Infinite molarity of amino acids

A well-known manufacturer of cell culture and other life sciences products has a VERY peculiar formulation for their MEM non-essential amino acids supplement. I don't think that's standard...

Funny cheque

This is the best cheque I have ever received. I got $5 per draw for two 50 mL blood samples = $10 - okay so that's just a good lunch - but it says CD1d T cells on it!!!

(It was for a lab that studies natural killer T (NKT) cells and autoimmunity. The reason they need such big volumes of human blood is because NKTs are rare.)

Response to "My Monkey" and "Monkey business" letters

This is a response to an article on nonhuman primate testing in the Isthmus weekly and the follow-up letters in this week's issue, all but one of which were extremely anti-animal testing.

Animal rights groups like to portray scientists as sadists torturing large numbers of animals. This is a pretty stupid accusation if you know anything about how animal testing really works, because a) the damn things are expensive. People buy pet store mice for less than a buck. If you had to pay $40 for a mouse, you would treat it very nicely, and you also wouldn't go out and buy several dozen of them unless you had a very good reason. Primates cost THOUSANDS. b) You get better data out of a group of healthy, happy animals than a group of animals where some are OK and some are sick or hurt. If - if - all of the stuff that the guy wrote in that article was true, the monkeys get worse treatment than our mice.

---

Dear Editors,

“We shouldn't test drugs on monkeys because 92% of drugs that pass nonhuman primate studies fail in clinical trials" is specious because the occurrence of adverse side effects that can be allowed for a human drug is so extremely low. Human clinical trials involve dozens, hundreds, then thousands of people. If for instance 0.5% of them have heart attacks, this is unacceptable but wouldn't have been detected in a study of a dozen monkeys, even when the drug has the same effect on monkeys as humans.

The only alternative would be to take drugs only tested in vitro or in mice and put them straight into humans, which I don't think would be acceptable to anyone. Of course there are some alternative medicine fans who believe that most of modern medicine is a conspiracy, but the vast majority of people reading this will have benefited from modern drugs and other therapies at some point in their lives, and all of these have been tested in animal models.

Yes, a monkey is not the same as a human, nor is a mouse. But with our existing technology, no amount of testing in vitro can replicate the fantastic complexity of a live creature, so they're the best we've got. Scientists are not sadists out to torture the maximum number of animals. We are workers with limited budgets to keep expensive animals, and humans with hearts. "Reduce, refine, and replace" is in
everyone's interest, but replacement is not always possible.

Sincerely,

I noticed that Rick Bogle (founder of the Primate Freedom Project) used the word "vivisectors" in his letter. "Vivisection" harks back to the days when people would tie up and cut up screaming animals without anaesthesia because many people believed that animals weren't actually capable of feeling pain. Nobody believes that any more, and any good IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) will reject out of hand a protocol that includes severely painful procedures - basically, anything worse than a blood sample or an injection - without anaesthesia. Even leaving aside that many people go into biology because we like animals, putting an animal under that much suffering would give you screwy results from the stress.

I strongly recommend reading CS Lewis' essay "On Vivisection" especially if you're Christian. I think this is the full version, many of the other versions floating around the Internet been selectively chopped up and censored. He writes about the tremendous sense of awe and responsibility which a Christian researches owes to God's creatures on whom he or she is inflicting pain. (He uses "trembling awe" but I certainly don't want to be trembling when I give a little baby chick an intravenous injection.)

"Reduce, refine, replace"; scientific reasons for minimizing pain and stress; the divine mandate to take care of Creation. Because of the world we live in, we have to keep using animals, but keeping all these things in mind.

Fifth human malaria species discovered by Unimas researchers

Swine flu, blah blah. I don't feel the need to comment on it since everyone else is doing so.

Also, the constitutional crisis in Perak is deepening. The Nut Graph has minute-by-minute updates. Cops with machine guns in KL. I'm totally wearing black tomorrow.

---

Anyway, I watched an interesting documentary recently and wanted to share the post about it that I wrote on the majulahsains Yahoogroup.

OK, I guess this is a bad day to post cos everybody's likely to be distracted by Ipoh, but I'm gonna post anyway.

Please watch the following documentary and additional interviews by Australia's
ABC channel:
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2533454.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2533596.htm

Over the last few years, the husband-wife team of Drs Janet Cox-Singh and Balbir Singh have discovered that there are not four, but FIVE species of malaria that regularly cause disease in humans.

According to the documentary, they found that a lot of malaria deaths in Sarawak were classified as being caused by Plasmodium malariae even though it is known that P. malariae is not that dangerous. They managed to recover some DNA from blood samples and looked at the DNA sequence to find that many of the cases had
had P. knowlesi, which was previously thought to only infect monkeys.

The first paper was published in 2004. Subsequently they have published more studies backing up the original discovery and found that P. knowlesi has actually been infecting humans in Sarawak for a while, but was just being misdiagnosed. Researchers in other parts of SEA are beginning to report cases in their countries.

If you are interested, here's a list of their publications:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Search&term=%22cox-singh%20j%22[aut\
h]%20AND%20%22singh%20b%22[auth]
#4 in the list is free/open access if you want to read more details.

What I am baffled about is that there is excellent research going on at Unimas and yet you rarely hear about it, either in the MSM or Internet news websites. I'm talking about the type of "world-class" stuff that the government keeps saying it wants Malaysians to achieve. The director of Unimas' Institute for Health and Community Medicine, Dr Mary Jane Cardosa, is a world-renowned expert on dengue.

How come we don't hear about these guys more? Is it cos west Malaysians don't care about Sabah and Sarawak? Is it cos the Malaysian government doesn't really understand how science works? Other factors? Big ugly clusterfuck of racism, apathy, and stupidity?

Sprinkles!

I'm just gonna copy paste this from my Facebook posted items page because I don't want to spend a long time blogging tonight.

Supplefer Sprinkles; iron sprinkles reducing iron deficiency anemia worldwide
When I hear "sprinkles" I think of those awful coloured sugar bits on cupcakes. I'm on a consumer survey website, and a prominent canned vegetable company once floated the idea of single-serving-sized canned beans with sprinkles on top to attract kids. I hope that never sees the light of day.

This kind of sprinkles on the other hand...a much better idea!

• Paper by the inventor.
• Letter in PLoS Medicine objecting to the use of Sprinkles on a regular basis The writer makes a good point that this makes people reliant on a foreign source for nutritional supplementation, but...
• Paper quoted by the Sprinkles people in their reply.
  Summary: complementary foods for weaning infants/young children from local sources can provide adequate amounts of most nutrients EXCEPT calcium, iron, and zinc.

Big Pharma is watching you

I'm pretty good at scaring myself, as you may have noticed if you've read some of my previous posts. I'm in the middle of a new book called "Our Daily Meds", which, as the title suggests, is about the massive amounts of medicines consumed by on a regular basis by Americans.

The book details how the industry that makes small-molecule drugs fell from its golden days in the 1930s - 1950s (antibiotics, corticosteroids) to the present mess. Now most "new" prescription drugs are often a) copycat "me-too" formulations of existing drugs, b) are less or only marginally more effective than generic versions, c) are "lifestyle" drugs sold to make people think that the common hiccups of a living body are diseases or d) all of the above. Real lifesavers are never discovered, or shoved in a drawer, because the markets for them are too small (rare diseases) or too poor (tropical diseases).

I kind of feel bad after reading this because I recently went to see a PA for a problem that's been bothering me all my life, but is relatively minor and doesn't affect my health which is otherwise great. She prescribed a brand-name anticholinergic. When I went to pick up the prescription, I found that it was $5 PER PILL = $150 per one-month supply. I also found out that it makes my mouth so dry that I can barely swallow when I wake up in the morning. Screw that.

I knew a guy in college who has ADD but stopped taking Ritalin because he hated what it did to him. Another guy with ADD has it bad enough that he needs his medication to function but also hates being dependent on it, as well as the insane price. In this day and age there is NO WAY synthesizing a small molecule drug should cost that much. My ex-boyfriend got antidepressants for a bout of depression that occurred when we were together (before you say anything, it wasn't my fault!), over two years ago, and I think he's still taking them.

