Interview with Victor Ambros

There is an interesting interview with Victor Ambros in the latest edition of PLoS Genetics.

Here's his thoughts on his Lasker Award:

And so it has very little to do, frankly, with the particular person getting the award. What the award represents is a process that involves interactions amongst many, many people. And the end, one person ends up getting the award. It's really important to try to acknowledge that and understand the fact that really everything that happens in science, including the discoveries that people try to acknowledge by awards, are really the products of this confluence of people's histories and people's interactions. I really believe that science gets done by people with average abilities and talents, for the most part, and when something special happens, enough so that people want to acknowledge it with an award, it was really…in large part…luck!

We try to say to the public, here's an award for somebody who's really, really special. But actually, it's not the somebody who is really special, it's the science that is special. The way we do science, and the way it works is so amazing. I wish non-scientists would better understand this. That science is a community exercise, that it involves people interacting, that it involves a lot of good fortune in the context of people trying to do something really carefully and following curiosity. That's why it works so well!

Words to live by!

Top 10 Funny Science Videos

Very dorky science videos.

Marshall Nirenberg (April 10, 1927 – January 15, 2010)

Marshall Nirenberg passed away recently from cancer. Nirenberg is famous for "deciphering" the genetic code. I wrote a piece about him earlier in this blog. In the classic experiment with Heinrich Matthei, the duo showed that nucleic acid codon poly-uracil (UUU) coded for the amino acid phenylalanine.

According to a New York Times Obituary, Nirenberg was “enthusiastic and magnetic. He had an idea every two or three minutes."

NIH has an excellent exhibit on the genetic code discovery.

Nirenberg shared the 1968 Nobel Prize with Robert Holley and Gobind Khorana.

Nirenberg's collected papers can be found at the National Library of Medicine.

Parasite of the Day

My colleague at the American Museum of Natural History, Susan Perkins, has started an ambitious new blog. She will be introducing a new parasite to the world each day in Parasite of the Day. Unfortunately, perhaps, for the hosts of the world, Susan has plenty of subject matter and should be busy for quite some time. A recent paper in PNAS (Dobson et al. 2008) states that although they "estimate that there are between 75,000 and 300,000 helminth species parasitizing the vertebrates. [They] have no credible way of estimating how many parasitic protozoa, fungi, bacteria, and viruses exist. At least the helminths parasites of vertebrates will keep Susan busy for the next 821 years or so.

The photo above is of Neoechinorhynchus emyditoides a species of acanthocephalan, or thorny-headed worm, by Mike Barger.

Ava at the Reef Tank interviewed me on my thoughts on evolution and fish husbandry. I confess that while I absolutely love aquariums, I don't have much by way of aquacultures at present. We've got a few really-easy-to-care-for Bettas and Telescope goldfish, but that is about it. I'm fairly lazy when it comes to maintaining animals in my lab and house, and try to chose animals that require minimal care (Leopard slugs anyone?). I did buy a female Betta with some breeding in mind, but it turned out to be a wild-type male. I was really disappointed since Bettas have such interesting breeding behaviors. Males make large bubble nests with their own saliva.


After female Betta has spawned, the eggs float up into the nest from below or the male Betta carries them there in its mouth. The male fertilizes the eggs and initiates embryo development. The male Betta will guard the nest for the next 24-48 hours until the eggs hatch. He also keeps a close watch on the eggs and will retrieve any eggs or fry that fall from the nest. He will also repair the nest by adding bubbles where needed. After the fry hatch (in 24-48 hours) the male will tend the fish for the next couple of weeks. How cool is that?

You and Your Research

Richard Hamming is not a household name. As a long-time Bell Labs scientist, Hamming made lasting impacts on mathematics, computer science, and engineering. He also gave one of the best talks I have come across for anyone pursuing/interested in pursuing a career in science. This talk, titled "You and Your Research" was presented to the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar on 7 March 1986. It could be titled "How to do Great Research".

Hamming first discusses his motivation:

At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.

Hamming found that the major difference between good and great is largely one of attiHe summarizes his findings:

In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important problems, they don't become emotionally involved, they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don't.

In other words, ask yourself three questions:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?

2. Are you working on one of them?

3. Why not?

Virus Evolution

Here is a short video on virus evolution from the Instituto de Biologia Molecular y Celular de Plantas and the Santa Fe Institute Professor Santiago Elena.

Synopsis

Viruses can evolve fast and sometimes adapt quickly to a new host species. For example, an influenza virus that normally infects birds can become adapted to humans. The tobacco etch virus normally infects tobacco plants. Professor Santiago Elena from Valencia wants to find out what it takes to make the tobacco virus capable of infecting another plant: Arabidopsis. The movie shows how Santiago Elena does the evolutionary experiment and we see that after 30 rounds of experimental evolution the virus is indeed adapted to the new host plant! After the experiment, Elena looks at the genetic code of the adapted virus and finds that there are just three differences between the genetic code of the normal (tobacco loving) virus and the virus that is now adapted to Arabidopsis.