Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

Wow! It seems just like yesterday that I arrived back at Duke to start my fellowship. Going in, I had never had any experience in a lab before, and despite gauging the experiences of some of my peers, I had no idea what to expect. Immediately I learned how the dynamics of labs (at least mine, and from talking to many other fellows, other labs at Duke as well) function. The P.I. often does not actually do a lot of the nitty gritty lab work. I always imagined the P.I. being kind of a leader that all the graduate students followed. I was surprised too that most of the papers that came out of the lab were not first-authored by the P.I. However, I soon learned the realities of running a lab that are funding and being involved in everyone’s projects, which are different. Lixian told me that Dr. Tracey is really good at getting grants. It’s interesting that perhaps of all the most necessary skills of P.I.’s writing can be the most valuable. The system is pretty cost inefficient when the P.I. has to spend so much looking for funding, but that’s how science is. I thought research would generally be a more collaborative field, with labs from different universities working together. I have certainly witnessed this, seeing drosophila sent to us from places like Princeton, but the field seems to run on competition more than cooperation. It would be really cool to look at science from a macroeconomics standpoint, and analyze it. Unfortunately, I have a pretty limited background in econ, and probably won’t take a lot of it in my next three years, but I think it would be interesting to look at all the economics that make the system how labs operate in the U.S. and what seems like the rest of the world. If I had to make an analogy to economic systems, it would seem to me that research labs are run under cold hard capitalism, as to get funding each lab must have a strong reputation, and to do this, it must produce quality research. At first glance this seems like a good model, however, as we saw with our look at scientific ethics, it can cause scientists to conduct research that might not be in the best interest of the field. Personally, I am surprised cooperation is not utilized more, just because everyone in the field seems genuinely interested in their work. Anyone smart enough to be in a lab could probably be making a lot more money and working a lot less hours in another profession, and graduate students and post-docs seem to have a good level of choice in their selection of labs to join. Coming in, I thought grad students in labs had it easy…work 9-5 five days and week and take nights and weekends without homework and impending exams. Over the course of the summer, I gradually started coming into lab later, from about 9 o’clock to 10, but I ended up staying into the night most nights, often into the a.m.,  and if I got out “early” at about 5, I usually would need to come back later. I also had to work on the weekends, because I needed to do all sorts of stuff to the flies at different stages of their life cycles and often collect virgins many times if they were low in supply. Usually this wouldn’t be as long, as I tried to get all the plate-making and miscellaneous stuff done during the week so I would only have to do the necessary daily tasks during the weekend, but I was in lab enough everyday that I often found myself losing track of the day of the week.

This will serve as a segue into a topic I meant to discuss in this blog, my future aspirations. I think in my last blog I mentioned that if we unfortunately hadn’t advanced so much over the past couple thousand years, I might wish I could be someone like Aristotle, and study just about everything. Back then, science and philosophy were largely the same thing. Now, both fields have subfields that are increasingly specialized, and the two fields seem just about as far apart as you can get. So I will try to be a little more realistic.

Right now, I am planning on double-majoring in both neuroscience and philosophy here at Duke. More than anything else, the mind truly amazes me, and I don’t think I would do it justice by only studying it from one point of view. Neuroscience is also such an expanding field; it seems like we know basically nothing about the brain. I have read books and articles about cognitive neuroscience, from both neuroscientists and philosophers, and they often seem to be worlds apart in their views (often neuroscientists being more sure and discounting things while philosophers coming up with thought experiments [of course, what else would they do] advocating paradigm shifts. I wanted to do more reading on these subject this summer but I’ve been more busy this summer than I ever imagined (see above).

One option I am considering after I graduate from Duke is an MD/PhD. Like many others, I am attracted to it because its brings the best of both worlds, research and medicine, into a program in which, even better, you get paid. Who wouldn’t want to be one? On the other hand, MD/PhDs are extremely difficult to obtain, and take a large chunk of your life away. For example, Richard, the MD/PhD in our lab just successfully defended his thesis, but has one more year of med school to go, while his wife has already finished her residency (I think…) and is beginning her career as a doctor, even though I think they entered at about the same year. These days, medicine requires residencies and academia requires post-docs, so either of these would extend my education quite for a long time. While I love learning (when I am interested in the material) and seem to enjoy going to school, I’m not sure if I will begin to feel like I will want to settle down more and find a job earlier in life. Perhaps it might be more attractive to be an expert in one area, then two different things well? Although from what I understand MD/PhD’s often seem to pick a focus between medicine or research. An MD/PhD still kind of stands as a goal focused a long way in the distance, and if I change my mind, it probably won’t largely affect my undergraduate education.

