On The Paris Climate Treaty Exit

I've written sparingly about global warming/climate change over the years. I'll be the first to tell you that most of the actual science that comes from the myriad concerned fields goes right over my head. I do take quite a bit of it with a grain of salt, not just because I suspect some people are playing fast and loose with the data, but also because on a social level it's become associated with a sort of eschatological environmentalism.

Nowhere was the latter bit more evident to me than following President Trump's announcement that the US would be leaving the Paris Climate Treaty.

It's hard to determine just how serious to take any of it anymore. I understand that Trump's election represents an existential crisis to many on the American left, but many declared that the US exit from this treaty means no less than the end of the world. Everything as we know it is lost! The world will burn! Our only chance at possibly saving a remnant is to vote Democrat!

Everything Donald Trump does is wrong, I get that. This panic over the Paris Treaty, though, the rending of garments, the gnashing of teeth . . . it's really not worth it. Let me explain.

On Origins and the Molecular Basis of Life

I've said on a number of posts, mostly about the possibility of life on other planets, that I don't particularly buy into the idea of a chemical origin of life. This often leads to some awkwardness in my professional life. I have advanced degrees in life sciences; how can I disregard actual science in favor of a purely religious point of view?

I don't reject a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life on purely religious grounds. Even in the absence of a motivating faith, the ideas regarding the chemical origin of life don't inspire confidence. Frankly, I find it requires more faith to believe that life arose out of a primordial soup than not, a conclusion in search of evidence to support it, and the evidence is wanting.

In all of the posts where I've mentioned this, I've said that I ought to explain why at some point. This is an attempt to do so, and like the theory itself, this explanation is complicated.

Missionaries to Mars

Every time there's exciting news about space, whether it's missions of exploration, the discovery of new celestial bodies, or an advancement in relevant technology, speculation starts flying about extraterrestrial life. One variant of that you don't see very often popped up in the Wall Street Journal: "Could Aliens Have Souls That Need Saving?"

Post title shamelessly stolen from Albert Mohler.

(If you don't have access to the WSJ, the discussion of said article over at Get Religion is worth reading.)

The question at hand: If alien life were discovered, would Christians have to share the Gospel with them? It's not a new question, although it's usually expanded to consider the role of cosmology in Christian theology as well. CS Lewis wrote a series of books about it, for example.

There's a few ways of looking at this.

• The positive case would state that, since Adam's sin caused the Fall to ripple out through all of creation, then aliens would also be in need of redemption. 
• The negative case would state that, since any alien life would not be descended from Adam, they would not be inheritors of Adam's sinful nature and thus not bound by the details of Christian theology. 
• The demure case would state that, since the Bible says nothing, positive or negative, about life beyond Earth, then speculation about the theological ideas surrounding it is improper. 

Dr. Mohler argues the latter case, incidentally. 

As for me, I'm a contrarian on this topic. The question is hypothetical, but I'm convinced that the possibility of alien life is so poor that it's not worth taking seriously. Allow me to explain.

There's No Place Like Home

"Howdy neighbor!" Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

I've got another post in the works on topic of Meaning, but it's been almost two weeks since my last post went up, and I wanted to break the silence with something that's a bit easier to write.

There's been quite a bit of news about the universe lately. First, there was the short-lived bit of excitement about SETI detecting a radio burst from deep space. Then we detected an "Earth-like" planet around our closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri. A scientist even wrote a recent piece for the Boston Globe about directed panspermia, the theory that life on Earth originated, indeed, was specifically seeded, from extraterrestrial sources.

Most of this is nonsensical. The SETI signal is most likely Earth-based interference, or at the very least random noise amplified by natural phenomena. Proxima B, even if it's located in the "Goldilocks zone," is unlikely to be able to support life as we might appreciate it for all kinds of reasons.  Even the author of the panspermia piece recognizes that it's not a particularly compelling theory, and it only moves the goalposts when working out the problems with the chemical origin of life. (That's a topic I've been meaning to address someday.)

Still, people get very excited about the idea of life on other planets. It's certainly been a staple of science fiction since the genre came about. Given all the recent talk related to that idea in the news, I wasn't surprised to see this article: What will it take for humans to colonize the Milky Way?

Forging science in the CRUcible

I should probably be burned alive for the title pun, but never mind that.  I've neglected to write about a story that broke before Thanksgiving, but I feel compelled to finally do so.  I don't really have a good link to a "summary" of the whole story, but you probably don't have to look very far if you just google "Climategate."  (Ugh.  Can we please get away from adding "gate" to word to name a controversy?  It's just silly, people.)