My mum and dad are on statins to control their cholesterol levels but they are both healthy and active people, and our family has no history of heart disease. I wonder if maybe elevated cholesterol is just a function of age and doesn't really cause heart disease in people with healthy lifestyles? Or maybe it's a biomarker of some other underlying process that causes the heart disease it's associated with? And, I'm sure a lot of the middle-aged ladies I know are on hormone replacement therapy...

I'm certainly not against taking medicine - I will usually swallow a couple of paracetamol (a.k.a. acetaminophen - I had an argument with a doctor about this who insisted they were different things) on the first day of my menstrual period or antihistamines in the spring. As mentioned above, psychiatric drugs really do help a number of people too, but it's scary that there are huge numbers of people who take them for years or lifetimes.

A lot of the medicines you see in ads are expensive, brand-name versions of drugs where generics or over-the-counter drugs do basically the same thing. I'm really appalled that the US is one of only 2 countries in the world (the other is New Zealand) that allows prescription drugs to be marketed directly to laypersons, so that they're brainwashed into asking their doctors for the shiny pills they saw on TV. At the same time companies are also working on brainwashing and bribing the doctors - sometimes indirectly with souvenirs and fancy dinners, sometimes with direct cash payments for "consulting".

Maybe there should be a Foundation for Responsible Medicine (in the spirit of the UK's Sense About Science, but targeted at reducing overuse of conventional medicines) that has anti-marketing campaigns about useless or dangerous drugs that has ads like:

• Sanlu Infant Formula: Makes your children strong! have kidney failure!
• My Pikin: Soothes Kills your teething baby.
• Ritalin: Turns your children into little angels zombies.

Obviously I wouldn't be studying what I study if I didn't believe that science is an amazing tool that can save lives and help people in myriad other ways. A lot of people, seeing the hazards and corruption mentioned above, have mistakenly turned to "alternative" medicine in the belief that conventional medicine is all bad. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is not a failure of science in and of itself. It's the failure of science to be stronger than capitalism.

Oh yeah, and I recently applied for a job at a research institute that's funded by one of the "Big Pharma" companies...at least it's not in the main company but is a not-for-profit arm. Round and round I go.

Where germs live

Yes, they're everywhere; no, I couldn't be arsed; and I'm only doing this dumb survey (20 pages of questions about Lysol and Clorox) because I get $10 out of it.

Strep throat is not a virus you morons. It's caused by STREP. Duh.

In case you're wondering, "Strongly agree" is on the left and "Strongly disagree" is on the right.

The massacre at Eulau

Oldest nuclear family 'murdered'
By Julian Siddle
Science Reporter, BBC News

All adult bodies were buried facing south
The graves contained mainly women and children

The oldest genetically identifiable nuclear family met a violent death, according to analysis of remains from 4,600-year-old burials in Germany.

I'm reading the PNAS paper that this comes from and it's making me cry. The two skeletons at the top of the photo are a man and a woman, buried facing south as was the custom in their culture. Their two little boys (confirmed to be their sons by DNA testing) were buried facing their parents.

In another grave lay a young brother and sister, and an unrelated woman with a baby girl in her arms. The boy had been buried with a man's axe blade. I can imagine some Stone Age man patting his son on the head saying "While I'm hunting, take care of your step-ma and little sisters, okay?" and coming back to find them slaughtered.

I don't know why this makes me so emo. I recently read a book about the civil war in nothern Uganda and yeah, it's terrible, but I didn't have an emotional reaction to it. And these people died over four thousand years ago...

BSG groaner

Battlestar Galactica, season 2 episode 7:

"We know it as lymphocytic encephalitis. The disease is carried by rodents - rats, mostly - but a couple hundred years ago humans developed an immunity. Now, I can create a simple vaccine that will dramatically reverse the effect of the virus on the Cylons. But they have an antibody in their blood that breaks down the RNA of the vaccine. So they will need regular, close-interval, injections of the vaccine, or they will die."
- Dr Cottle on the Cylon-killing virus (similar to LCMV in real life)

*groannnnnnn*

OK so presumably since the vaccine has RNA, it's some kind of live attenuated or replication-deficient version of the Cylon virus. So if the Cylons can form Abs that can target ("break down"???) the viral vaccine RNA, why the hell aren't they immune to the wild-type isolate from the Earth beacon then?

Also, if a vaccine is chewed up by the immune system before it can mount an effective response against the target antigen, it's a pretty frakking useless vaccine and I don't see how it could possibly "reverse the effects" of the virus.

(in real life anti-RNA antibodies are found in patients with autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis, and synthetic anti-RNA Abs are being made for various purposes. I don't know if you get anti-viral-RNA Abs in nature.)

Funny things people said in lab

So we recently this mycoplasma contamination issue...we were discussing things to try like getting new cell stocks, trying antibiotics, decontaminating everything.
Adam: The lab I was working at in Germany had mycoplasma too, and they had to decontaminate the whole place.
Diana: Everything?
Adam: Yup, they just gassed everything.
Brock: Those Germans, that's how they solve problems. They just gas everything.

Last fall when flu season rolled around, Angela and I were talking about going to get our shots at University Health Services when Brock walked into the room:
me: Hey Brock, we're going to get our shots after lunch. Wanna come along?
Brock: What are you going to do after that?
Angela: We will come back here.
Brock: Isn't it going to be weird if we're all drunk in the lab?
me: FLU shots, not SHOTS shots.

Diana: Hey guys, look at this! [explosion]

Adam: I need to shut down total immunoglobulin production.
me: Why?
Adam: To overcome immunity to the vector.
me: So let me get this straight, you're going to cure Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome but you need to shut down immunity to do it?
Adam: Well...

Joe [who used to work with cows]: Why can't you just stick a needle in a vein and pull out ten mils of blood?

Brock: Would you believe me if I told you my name was short for Brocktholomew?
me: Noooo.
Brock: I told Sarah that and she believed me.
me: That's because she's blonde.
Angela: Shi-Hsia! That's so mean! I thought you were a nice person!
me: [...spluttering...]
Angela: That's the kind of thing *I* would say.

me [holding up a six-week-old cockerel from our chicken study]: Joe! Look at how big this cock is!

Epiphany

Papa had TB when he was a small boy. He was sick for a long time. They gave him streptomycin but it made him deaf in one ear.

Pa's secretary Mr. Roberts has a twisted foot that stands on its toes all the time, because that leg is shorter than the other. He had polio when he was small.

I am scared. They're taking us all out of class when there isn't a different class on the timetable. I am in Standard One and still don't feel comfortable in school, in this cage of dark blue pinafore, grey cement floor and wooden desks, trapped by my lack of language.

Teacher is taking us to the hall but instead of lining up two-by-two as we do for assemblies, we're lining up single file. I can hear girls crying.

There are people in all white who look like nurses. There is a needle in my arm that brings sharp, burning pain. I am told to open my mouth and given a drop of bittersweet liquid.

The taste of the liquid triggers a revelation: I know what it is. We have a book at home that has pictures of sick people. It tells you about all kinds of diseases and how to stop them. There is a picture of a boy who has polio with a twisted leg like Mr. Roberts, and a picture of a child taking a drop of liquid in his mouth.

And I think I'm the only kid in this whole class who knows: This needle and this drop are the magic potion of freedom.

---

And that's how I became interested in vaccines at age six. It just took me 17 years to realize.

That which bends up

Saturday September 20, 2008

26 more Chikungunya cases reported in the country, says Health Ministry

KUALA LUMPUR: A total of 150 Chikungunya cases were reported in the country between Sept 7 and 13, an increase of 26 cases from the previous week.

...

So far, the cumulative number of cases reported nationwide are 1,975 with most of them in Johor (1,098), followed by Malacca (471), Perak (193), Negri Sembilan (124), 40 each in Selangor and Pahang, four each in Kelantan and Putrajaya, Sarawak (two) and one each in Penang and Kuala Lumpur.

The disease is spread through Aedes mosquito bites.

...

— Bernama

The average person reading this will think "OK, 26 people demam. Big deal."