Philosophically, I am drawn very strongly to research and the quest for knowledge. One of the goals I had earlier in life was to question everything I thought I knew and try to push the boundaries of my knowledge. Research seems to be the path to pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. It is very exciting. If I went to grad school, I would probably enter as a student in neuroscience or neurobiology. Ideally, my program might also include a cognitive neuroscience focus, bringing in more larger ideas. Although when I was younger, I think, in terms of philosophy, I was primarily drawn to ethics, recently I have also been especially intrigued in philosophy of mind. I’m probably not going to go to straight-up philosophy grad school, although I’m not ruling this out. I think philosophy is something I will always try to learn through life, and since it is so broad it pertains to just about any field. I think doing an undergraduate degree in philosophy will give me a good base for this continual learning, but I am leaning on focusing more on science and medicine post-graduation from Duke as opposed to only philosophy. I know there is a new, rapidly expanding field called neurophilosophy, which might for all I know be a fancy name for research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, but I might be interested in graduate programs tailored in this area if they exist. I haven’t put in a whole lot of time searching around yet as I’m not completely certain with my life goals. In terms of the great competition of science though, I think having a solid philosophical background gives me a great advantage. It’s hard to describe, but I think exposure to many branches of philosophy instills an ability to critically think and synthesize knowledge from different areas to create. This after all, seems to be what research is all about. On the other hand, I find the basic ideas of genetics so amazing, I might be more drawn to that as I begin to do more genetic testing in my lab work. Medicine has the advantage of having a more direct human aspect, and this is appealing, as your ability to help others is more directly apparent, and oftentimes you can probably see results of your work more quickly and probably more successfully.

Anyway, I plan to continue in the Tracey lab next semester, probably either as work-study or independent study. Actually, I have decided just to stay here at Duke for the 2 weeks after HH ended until FAC-training camp begins. This is actually kind of an important time because it will be much more difficult to do this experimental protocol during the year, as I think I’ve said on just about every entry. I’m also playing a lot of basketball and trying to work off some of the Vermonster I consumed the past Friday night. I really haven’t had a whole lot of time to do anything else besides these two things and eat and sleep. Actually, I am kind of low on time. So I guess previous worries of being bored, like before, won’t come to fruition. We actually may have found something interesting today, that we may build on if our results seem to suggest it plays an important role in the flies’ decision making.

It’s kind of late so I better go to bed. Not really tired tonight, but I’ll have to get up tomorrow. But I just want to say this has been an awesome summer! I don’t see going in to lab every day as work so as much as a great educational opportunity, with a nice stipend. I’ve learned so much about drosophila and gotten so much better handling the flies from when I started. I remember the first days when I would turn the microscope on the highest settings and debate whether the fly I was looking at was a male or female. Now I can quickly separate them by naked eye. I’ve also significantly decreased beheadings…although the food in many of my vials is often too wet. There is still so much to learn and improve on. I feel like I’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of knowledge held by others in the lab. Hopefully in the future I will learn new techniques; I think we might use some genetic mutants in the future to test a few things with our experiment. I want to thank Dr. Tracey for hosting in his lab, and providing me with so many great ideas. He is truly an innovator, and I’ve learned how important having an open mind is when doing work because you could otherwise miss over potentially interesting findings. He provided many ideas and the basis for the work I’ve done this summer. I also would like to thank Lixian, my mentor, who still patiently even now will help check flies if I’m not completely sure that there may be a few more virgins left in the bottle. She has been instrumental in helping me run the experiment and teaching me all of the fly and lab techniques. I’ve also learned a ton about China and graduate life from her. Everyone else in the lab has been great too, always providing ideas and assistance usually before I have the chance to ask.

