All the same at Heart

Two weeks ago now, I was talking to someone about the sort of work I do (when I’m playing at being a scientist) and she mentioned that she knew someone else who studied rat hearts. She said she thought this was very odd, as surely there can’t be much in common between the heart of a rat and a human heart, so what could there be to learn? I was quite pleased with the response I was able to give so I wanted to put it up here too. 

Not so different really. Sarah Palin helps to demonstrate that we're not actually so different from any other animals. (Images from Therealbs2002 and feastoffun.com)

It’s quite a common misconception that the biology of a human is very different from the biology of any other animals. What can we ever hope to learn from them that would be any good to us? The classic example of this comes from Sarah Palin – that fount of well-informed scientific knowledge – who famously commented that ‘[Tax] dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good — things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.’ I was also reminded of this by the recent story about scientists making a ‘jellyfish’ out of rat heart cells. This sounds like a bit of fun but may actually come to revolutionise heart transplant procedures by allowing us to grow operational heart muscle from just a few cells. More on that later.

The big cure for the big ‘C’

This time I'm not going to make any promises. I'm going to try and keep this place going better than I have done but I may get distracted again. There's a lot of fun stuff ahead, but it should mean you'll get to see me cropping up in other places very soon. In other news, if you didn't see it, I got a post on the Nature.com network on Monday which I'm very excited about. It's on the theme of new beginnings and organising my first conference.

I'd also like to say a quick hello to some of my readers that I've had the good fortune to meet around Cambridge since I last posted anything. I'm always surprised that people have actually heard of my ramblings and am glad that I'm not talking to myself here (although after so much inactivity that may have changed :S )

Anyway, people are always asking me if I've cured cancer yet. This is one of the things that my lab and many others are working towards, in a roundabout sense. But it seems likely that there will never be one cure for all cancer and here's why:

At the risk of being cliché, given all the recent media activity (which I have spectacularly missed the opportunity to write about), finding the ‘cure for cancer’ is to biology what the Higgs Boson was to particle physics. Everyone’s working on it and it means a lot – not just to our understanding of the universe, but to human healthcare – and it may not even exist.

People like to think there can be a simple pill that will fix any problem in life from cancer to cellulite, obesity to osteoarthritis (source).

It’s very nice and easy to think of one simple, easy to administer cure – this is the ultimate dream for many illnesses – but most diseases just aren’t that simple, in particular a ‘cure for cancer’ is a very misleading concept.  It suggests that cancer is one illness that is the same every time it occurs and therefore should have the same solution each time. Actually, there are probably as many cancers as there are people with cancer, with each one unique and different to any other, to some extent.

Resurrection: Halloween, spooky proteins and the return of ClearSci

It’s Halloween night and a dark shape is moving towards you through the ether of the information superhighway. Surrounded by the blackness you feel something closing in, disturbing the thick layers of accumulated dust. Just as you’re about to start screaming in terror… IT’S ME!!! Lights on, and by gosh it’s a mess in here, I don’t remember putting all of these spiders up for Halloween. Eww! Eww, eww, they’re real. I’m really going to need to spend some time cleaning all of this up…I’ll deal with that later.

Halloween revival.

So, if you’re here that means you’ve been on the look-out for more of my slightly eclectic and sporadic brand of science writing and I will try not to disappoint this time. Just so we’re all caught up, no I’m not dead and neither is this blog, it just went into reverse-hibernation over the summer (that’s called aestivation, if you’re interested). Also, neither of us has been temporarily reanimated for Halloween, this will hopefully be working its way back into my normal routine.

Summer was great! Although crazy, so I didn’t have much writing time (poor excuse I know). I joined the college graduate committee so I’ve spent a lot of time planning and organising events for our new freshers and negotiating college politics. I also finished the third rotation for my first year (currently in editing for the Wellcome Trust), selected my PhD project and wrote the full project proposal (I’m back with the second lab, playing with fission yeast genes). All of that earned me an MPhil which I will be collecting sometime in the new year.

Sci Comm: The Next Generation

Hi everyone! As always it's been a while. Sorry. There's been a lot of conferences lately and I'm currently house hunting, which means this place and my PhD have both been feeling a little neglected. First I'd like to congratulate NASA for another successful shuttle launch today and second, I have an exciting new post for you.

This is all about a one day conference that was held here in Cambridge last Wednesday for a select group of people from sicence media, predominantly including journalists and film makers, all of whom have extensive and well developed online personas. Several of us from BlueSci where very honored to be asked to attend too, as the focus was squarely on the future. Where we at BlueSci, as aspiring science writers could take the field in the coming years.

