Future Ben

I am in a mood. It is unfair to completly blame my state upon the absence of my lover although that poor situation most certainly exacerbates this affliction. Everything around me is moving a little too fast and I feel uncomfortable in my skin. At once tired and restless I have been wandering Brooklyn for 3 hours one step behind synchronicity.

This began as a friendly offer to accompany TwinA to the Disorient fundraiser. As usual the lab kept me late. As I walked to the train I started to become aware of how off I felt. The notion of prolonged social interaction became increasingly axiety inducing. Almost to the train Twin A texted me asking to pick up batteries since Leo had already laid claim to the DIY blinky pendant I was supposed to be wearing.

My raison d’être foiled, it was pure stubbornness that pushed me on. I bought 2 9V batteries for 7 dollars and continued on my way. On the platform I recognized Orion and several other Disorient core. He and I have spoken on many occasions and greeted each other by name just one week prior, but the anxiety that he might not remember me became too much to hazard the interaction. I willed myself invisible which doesn’t really work on anybody but Orion for some reason and he walked right by me without so much as a glance.
I rode the train to Bedford standing next to a man in a pink sequened miniskirt whom I once loaded a cargo container with. He was wearing the same straw cowboy hat. Still I felt to out of place to share my reverie with him. I stepped out at Bedford though no one else who mattered followed suit. Still, I would never trust my portage to the G train so I contined on through the vapid wasteland that is the Bedford stop on the L.

True Greenpoint is by no means a short walk from Bedford and it was several hours and text exchanges with Twin A before I caught sight of the telltale pink afro wigs which are the hallmark of the Disorient subcultural niche.

This particular confectory halo was enveloping Jewels. Which presented a gamut of complex social issues. Jewels is dear to my heart and yet to see her outside of the context of our conclave would force a necessary reevaluation of our working relationship. It could be weeks before I would be comfortable working with her once the formalities I usually hide behind were washed away. Again, obfuscated my ego and added another person to the short list of people that actually worked on.

Dawn however is not on that list. Her training and former career addressed the wretched individuals who suffer from legitamate mental afflictions rather than my own self indulgent melancholic bouts. She caught me hiding behind a lightpost waiting for TwinA to come get me. Forced before an audience I searched for the appropriate poise but could find nothing within me.

At the door I was somewhat relieved to discover that I had no ID or valid proof of age. In self directed obstinance I made sure I wasn’t hiding my liscence from myself to cop out on the evening. It has been months since I went to a legitamate establishment via the front door, perhaps over a year. I made my apologies to all concerned and made a mental note to put the search for or perhaps the replacement of my liscence on my “to do” list after collecting my tax returns and buying Shinkansen tickets from Tokyo to Kobe.

I won’t recount the rest of my evening but succinctly, I learned about Grand st vs Grand ave and forgot to remember to check the cab meter, especially in Brooklyn where they can plausibly deny you ever existed. On the way home my old friend Deb texted me inviting me to her wrap party for her recent sculpture. In that instant an evening in the company of old friends seemed like the bromide I needed so badly. Those people were well aware of the trainwreck that becomes of my social grace. And for a moment I was cured.

This moment quickly passed as the batteries in my pocket bridged and began to overheat. The silicone skin of my phone had sheilded me long enough for the batteries to reach a critical temperature and just as my old compatriots communication was lifting my spirits scalding alkalai gel filled my pocket and burned my skin.

As I briskly removed my pants and let the cold shower washed over me a few minutes and a short cab ride later. I thought a out the evening and came to a realization. I should have stayed home.

First off I hate cancer. I hate the disease almost as much as the vulturous profiteers who are assosciated with this ubiquitous disease.
That being said I am at the NYAS meeting, “A systems approach to the study of cancer.”
Andrea Califano: Interactome Analysis Reveals Master Regulators of Human Malignancies. ARACNe reverse engineering regulatory networks. Hmm if you apply information theory to regulatory networks you can predict edges to look for. ChIP on chip data has been show to have a false negative rate an order of magnatude below the predicted and later proven interactions.
The. Ext genome scale project should be devoted to assembly and validation of whole regulatory networks.
You definitely have to be a beleiver in Sys Bio to buy into this.

Galit Lahav: Dynamics of the p53 signaling pathway
P53 and Mdm2 regulate each other via transcription and through direct interaction so it works in a slow grade way and through damped oscillations. Sweet they made fusions that report relative levels oscillating and do a 30 hour time lapse movie. There we see they aren’t damped oscillations it’s just that more cells oscillate more under stress. You can show whole mouse p53 oscillations. Perfect for in vivo imaging. So the pulsitile dynamics allow for a wider range of regulation depending on the frequency of oscillation vs the stability of the regulated protein.
In order to look at a sychronized population they image individual cells and retrospectively synch their cycles with image processing. Another common in vivo method repeated.

Chris Sander: Network Pharmacology of Cancer
Anyone who starts off telling you how they failed to solve the protein folding problem is OK by me. Structure is function, but so is function. This is another repeating motif. He takes pairs of drugs to cause network perturbations. Hey this is the first time I recognized a differential equation! Go Hopfield network model!
Oh man I just realized why network modeling actually works. Even if you are missing nodes the model is still somewhat accurate. In a structural model you have to have every atom as a vector even if it’s a chaperone or membrane or whatever random thing the folding protein bumps into. The former bravado of a structural modeler is actually realistic in a network milieu.

Arnold Levine: single nucleotide polymorphisms in the p53 pathway
There are roughly 5 snps per gene in people. Not counting the untranslated regions. 18million total. SNPs and populations getting cancer. It reminds me that we would help more people if we spent our research budgets on public health. The other nice thing about SNPs is you can look at phylogenies over the last 30,000 years. I really appreciate that he presents all sorts of hypotheses about why these SNPs are more or less prevalent.
It turns out p53 upregulates LIF needed for implantation of embryos. So low levels of p53 can prevent pregnancy in women. It also can sense aneuploidy and reject implantation. So p53 can control germline cells. P53 is more of a germline preservation mechanism. The stem cell functions only came later in mammals. There is a p53 in very primitive animals.

This symposium shows a real turning point for me and cancer. We are finally realizing the deeper implications of cancer and stem cells and of course systems modeling as an informant for benchwork. Plus it gave me some solid ideas on dynamic imaging.