Edit:  Ah, I have such little imagination.  Here's one from the Times of UK, and here's one AEI.

Here's what I can recall from memory:

A few weeks ago, some computers purportedly hacked at the East Anglia (that's England) Climate Research Unit and a vast array of information leaked onto the internet.  Email, data, modeling programs and algorithms . . . it was a treasure trove of information.  Analysis of the leaked information has led people to conclude that life at CRU was fishy at best and fraudulent at worst.  The emails indicated that the scientists there were purposely avoiding FOIA requests for their data (which they are required to give, since they receive American grant money), spiking the research of colleagues who published research that rejects anthropogenic global warming, and manipulating their data to hide trends which contradicts the AGW hypothesis.  As this has been coming to light and calls have been made for investigations, CRU has admitted to destroying data.

Altogether, that's bad.  It's very counter-intuitive to how the scientific process is supposed to work.  You might want to say that this isn't that big of a deal because this is only one place, and in general peer review is supposed to root out bad science and bad scientists.  One problem is that apparently the CRU crew were big players in the AGW scheme, playing big parts in collaborations such as the IPCC.  Additionally, it seems that a lot of secondary work is based off of what CRU produces, so if they manipulate their data or produce faulty read-outs, those errors may be multiplied down the road.

Of course, you'll want to read about it yourself.  Some people are debating about the implications for the veracity of the AGW hypothesis altogether.  I'll save my thoughts on that for another post.  Instead, I'd wanted a chance to link to this Wall Street Journal opinion piece saying that the credibility of science is on the line because of this.

I sympathize with a lot of his main point.  The general public is scientifically illiterate in ways that make me uncomfortable sometimes.  Combine that with the fervent, political way in which AGW has been presented to them, and the sudden development that bigwigs up top are putting down the answers that they want and then saying the dog ate their homework, well, I can see how that might lower the general trust in that field specifically and the sciences as a whole.

Still, I'm reminded of another time that big players were found to have falsified their data in a highly controversial field.  It wasn't too long ago that a Korean scientist was found to have forged data related to embryonic stem cell research.  It's unfortunate that I don't remember either his name or the consequences of his shenanigans, but I do remember writing about it on this blog.  My point being that, despite his actions sullying the "respectability" of the field, that area of research has continued onward.

Of course, the two topics are only similar in that there was scientific fraud being committed.  That doesn't make this a bad example, but it does mean that we'll have to wait and see how this plays out.  This could very well be the turning point at which AGW stops being the "consensus" position and politicians stop trying to implement catastrophic economic policies based on the word of over-zealous scientists.  Or it might change absolutely nothing, with a few empty words spoken about how good it is to pick out the bad eggs but that the science is still sound, settled, and must be acted upon with all haste. 

I'm hoping it's the former.  Time will tell.

HPV Vaccination Strategies

Ugh, it makes me sad to see that Oblivion post still sitting there at the top of the page.  It's like a testament to my inability to finish projects.  I still have half a dozen things to say about that game, but it stops seeming like a good idea when my last entry on the subject was almost a month ago.  Where does the time go?

In any case, let's talk about something else. 

Not long ago, my virology class hosted a lecture on Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) by Dr. John Schiller, the guy who pioneered the work that led to Gardasil, the HPV vaccine.  Needless to say, it was a very informative lecture.  It made me reflect on how there's such a poor spread of scientific and medical information to the masses.  Sometimes I don't think it's even just that the journalists who spread this information get things wrong, though this factors in enough, but that many laypeople don't have the patience to learn about such things.  

Anyhow, one of the misconceptions I had going into this lecture was that the carcinogenic HPV strains were mainly a female problem.  This turns out not to be the case.  While they do cause cervical cancer in women, they can also cause rectal cancer in men.  Of course, this is only a problem for men who engage in anal sex with other men, and that isn't a big portion of the population.  The number of cases of rectal cancer reported each year in men is very low.
 
However, when it comes to vaccination strategies, this is when it starts getting complicated. 

Right now the idea is to vaccinate young girls.  Since they stand the largest chance of getting the infection and it is easier to check for an infection in them, there is the most to gain by vaccinating them.  While the vaccine is now approved for males, its utility is unclear.  With the exception of rectal tissue transformation, men are asymptomatic as far as this disease goes.