Also, a thanks to the coordinators of the program. Dean Nijhout remained very involved throughout the program, coming to all of the chalk talks and some of the speakers, and was very supportive, knowledgeable, and encouraging about my research. Alex and Suzanne were both also very enthusiastic and always responded to emails and went out of their way to do everything they could to help provide us the best experiences. The program also got us a really nice breakfast, some really good cakes, cool bags, and all sorts of stuff I can’t really remember now. I hope they know their kindness and effort is greatly appreciated. I am also thankful that all of the speakers came in and gave interesting, great talks. Nobody B.S.’d their presentation even the slightest bit, which surprised me a little because I know professors (and many the program had were important faculty) have a very tight time schedule and many people demanding their time. They all were prepared and gave different looks at the field. We don’t learn about research or the field all that much in the classroom (and since most of my family is not science oriented, I never really learned about the field from them), so their talks were very meaningful, at least for me. Finally, of course, none of this would have been possible without the funding from HHMI, so I am I’m sure my peers are also grateful for their willingness to support this program.

I have also had a great social experience this summer. I really didn’t know most of the fellows at the beginning of the program (and I still really don’t know a few that well), but I’ve met some extremely bright and enthusiastic students interested in biology and made some great friends. I remember thinking how I was going to be bored this summer since most of my friends weren’t here and I wouldn’t have anything to do except go to the gym when I wasn’t in lab. It turned out that I was almost as strapped for time as I was during the academic year. I will have so many great memories from this summer…its too late to list them but if you’ve somehow bothered to read this far and you’re still interested just check out the list Shilpa made in her last blog entry which encompasses many of my memories as well.

Looking back, though, from what I knew when I came in, to the poster that’s sitting here in my apartment on Central Campus, it’s truly amazing to see the progress I made over only 8 weeks. It sounds really cliché, but I bet everyone else in the program would say the exact same thing.

If you have any questions or are thinking about applying to this program or want to know about my experiences working in a lab, shoot me an email at nus2@duke.edu.
 

Haven’t updated in a while. The past few weeks, I’ve been really really realllllly busy getting all the trials done I needed for my poster. Usually I end up in lab for a good portion, if not all, of the night. We had a good idea of what the data was going to look like, but we had to perform a lot of extra trials so certain experiment types would all contain the same number of trials and our data would be statistically relevant. Overall, our results seem to confirm our hypotheses that we set out with in the beginning. Right now I’m trying a bunch of different things to try to get a results I am hoping for, but nothing seems to be working. The summer is the perfect time to do this type of experiment because you need to manipulate the flies each day at different life stages at certain times of day, and that would be a LOT harder (basically impossible) to do during the regular semester unless I was working full-time.

Throughout the Howard Hughes program, many speakers have come to talk to us, usually on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, to, among other things, explore their area of research, describe their career path, and give us the glimpse of what life as a primary investigator is like. Thinking back on these seminars, I realized I had forgotten many of the details of the research of many of the P.I.s, especially the ones that presented near the beginning of the program. However, I don’t think the overall, main purpose of these talks was to give us a supplemental guest-lectured survey course of all of biology. Well, I hope note, because I honestly can’t remember everything each person said. But I did draw some general impressions from hearing each speaker talk.

All the speakers had organized, clear presentations of their research. They came prepared and knew their stuff. But they didn’t feel the need to make it more complicated than it needed to be, considering we (rising sophomores) were the audience. It seems like almost everybody tried to through in a little tongue-and-cheek humor too, or at least keep things light.

Another thing that seemed to differ was how the speakers reached the spot where they are now. Some seemed to have more normal tracks and always wanted to be a scientist. Others did things such as travel around the world I remember Steve Nowicki, Professor of Biology and Dean of Undergraduate Education said at a dinner that he was planning on pursuing music when he entered college. It was that one course in biology that helped persuade him to major in biology and pursue graduate work and a career in the subject after college. I really haven’t had that one course yet…I’m still not totally sure what kind of degree I want to do after college…but I will not digress, more on that to come.

It was also interesting to see how specialized everyone was. Back in the good ‘ole days, guys like Aristotle could write and philosophize about just about everything and still have time on the side to found systems of physics and biology that was the golden standard for just about two millennia. Although Duke instills a sense of high expectations in us, obvious it would be impossible to do this now. It’s kind of too bad careers like this aren’t available right now, as I think it would be fascinating to ponder just about everything. These days, researchers can spend their entire careers studying one step in a particular pathway. As we’ve accumulated a lot more scientific theories since the days of the Greeks, research must be increasingly specialized and more education needed. This also has it’s pro’s though, because you can become an expert in the area you work in and know (at least compared to Aristotle) you are doing extremely advanced work. All of the speakers did a great job of keeping their research in perspective by making sure we took home the importance of the work they were doing. I was actually a little surprised by how much of the research by being done by working with “model organisms” to understand something more in general than just to understand it. It seems that even the most trivial topics have great importance. On that note, it’s too bad Sarah Palin couldn’t make any of the seminars. Maybe she can do Howard Hughes next year since she is without a job now.