To infectious disease researchers, this is damn bloody scary. Chikungunya is an emerging disease in SEA (originally from Africa). There were virtually no cases last year, but now there have been 1098 in Johor alone, 1975 nationwide total.

It's spread through Aedes mosquitoes, which helps (the virus, not us) since it's an animal vector that is already quite plentiful in M'sia.

I'm getting increasingly fed up with science reporting in the mainstream media. This ought to be in BIG RED LETTERS on the front page. Something like EXPLODING AFRICAN VIRUS CRIPPLES THOUSANDS OF MALAYSIANS. Then maybe there would be some decent funding and infrastructure for biotech research.

Lots of "tampon"

I found a Western blot protocol on our French postdoc's bench in which the word "tampon" appears a lot. Naturally intrigued, I looked at it for a minute and came to the conclusion that "tampon" in French must mean "buffer".

It looks like I was correct and not only does it mean "buffer" in the chemical sense, but also the computer science sense. (Babelfish is not much help because these are technical jargons. Google Translate, however, gets it right.)

I'm tempted to re-label all the bottles in the lab to make the American guys uncomfortable.

For a while we had Fetal Bovine Serum tubes labeled not only "FBS" but also "SBF" (suero bovino fetal) and "SVF" (sérum fœtal bovin)...the joys of working in a multicultural lab. It's also very cute to hear D (Colombian lab tech) and W (the French guy), who are a couple, talking to each other in broken English.

---

You know, I could just go and write 胎牛血清 (tāi níu xuè qīng) on all the tubes...

The marvellous limp

Steve told me a story about Honda's ASIMO robot, I don't know if it's true or perhaps applies to another humanoid robot, but it sounds entirely plausible. The robot was being shown off at some expo or another; in particular, its ability to climb stairs. Halfway up, one of the servos in a leg froze, and it fell over.

Then I thought: wouldn't it be amazing if someone designed a robot that could limp?

This isn't as stupid as it sounds at first blush. Limping, when you think about it, is an amazing behaviour. It's the ability to circumvent almost any non-critical musculoskeletal damage or defect in the legs and pelvis (chassis?) and keep going.

It is not something we think about consciously, which is amazing. If you get a rock in your shoe and don't have time to take it out, you will automatically alter your gait to put less pressure on that part of the foot. You can sprain your ankle and thereby limit its range of motion and the load which that leg can bear, or you can even fracture an important structural element like the foot or the tibia and if the situation is important enough, you will keep walking.

Even something as small and stupid as an ant, if you break off one of its legs, will go where it wants to go instead of wobbling around in a circle as a six-legged robot would.

OK...I just Googled it...robot limping has been looked into. We really need to know more about this if robots are ever to function usefully "in the wild". ASIMO will not be useful for taking care of housebound old folks if itself is also prone to falling down the stairs and lying there helpless.

Chickens for fun and profit

You know, I was going to write a proper blog post about this but I'm SOFA KING tired I'm just going to copy the contents of an email I wrote to my family.

I just got home at 9:15pm. I've had a nerve-wracking day due to the peculiar regulation that states that an egg which has not been pipped (hole poked in it by the chick) is not an animal, whereas an egg which has been pipped, even if you can only see a small SMALL point of beak sticking out, is an animal.

(Come to think of it, the US has similarly idiotic rules regarding what a human fetus is and how to treat it depending on whether or not it's inside the uterus.)

Anyway I was going to refrigerate some 20-day-old eggs today to kill the embryos, then cut them up. But, two of the eggs had been pipped. And not only that, they were making cheeping noises. So I had to call the RARC campus vet and ask her what to do. She said since they're pipped, I can't refrigerate them to death and instead have to CUT THEIR HEADS OFF straightaway.

Fortunately this only applied to one of them which was infected with my luminescent virus. The other one was the control and I half jokingly asked her if I could take it home as a pet. To my surprise she said yes.

Meanwhile I had a very boring day since I had to extract a lot of RNA samples.

And while I was doing that, the virus-inoculated chick almost cracked its shell half open! I picked up this rocking, cheeping egg and removed the shell. And then, I took this cute, newly hatched baby chick and cut its head off with a pair of scissors.

...it reminded me of the scene in Blade Runner where Roy Batty says to Deckard, "Wake up, time to die."

After cutting off its limbs and stuffing it in a 50 mL tube for deep-freeze storage, I took apart the rest of the eggs. Since they had been in the fridge from 10am to 8:30pm or so, they were quite dead. (On Monday I had found out the hard way that refrigeration for two whole hours is not sufficient to kill chicken embryos.) The beaks had pierced through the shell membranes, so they must have been breathing from the air pocket. A strange thing I noticed was that the yolk sac had at this point completely entered into the the chicks' bellies and become part of the intestine. Eggs are amazing things. They're like a little universe, a microcosmos.

Anyway...the other egg that had pipped is still in the incubator. If it hatches I'll take it home and keep it in my bathtub for a few days then I'll find someone to give it away to. Maybe just give it straight back to the campus Poultry Lab that I got the eggs from.

Immunology ain't English

Immunosurveillance is now an official English word, along with, apparently, "hellazpoppin'". Yay!

Microsoft Word spellcheck really hates scientific literature. I have the "check spelling as you type" option turned off on computers I use, otherwise any work-related writing becomes a sea of red.

The Braided World

Just finished writing an Amazon review of a good book (The Braided World) I read a couple months ago. Had to rant about two annoying characters though.

I picked up Kenyon's latest, "The Bright of the Sky" from the new sci-fi shelf in the local public library and loved it so I went looking for more of her work.

The book takes place in the aftermath of a cosmic disaster which somehow "stole" information from Earth, including information in the form of genetic diversity. As a result, the human race is slowly dying off due to a lack of resistance against various infectious diseases. A mysterious message is received, giving directions to a planet in another star system. A small expedition funded by a wealthy retired singer, Bailey (forgot her surname) goes off to check it out.

They find a very Earthlike world, inhabited by humans with one startling difference: they, and other mammals, are not viviparous. They don't get pregnant. Males and females both eject their gametes into "birthing pools" and the babies grow inside symbiotic waterplants. Eventually we learn that this planet was created as a giant seed bank by some other extraterrestrial Good Samaritan to preserve Earth biology till after the passing of the "dark force" and the strange reproductive system was set up to speed up the restocking.

Sex, being totally dissociated from reproduction, takes place casually and publicly between friends (however, penetration is considered disgusting), which startles the visitors from Earth at first. The rest of the book is an exploration of how human culture might develop with such drastically different reproductive biology, while the original mission to recover Earth's lost genetic diversity becomes almost peripheral.

Despite the beauty of this planet - "The Braided World" refers to both the riverine kingdom of the Dassa and the interdependency of humans and the birth plants - it's no utopia. The Dassa and their neighbours are just as flawed, brutal, and prejudiced as Earth humans. Occasionally girls with fully functional reproductive systems are born as throwback mutants, called "hoda". Upon their discovery at menarche, their tongues are cut out and they become mute (or so we think at first) slaves for the rest of their lives. Hoda's lib becomes a passionate subplot and a personal mission for Bailey.

Readers who enjoy SF with good world-building will like this book. Although Kenyon's skills aren't as mature as in "The Bright of the Sky", the braided world is a fully fleshed-out planet. You know it's good when you wish it was a real place you could visit. Like Octavia Butler's works, this is a more bio-driven SF rather than the majority physics-driven type of story. Kenyon doesn't get in over her head with the science or let it drown out actual plot. My only quibble is that the plant-dependent reproduction is at different points in the book said to be faster than normal pregnancy OR much less efficient.

The only two major characters I found unconvincing and annoying enough to somewhat mar the book were the anthropologist Nick Venning and the biologist Cai Zhen, who are both horribly stereotypical. Venning goes from being a wide-eyed kid who wants to go everywhere and do everything against the commander's advice (think Daniel Jackson in Stargate: SG-1) to being a raving murderous bigot after incautiously taking several doses of a psychotropic drug.

