Future Ben

Damn I have to geek out here for a minute. I am listening to this dude give a tlk on the lambda repressor. It’s been 20 minutes of rambling about how life is just mass action and kinetics. He has the smug confidence of a man who doesn’t know how dated he is. Denying Systems Biology is the new Inteligent Design.

Seriously, just because you figured out that the Cancer field is mostly bullshit doesn’t make you Linus Pauling!

Now Len Girrenti is talking about Sirtuins. Makes sense that Sir2 in year and worms points to a working Sir2 in humans.
“I don’t know of caloric restriction will make you live longer, but it will sure feel like it did”. Ha!

I guess the whole point of taking resveratrol is to pretend like you are living like a yogi. Awesome!

Sirt1 stimulates BDNF production. Who is taking a systems approach? There must be a bunch of people.

It makes me think about going all out on aging. That field is never going away.

It’s a rainy day. When it’s like that outside I find little things to do around the lab.

I have a series of surgeries next week so I better get all my scissors sharp and organized!

I finished running all of the gas lines for a new oxygen enriched anesthetic system. Once the last part was in place I had to step back and get a picture.

Techically not steampunk, but all the gauges and pneumatic hoses next to the superconducting electromagnet reminded me of a panel from Girl Genious.

Next I will install a tesla coil and a giant knife switch.

After months of failure. I finally succeeded in electroporating my novel reporter gene into the brain of a newborn mouse. As it turns out the equipment I was using was crap, and since I don’t know anything about unipolar square pulses with exponential decay, I was unaware of its shortcomings. So after ~250 mice injected that sacrificed. Here is the result.

The champagne doesn’t pop just yet however. This wasn’t what I was going for. Getting GFP to express like this was an achievement a few years ago, but it is just the control for my real experiment. The question is, does this correlate to an MRI? I have a whole litter of these pups, and hopefully the other 9 have the same kind of expression as the 3 who were sacrificed so far.

But, if they really do correlate, suddenly it is endgame for my thesis and I can start doing some cool stuff with the my new technology.

I have made 9 lines of transgenic mice. The idea is these mice are expressing GFP and my synthetic MRI reporter gene. We are at line 3 with no sign of expression.

I know transgenic mouse technology is not very reliable, but I am braceing myself for the worst case. I added an extra feature above and beyond what a normal transgenic DNA construct warrants. I fear the cost of my futureization habit will be epic fail.

It is in my nature to meddle with elements beyond my understanding.

I have been appointed the task of naming my first foray into synthetic biology/ protein engineering. I have never invented anything substatial enough to name before so I am having some trouble.

The protein is a new reporter for MRI. It binds paramagnetic Manganese and it creates a brighter signal than background tissues when imaged properly. What the hell do you call something like that?

My coleague and friend Yousef had this to say.

your construct could
termed as MP’s standing for either “magnetic protein”, “manganese protein”,
“metal protein”, “MRI protein” (a lot to stand for) to parallel the FP field
(fluorescent protein). Since there is no color such as in GFP and RFP
etc….Your enhanced MP (EMP) are reduced to 2 tone: darkening (DMP)and
brightening (BMP)proteins. In DMPs Ferritin would be one of them and in BMPs
yours would fall in this category…

BMP? I’m not sure it has pizzaz. Although I agree that an acronym would be appropriate. How about Manganese Enhaced Magnetic Resonance Imaging Protein? MEMRIP. Maybe MRI can be collapsed and I could just call it MEMP. If I did and Iron one it would be FEMP.

I have to figure this out before starting the patent.

Dude I don’t even know where to start. On the surface it’s not really that much of a crackpot site, it just has the all the standard layman’s freaky science highlights. Nothing about Atlantis, but what the Brazillian Stonehenge has to do with the future I don’t know. Maybe the dude is right and Light Transformation is going to be the single most important scientific theory of our time. Although its not so much of a theory as a series of wandering “what if” statements based entirely on handwaving and misderstood generalizations. ( I knew the spite would kick in)

So why on pick on somebody else’s vanity site which is also based loosely on science and the future. It’s a matter of priciple! There is a real danger in presenting your assumptions along with a little data. This website is the result. What kind of reference is the fucking Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch? Who peer reviewed that? Actually, I am noticing most of the citations are largely self referencing. Of the few links that acutally work my personal favorite is this statement on the martian pyramids.