One could argue that it would be discriminatory to spend public/insurance dollars vaccinating one sex over the other when both are just as vulnerable to the disease.  However, the actual rates of infection and cancer would make it hard to justify vaccinating both sexes with limited funds rather than just the one sex that is more likely to be affected by the infection. 

Of course, people can buy the vaccine on their own, even if insurance won't cover it.  The price will probably drop, too, now that a competitor to Gardasil is on its way.  However, we've already seen lots of opposition to this from some parents.  The idea of vaccinating their girls against an STD is distasteful, as if preparing them for a life of licentious behavior, or at least acquiescing to the idea.  How much more resistance do you think will arise for male vaccinations?  "Hey parents, vaccinate your boys just in case they turn out to be gay!"  I'm not sure that'll fly.  The age is a complication here as well.  The vaccine is being recommend, from the looks of it, for children aged 10-14.  How many gay men would have had the foresight to get vaccinated at this age?  How many would balk at getting it "just in case?"  It's quite the conundrum.

I'm not sure I have any real gems of wisdom to add in here, no grand suggestions to make all of this go away.  I simply found it interesting. 

Speaking out

Just a quick follow-up:  The other day in my post on the use of animals in scientific research, I mentioned that most of my colleagues thought that scientists should speak out, do more to educate the public about the importance of animal research and how seriously we take it.  Well, recently I've seen some billboards here in Baltimore that do just that.  The one that I've seen says, "Ever had leprosy?  Thanks to animal research, you won't."  The boards seem to be sponsored by ResearchSaves.org.  I don't know if there's some larger sponsor behind the organization, but the premise is certainly a good one.

Side note:  The animal model for leprosy is an interesting one.  Apparently armadillos are the subject of choice when doing animal research with leprosy.  We once had a lecturer come to our school whose work was on this.  Since you can't breed armadillos in a lab setting (though not for a lack of trying), they have to catch them in the wild as needed.  The researcher assured us there were many amusing tales of the local universities paying undergrads to go catch armadillos.  It's fun to imagine so.

Research ethics and animal use

The other day, I was talking with some of the new students in my department. I was rather curious why most of them wanted to work in microbiology rather than immunology, and it turned out that the reason had a lot to do with an unwillingness to work with animals. For several of these students, there was no justification for harming animals; at least, "in the name of science," wasn't good enough for them.

Yesterday, during our monthly ethics seminar/discussion, the topic fell to lab animal care and rights. Several people had stories falling one way or the other, either researchers who refused to use anything but cell lines (and even then, some refused to use animal derived cell lines), while others told tales of of lab techs who would euthanize their animals by whacking their heads against the counter, or smacking them in the head with a stick. Blech.

The mission leader stated that 52% of the public opposes animal use in research. I don't know where he read that, but it's a dangerous number all the same. He only had one explanation for such opposition, but I can think of a few reasons to add to it:

1. Ignorance. The thought was that people oppose animal research because they don't really understand how much benefit it brings, how widespread its use is, how much caution and care is taken in the use of laboratory animals, etc. I find it likely that this makes up the majority of that 52%. At least, I hope that's the case. These people likely oppose it when asked for a survey, but don't care enough to make an issue out of it during an electoral cycle.
   
   
2. Naturalism. These are people who think that most modern, biological sciences are tampering with things that ought to be left well enough alone. This is the same group that rabidly opposes "frankenfoods" and other uses of bioengineering. I don't think this is a large segment, but they are quite vocal, and visible, when they want to be.
   
   
3. Anthropomorphism. The fundamental justification behind the use of animals in research is that the life of a mouse (or rabbit, goat, rat, frog, etc.) is not worth the same as a human; the loss of a mouse to save the life of a human is, thus, a "no-brainer." If you place any sort of equivalence between human life and animal life, I'm not sure there's much to be done to convince you that animal research is worthwhile. For what it's worth, I dislike this position most of all because the end result is often people who will attempt to kill researchers in an attempt to "save" the lives of their research animals.

Oh, I'm probably oversimplifying things, but I think scientists need to hope that most of that 52% falls into the first category. My colleagues keep suggesting that scientists need to become more visible in the public eye, defending their efforts and justifying their work. I don't necessarily disagree, but it's awfully dangerous to be a spokesman for animal research these days.