Zhen was annoying on two levels: one, that she's simply a mean person and every sentence that comes out of her mouth is a snipe. This could have been justified if her dialogue was humorously sarcastic instead of just plain vicious, or if she contributed something to the plot. I kept expecting some sort of shocking revelation, like her being impregnated by one of the Dassa, but no such luck. I felt like I had been led on since the other characters make a big deal of protecting her, as the only fertile Earth "hoda" - Bailey is postmenopausal. Even her extremely minor role in the story, sequencing the DNA of native organisms, could have been filled by a friendly robot (and I mean this literally; back here in the 21st century there already are robots that do that sort of thing). The other thing is that Kenyon seems to have subconsciously written in the stereotype of the ice-cold Chinese dragon lady. I'm not accusing Kenyon of racism (the diversity of cultures and persons in her novels is beautiful and honest), but of a worse crime for a novelist: writing a BORING CHARACTER.

Before anyone comments, I'm highly aware of the irony of a Chinese female biologist complaining about a book character who's a Chinese female biologist who complains too much... I'll stop now. Read it, it's a good book.

Vitamin A study

This is SOFA KING ironic. I can't participate in a nutrition study that would provide me with free food because I don't weigh enough.

I'm sorry to say that I can't enroll you in my study because you are too lean! I really appreciate your interest and time.

Thanks,
Ashley
....
....
Tanumihardjo Lab
Department of Nutritional Sciences

Anyway, the point of this study is that the researchers want to look at Vitamin A levels in young, nonpregnant women because they "believe the intake recommendation may be too high".

The study is going to provide participants with groceries for twelve weeks. Deviations from the provided food must be logged, and they definitely aren't allowed to eat anything on a list of Vitamin A-rich foods. (I was happy to see that garlic wasn't one of them...my diet scares vampires.) I spend about $160 per month on groceries...I do eat a lot for a girl and I prefer fresh food, or at least dishes that have SOME fresh ingredients rather than frozen or all-instant meals. I'm not in great shape financially, so the free groceries sounded great on that front even if the menu wasn't all the stuff I like.

I had to fill out a long questionnaire on my eating habits plus the typical short "are you asthmatic/anorexic/alcoholic" health questionnaire. Then I got to sit inside this peculiar chamber called a BodPod that measures body composition...but it makes you feel like an astronaut. (Yes, that's a real picture from the manufacturer and not a starship's lifeboat from a 70s science fiction show.)

Unfortunately, not only am I underweight according to the NIH's body mass index scale, the percentage of fat in my body falls under "Ultra Lean[Women]: 15-18%: Fat levels sometimes found in elite athletes."

WHATTTTT????

I like to go for walks in the woods with my cat. I like cycling with the wind at my back on a sunny day. I like capoeira when I can get over feeling intimidated by the instructors. I swear it's gotta be genetic. My 60+ year-old aunt who's had 2 kids has dresses I can't fit into.

*Looks at bum* There's a little bit of cellulite there! Come on! *pinchpinch jiggle jiggle* The "elite athletes" thing make more sense if I was my sister who's been running cross-country for the last 15 years. It would be more funny if it didn't mean missing out on 3 months of free food...sigh.

Another little irony is that Ms. Valentine told me she's too skinny to qualify as a participant in her own study. Well, if anyone else at Madison reads this, you could try looking up the lab that's conducting the study.

Yes, I just wrote an essay complaining about being too skinny...I'm sure a lot of girls would want to kill me. I just wish I wasn't so blasted hungry all the time *putters off to find midnight snack*

Immuno in space

I love how the authors of this paper are looking to the future:

The development of T cells in newborns and young adults living in the microgravity environments of space or on other planets may therefore be compromised, leaving these individuals susceptible to infectious diseases due to their inability to develop a fully functional immune system.

Woods CC, Banks KE, Gruener R, DeLuca D. Loss of T cell precursors after spaceflight and exposure to vector-averaged gravity. FASEB J. 2003 Aug;17(11):1526-8. Epub 2003 Jun 3.

So...we no can has babeez on spaceshuttle. Yet.

But I really hate journals that force paper authors to stuff all their figures at the end. Figures should be put as close as possible to the relevant text so you don't spend half your reading time flipping back and forth trying to see what goes with what - major pet peeve.

PowerPhluff

There's something remarkably perverse about taking study breaks from composing a PowerPoint presentation of a paper, to read a book where the author tells you how PowerPoint makes presenters stupid, holds audiences captive, sucks for technical data in general, and was responsible in part for the deaths of 7 astronauts on the Columbia shuttle.

I'm not kidding. Read Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence. It's a great book, spurring me to think about what I'll need to do to best present my work in the future, and its publication is responsible for the resurrection of Minard's map of Napoleon's Russia campaign that's being bandied around by the mass media. But I think it's sort of funny that he hates PowerPoint so much that he devoted an entire chapter to it, but I can see his - 'scuse me - points very well. I've had some professors who, when their laptop won't talk to the projector, can't flipping remember what that big whiteboard hiding behind the screen is for.

Minard's map:

The Yeast of Malice and Wickedness

(originally written the day after Christmas)

My grad student Bible study group's doing St. Paul's first letter to the early church in Corinth, usually called 1 Corinthians for brevity's sake. Paul being Jewish uses the metaphor of leavened bread as "contaminated" and flatbread as "holy".

Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.

(reference: 1 Corinthians 5:6-8)

One of the new girls, a first-year student who's doing a rotation in a Saccharomyces lab, starts laughing. "I should label one of my freezer boxes 'The Yeast of Malice and Wickedness'," she says.

---

I'm having my own encounter with the Yeast of Malice and Wickedness today. In the morning I pull a flask that I'd seeded with quail fibroblast cells on Christmas eve, wash the layer of cells growing on the plastic with saline, then add some fresh M199 medium. I take another flask that I infected some days ago with my virus, scrape out the cells with a plastic squeegee, burst them to bits with an ultrasonic probe, and pipette a small portion into the new flask. I've done this five times over the past couple of months. Each new flask is infected with virus grown in the last one - this is called "passaging". What I'm trying to do is to get this virus to adapt to growing in cultured cells instead of the chicken embryos it prefers. Whole eggs are messy, fiddly, and largely unusable for genetic engineering purposes. It's a large DNA virus, so they don't evolve quite as fast as some others like the RNA-based ones, but I'm hopeful.

A few hours later, I come in to look at my cells and go OMGWTFBBQ as I realize that the myriad floating bubbles in my flask aren't just fragments of dead cells from the inoculum. For one, they're too small; for another, strangely opaque; also, joined together in short chains of twos and threes. My first thought is bacteria, but they're too small. I groan inwardly, contemplating the necessity of throwing this one away.

"Diana, can you look at this for me?" I ask, baffled.
"This is yeast," she says. "What medium did you use?" We pull the M199 bottle back out of the fridge. The medium is clear, unclouded by growing cells, but I groan again as I recall that I'd dropped the bottle momentarily that morning, letting the medium slosh up into the neck and cap. The cap of any bottle is always to be presumed contaminated, especially since these medium bottles are plastic which can't be flamed (passed through the flame of a Bunsen burner) like a glass flask.

"Maybe you can wash the cells and put fresh medium with antibiotic-antimycotic," she suggests. I do so feeling vaguely guilty. Cross fingers...

Next day the quail cells look okay, with no sign of the proliferating yeasts. But now I have malice against the stuff.

Multidrug-resistant infections in Sultanah Aminah Hospital

This is absolutely appalling. (Scroll down to the second part of the story in the middle of the page.)

If you don't want to read it here's a quick summary. A woman whose 60-something diabetic father was in Sultanah Aminah Hospital in Johor complained because a consultant told him he urgently needed a wound debridement surgery, but he was subsequently left in the multidrug-resistant isolation ward for five days with only i.v. antibiotics. He has a multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter infection in the ulcer. A reporter from theSun went to visit them and found that:

• The door of the quarantine ward had a sign saying it should be closed, but it was left open
• another sign said that everyone going in must wear gloves, masks, and aprons, but there weren't any masks or aprons
• there was a pile of used gloves next to the glove box (yay cross-contamination!)
• visitors were ignoring the signs since the protective equipment wasn't there
• even worse, the reporter saw A NURSE AND A DOCTOR!!! walk in, attend to patients, and walk out without putting on the PPE or washing their hands (and the doctor's tudung wasn't tucked into her lab coat, which is effectively the same as a non-Muslim doctor having unbound long hair trailing all over).
• Another guy was there who had been in a road accident and acquired a multidrug-resistant infection from a metal implant in his leg. He's been there with a FRACTURED HAND for over a month. His fiancee said that the quarantined patients appear to have been "forgotten".

