial consideration" from "under consideration". What does it mean? No idea. And it's April fool day. So does it count?

Manuscript Venting

I have been writing a manuscript and it seems forever, of course, considering going through every responsible co-author's comments and edition. While the overall goal of this endeavor is to get the manuscript past the reviewers’ wrath or unforeseen comments, the main author or the first author unavoidably seems to bear the brunt of other co-authors’ irresponsibility and reckless comments. As to fulfill the entire business of manuscript publication, we tried every possible technique to prove that our finding might be useful for other researchers in the same field who might be toying with the idea of testing his hypothesis in this very technique.

Preparing the main manuscript, figures, tables, supplementary and all, I cannot help but to think of the main author as an expert civil engineer who carefully designs the floor plan or lay the groundwork for this entire industry in his hands. On the other hand, there are people or quite commonly known as VIPs, coming late and comment this and that while pointing their fingers aimlessly. Because of their astute comment on reminding putting the toilet tissue in the toilet, they are well received and claimed “Very professional advice”. 

I am not a whiner myself and do the job to my best. My principle is “Give credits where credit is due.” Don’t patronize me just because you made a very useful edition. I struggled myself learning the journal particular format and author guideline policy while keeping the writing as concise and grammar error free. Besides, I am not paid to write only manuscript; my job entails doing benchwork for ongoing project as well. I commend every one if our purpose is to make our paper look good, and outstanding. But, I’ll say again, BUT!!!.... don’t try to condescend me as if my particular writing is rookie. If you dare, why not you develop your own idea and take the first author responsibility? 

How many percentages?

I recently found out a very interesting aspect of other percentage of our human genomes which has 3 billion base pairs. Looking through literatures, though I cannot safely say which percentage of our genome is functioning to the best of our knowledge, it is well known that only 2 to 3 % of our 3 billion base pairs encode functional genes. What the other percentage of 97 to 98% represents is still unknown.

Even from those 2 - 3 % established regions which encodes genes, functions of certain genes are still unknown. Some are established as in p53, tumor suppressor proteins, or VEGF, FGF, IDH, and so on. We are still figuring out the functions of unpopular genes.

As our knowledge on biochemical pathways increased incrementally over the years, it becomes difficult to pin point a very specific function of a particular gene in the first place without going through a vast arrays of molecular techniques. Mendel's earlier observation of phenotypes of his experiments on peas would have been much simpler comparing to nowadays technological advancement and state-of-the-art molecular technique.

I'm rambling and typing whatever comes into my mind. Coming back to our topic, the other percentage of our genome? What are they doing? I have some idea. Since it is not yet been formally tested, I cannot divulge what I have been toying with my idea. But I do have some idea though.

In the same field

One of the things we must learn during our scholarly study is which symbols represent what kind of meaning: which words say what we wanted to express. In a way we first conceptualize our way of thinking with words to describe and share or pass our thought or idea through expressing the words or symbols or gesture which we assume we all have the same meaning.

Nothing is better than understanding the meaning behind the words we use everyday. I am particularly interested in how words develop and how deeply they evolved to such an extent that we no longer grasp the true meaning of what they represents. Rather we use them for their single meaning in their entirety.

Recently I learnt the word pUC, one the plasmids commonly used in cloning in the laboratory. I knew nothing but the small 'p'. The small 'p' here describe it is a plasmid. Until recently I realized that UC symbolizes where the plasmid was initially constructed. The place is University of California. I still need to find out in which campus the plasmid was developed. Was it Berkeley, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara? No idea.

Epilogue

I have been dwelling and learning in biosciences field for almost a decade, and everything I learnt has not yet been annotated as in what I have been learning, and shared with someone else who might be interested in learning weird and strange, and yet peculiar and fascinating aspects of sciences in nature. Until this very post, I enjoy reading articles, journals, forums, blogs, and so on, but I never inked my idea and thought or at least my attitude towards sciences or research in written forms. Here come my personal musings on research and anecdotal life events reflected on history and present of biosciences.