Haven’t updated in a while.

Anyway, I’ve put in a lot of hours in the last few weeks. Usually Lixian and I are the last people out of the lab…however I can’t really say we’re ever really the first ones there. I’m thankful that my lab is so close to Chipotle/Firehouse/Green Tango so I can easily grab food when I leave. A slightly disconcerting result of this, though, is that our refrigerator is probably more full now than even when we took the original picture that posted earlier to the blog. So I’ve been making dinner the past few nights to try to deplete the food supply. If anyone on Central reading this wants cake, feel free to stop by!

I don’t want to reveal too much about my research at the moment. Got to keep some surprises for the poster session. ☺ Right now a lot of what we’re doing is re-running a lot of different set-ups we’ve done to get clearer data. Because we have a good amount of data, we are branching out a little from our main objectives and testing some other compounds than sugars. Most of the results are consistent with our results, but a few have been a little surprising. Then again, our main findings have been quite surprising in their own right! Anyway though, we’ve been pretty successful on getting those error bars down so that a lot of the comparisons we hope to make are statistically different. In doing so, we’ve seemed to notice some even more minute differences between different sugars, but I don’t know if we will have enough flies in the upcoming days to run enough trials so we can get error bars from our Preference Indexes that are small enough to be useful. Time is always against the researcher!

However, we have collected a bunch of virgins the past few days, so we can be prepared to set up a flurry of trials at the last minute if we find out we need more data in some areas. But it’s amazing to see how much data I have recorded so far in less than a month and a half, especially since the first couple weeks we spent perfecting the set-up and not to collect data we would use for our official results. All the hard work will hopefully pay off! Over the next few datas I will need to start putting the data together in graphs and preliminary visual representations.

This summer has turned out to be a great opportunity to run this experiment because I need to put in significant time every day collecting virgins, mating flies, setting up the feeding stage, setting up the experiment, and counting. Since these all occur on different days of the adult fly’s life cycle, missing one day in effect messes up four different days of the experiment. Since I don’t really have any other commitments now though, I can come in every day to get these done. A behavioral experiment such as this with work at many specific moments of the flies lifetime would be much more difficult any other time because I need to be in lab certain times every day.

In other news, I really liked the last Harry Potter movie…even though I basically forgot everything that happened in the book. Oh, and I also turned 19 since my last post! Had a nice night at Olive Garden with friends… The birthday also contributed to the surplus of cake. I’m reading a book on the ancient Greek philosophers and I’ve gained a great new respect for Socrates…it seems like he’s usually overshadowed by Plato and Aristotle but I think Socrates is my favorite of the three. He should be known for a lot more than just the “Socratic Method.”

Oh, and what up Andre Dawkins. We NEEDED another guard. I’ve watched a bunch of Youtube highlight tapes and I’ve come away with two things: 1) He looks REALLY young. 2) But he has a REALLY complete game. He seems a little more polished of a player than Elliot was coming in. I think he’ll be able to come off the bench and get some extensive playing time. He may not be the next JJ Redick but he’s got a sweet jump shot.

Until next time,
Nick
 

So…if you haven’t noticed in my blogs I like to ramble on about random things. So instead of doing a topic I’ll make this blog centered around my random ramblings. Over the past couple days I’ve been putting a lot more time in the lab. Since the program is only 8 weeks long, and the first two weeks we needed to set up a lot of bottles of the genotype of flies I am using, and we did as many trials of the experiment to optimize our conditions and get some very initial results. This was important because we started mimicking the conditions used by another previous paper doing a similar study, but since then we have made many changes to maximize the amount of eggs laid and try to control all of the possible variables that could affect results. Testing behavior is difficult because so many things can affect it. Little changes in light and odor could very be factors. Since the topic I am working on hasn’t been extensively studied, all of the effects of the conditions are not completely understood.