This hospital is apparently run by monkeys. Even if the patients weren't KNOWN to have an infectious disease, clinicians are still supposed to wash their hands between patients (I don't use the same gloves for different experiments in the lab).

Let me point out again for the sake of my American readers that Malaysia is not, in terms of technology, resources, or wealth, a backward country. I take every opportunity to smack down the ignoramuses who assume that "developing country" = "1990s Rwanda". We make computers, other electronics, drugs, all kinds of fine consumer products. We have so much. But brains? Who knows.

Hi ho Silver!

I'm da Clone Ranger!

Also, found out today that our lab is going to get a virus from the UK that I've been waiting for for a really long time. It's going to speak ATGC with a Cockney accent.

2008 New Year's Resolution

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions (e.g. "I will not bite my nails" has been a historical failure since age eight or so) but I've come up with what I think is a viable one this year:

• To match any amount I spend aside from regular groceries, household, and toiletry supplies with donations to NGOs doing food aid, health, education, social justice, or women's issues - both secular and Christian.
• To match ALL spending on my cat with donations to animal welfare (not animal rights) and wildlife conservation organizations.

This way I'll probably spend less money this year on silly stuff and waste less time Internet shopping.

Maybe it sounds a bit extreme to some people but I've found since leaving home and starting to earn my own money at age 18, that the less stuff I buy, the less stuff I want. Materialism is a self-perpetuating lust, and most of the hobbies I really enjoy require very little material.

Other things I'd like to do:

• Write at least 2 short fiction stories and submit at least 1 to Writers of the Future or a science fiction magazine.
• Draw more, and spontaneously.
• Reinstall Creatures 3/Docking Station on my computer and start tinkering with the CAOS (Creatures Agent Object Scripting) language.
• Call parents and sisters and "small" boy more often (sometimes I forget my brother has a phone because he never calls me...)
• Clean my bike more often.
• Cook for my boyfriend and make him take his vitamins regularly.
• Watch more movies.

It's gonna be a personally interesting year...my project is going to get into animal studies...I'll have to write a thesis and hopefully graduate...my parents just got transferred to Penang...two of my London cousins are getting married in the summer so I'll finally have a chance to go to England...a couple of Phases kakis are getting married in Malaysia...another couple is having a baby, which makes them the first friends my age to reproduce...my boyfriend is taking 2/3 of a year off school for an internship...his mum wants to show our respective cats in the summer (TICA lets you show household pets)...

Et cetera. 'Tis life. =)

Public Service Announcement

Public Service Announcement: Cowpox is not vaccinia.
Cowpox is not vaccinia.
Cowpox is NOT vaccinia.

OK? Geez.

(this is something I didn't know either until I started working in a poxvirus lab...I wish "science writers" for lay audiences would stop perpetuating this inaccuracy. one hears it all the way through undergraduate. it's like Protestants thinking the Immaculate Conception refers to that of Jesus and not Mary (I thought that was the case until college too).

yes, Jenner did originally start "vaccinating" people with cowpox, but as the virus was propagated in cows, buffaloes, horses and other four-legged animals, at some point it was replaced with vaccinia, which is another poxvirus but genetically distinct. i.e. vaccinia isn't a derivative (descendant) of cowpox.

In case you're wondering what set me off, I'm reading Steve's mum's Christmas present to me, John M. Barry's The Great Influenza, about the 1918 flu pandemic.

Charles River Labs Christmas card

Charles River sent me a Christmas card...I'm kinda wondering why they bother to be politically correct in English by putting "Season's Greetings" but still have "Joyeux Noel" and "Feliz Navidad."

The funny part was the envelope: illustrating the dangers of using robots to address people.

Jef Mallet reviewing Pavlov

Quote of the day

Splitter: But there's no lab animal model for it.
Talaat: In the vet school, cows are considered lab animals.

(This was in the middle of a discussion about how to determine whether or not Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis is the aetiologic agent of Crohn's disease in humans. If you click on the first link, the September 1 news article is the review paper that was under discussion. We kinda came to the conclusion that the only definitive way to determine this would be to kidnap a bunch of preschoolers and force-feed them MAP-tainted milk.)

So, uh, are you doing anything after the midterm?

I'm quite enjoying the Immunology course - there's enough new stuff to keep me engaged but it's (to me at least) simple enough to not make me sweat over Thursday's upcoming midterm. Last Monday, however, we had a "discussion section" in the evening outside class time, which the TA decided to make into a review session because a lot of people were confused.

After a very short time we came to the conclusion that he was a prat. I think most immuno newbies left more confused than they came in. As CS Lewis wrote of Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he "had never learned to tell a story straight". For introducing people to immunology you HAVE to tell it as a narrative - what happens when a pathogen enters the body. He was jumping all over the place spewing out blobs of unconnected, and often irrelevant, facts. I had an almost unbearable impulse to leap up and grab the chalk from him.

Anyway, the following email he just sent out has failed utterly to improve my opinion of him:

I hope your studying is going well (and just know that I’m around, and am flexible for the next few days if you want to get together). I also thought I would direct your attention toward the release of Matchbox 20’s new album, Exile on Mainstream. Anyway, it’s released tomorrow so you better appreciate that… or else.

Is he trying to ask the entire class on a date or what? *baffled*

The fate of tattoos

I'm taking Immunology this sem with labmate Angela and boyfriend Steve (and my poor engineer is going to die of acronym bombardment, he's not used to us biologists). So far we're going over the basics...classes of immune cells, the difference between adaptive and innate immunity and whatnot.

If you're a layperson reading this and want to know a bit about immunology I recommend Lennart Nilsson's dramatically beautiful The Body Victorious - you can see some pics from it here. He's most famous for A Child Is Born, which is the one that has all those neat pictures of fetuses.

Anyway, the prof today was talking about macrophages, which are big cells that eat things (you can basically figure it out from the name if you know Greek). One slide was about tattoos, and it finally answered the question I've been wondering about, which is why don't the macrophages eat up the tattoo ink and carry it away?
(Slide copyright Gary A. Splitter)

Actually, I like Sgt. Colon's explanation better (from Terry Pratchett's Jingo, which I think should be recommended reading for all citizens of any nation with a military):

"Sarge," said Nobby, as they looked out at the wonders of the deep.
"Yes, Nobby?"
"You know they say every tiny part of your body is replaced every seven years?"
"A well-known fact," said Sergeant Colon.
"Right. So...I've got a tattoo on my arm, right? Had it done eight years ago. So...how come it's still there?"
Giant seaweeds winnowed the gloom.
"Interesting point," quavered Colon. "Er..."
"I mean, okay, new tiny bits of skin float in, but that means it ought to be all new and pink by now."
A fish with a nose like a saw swam past.
In the middle of all of his other fears, Sergeant Colon tried to think fast.
"What happens," he said, "is that all the blue skin bits are replaced by other blue skin bits. Off'f other peoople's tattoos."
"So...I've got other people's tattoos now?"
"Er...yes."
"Amazing. 'cos it still looks like mine. 's got the crossed daggers and 'WUM.'"
"Wum?"
"It was gonna be 'Mum' but I passed out and Needle Ned didn't notice I was upside down."

Biasiswa Agong follow-up

For whatever peculiar reason, my post last year on interviewing for the Biasiswa Agong (King's Scholarship) is the first English language Google hit for "biasiswa agong", even above the JPA's page. This is sort of weird because I didn't get it (only 10 scholarships for MS and 5 for PhD are offered per year).

Anyway, a couple of people subesquently posted comments asking for advice (sorry for the delays in replying). Here's a short list of what I think I did right and wrong, hope it helps.