The day was full of exciting and controversial bits of debate and we got to hear lots from many different view points about what science journalists should be doing and how we should be interacting with academics and the public. Here I have outlined the major topics discussed, more details are available elsewhere (see the end). Whilst I dod find some opinions difficult to agree with, it was interesting to hear what everyone had to say and I feel I have gained a lot from the experience.

Also I'll hopefully be posting again soon as following this conference I saw Simon Singh again, along with Ben Goldacre and Brian Cox on their Uncaged Monkeys tour here in Cambridge, so stay tuned for that.

The crest of Jesus College

What is the future of science media and science journalism in the 21st century with all of this new media and the shift of communications onto the Internet? This was the focus of a one-day conference hosted by John Cornwell at Jesus College, Cambridge.
 
The day took the form of a series of open discussions with two leaders providing focus to the discussion. After a warm welcome by John Cornwell, John Naughton opened the first session by discussing the opportunities and challenges involved in adopting new media. He focused on how newspapers have become news organisations, with the paper being one of many media products. Science journalism was effectively compared to a developing ecology where a few large dinosaurs are being replaced by a myriad army of journalistic, blogging termites with a corresponding increase in productivity. The reduction is media size was also highlighted; people buy tracks not albums, read stories not papers and posts not blogs. He asked the questions: How do we add value to a story amidst such competition? And who pays for good journalism when so much of it is free online?

A Right Royal Easter Spring Conference

Hi everyone! Sorry for the neglect, I'm working on several things at the moment so this place has been a bit neglected (hides the cracks in the paintwork). Have no fear that I do have several things chasing each other round my brain and one or the other of them may actually make it into print shortly.

Firstly, the launch of the Easter issue of BlueSci is expected on Thursday, so it's been crazy getting that printed and making sure that the online version will be ready to go too. Thankfully I think I'm on top of that now, but that was quite a few evenings eaten.

Also, and probably most excitingly, I went to my first real, proper, grown-up conference over most of last week so what with the long hours I was a bit short on news hunting/writing time. I did however squeeze in time to write several daily pieces for ConferenceCast, which will be appearing over the next few days. It was really cool, focusing on Cell & Developmental biology so we had loads of great speakers (and the occasional dull one, but not everyone's perfect). The prize winners were all awesome and really interesting, especially the Beddington medal winning PhD student who used music to illustrate how well cells moved together during migration.

Now I finally get some time in my third and final lab of the year, 2 weeks after we offcially started, so it's going to be pretty intensive to try and get some results in just 7 weeks. Also I'm putting together a poster about the importance of science communication for a one day conference later in the week.

 I also had to watch the new series of Doctor Who, of course, which is fantastic, although like everyone else I have NO clue what's going on.

So if you've been missing my senseless ramblings you can pop over to ConferenceCast and see exactly what I've been up to and I promise to get my next proper piece up ASAP and to stop writing all about myself.

tMoL: Genotype vs. Phenotype

It's the end of another term, time for me to move on again. I'll be going home soon to write about what's been going on, and there's a lot to say. The talks I did in schools went really well, although there's still stuff to improve on. This lab placement has been really great and I've been enjoying all the other projects I'm involved in. Next up is an unconference, SciBarCamb, which I strongly recommend to anyone reading this blog.

This is a peice I wrote for a friend of a friend, she's doing a course in genetics and was looking for clarification of the difference between genotype and phenotype, it was a bit of a rush job but hopefully it clarifies matters.

In order to live, grow and make more of themselves, cells need to have instructions. These are stored as DNA, which is mostly found in the cell nucleus. Each set of instructions is called a gene, each gene produces a particular protein. The full set of human DNA, the human genome, can make thousands of proteins and each protein performs a specific function within a cell.

Genes are specific DNA sequences (source)

 Different people have different versions of the same gene and hence of the same protein, this is what makes us genetically different. These different gene alleles have different effects within our body. As a simplified example; there is a protein which is responsible for hair colour. If it is functioning properly then you have brown hair. Some versions of the protein do not function properly so there is no colour made, this results in blonde hair. There are various other versions with intermediate effects resulting in all different hair colours. This is a slight simplification, as there are actually multiple proteins involved in hair colour, but it illustrates the principle.

SOS: Save our Science - Yet More Alien Bacteria. Really!

