It’s not often that a fellow alum of Washington University School of Medicine (in The Lou) gets featured on Boing Boing, but, as you might expect, I’m not really all that rah-rah, school spirity. When said fellow alum, however, has some significant overlap with the rugbyologist clan and highlights it with some top-shelf LEGO creations (including a secret code), well that deserves some attention. Said fellow alum, is LEGO savant Nannan Z., who is featured about every other minute on The Brothers Brick, created personalized works to give to some of the important people from his experience at WashU. Let’s take a look whilst I drop a little local knowledge on y’all.
Like, Ruth Clark. My lovely and talented wife, Dr. Mrs. Rugbyologist worked with Dr. Clark doing exercise science experiments. The only thing this creation is missing is a matching sculpture of a trained rat on a treadmill.
And, then, this beauty in honor of Dr. Gary Stormo. Dr. Stormo works in the Washington University Department of Genetics and in the Center for Genome Sciences, which is where the rugbyologist “earned” his PhD. Not only is Dr. Stormo brilliant and one of the nicest guys around, but he also used to be in a touring rock band and is a pretty darn good soccer and softball player.
In addition, Dr. Mrs. Rugbyologist published a paper with one of Dr. Stormo’s graduate students, who is now faculty at the WashU Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences – and is a great guy to have a beer with at a Cold Spring Harbor conference, or anywhere else for that matter.
And, yes, I can identify specific members of the Stormo lab in Stormo Park.
There is a coded message in the DNA sculpture (which is by the way a lovely and correct double helix and not the twizzler looking thing most people do), but you are going to have to go poking around at Nannan Z.’s Flicker photostream to find out the answer. Or you could just solve it yourself.
The Finch and Pea 