• In the letter notifying interviewees, they say to bring a hard copy of your proposal. Bring FOUR copies - 1 for each interviewer and 1 for yourself so you don't get confused.
• Also bring a copy of your CV just in case - if I remember correctly, the original application that we mailed in required one, but won't hurt right?
• Also bring a short outline of a verbal presentation of your proposal so you can rehearse silently while you're waiting. It's an interview not a presentation though, so don't make yourself a long speech.
• If you've been studying abroad for a while, PRACTICE YOUR BM!!! The interview was in English, but they asked a few sentences in Malay to check if I was still reasonably fluent. Pull out your long-forgotten SPM buku rujukan or whatever.
• Even if 1 interviewer does most of the talking, try to look at/address all of them while you're speaking. My interviewers were 1 Malay lady and 2 men; the lady seemed to talk most and to know the most about the subject I was discussing.
• Make sure you can explain how your studies/research will be useful to the rakyat eventually.
• If you're applying for a program abroad, be prepared with a convincing reason you won't just take the money and run (I think the govt is becoming a bit more aware of the brain drain problem even if they still suck at corralling the undergrad JPA scholars). And no, "my parents are getting old" is not convincing.
• Try to make yourself sound original and independent. This is where I think I screwed up - my current advisor/boss had just emailed me a big PDF of his grant proposal so I was sort of like "Er, yah, I'm just going to be the research assistant on this cool project..." *slaps forehead*

Good luck to you people who contacted me or who are reading this...let me know how it goes!

By the way, they suck at notifying unsuccessful candidates. I only found out when there was a newspaper article about the YDP Agong having lunch or something with the scholars. I can understand not notifying every Ali, Muthu, and Ah Beng who applied, but there weren't that many people who made it to the interview stage so at least could have sent out "We regret to inform..." letters right?

As for me...I came to the US anyway. I'm 8 months into a 2-year MS program. My salary and tuition are being covered partly by a scholarship from the institution I'm at (you know, "institution" sounds a bit like a mental hospital...) and partly by my PI's grant funding, since I'm working for him as a research assistant. This is generally what happens in the US for students in the natural sciences - funded either as RAs or TAs (teaching assistants, who teach undergrad classes).

However, if you're in bio like me and thinking of taking the same path to "the States", be warned that the NIH (National Institutes of Health), which is one of the biggest resources for life sciences research here, has been funding a smaller and smaller fraction of grant applications over the past few years, so your boss may run out of money for graduate student salaries. One of my lab-mates just lost her job due our boss pokai. So keep looking for other scholarships, and also for TA-ships and the like.

By the way - if you have any adik-beradik who want to study in the US for undergrad, tell them to apply to Williams College. Williams gives all international students a roundtrip ticket home annually. I almost fainted when my sis FlowerMoonFish told me. Bloody kid!

...under a gibbous moon

I got an email from Steve containing the phrase

Every Wednesday, someone sacrifices a mother rat..."

and to me it would have made perfect sense even out of context, even if I hadn't been asking after the rat, because I now think in terms of scheduling experiments, harvesting fresh cells.

...and then I realized that to someone else, we would sound like frigging Satanists =D

Also, I was going to reply to Steve's email and forward the relevant chunks to my advisor, but somehow I replied to the boyfriend and added el jefe's email by mistake. Which wouldn't have been terrible except that I signed off with "Thanks sweetie!"

So if you don't see any more updates to this blog, it's because I've ended my shame.

Terminally.

Bleep you like an animal

This is super funny. Apparently you can make female mice think they're males and try to hump everything in sight by removing their vomeronasal organs (either by genetic knockout or surgically).

Poor black mouse, the girl-on-top position doesn't work so well when you have four legs.

So sexual behaviour in mice is hardwired, but you can flip the switch:

Dulac thinks it makes total sense: "Instead of building a male brain and then a female brain, you build a mouse brain, and then there's a sensory switch that makes sure that the animal behaves appropriately according to its gender."

Let's not jump to any conclusions about the mutability or lack thereof of human gender, though:

It isn't clear how these findings might translate to other species. Many researchers think that the human vomeronasal organ is defunct, and the human TRPC2 gene is functionless.

"Different species use different sensory strategies to understand the world," says Dulac. She notes that whereas rodents use pheromones as an important trigger for sexual behaviour, primates and humans are more visual creatures.

Cancer vaccine - what??

Cancer vaccine trials for 230

KUALA LUMPUR: Some 230 advanced-stage lung cancer patients in the country will take part in clinical trials for a therapeutic cancer vaccine.

Deputy Health Minister Datuk Dr Abdul Latiff Ahmad said the vaccine, Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF), was the first of its kind in the world and produced here with the cooperation between Malaysia and Cuba.

“The second and third phases of the clinical trials would be conducted on 230 patients who volunteered to undertake the trials at 14 hospitals nationwide.

“They have been told they have about six months to live,” he told a press conference.

Dr Latiff said the trials would be conducted by a local biotechnology company and Cuban researchers.

(From The Star)

Ok, I'm really confused as to how EGF can be used as a cancer vaccine...as far as I know the therapeutic use of recombinant growth factors is in special bandages to heal chronic wounds like bad burns and diabetic ulcers. But I've spent all day reading Harry Potter so I'm not going to PubMed it now.

---

I'm suspicious of "big" announcements with regard to scientific research in Malaysia because Malaysian officials like to say all kinds of karut stuff...like last week the Fisheries Department said they were going to save the vanishing leatherbacks by cloning turtles (can't access the original article because the New Straits Times is a lot more stingy about giving free access to archives). I mean, do you know how hard it is to clone mammals? Nobody's even TRIED reptiles yet...Junaidi can go jump in the lake with Michael Crichton and his dinosaurs lah.

Melaka

So Melaka, the place where I suffered for two and a half years before going off to college - also known as "an overgrown fishing village where everybody is related to everybody else", and by its Anglicized name of Malacca - is in the news again since someone discovered a new bat-vectored reovirus there. Apparently the Chief Minister isn't too happy about a virus being named after his state, never mind that nobody minded the naming of Nipah virus back in the 1990s (Chua Kaw Bing, the leader of the Malaysian team, was also involved in the discovery of Nipah, if I remember correctly).

Viruses have been renamed in the past, most notably the Sin Nombre ("No Name") hantavirus that killed a lot of people in a Native American community. The researchers were originally going to name it after the place it was discovered, but the community objected, not without reason since a number of their best young people had just died.

Thinking about Melaka again, I can't say that this is the only thing I find interesting about it. Melaka has a great history, but the vast majority of Malaysian local governments wouldn't know what history was if it bit them on the bum. The vaunted Portuguese fort, A Famosa is a pile of rocks while beautiful old Chinese shophouses that have been around for generations crumble (warning: 鸟屋 [The Bird House] is one of those artsy movies where the ending makes no sense).

During my time in college, I read Shellabear's transcription (it was originally written in Jawi) of the Sejarah Melayu [The Malay Annals - or loosely, "The History of the Malays"] and finally finished it during spring break of senior year. We had been exposed to snippets of classical Malay through the last two years of secondary school, but never read a full text like how American kids have to swallow at least one Shakespeare. I wanted to taste at least one classical Malay book in its entirety...which was pretty much the equivalent in difficulty of an ESL speaker digesting the Lord of the Rings.

I was volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity build that spring break. Lying on the bottom bunk in a beach house in South Carolina, reading by torchlight, I wept over the terror and betrayal of the Portuguese invasion:

Setelah datang musim maka kapitan kapal itupun kembalilah ke Goa. Telah datang ke Goa maka, diwartakannya kepada wazir-wazirnya peri kebesaran negeri Melaka dengan makmurnya serta dengan ramai bandarnya. Pada masa itu wazirnya di Goa Alfonso d'Alberquerque namanya. Maka ia pun terlalu ingin menegar khabar negeri Melaka itu. Maka ia menyuruh berlengkap kapal tujuh buah, dan ghali panjang sepuluh, fusta tigabelas. Telah sudah lengkap, maka disuruhnya menyerang Melaka. Maka Gonzalo Periera nama kapitannya. Telah datang ke Melaka, make dibedilnya dengan meriam. Maka segala orang Melaka pun terkejut menengar bunyi meriam itu, katanya, 'Apa bunyi ini seperti guruh?'