I saw James Watson last night! and I have his autograph. :D He was in London, in conversation with Brenda Maddox, who wrote Rosalind Franklin's biography. It was fascinating, although I have to admit that he was clearly on his very best behaviour and kept the outrageous comments to a minimum. I'd also like to take this as my excuse for any 'enthusiastic' comments in the post below, which is a great peiece of storytelling. This week was also my first outreach talk to school children, I think it went rather well, although I'll be writing much more on that in a few weeks.

 

OK, so this is another story that I was asked to write (Yay!). Once again there have been reports of alien bacteria in meteorites (that’s the third time in 14 years, if you’re counting).Here is the latest story, I suggest you read it first as it makes what I’ll be saying more surprising. Go on, I’ll wait. Sounds good doesn’t it, highly acclaimed doctor with a paper in a prestigious sounding journal, with authoritative quotes and everything. Not only that but the journal seems to have gone to great lengths to ensure extensive peer reviewing of the findings before publishing. Well, as with many stories that get NASA plastered to them, it’s got a lot of people rather riled up and for a lot of different reasons. Read on and I’m sure you’ll see why.

This is a fantastic story, I’ve never seen so many mistakes made by so many people in so many different ways, it’s quite a feat of engineering really. Also it does go to show that some people really do never learn. The roots of this story lie all the way back in 1997 when NASA scientists reported finding bacterial fossils in a meteorite from Mars.

This astonishing and revolutionary finding was reported by Richard B. Hoover who works at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre. This was discounted shortly afterwards when it became apparent that the structures observed were probably contaminants from the time the sample spent on Earth before being studied. Now some people would learn from such a colossal mistake that was a huge embarrassment for NASA and Hoover personally.

This bacterium from Earth looks strangely like some observed in these meteorites (source)

Hoover, however, is made of stronger stuff. After his error in 1997 I’d like to say that he improved his working scheme, ensuring all samples were properly sterilised and cross checked before announcing proof of alien life to the public. But he didn’t. He returned in 2007, although with less impact (mainly due to lack of a successful publication), to say that he really had found life, this time in a totally different type of meteorite. Thankfully this time he attracted less attention.

Now, to the delight of many, Richard B. Hoover has returned to the public stage, thanks in no small part to the lovely people at FOX news, with another attempt. He’s still looking at the same rocks from 2007 but this time he REALLY thinks he’s got it.

SOS: Save our Science - Drink Hearty Lads (and Ladies)

Hi Everyone. Hope there's still people out there reading this. Would be great to hear from you. Sorry things have been a bit slow, there's a lot going on this term, which I hope to write about (in part) soon. This new rotation is really fun, although quite long hours, and I've got loads of other projects going on relating to Science Communication, as many of you may already be aware. It means I'm not getting much time to sit and write articles on here though. I will be working hard to try and get back to ClearSci as much as possible, so hopefully more will be going on around here.


Anyway, so here's a fun story that is an issue I've been looking forward to having a go at. Everyone always has some new story about how alcohol is good for you or bad for you, and usually it depends on what you measure and whether it's the alcohol itself or something else (e.g. tannins in red wine) which is helping you out. This latest is cool because it pulls together a lot of research from the last 30 years, and actually finds some benefits, in certain instances, but also points out the importance of moderation. Enjoy. :)


This is a debate that I find quite interesting, especially since everyone seems to be more than a little biased in their desired outcome. It is the endless search for positive effects of drinking alcohol. A new meta-analysis (re-examination of lots of old data from different studies) of alcohol research may finally be able to put part of this issue to rest.

tMoL: Nucleus

The brain of the cell. It is one of the most well known elements of an animal cell, and is common to all higher organisms (eukaryotes – animals, plants,fungi), as with most structures inside a cell it does not occur in bacteria (prokaryotes). Most DNA in a cell is found in the nucleus, it is the storage centre for all of the information to make more cells. The nucleus is also full of proteins which control which genes are active in a cell and help to pack all of the DNA into such a tiny space. This is how cells are able to become specialised to a specific function, by controlling which genes are active.

Small beginnings

Hey! Well, since this is my first post I guess I'd better introduce myself and what I'm trying to do here. For now you can call me Ret, I'm here to give you an inside view of modern biological research. I'm an avid believer in communicating biology to everyone. The point of this blog is to introduce biology to everyone, in a way that is clear and easy to understand. To dispel some of the bad reputation research has gained over the years.

I am a 23 year old, first year PhD student. I am at the University of Cambridge studying animal development; how an adult animal is formed from a fertilised egg. This is a very popular field of study, especially since the advent of stem cell research. I will also be your guide to the "Cambridge bubble" hopefully giving you some idea what it's actually like here on the inside, and showing you some of the things that go on here, besides working. Personally I spend a lot of time dancing and baking.