No one's immune

Sometimes my colleagues worry about how the public perceives them and their profession (that is, research scientists). There's a worry across the country that too many laypeople are uninformed about basic science and thus unable to appreciate what it is that we do. This can reflect poorly when it comes to public attitude about the sciences, affecting funding and policy.

Guys . . . stories like this don't help:

Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, grew sixfold last year inside the taxpayer-funded foundation that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants, according to budget documents and other records obtained by The Washington Times.

The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.

Okay. This is bad. But at least the people involved copped to it, right? I mean, intelligent, rational people know when to acknowledge that they've been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Right?

When finally caught, the NSF official retired. He even offered, among other explanations, a humanitarian defense, suggesting that he frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women. Investigators put the cost to taxpayers of the senior official's porn surfing at between $13,800 and about $58,000.

"He explained that these young women are from poor countries and need to make money to help their parents and this site helps them do that," investigators wrote in a memo.

. . . I don't think that's gonna help your case, buddy.

I'm always glad when a spotlight is shone on the abuse of taxpayer dollars, but this is just embarrassing. Thanks NSF, glad to know that you're putting a good face out there for us.

See figure 1

One of the first lessons you learn in grad school is that your text book(s) is/are as valuable as a paperweight. At least in the hard sciences, the field tends to move fast enough that, by the time a text book is published, the information within is either incomplete or inaccurate. Consequently, you'll spend more time reading the relevant journals for your field than any text book, and new information is introduced through review articles.

The long preface is only to introduce Shamus's post on the problems he encounters in the tech world, writing support documents and other technical documentation. Though many of his examples are angled towards programming or coding languages, the general principles are by no means unique to his field.

I find often that the scientific literature suffers from the problems Shamus describes: No explanation of technical terms, assuming a higher level of knowledge on the part of readers than is warranted, assuming a high level of knowledge in related (or not) fields, over-complicated examples, building too steep a learning curve, and so on. One problem that is more unique to this field is the use of self-serving examples. That is, all of the "relevant" work referenced by the author of a review is to his (or their) own work in the field. While this might be appropriate if you're one of a handful of people who actually study the topic at hand, it usually gives only a narrow impression of the work being done in the field, and thus not appropriate for a "review."

One idea that Shamus introduced that I would love to see implemented more fully in the scientific journals is better use of the electronic medium. Everything that is published on paper also is published online as a PDF. Journals like Science usually affix a "title" page to it, with links to the supplemental material on the web (additional figures, movies, and whatever else the authors considered important enough to include but not critical enough to warrant space in the paper). However, taking this further would be an incredible step in bringing science into the age of the internet.

In a review article, what if certain terms or phrases were hyperlinks to either a "dictionary" of terms or to futher review articles on the specific topic? What if the citations at the end of the paper were themselves hyperlinks which would take you to the reference? What if each of the authors' names were hyperlinks to other articles they have published? When a technique is not fully explained by said to be done "as previously described," either link to where it was described or to a database which explains the principles such techniques.

While I realize this might seem like a lot of work to put into a simple PDF journal article, this would be insanely useful to all sorts of people. And these are just the hasty suggestions of a graduate student . . . I'd love to see what sorts of suggestions actual experts might come up with.

Tools of the trade

Grad school . . . what a meat grinder. I ought to be studying for my exams, but I'm feeling a bit of burnout, so a quick post to remind people that this site exists seems like quite the remedy. Allow me a bit of navel gazing (Ha! Like you have a choice.).

As I'm studying for my exams, I find myself pawing through piles of powerpoint printouts, each covering various areas of immunology in (sometimes) exquisite detail. I sometimes wonder how this process went for PhD students in ages past. Information imparted during lectures was limited to what the professor could write on the chalk board or show on an overhead transparency. You wrote down what you could during lecture, and tried to scrape everything else from the text books. These days, it's much different. You get superfluous notes and carefully rendered illustrations (graphs, models, photographs, etc.) from powerpoint presentations. The textbooks are rarely used, as they're typically behind the curve by the time they hit the shelves.

There's certainly advantages to the new system. The professors get to share much more information, rather than focussing on the bare essentials they want you to leave lecture with. You're free(er) to listen to the lecturer rather than furiously scribble notes in an attempt to have a lasting impression of the lecture. You get to see details of the science (such as FACS plots and tissue stains) in lecture rather than having to go to the library to look up the journals.

All of this makes me wonder, though . . . do these tools make us better or worse students? Subsequently, are we producing better scientists for all of these tools?