Pyramid structures which range in dimensions of 3.0-base to 6.0 km mean diameter have been identified in the Elysium Quadrangle of Mars. Geologic processes that could result in such features have not produced a satisfactory scientific explanation for some of the pyramids. Thus we must keep in mind that what may appear to be a natural hill from an aerial view may be a pyramidal artifact.

Perhaps, instead of preparing for the contemporary scans of the Martian micro-intelligence, we might prepare ourselves for a close examination of pyramidal structures as blueprints for bio-magnetic analogs? The Martian and Egyptian pyramidal grids may be models preparing us to meet the superior architects in our immediate universe? Perhaps, the pyramid is a future artifact?

And all this is based on what data?

OK…So based on this image alone, not only does Mars have pyramids from the future, any hill on Mars could be actually be a pyramid in disguise that might “hold the keys to man’s existence.” This dude comes right out and says that we should beleive that a bunch of piles of sand are magical because it would be awesome if they really were. Get over yourself!

Everybody wants to believe there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and that all of our questions will be answered if we can just get over the horizon. And let us not forget that old chestnut. Everything you know is wrong, but I have got it all figured out, so come join my clique of people who know what’s really up. I would like to make through at least one Burning Man without having to hear a variation on that one.

But what if they really were pyramids? That would in fact be awesome.

What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I have spent a large chunk of my day trying to figure out another of these little puzzles and it has left me rather cross. In fact I have spent at least a dozen hours over the past few days trying to pick apart other people’s cryptic little maps. This is the promoter/enhancer of Flk1, some receptor that does I don’t know what. The point is that this sequence will cause expression in developing vascualture. The key word here is SEQUENCE. Why am I looking at a crude line drawing when they could just post a text file? No, instead I have to Genbank and BLAST my way through the mouse genome looking for the right piece of DNA then take my best guess at what they cut out. Did they not know the sequence? I guess this stuff came out in 1995 so it wouldn’t be surprizing.

I remember an a review paper about Genomics being, “too much information” to be useful. Give us our bright and shining gel bands of approximate size! Luddites! I dig through notebooks of paper notes, pictures, crude maps all for one text file worth of information. And the actual DNA is nowhere to be found. Its a wonder anything ever got done that way.

So here I am, doing reverse bioinformatics to digitize what has already been published. Compiling my sequences in VectorNTI and creating dynamic maps that have more information that I am going to use, which is just about enough.

Yeah, so apparently a huge problem in Africa is that women aren’t producing enough babies for their husbands. You see in many parts of Africa a woman’s entire worth is based on her ability to produce children for men. A woman who reproduce “is worse than a dog.” What could be the answer to this grave social ill? In Vitro Fertilization of course! God forbid we address the issue of the blatant sexism that lets men think its OK to throw their wives onto the street for not producing children. Or maybe the rampant venereal diseases that are left untreated and cause infertilty. Unfortunatel nobody ever made any money promoting social elightenment or public health so the answer is of course to provide affordable IVF for the third world.

How can a world be so ass backward? Where a woman is mutilated at birth, has no access to or knowledge of contraceptives, no treatment for subsequent diseases, and after all of that, despite being the infertile member of a couple only 60% of the time is driven into the street when no babies come from the indentured rape that so often is marriage.

When I grow up I’m moving to Africa to marry a bunch of beautiful but recently divorced ladies and open a university for women. It will be a school with only three majors. Public Health, In Vitro Fertilization and Lesbian Studies.

This is just ridiculous. This is an article about science education in Arkansas. I have been very slow to accept the idea that biblical history carries so much weight in the American educational system. Thinking back, I don’t remember being explicitly taught evolution, but all but one science teacher I ever had felt quite comfortable saying, “millions of years.” Apparently that is taboo in some parts of our country.

Its easy to write off anti-evolution as an outspoken, but backwater movement.(Fun too) But this article shows that this is not the case. Arkansas has been independently ranked 37th in the nation for education. OK so their kids aren’t all Ivy League bound, but they aren’t dead last. (Hey Arizona, I guess you guys are better off going to school on Martin Luther King Day. Maybe it might help you guys catch up.)

This passage is just shocking.

So basicly the Arkansas educational system has been bullied into mandating ignorance. Yikes! No wonder the Clintons abandoned that state for New York.

Maybe this awesome Doonesbury will cheer you up.