Soap Box Part 1

So one of the many things I'm really passionate about is education.

It just occurred to me that one of the many things with education is that when we teach it is with the intention that information flows unidirectional. This is what we know and this is how it is. As any of you know who I've talked to about knowledge is that when I go to a scientific meeting and listen to talks on the current research one of the first things I think is, "What? We didn't already know this?"

I mean COME ON! When we teach we should be informing students, Hey this is what we know but this is what we DON'T know about the same idea. The list of don't knows will be more mind boggling than what we do know.

How do we expect the next generation of civilians, politicians, educators and researchers to solve a problem if we lead them to think that the only way to solve a problem is with the solutions of the past? The fact the solutions of the past have not solved cancer, world hunger, poverty, heart disease.....and the list goes on just reinforces the need for more creative thinking and better education than is currently in place.

Fear seems to always come up as a beneficial does of reality but at the same time fear can also render people unable to do anything. We should not be instilling fear of the unknown into a society that is faced with more unknowns than any other. People are innately afraid of what they don't know or understand. One of the best way to correct for this would be enlightening young impressionable minds that we know much less than we are informing them.

Propelling students into the unknown armed with the knowledge that we've survived this long without the answers to the greatest mystery's of life seems to me the best way to help us further society without hindering creativity causing mass hysteria along with a dysfunctional society.

We are all going to hell but hey, good thing I don't think such things exist.

...Almost forgot.

One more thing I thought was really interesting about this Nobel award in chemistry.... Alfred Nobel accumulated his wealth through many things but he is the noted inventor of the explosive dynamite. One of the niftiest things that researchers are trying to do is to make an organism produce fluorescence, via GFP, in the presence of TNT. This would be useful in the location of unexploded bombs in mine fields in war torn countries. I would like to think that Nobel would be proud.

Kudos for C. elegans and GFP!

To celebrate and honor today's Nobel in Chemistry here is a video highlighting the focus of the awards research on Green Fluorescent Protein. The three men who will split the 1.5 Million dollar prize discovered and further developed the usefulness of GFP.

Osamu Shimomura isolated a single protein like a needle in a haystack. This adventure was even harderer than I made that sound. For starters, the jellyfish that the scientists were working with was relatively unknown to the biological community and consequently no funding was available to do the work. Martin Chalfie, a C.elegans researcher, shameless plug for the best model organism ;), realized that this proteins potential would be endless if he could splice the gene and express it in a living organism. In 1994 he and his lab provided the first evidence that this was possible in an article published in Science. As with most tools in science GFP was further "optimized" by Roger Tsien who altered the chemical structure of the protein to excite different wavelengths and produce a family of proteins that can produce all the colors of the rainbow.

Enjoy the video! I'm starting to make my own GFP worms, I'll have to post some pics when I'm done cloning.

GFP pigs and fish


B

Squirrels

A brief history... When I was 8 or so my dad found a squirrel that had fallen out of its nest and to make a long story short we ended up keeping Sammy until he died. He was the best pet ever! LOL. So needless to say I have a soft spot for squirrels.

Since then most of my experiences with squirrels have been...well, squirrely. And I've had really interesting encounters. These events are probably on the same level as the events that always are there but you never realize until something happens and then you have a heightened sense of awareness. Once, while taking a three hour night class I took a break and witnessed a dive bombing squirrel go all kamikaze. I heard a whole bunch of rustling in the tree, a couple o' nuts rain down from the trees followed by the squirrel itself. It bounced three times not a foot from my feet before running back up a tree. I've never seen such resilience in an animal.

Coincidentally, the school I attend has an albino squirrel for a mascot. Technically had, since last semester the white squirrel met its end to a hungry owl. Evolutionarily speaking it was destined to happen. Seriously, an owl hunting at night? Will it see the white or dark brown squirrel first. Anywho, it was sad and the campus community seriously came out and mourned for this squirrel. An albino squirrel, to my knowledge, hasn't been seen since. But the legacy does live on in a couple of campus "clubs."

So this brings me to a couple days ago when I was running late and and had to take my blueberry bagel on the run with me to school. In my walk to the lab I walk under a 5 yard stretch of trees where the sidewalk constantly looks like a nut graveyard. I've never really thought about the implications before....Mainly being a lot of fucking squirrels in the tree above me watching me come and go to school every morning. So apparently these squirrels really like blueberry bagels because all of a sudden I was attacked. I had to pick up my pace just to make it out alive. Then when I get to the street there are seriously two squirrels "waiting" for me and they gave me what I can describe as chilling.

I'll never take a bagel into their trees again. Beware the cracked out squirrels.

B