I have no answers to this. I'm not even sure how you'd begin to answer this, given all the variables involved, but I'm quite interested in how people might respond.

Hiring Practices

Sometimes I really have to disabuse myself of this notion that I'm a "reasonably intelligent person." I say this because I usually have something cogent and illuminating to add to any philosophical/political discussion . . . about an hour after it's finished.

Yesterday during our monthly "research ethics" course, we were talking about hiring practices. It was commonly accepted around the table that a physics department was more than justified in passing over the most qualified applicants for a position in order to hire a woman. After all, she brings benefits that you don't find on the resume, and it helps to have women there to help other women keep from getting lost in the milieu.

First things first, I don't find that diversity, in and of itself, has any inherent value. At least, not from a scientific perspective. If they're trying to hire someone, they should hire the person who brings the most to the department, and this should be regardless of what the applicants have dangling (or not) between their legs.

Ah, but the counter-argument is that "diverse " people bring other benefits to the table. Benefits you can't put on a resume. Benefits that only they can provide, with their gender/skin color. Benefits that students of the same gender/skin color require to succeed in this field.

I've never heard these benefits explained or defined. I think it's important to answer this question: To what extent to these "benefits of diversity" match or exceed the gap between the standard credentials on a resume? Normal resume differences can be quantified in a situation such as this: Length of experience, number of publications, number of high profile publications, research grant money, etc. How does a department quantify that? How many research grants are two X chromosomes worth? How many Nature or Science papers is being black worth?

Finally, it's always gets back, for me, to the "What would happen if this went the other direction?" argument. By hiring a "diverse" candidate simply for their "diversity," that physics department is saying, "We only hired you because you're a woman, and we need more women around here." The corollary to this is that they're telling the most qualified applicant, "We're not hiring you because you're a man. Sorry, we don't need any more men around here."

Now imagine how this might work in the opposite direction. "Sorry, we've decided to hire someone else. Yes, you're the most qualified, but you're black, and we don't need any more black people around here." Good lord, can you imagine the lawsuits? I find it worth pointing out that people have sued for similar situations (that is, white male applicants passed over for "diverse" candidates) and won.

If you disagree, do try to articulate your opposition in a meaningful sense; the problem I have with these arguments is that I've never heard them explained in a cogent sense. Now if only I could do the same in a timely manner. I really hate that, by sitting at the discussion and not objecting, people think that I'm okay with such discrimination.

Scientific Meanderings

Grad school has swallowed me whole, lately. I've had a lot of interesting observations and musings I've wanted to jot down here, but I keep forgetting or putting it off. Let's get a few of these out there:

• So, what do you do for a living?

In one of my classes, we learned of a study where researchers wanted to see whether or not gonorrhea undergoes selective mutations during an infection. How did they test this? They infected volunteers with the freaking thing and sequenced the bug at various times during the infection.

I'm not sure I can put a dollar value on what it would take to willingly get infected with an STD, regardless of whether antibiotics will treat it. I'm having enough trouble getting a date these days without something like that mucking it all up.

• The Pertussis Scare

Today we talked a lot about bordetella pertussis, the bacteria behind whooping cough. The disease is typically included in a cocktail vaccine, including diptheria and tetanus as well. I found it interesting that, for a period of time starting a few decades ago, Europe ceased to include pertussis in the mix due to some fears of deaths that may have been related to the vaccine. It turned out that they weren't, but there was enough public fear and bad PR floating around that it was only recently that Europe began vaccinating for pertussis again. As you would expect, there's been a lot of whooping cough in Europe in the meantime.

Given everything I hear about Europe's reactions to new vaccines, drugs, and genetically modified crops (especially GM crops), this doesn't really surprise me. It makes me wonder: We hear so much about how the US is so scientifically illiterate, how we're these religious nuts who want to drag scientific progress back to the dark ages and revert medicine to the time when leeches were considered the hot new thing. Why is it, then, that our more "enlightened" cousins across the pond always seem to be so eager to break out the pitchforks and torches when a new drug weighs the same as a duck?

• Where's it all coming from?

In a related anecdote, while talking about pertussis it was shown that pertussis infections have been ticking upward for the last 20-30 years, with a noticeable spike during the 90s. There is apparently some debate over whether this is an actual increase in cases or just better reporting of cases. The argument being that, with vastly improved technologies for diagnosis, we're just finding the infections more readily than in the past.