This week I’ve put in some significant time on the nights. It’s a lot more convenient if I leave and come back because at night and on the weekends I can park on the side of the road right by the building. Working at night is really different from the day. I kind of like a mix of both. It’s nice to be there for most of the time during the day because there are other people there to converse with and provide help and guidance. On the other hand, working at night is a little more relaxing, because I have most of my day’s work done and generally have a more predictable schedule. I often play music when no one else is in the lab. It can get a little creepy when I’m alone late at night, but I’m an only child and have spent my fair share of nights alone. Plus, my lab seems to be one of the safest places at Duke. To get in after 5 pm on a weekday (or on a weekend), you have to have an electronic chip to gain access to the building, and then an electronic chip to gain access to the specific lab I’m in. Plus, the area around my lab is well lit and it feels safe, even though it is a little ways from the heart of West Campus. Fortunately though, I am probably going to take tomorrow off! I made a bet with Lixian that there was a new virgin fly in the bottle we started about 10 days ago, which is about the time it takes for adult drosophila to lay eggs that develop into virgin drosophila. Even with all of the biology I have taken, it amazes me how quickly the worm-like pupae can change into the form of adult flies. Virgin flies are kind of like an intermediate form, because their body seems more simple, clear and wormlike, and when they are really young you can see their wings developing. Anyway, there were about 7 flies in the bottle, so I bet that at least one was a virgin, from looking on the outside. When we anesthetized the flies on the CO2 pad (cold temperatures also work; we do this after the flies have laid eggs in the plates and we need to take them out to count the eggs, however, this takes a little longer so it is not convenient unless transfer to the CO2 pad without high escape rates), and looked at them under the microscope, it was pretty clear that one of them was a virgin. So she has agreed to do a couple basic things for me tomorrow. I was a little wiped out anyway because I was in lab from 9 to 1 the day before, with breaks for lunch, faculty seminar, and dinner. I’ll have to work on increasing my productivity and efficiency to avoid having long hours such as these. Actually, I might run in for a little bit tomorrow shortly; I think I left my cell phone charger in lab and my phone is pretty low. Going in on weekends is pretty convenient because I can just drive and park right next to the building. Usually there are other people there during the day, but it’s definitely not as busy as a weekday. I think Lixian goes in pretty often on weekends; she is a very dedicated student!

Anyway, we’re giving chalk talks next week so hopefully that will go well. I still have to put some time preparing that. I taught an ACT class before so I have some experience writing stuff on the board and trying to explain it at the same time, although the difficulty. However, most of that job was helping to engage the students and explain answers and techniques; for my chalk talk, I will have to present my topic with enough depth to show that I have a pretty thorough understanding of what I have done so far. Also, since I am getting results every day I think I may have to modify what I plan to say in that regard every time I check the plates for eggs. Right now we’re testing some things we didn’t initially plan at the start within the context of our experiment. It appears the drosophila like to lay eggs predominantly on one side of the plate, even if both sides of the plate contain the same substrate. So by manipulating the conditions we are trying to figure out what causes the drosophila to make this decision.

Looks like Williams is going to win Wimbledon tomorrow! I haven’t been able to see a whole lot of play, but I’ve been following the scores pretty closely. Congrats to Roddick for making the final, but I’d give him maybe a 1% chance against Federer. My Detroit Tigers also won in 16 innings tonight; pretty awesome.

They re-did the basketball courts on central. Now they are painted blue with white lines. Unfortunately they also decided to move the 3-point line back to the line they now use in college, which I am not to. It is also unfortunate my shot seems to peak a couple steps inside the 3-point line. Hopefully if I have free time my shooting will improve this summer. So far it has not reached my expectations. Anyway though, the court surface is much nicer than the old version. I still have a scar on my left palm from a pretty nasty fall Arun and I took about a week ago because the court surface was so uneven. The new surfacing also means I can wear my new basketball shoes I got a couple weeks before the program started without damaging the soles too much. So far I really like them. Hopefully, they will put nets up on the baskets soon. I think they may have gotten stolen last time. Although I can’t imagine what you would do with a cut-up basketball net.

If you like hip-hop, check out Lupe Fiasco’s new single, Shining Down. I don’t think he’s officially released it yet, but it has been leaked and it’s on Youtube. Matt Santos does the chorus, which is really catchy. A contentious issue in contemporary hip-hop is the use of auto-tune technology by many rappers, which Lupe indirectly addresses; apparently, Lupe is in the Jay-Z camp and isn’t a big fan of auto-tune. The new Mos Def album is pretty good too, but I haven’t had the chance to listen to it a lot.