Maka peluru meriam itupun datang mengenai segala orang Melaka: ada yang putus lehernya, ada yang putus pinggangnya, ada yang putus pahanya, ada yang pecah kepalanya; makin bertambah-tambah hairanlah orang Melaka melihat peluru bedil itu, katanya, 'Apa nama senjata bulat-bulat ini? Mana tajamnya, maka ia membunuh ini?'

[My crappy translation: When the season came, then the captain of that ship returned to Goa. When he reached Goa, he reported to the viceroys of the greatness of Melaka, of its sovereignity and its many towns. At that time, the Viceroy of Goa was named Alfonso d'Alberquerque. He greatly desired to hear more of Melaka. therefore he commanded that seven ships, ten long ghalis [dunno this word], and thirteen fustas [dunno also] be equipped. When all was ready, he commanded the invasion of Melaka. Gonzalo Periera was the name of his captain. When they reached Melaka, they bombarded it with cannon. Then all the people of Melaka were shocked to hear the cannons, saying, 'What is this sound like thunder?'

Then the cannonballs came and struck the people of Melaka: some had their necks broken, some had their waists broken, some had their thighs broken, some had their heads crushed; and the amazement of the people of Melaka grew watching those missiles, saying, 'What is the name of these round weapons? Where is their sharpness, that they kill like this?' -- Sejarah Melayu, WG Shellabear edition, p.184]

That is the history of Melaka. The history of Melaka cannot be conveyed by a bunch of lazy vendors selling trinkets made in China. The history of Melaka cannot be conveyed by painting all the buildings in the historical district brick red. The history of Melaka, for heaven's sake, cannot be conveyed by a giant revolving tower shaped like Hang Tuah's keris.

The history of Melaka is the history of a fallen kingdom whose conquerors themselves all fell in time. It comes to us through stories, read or spoken, and through the lives of the people whose ancestors were there - Malay, Chinese, Indian, Portuguese. In comparison all else is dirt.

Nucking Futs

My friend Koidy, who's from Batu Caves and just finished her BS at Franklin and Marshall, sent me this story. Ooooookie. To treat erectile dysfunction? (Or as the less squeamish of us would call it, "impotence".)

Koidy brought up concerns about proper controls since the article says

so far 40 volunteers had tried the tablet and responded positively.

Perhaps it's just sloppy writing on the part of The Star - maybe Dr Kim did describe a controlled study but the reporter just thought it would be too boring to put in a mainstream paper - but otherwise it sounds sketchy. Also no mention of whether the results were published in a peer-reviewed journal.

This is a really irresponsible statement to make:

“Furthermore, because it is not a drug, it is safe for those with hypertension or diabetes, or (those) who have recently had heart bypasses,” he said, adding that some of the volunteers had undergone bypass surgeries.

Not a drug? The last time I checked, the general definition of a drug was any chemical that alters the body's physiology. If you claim that it can give fat old men boners by dilating their blood vessels, it's a drug. This also falls under the fallacy about "natural" remedies that technophobic types like to believe - that if something is natural, it must be safe. Another small molecule that can be extracted from nuts (cyanide from almonds) is "natural", but I wouldn't care to assume its safety in any great quantity.

Anyway, nitroglycerin is used in heart patients for the same purpose - it's converted into NO in the body. Why reinvent the wheel?

Also, something I might not have picked up on if I hadn't seen someone's letter to The Star about Malaysian academicians entering bogus design contests: the "International Invention, Innovation, Industrial Design and Technology Exhibition" that this product won a gold medal at is hosted by Malaysia. From the list of "winners" [PDF] from last year, it looks like virtually all the entrants were Malaysian. And there were FIFTEEN gold medals given out to university teams in the "Biotechnology, Health & Fitness" category, out of a total of 46 gold medals awarded to universities. It's like a primary school Sports Day where everybody gets a prize. (I was going to say "Special Olympics" but it's not fair to associate handicapped people with the incorrigibly incompetent.)

Check out the guy lah...see for yourself.

And whatever happened to Tongkat Ali?

---

Stupid cat went out right before a thunderstorm. I have now one very soggy and unhappy kitty wandering around my apartment looking for things to dry herself on..aiyayayayayaya.

You know you're becoming a poxvirologist when...

Gah. I re-read Stephen King's Carrie last night and every time they talked about the "TK gene", instead of "telekinesis" I thought "thymidine kinase".

It really isn't as scary as it was when I was 16...

Poor little devils

So, now that I've gotten my 3rd and final Pathology 750 assignment grade back, I'm going to post the first one, which I'm proud of now but at the time was making me sleepless for a week. Since it was my first big assignment after not having had any science classes for 2 years, I was sick with worry after submitting it.

When I logged on to my uni's course content system and saw the 50/50 grade, it was a nearly orgasmic moment: I screamed. ^_^

Performing well academically makes me paranoid, though: it can't be that I'm that smart, I must be screwing up and picking all the easy classes. Low self esteem konon >D

Anyway, a quick run-down of the problem: Tasmanian devils get a peculiar cancer called Devil Facial Tumour Disease, which makes horrendous growths that swell, rot, and eventually cause them to starve to death. Theory is that the etiologic agent (i.e. thingy that causes the disease) is the tumour itself - since devils fight pretty much whenever they meet each other, chunks of tumour cells break off, stick to the new host, and grow on it.

People think this is possible because devils went through a population bottleneck at some point, so they're very inbred and therefore don't mount an immune response to each other's cells. Contrast this to humans who need to take powerful immune-suppression drugs if they receive organ transplants, even from relatives.

For the question we were asked to come up with an alternate theory (since reduced genetic diversity doesn't automatically translate into an epidemic of transmissible cancer) involving "the failure of the MHC class I antigen processing and presentation machinery". I racked my brains about it for the better part of a week until having an "eureka" moment that it was similar to something else we'd discussed in class - Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour (great disease name, tells you exactly what it is).

Download a .pdf of the essay here.

I was really afraid that my answer was too "off" to be acceptable, but surprisingly the prof liked it. Anyway, I'm sort of proud of my answer because at the time I wrote it there wasn't any information out there to really confirm the popular model.

Although it turns out that someone's gotten around to testing devils' immune reactions against each other (scroll down to "A Contagious Cancer") and they really don't recognize other devils' cells as foreign.

Mixed lymphocyte reactions were then undertaken to investigate whether the Tasmanian devil has the correct genes to allow recognition of foreign cells. This was performed by mixing lymphocytes from many devils to see if they reacted to each other. The results from these studies clearly showed that devils failed to recognise cells from other devils as different. This provides strong evidence that a lack of genetic diversity contributes to why the cancer is infectious.

There goes my pretty theory. The scriptwriter for Stargate SG-1 who had a character say "I'm a scientist. It's just as exciting for my theories to be proved wrong as to be proved right," clearly hasn't talked to any of us recently...

Too bad the prof didn't comment on my really really alternative theory of DFTD etiology (or aetiology if you're British): Martian cancer rays!

Agar-oops

"...is a total idiot!"

My ears perk up. Who's Keith complaining about? Anything for entertainment on a slow afternoon like this. Angela turns as he comes into the office. "Who is a total idiot?"

"Kris!"
"What did he do?"
"He overlaid those rat cells with agar but he didn't take the medium off first!"

Angela and I start giggling. Keith flings his hands in the air. "Someone needs to hit that kid in the head with a rubber mallet."

Ok, so it's only funny if you're a virologist... I'll try to illustrate later, I've got my drawing tablet back now.

The perils of poor housing

"...Spemann's organizer was discovered by Hans Spemann's grad student Hilde Mangold. Spemann got the Nobel Prize. Hilde lived in crappy grad student housing and killed herself^*. You can't win a Nobel posthumously. Moral of the story, if you want to win the Nobel, don't live in crappy housing."

- one of the Path 750 lecturers

*Gilbert's Developmental Biology says Mangold died when the gas stove in her apartment exploded. I guess that's why most crappy apartments now have electric stoves...to preserve the lives of potential Nobel laureates. =P

Final

Today I waltzed out of my molecular biology final after barely half an hour - the first to leave.