We didn't discuss it in class, but I can't help but wonder if it isn't related to illegal immigration. It's not news to anyone who's been paying attention that a lot of the people coming here illegally don't get vaccinated from anything themselves, resulting in upticks in diseases only rarely seen in the US. Several of the studies cited to us about the spread of the disease were centered in California, which isn't exactly a model of immigration law enforcement.

I really don't have much to add to that. Curiosity, but not much else.

Pandora's Cell

Developmental biology is a Pandora's Box of scientific mysteries. We understand a lot of things about how indeterminate lumps of matter know to become a thumb or a finger, the spine or the lungs, or any number of other things. For all that we know, however, there's an almost endless list of things we don't know or don't understand. Especially when it comes to humans, since the methods that would be used to study them are almost universally considered unethical, even to people who don't think twice about harvesting embryos for stem cells.

So, when I read about experiments like this, where scientists try to make human/animal hybrid embryos, I start to wonder how we get scientists so devoid of morals or ethics.

My best guess as to why this fails is probably genetic incompatibility with the transcription factors. Transcription factors are the proteins which latch onto your DNA and signal for other proteins to be made. They're usually pretty picky about where they will bind, and even slight changes in either the TF or the DNA it binds can be fatal. More than likely, the TFs in the animal cell just aren't good enough to keep things going.

My only other guess would be that they're attempting to turn on genes which turn off at development. Cells turn these genes off (and work very hard to keep them off) because letting them run rampant leads to all kinds of problems. Cancer is usually the most obvious result, but I'm sure it's not the only one.

I'm really not complaining about the failure. The monsters who do these sorts of things ought to have their degrees stripped away.

I guess I'm a double agent

This is pure, distilled awesomeness in stick figure form.

I hope they don't make me pick a side.

Murine apocalypse

I've started my first rotation in an immunology lab, and I have to say that the transition is raising a few starts out of me. I've only ever worked with microorganisms, bacteria and yeast, so switching over to immunology's preferred model, mice, has been a strange experience.

The last two days I've gone to the vivarium to either observe or to practice handling the animals myself. It was somewhat disturbing to watch samples being taken from the mice, either orbitally (having a capillary stuck behind the eye to produce blood) or by snipping off a piece of the tail. I'd have guessed the latter to be incredibly distressing, but apparently this isn't the case.

I also watched as mice were sacrificed, either by CO₂ asphyxiation or by having their necks broken. I'm assuming the latter is within proper protocol, though I'm not certain.

It's the sacrificial part that really felt weird. I've been a pet owner all my life, so it's rather jarring to see small, fuzzy creatures being killed. In my head, I know that it's all for the sake of scientific progress, and I personally have no problems with the use of lab animals, but that doesn't change the lurching feeling it gave me.

I suppose this is very similar to the reaction people have when they see these things at a slaughterhouse, on a hunting trip, or even on a family farm. As a society, we're largely removed from the production of our food, which puts us several steps away from these animals being killed. (I keep trying to come up with a good "6 degrees of _Kevin Bacon" joke, but it's not happening). We're far removed from the days where almost everybody had to kill an animal for food at least once in their lives, so it's understandable when the practice makes people a bit squeamish.

Still, maybe it's a good thing that I feel uneasy about the whole affair. The conventional wisdom seems to be that most serial killers get their start torturing/killing animals. I should probably worry if I ever start to enjoy doing it. Hm . . . what if many would-be serial killers end up in science careers so they can stick to what they know? What if science turned people into serial killers?

Incidentally, does anyone know a good recipe for fava beans? I was hoping for something that would go well with a nice chianti.

You can pick your Research Advisor, and you can pick your nose . . .

Stop me if you've heard this one.

My semester's pretty much over, with all the in-class exams finished and just a take-home yet to go. I'm told by the older students that it's a cake walk, so I'm not stressing over that. No, what I'm stressing over is the end of the semester itself. Friday is the last day of classes and we're supposed to start our first rotation the following Monday. This wouldn't be so stressful if I'd get off my tuckus and find a lab.

I guess the problem is that I don't know exactly what it is I want to do with myself. Not that your PhD research has to be the defining moment of your career, but we've heard from a lot of professors who wanted to take students this year and none of them exactly set me on fire. I have other options than the people we've heard from, of course, but that means making a slightly less-informed decision, and I really hate doing that.