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on one of the problems that really puzzles me: in what instances are customs, opinions and worldviews right or wrong, and when are they only relative to the individual and one’s culture? This is such a general question, but it seems to come up in a lot of discussions I have and things I notice. I could go on for a while but it’s getting pretty late.

Happy 4th of July! Maybe I’ll watch the movie Independence Day later tonight/tomorrow for like the tenth time. It’s one of those movies that isn’t that good but you still end up watching repeatedly.
 

Hi,

Recently, all of the Howard Hughes fellows watched And The Band Played On, a movie that presented the work leading to the identification of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. HIV has lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people all over the world, and is a prominent topic of research both at Duke University and around the world. I wrote a group report on antiviral drugs on HIV in high school; it’s amazing how researchers are developing drugs to attack the virus at all stages of its life cycle.

But what really made the movie compelling was that it was about so much more than the discovery of HIV. HIV had initially had a large outbreak among gay men almost 30 years ago before it spread among humans all over the world. Science and politics regularly conflict, but this made the conflict much more apparent. Gays in America have faced discrimination at both the political and personal level, so the idea of shutting down bathhouses that cater to the gay community and facilitated the spread of HIV would seem like a continuation of this. Many diseases and conditions often are more serious to certain ethnic groups or cultures because or different customs that affect their severity, so proactive measures to confront them can often be seen as inflicting on the rights of a particular group. It seems natural that members of gay groups would be greatly angered by any outside forces trying to control them, as they feel this has happened for much of their lives. On the side of the CDC, it makes sense to close the bathhouses because not only do they cause a dangerous threat for all of the gay community, but they help facilitate the spread of the virus which can (and obviously has) infect the entire human population. I think general situations which deal with controlling the interests of groups of people are the hardest to provide clear guidance, because often the repercussions of the group’s interests can affect the general public. Throughout history, we have seen people try to prescribe rights and culture and ideas upon others. In some cases, these can lead to advancements, and certainly treatment for certain ailments and new scientific paradigms are only a few examples of beneficial sharing. In fact, it seems sharing would always be preferred to prescribing, but sometimes you cannot influence people to do what is “best” for them by simply suggesting it, at least not quickly as is often necessary. Many people did not understand the threat of HIV because it’s dangerous nature did not initially garner strong attention from the media. Activists in the movie said things like they would rather live free than oppressed, but after catching HIV, they would probably take statements such as these back. Is it ethical to act in their best interest, even if they do not approve of doing so? It is a difficult answer to provide.

Another example of an ethical situation the movie presented is privacy. Should a patient’s anonymity be protected if exposing their identity could lead to advancement in the prevention of a disease. This reminds of the classical ticking bomb scenario, in which police confiscate a terrorist who knows the location of a bomb that will go off in a densely packed area. Is it ethical to torture the terrorist for the greater good (in this case, to save lives)? One argument against torture is that such a perfect scenario would never occur in real life, in which you could know the truth of all these statements. It’s also interesting that since torture isn’t being used as a punishment, this scenario does not discriminate among terrorists and other laymen (such as family members of the terrorist, or maybe a pedestrian who overheard his plans) since the sole purpose is the obtain information that will promote the greatest good and cause the smallest amount of pain. I think this analogy applies fairly well to case of a patient. The odds that information from one person would help so many others is incredibly small in any individual case, and would allow for many slippery slopes. Resources could be used in other manners that are more effective to the situation at hand. I think this is a reason why privacy is valued so strongly in research that involves humans. If revoking rights to privacy could have such a great benefit on a regular basis I think you would see it occur more often. However, one’s identity, other than basic characteristics that may affect the data, does not play a large role, and is usually then correctly ignored. In the movie, when finding the flight attendant, his privacy for the most part was respected as much as possible, and I think the researchers did a good job of getting the information they desperately needed while respecting his rights.

