The National Cancer Institute wants researchers to start asking non-obvious questions.
I suppose that’s good, because the NIH’s very conservative funding process is one reason why so many researchers focus on the obvious questions. On the other hand, it’s not so clear that answering non-obvious questions lead to more insight than answering obvious questions. The question can be obvious or non-obvious and still generate that key to scientific progress, the unexpected answer.
Gene regulation is an old field, but gene regulation at the single cell level is a whole new ball of wax. Some of us in the lab are trying to get up to speed in this field, and I need to pick out five good papers for consideration.
The place to begin is with this great review, and then work through the references:
Central dogma at the single-molecule level in living cells, Gene-Wei Li and X. Sunney Xie, Nature 475, 308–315 (21 July 2011)
Picking selectively, I ended up with the list below, and unfortunately I need to somehow narrow this down to five… and preferably all five won’t be from Sunney Xie’s group. Any suggestions?
Quantifying E. coli Proteome and Transcriptome with Single-Molecule Sensitivity in Single Cells, Yuichi Taniguchi, Paul J. Choi, Gene-Wei Li, Huiyi Chen, Mohan Babu, Jeremy Hearn, Andrew Emili and X. Sunney Xie, Science 30 July 2010: Vol. 329 no. 5991 pp. 533-538 Continue reading “Single cell gene expression linkfest”
Electrical arcs stabbed through the violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in distant corners of the facility, sending up showers of glass as nearby workers cowered beneath seaside umbrellas set up for just such protection. Gauge needles oscillated feverishly. Sensitive flames sang at different pitches. Amid a gleaming clutter of burners and spectroscopes, funnels and flasks, centrifugal and Soxhlet extractors, and distillations columns in both the Glynsky and Le Bel-Henninger formats, serious girls with their hair in snoods entered numbers into log-books, and pale gnomes, patient as lock-pickers, squinting through loupes, adjusting tremblers and timers with tiny screwdrivers and forceps. Best of all, somebody in here somewhere was making coffee.
– Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day p. 235
In association with my reading of Bernard Wolfe’s post-apocalyptic, proto-cyberpunk, Limbo, I’ve run across a few fun links:
Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson by Dani Cavallaro (PDF):
In contemporary western and westernized cultures, people are sur- rounded by an increasingly wide range of tangible products that seem to impart a sense of solidity to their lives. Objects such as mobile phones, computers, portable physiotherapy units, personal stereos, microwave ovens, video recorders and fax machines (to mention but a few examples) are integral components of many people’s everyday existence. Often, they are regarded not merely as useful tools for the accomplishment of practical tasks but actually as defining aspects of people’s identities, lifestyles and value systems. They thus become comparable to prostheses, the artificial supports used by medical technology to complete otherwise lacking physical organisms.
“Cyberpunk 101”, Richard Kadrey and Larry McCaffery (PDF) Continue reading “Cyborg and Cyberpunk links”
Cool Life pictures of science’s post-WWII golden age. These pictures are probably best viewed while listening to someone read Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier*, in a room wallpapered with vintage 1950’s sci-fi covers.
Hat tip to io9.
* a clip of Gingrich pushing his moon colony would be an acceptable alternative.
The Finch and Pea 