Future Ben

First off I want to be clear that I didn’t expect to win the young investigator’s award. OK, I am still bitter about it, but I am bitter about lot’s of stuff. So while I am not particularly upset about not winning, it was the finalists who really irritated me.

All three featured commercial products some with affiliation to the “judges.” That really set the tone. Sure there is no point in reinventing the wheel, but using something you bought as directed by the manufacturer is not exactly ground breaking. To her credit the winner was actually collaborating with a chemist to improve the agent. La di frigging da.
None of the finalists used any methods other than imaging. Sure it’s an imaging conference, but if you are going to claim your labeled differentiated into a particular type of cell, you are obligated to back that up with some staining. “We injected some bone marrow, it did aomething, you can see it, isn’t that awesome?” Wow, mail that back to 1988 when it wasn’t taught in first year immunology!

So what was the judging criteria. judging from the abundant use of the RGD peptide for labeling avbeta3 integrin, it was mostly based on FDA approved nonthreatening tech. By nonthreatening I mean it doesn’t challenge anybody’s research. To set such a conservative standard for grad students and post docs is a travesty. This is the point in our careers where we should be challenging the status quo or at least looking at biology in a new way. Sadly, medicine is too parochial and corrupt to allow real creativity to flourish.

I am in Kyoto right now. Really I am! this is my second time in this city. It’s the 3rd if you count the time came through just to eat Anago at the Nishiki market.

I am here for an imaging conference, but I am taking the opportunity to stay at a ryokan and absorb the culture as best I can.

Japan is generally a pretty foreign place to the likes of people like me, but the extent the people here go to ameliorate the alienation. Here I am the only white person in this little okonomiyaki place but there is a helpful english menu all the same.

Of course this isn’t remarkable. I am attending an international conference conducted in English. The scandanavian girls who stopped and asked for directions, which I was patently unqualified to give, started in English. If the greatest generation fought and died for anything it was to establish English over German or French as the international language.

I am not entirely comfortable with that fact. I took Spanish and Mandarin and do my best to pick up what Japanese I can, but in the end the native speakers I interact with will be better at English than I will ever be at their languages because they have to be.

And for what honestly. True the US publishes more scientific papers than the rest of the world but we as a culture reach so much farther than we as a people.

Or so the complaint goes. But wait, isn’t that a inherently racist statement? Who are the American people? Certainly not all native English speakers and obviously not all white. It is this truth alone that helps me accept the decades of cultural imperialism. Our only claim to our global language is the sheer number of people who learn our language in order to live in America.

epilouge:
On the flight back I caught myself again. I was one of 10 white people on the plane, but not until I lined up for entry did I realize that 1/4 of the passengers were Asian Americans.