Also, the theme of academic honesty came into play. It seems to me there are two fundamental pressures in biological academia that keep the system afloat. The most basic is the drive for funding, which is needed, in great amounts, to run a lab and have the equipment needed for creating knowledge. The other is the drive to be recognized, which is more like icing on the cake. Sure, professors on track for tenure and post-doctoral students need to be published in order to fulfill their goals and move up the chain, but it is not as critical as money. Lixian told me today about a lab she knew that had to shut down because it simply was not able to receive adequate funding. These two needs are interconnected, as funding usually finds its way to reputable labs performing meaningful research. Anyway, in a competitive environment, only the fittest will survive. Ideally, this might lead to a little bit of reciprocal altruism and collaboration. Collaboration is needed today because of the increasingly specialization of labs and scientists yet the greater need for interdisciplinary work. But a lot of this cooperation is then by force. So, the conflict as I see it, often can come down to the battle between the two pressures and the strength of the desire for knowledge and truth. Game theory might suggest the pressures would promote ultimately selfishly guided behavior. Researchers might not be willing to provide help or credit to another if his or her resources will not likely be needed in the future. This kind of makes sense with how the movie showed Dr. Gallo, who after discovering the identify of HIV would have made a big enough name for himself that he could be assured of prominence for the rest of his life, and wouldn’t likely have any need to collaborate with the French again. On the other hand, the main character (I’m blanking on his name) working for the CDC enlisted the help of the French, which was seen by Dr. Gallo as almost treason. This was shown as not coming from his desire to further his career but his hope to discover HIV as soon as possible. Usually the two previously mentioned pressures coincide with discovery, so as they promote research. Problems occur when they do not, and I believe this is a major area that could be reformed in academia, so there is less attention paid to personal achievements and more toward advancing knowledge. I believe academia is self-selecting in the sense that the people who enter it are primarily motivated by this quest to push the frontier of knowledge, because basically there is a lot more money to be made much more quickly and easily in other professions. While researchers do not necessarily need to earn higher salaries, I believe more funding needs to be available. I realize this is not a bold position from somehow who has experience in a lab, but I think because science can seem so distinct to most Americans they have difficulty relating to it, and see the greater necessity for other areas of spending such as defense, which can have a more immediate imaginable impact.

I was thinking the other day, what would happen if all the peer-reviewed journals switched to a policy in which articles were published in an anonymous basis. This obviously wouldn’t work at all today, in which publishing is a necessity for primary investigators to get grants accepted and other students to work their way up the long chain. But it would be interesting to see if the quality of research would increase or decrease, perhaps in a ten-year period.

This article in Popular Science describes a paper in Nature that has since been retracted: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-03/nobel-prize-winner-retracts-paper. Although the researcher, Linda Buck, cited this previous work in a paper that helped her earn a Nobel Prize, the retracted paper is only seen as a more minor footnote and that does not deal with the main topic of the work that won Buck the Nobel, which was discovering a gene family involved in olfaction and that particular odors generate combinations of olfaction sensory cells that activate together to give us an impression of a particular smell. Her retracted work dealt with a particular olfaction pathway. I bring this up because from the nature of labs, with many people working together and errors can occur. While many problems can happen in science because of misconduct, they more often occur because we are, after all, human. It appears that this was the case, and Buck’s major findings are still valid.

Anyway, the cool thing about drosophila (besides their relatively small genome, ease of physically manipulating in the lab, [although I still have my struggles], and ability to be selectively mated and mutated for certain genotypes) is that they don’t resemble humans and probably have very little, if any, consciousness. This lets us do things with them that we cannot do with apes and rats, which we, for many reasons (which can be argued if they are just or not), associate more with ourselves and for possessing higher cognitive abilities.

If you are interested this is a video on youtube I watched a couple weeks ago with Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene, interviewing Peter Singer, a professor of philosophy at Princeton who is famous for his utilitarian views concerning poverty and animal rights among others. He wrote the book Animal Liberation, which is famous for its role in the Animal Rights movement. Singer is angered more by the way we use animals for food than research; the former is much less regulated. Anyway, I don’t think he would have a large problem with fruit fly research compared to other practices in the animal industry, but he is pretty radical in his views.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU

I thought Transformers 2 was pretty good, considering it basically lacked any plot. Right now I am going in to lab every day but I’m still finding time to watch a lot of movies. Hopefully I will have more time to read in the near future.

I have worked in the lab a little later recently. The lab is surprisingly very relaxing and warm at night when no one is there. I would try to go early in the morning but my tiredness would likely wipe out this nostalgia.

Leave a comment =)

Nick