I guess I should be thankful we get to do three rotations (four if we're feeling indecisive). It's possible I'd still be at Northwestern if I'd had that option. Still, three rotations doesn't feel like it makes it any easier when the list of people I might want to rotate with is three or four times that long.

The only thing I would think to change about this system, at least up to now, would be to change how we hear from professors about their research. At the moment, it seems like professors who have funding and want students volunteer to take part in the research presentations to first year students. That's all well and good, but apparently the entire section of our department devoted to viral research got the email about speaking and went, "Meh." Oh, they have funding and openings, but apparently they think that ought to be a big secret.

Perhaps there ought to be conditions for making their presentations mandatory. I can't say what that might look like, but 90% of our presentations were from bacteriologists, and that just didn't do anything for me.

Hm, this post is over and I didn't say anything funny or controversial. Wait, I got it: Why didn't they do that?

Is that an antigen you're presenting or are you just happy to see me?

I'm working on my PhD in Immunology, so I found this article fascinating on a few different levels (there's a long version and a short version). Recent research has found, apparently, that women are more attracted to men who are immunologically dissimilar (that is, their MHC* alleles are more distinct) than those who are similar to them. The interesting thing about this is that it is "detected" through scent. The kicker is that this trend reverses when a woman is on birth control pills; she is more likely to be attracted to immunologically similar men than not.

Of course, pheremone and other scent-based research often ought to be taken with a grain of salt, but if it's true, it's interesting. The authors of these articles (and the researchers) speculate that a lot of relationships may experience difficulty because a woman will find herself attracted to her partner while she is on the pill, but after they marry and she goes off of it she suddenly finds herself attracted to different scents. This does ignore the human element in every relationship, but it's certainly feasible that this might be a factor.

I've said for a while now that I think research is going to find, someday, that these birth control schemes are not as healthy for women as we think. It may not be overtly harmful, but there's a lot of subtle things happening in there, and it's going to be those things which get overlooked in short-term studies.

On a different note, perhaps I should figure out how to turn the clothing I wear to bed into a cologne. Apparently the ladies can't resist a big ol' wiff of your MHC.

* - For those of you not in the know, MHC stands for "major histocompatibility complex." The immune system uses it for presentation of foreign components in order to trigger an immune response as well as preventing the immune system from reacting to your own proteins.

Bad genes are racist?

I'll admit that I'm pretty hard on college-age liberals. It's been my experience, by and large, that they're driven largely by passion. This gives them the illusion of legitimacy, but results in people who end up throwing their brains out the window at the behest of their "passions."

Like I said, sometimes I think I ought to give them the benefit of the doubt. Then I read stories like this:

OTTAWA - The Carleton University Students' Association has voted to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease is not "inclusive" enough.

Cystic fibrosis "has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men" said the motion read Monday night to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it. The decision caused heated reaction and left at least one member of council calling for a new vote.

Every year near the beginning of fall classes, during university orientation for new arrivals, students fan out across the city and seek donations from passersby. According to the motion, "all orientees and volunteers should feel like their fundraising efforts will serve their (sic) diverse communities."

I'm not sure I can accurately describe just how flabbergasted this leaves me. If you are so wrapped up in identity politics that you're willing to declare that "white" diseases unworthy of your dime, then perhaps we need to revisit the concept of "racism."

Yeesh. This is exactly why I don't like discussing politics on university campuses.

The Banality of Evil

Today in lecture, we were discussing the diagnosis of genetic diseases, sickle cell anemia and thalassemia in particular.

Thalassemia is a rather brutal disease when one is homozygous for the disease. It's not pretty. The lecturer discussed various methods by which the Italian island of Sardinia reduced the number of cases of people with the advanced form of the disease. Genetic counseling and widespread testing lead to people not having children if they were at risk of having diseased children.

If that had been all, I would have been fine with it. The professor also decided to mention prenatal testing, and cited abortion as the obvious outcome of such a procedure. She made reference to Italy legalizing abortion in the 70s, and apparently no one has looked back. She made a joke about the Pope being free to mind his own business. Some people in the class chuckled.

I'm not going to pretend that such decisions are easy to make. It's certainly a heavy matter to find out that your child is going to be born with a painfully crippling disease. This doesn't change the morality of such a decision, but I'm not going to trivialize it.

Still, the amazing thing to me was how glib the professor was about the matter, as if she was referring to something as simple as an appendectomy. Some people laughed when she acted glibly about it; I think you could have picked my jaw off the floor.

There are some thing I'll just never understand.