148 pages.  That is how much dissertation I’ve got right now.  I’m estimating the final product to be around 180, so that’s 82% finished.  Not too bad considering it is still two months away.  I’ve got plenty of more experiments to do, but things are lining up nicely.  I must confess that I still have a sinking feeling about all of it - that some kind of train (literal or metaphorical) will blindside me beforehand.  Everyone else says that’s just nerves and I want to believe that.

I’m off to Kuaui tomorrow for a week. Yay!  I’ll try to get some light and breezy Diss editing done - stuff for the plane ride and the like.  Check my flickr photos if you want to keep tabs on the amount of macadamia  encrusted goodies I’m chowing on.

Found this fascinating article in Pubmed. If I could publish Scooby-Doo crap like this then how hard could getting tenure be? /sarcasm Of course, the impact factor of the International Maritime Health Journal is probably negative.

I was able to hook up my D40 to both the inverted and upright microscopes in lab. Yay. We’ve been using 35mm film SLRs for too long, and viewing our cell cultures and tissue sections digitally in an instant will be incredibly convenient. It’s hardly state-of-the-art either, if anything it’s like the Fan Lab is joining the 1990’s. Checkout my flickr set if you want; the below image of mouse fibroblasts is my favorite since you can clearly make out a number of organelles. How many can you name?

Here’s a story about a cat who curls up next to hospice patients who are within a couple of hours of death. Remarkable. He’s done this in about 25 cases so far.

Doctors say most of the people who get a visit from the sweet-faced, gray-and-white cat are so ill they probably don’t know he’s there, so patients aren’t aware he’s a harbinger of death.

This phenomenon is also described in an essay in the latest New England Journal of Medicine. (via Nelson)

There’s an interesting article at the New York Times about genetically engineered dogs.  Think its cute when a dog cocks its head when it looks at you?  You can engineer that gene right in to your next pet. Wild.

[tags]genetic, engineer, dogs, nyt[/tags]

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There are a few things I won’t often bring up on this blog; religion, spirituality, or politics for instance (despite the online poll.) I am also not fond of quoting song lyrics or reprinting inspirational quotations. But there is something I read recently that has me thinking, so I thought to myself, “Self, just post the text - it’s probably worth sharing.”

I’m reading Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow right now. It is not an easy book. However, the first chapter Beyond the Zero starts with the following quote from a well known rocket scientist of the 20th century:

“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.”

-Wernher von Braun

I don’t know if I agree. Von Braun is making a leap here, but I hope it’s true. One things for sure though - we all get to find out.

[tags]gravity’s rainbow, von Braun, spirituality[/tags]

Do you have a small dog like this one? If so, your dog has a mutation in a gene coding for Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 (IGF1). An IGF1 single-nucleotide polymorphism haplotype is common to all small breeds and nearly absent from giant breeds according to this article in Science. That’s a one base-pair difference in canine DNA that seems to be a major determinant in body size, and possibly cuteness.

[tags]small, dog, mutation, polymorphism, IGF1 [/tags]

These days I’ve been prepping for “the hunt.”

No, I’m not donning camouflage and fluorescent orange caps like the mid-Michigander in me might. I’m referring to the job hunt I’ll be on in the next half of a year. I’ve been going to resumé workshops so I can look good on paper, and doing some popular literature searches so I can look good in pin stripes.

Also, this week I attended HIV / AIDS on the Frontline, a conference focused primarily on HIV+ patient issues for caregivers. I would not have consider myself part of that cohort just a few weeks ago, but my work with ACTION has certainly changed that lately. An added bonus for me was the number of pharma corps. there talking about their latest drugs. Even though I consider my thesis to be more cancer focused, I sometimes forget that our retroviral work extensively overlaps with HIV research. I was able to talk to a number of scientists about potential job opportunities working in the HIV focused areas of these companies.

I learned there a number of exciting, new anti-HIV drugs coming out in the next few months. These are getting a lot of press lately because they appear to work well and they target parts of the viral life-cycle that available anti-retroviral drugs do not. Who knows, maybe I will end up working with these medicines in just a few months?

[tags]AIDS, biotechnology, HIV, hunt, job, pharmaceutical, biotechnology [/tags]

Okay, here’s a sample of the kinds of things I spend my time on at work. This is an image I made recently using a combination of light and fluorescent microscopy. This picture is of an 10μm thick section of mouse lung tissue. What you are seeing is actually an overlay of four different images:

1. The gray “embossed” looking image is of the overall structure of the tissue as viewed through light microscopy using a laser scanner on the Zeiss confocal microscope I use.
2. All of the blue clumps dispersed around the field are the nucleii of pneumocytes (lung cells) that have been stained with a fluorescent dye called DAPI.
3. Probably the most obvious stain is the green fluorescent color which is another dye bound to an antibody which sticks to Clara Cells of the bronchioles. These cells are responsible for eliminating any foreign matter that finds itself in the lung. You can see the green is in a circular pattern like the cross section of bronchial tube would appear.
4. Lastly, there is red dye that is bound to an antibody which sticks to a special kind of pneumocytes that are deep in the alveoli of the lung, the small bags of air where gas exchange takes place.

A rare stem cell population would stain positive for both the green and red fluorescent dye (showing up as yellowish), but none of those appear in this image. My current work involves adding a fourth stain (and fifth image) which would light up the cells expressing the customized gene I inserted into the transgenic mice I engineered.

[tags]antibody, Clara Cells, DAPI, fluorescent, laser scanning microscopy, microscope, Type 2 Pneumocytes[/tags]

Google founder talks about the unsexiness of scientific undertakings in this article at CNN.

“There are lots of people who specialize in marketing, but as far as I can tell, none of them work for you,” Page told researchers.

[tags]science, marketing[/tags]