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.

I am back in construct design mode, and a deeper lesson just dawned on me. I have been playing with a human protein in a human cell. It’s the metal transporter DMT1 that I will be talking about in Kyoto next week. Not surprisingly, this protein is tightly regulated at every level. How do I get around that problem?

I could edit out parts of the sequence and figure out what parts are regulatory, but that could take a long time. It turns out that a long time ago E.coli picked up the gene for DMT1 through horizontal gene transfer. All the regulatory parts have long since mutated away. Thanks for the help. I am going to use the Bacterial protein as a starting point, but of course it’s not that simple. First off bacteria prefer to use different codons for proteins. you can still get bacterial genes to express, they just don’t do it very efficiently. i have to synthesize the gene for mammalian expression. That’s not so tough these days. A trickier problem is the membrane. E.coli have a different thickness of membrane than a mammalian cell. I will have to do some serious sequence gazing and mental modeling to fix this problem. Sadly there is no structure to work with. If there was somebody else would have done this already.

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.

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.

It is a little known fact the med center is kitty corner to the Chinese UN consolate. It’s also just down the street from the UN. Roll that up with an ER and a helipad and you have spectacular traffic. I like the night traffic more because at least you can watch the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles and think of the playa at night. If China the UN and the police have one thing in common it is that they take themseves to seriously.

Oh the irony of my moniker. (One I did not choose for myself I should add.) Anyway so very long after mobile blogging started, I have finally gotten to it. And what better first post than the place I spend most of my time. Ah sweet purgatory that is lab

When I was a little kid I remember wanting to be an inventor. Oh the things I would invent! I would put together tinker toys and imagine I was building a giant windmill or a shrink ray. Oh those halcyon days of youth.

Here I am actually inventing something and it is not at all as I expected. Sometimes it feels the way I imagined seeing something from my mind take shape in the real world, but most of the time it just sucks. Things fail all the time! If it isn’t some stupid mistake it is a fundamental flaw in my reasoning. Some creeping unknown that stabs me in the back when I least suspect it.

Yes I am just railing because experiments aren’t turning out the way I want them too. And yes I made my bed and now I have to lie in it. I could have taken baby steps forward and worked on something easy. Well… you have a point.

What is it within me that makes me take on a project that demands my ability to distill molecular biology, protein engineering, animal surgeries and MRI physics into one creation? Is it overconfidence or kid in a candy store naivety that makes me reach and reach until I am beyond my depth. Of course it’s both. And maybe that’s OK?

Sigh… back to it then.
Onward I press into the dark. Hopeful that dawn will soon light my way.