This is notable because (aside from it being my first final exam in more than two years) I'm rarely the first person to hand in an exam. It's partly because my father's drilled into my head since primary school that one should always check one's answers, but also because...if you're the first person to walk out and you know others are struggling with it...you feel bad.

It's a form of survivor's guilt, a feeling that one's ability is undeserved and is morally culpable. My sis FlowerMoonFish, being both smarter and nicer than me, feels it more strongly. (Last year when she was taking A-Levels she said she studied extra so that the girls who actually needed to study wouldn't feel bad when they saw that she was mugging too.) It's an emotion that the jerky kids who like to suck up to the prof and wear their brains on their sleeves don't have to deal with.

But in the final analysis [hur hur hur], someone has to walk out of that room first. It's a nice day outside, might as well be me.

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Last night I was explaining to Steve about in situ synthesis of oligos for DNA microarrays (see here, it's really cool):

"And who came up with that? A biologist or an engineer?"
"An engineer, but it was a biologist who came up with the application. I'm sure an engineer didn't wake up one morning and say 'I'm going to invent a way to synthesize oligos on a slide for fun.'"
"I don't think you can be a pure biologist or a pure engineer any more. You have to merge."
"Oh yeah? Let's merge."

^_^

EDIT: good GRIEF I'm degenerating into one of those girls who talk about their boyfriends all the time. The other night on the phone my dad asked me why I "have to be in a relationship all the time". Emotionally needy I guess =D

Species

I was reading about the concept of virus species in the intro to the Virus Taxonomy Online site and found a statement that sounds a bit the stupid when you think about it:

It is remarkable that a century and a half after Darwin, there is still no agreement about what a species is.

Er...no it's not...because if Darwin's right that means living organisms are constantly changing, which is precisely why it's hard to put them in a nice box.

Fuzzy logic. 'S all good. =)

Not to mention dead organisms...I was Googling "finch pox" and somehow ended up reading about a debate about Archaeopteryx's relationship to dinosaurs. Evolutionary biology is cool but evo biologists spend so much time arguing with each other, which I don't have the energy for. The kind of stuff I'm doing, something works or it doesn't work, finis.

Especially viruses. It's been several days since I found out about reticuloendotheliosis virus (an itsy-bitsy retrovirus) piggybacking on bigger DNA viruses like pox and herpes, and I still think it's cool. Viruses have viruses??? It's like in the Jonathan Swift couplet:

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Random lists of things

Things I own or owned that are older than me:

• My mum's swimsuit (it was actually quite nice-looking)
• My dad's Bible (pocket-sized copy of the NIV)
• My friend David's mum's old bike (a Motobecane Nomade, mixte-frame road bike. The photo in the Wikipedia entry is mine, actually.)

Things I like:

• Skinny boys (must work on Steve!)
• Sharp knives (I have 14 bladed instruments in my tiny apartment at last count, ranging from a foot-long Filipino bolo to a #11 craft knife)
• Medium-sized dogs
• Cats except brachycephalic breeds (e.g. Persians, which look like they've been punched in the face)
• Rainy days
• Broccoli, green peas, Chinese/Napa cabbage, Chinese radish/daikon
• Boston Cream doughnuts
• Automatic microplate washers
• Watching animals interact without human intervention
• Lindt and Dove chocolates, and those fancy Guylian hazelnut praline seashells
• Fireworks of any type
• Lego
• Complex but gramatically well-structured sentences
• My immediate family and most of the Hwa cousins
• White mice
• Wensleydale cheese
• Char koay teow and Penang laksa
• Microwave ovens
• Evolutionary psychology
• Thick copper wire, like the kind in the solenoids of ceiling fans

Things I don't like:

• Indexed shifters on cheap bikes (because the "clicks" on the shifters don't line up properly with the gears)
• Running
• Pipettors that take weird-sized tips
• Mustard greens
• Toy breeds of dogs (especially since working at a vet clinic in college)
• UMNO politicians
• Girls/women who wear a lot of makeup and expect males to carry things for them
• Radical feminists
• Ultracentrifuges (because I'm scared the rotor will come off and fly through a brick wall)
• Cotton rats, because they bite and they're tough bastards to catch
• Oscillating fans
• Cheap chocolate with palm oil or other vegetable oils substituted for the cocoa butter
• Whiny accents, particularly Malaysian Chinese-school-educated and the US "Valley Girl"
• Powdered latex gloves
• People who are stupid because they're lazy and/or arrogant (people who are stupid because of innate skill level are fine, it's not their fault...and they often act more sensibly than the former type of stupidos)
• Chee cheong fun ("pig intestine noodles")

OA research

About that Robin Weiss essay I blogged yesterday...something else interesting in it is that when he was trying to identify how far back in chicken lineages ALV (avian leukosis virus) became incorporated into the chicken genome, he went and stayed in the jungle with Orang Asli in Malaysia to take egg and blood samples from red jungle fowl (wild chickens).

I was interested to know if the chicken ERV was a recent introduction into domestic fowl, or whether it was present in the ancestor species, the red jungle fowl. In 1970, I made a field trip to Malaysia and lived with tribesmen (orang asli) in the Pahang jungle who knew how to trap these birds, in order to take blood samples and to collect eggs for cell culture.

This is one little anecdote, but it's a concrete illustration of how indigenous people's knowledge can contribute to science. No doubt if he had just gone there with a bunch of other urban-dwelling academics either from his UCL or from UM, it would have taken them months longer to find where the jungle fowl lived, develop trapping techniques, etc.

All the talk about biotechnology and bioprospecting that the government puts out is highly ironic in light of the fact that they're kicking some of these people off their ancestral lands, especially for a silly garden which is likely to be mismanaged and turn into a white elephant as usual anyway...

Really, really, retro

I was looking up feline leukemia virus on the Virus Taxonomy site for a reason that I hopefully will be able to write about later. Then I started browsing through the whole retrovirus section and remembered that I had been going to look up reticuloendotheliosis virus (it's something chickens get, don't ask) 'cos I need to find out if it's piggybacking on our fowlpox or canarypox samples. Then I got totally sidetracked because I found this cool paper by some old guy narrating the history of the discovery of endogenous retroviruses.

Science history is more interesting to read if you're a science student, I think, because it gives you an idea of the significance of technologies and knowledge you take for granted:

So the next step was to collaborate with Jim Payne to determine whether Env complementation and Gag expression were inherited concomitantly. Using inbred chickens, F1 hybrids and back-crosses, we found that both phenotypes were indeed inherited according to Mendel's first law and that they segregated together as a single locus [27].

My first reaction to this paragraph was "Why the **** didn't they just extract DNA from the chickens and run PCR on it to see fi the gag and env genes were there???"

Then I remembered...oh yeah hor, last time no such thing as PCR.

Nonetheless, the evidence that we accrued in the pre-molecular era has stood the test of time, and our hypothesis on ERV, which one reviewer described as 'impossible', proved to be correct.

And it's really impressive how much discovery got done back before the molecular biology explosion...like McClintock and her discovery of transposons by looking at blobby lumps on chromosomes under a microscope.

Back then...men were real men, women were real women and small fuzzy creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small fuzzy creatures from Alpha Centauri^*. Now we just buy reagents in kits and send our DNA samples off for sequencing and get a nice data file back.

*I think this is from Douglas Adams but I'm not sure.

National embarrassment

Good grief. I just found out from a commentor on the Education In Malaysia blog (see this story for background) that Malaysia was featured in Nature back in 2005. And not in a good way.

I know it's too easy to blame everything on the government...but that's because it is too easy. The idea of Ketuanan Melayu is a load of crap (as any idea of the supremacy of a particular ethnic group is, especially in a country with ethnic miniorities this big), and the resulting policies and practices are doing as much good for our country's progress as a pair of lead boots to a swimmer. See the Nature story here.

Science and Christianity seminar last weekend

Posted in my Facebook notes.

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The church I attend in Madison (I don't like to say "my church" ever, because as a pastor's kid I'm a bit allergic to church-specific allegiance) is a bit of an odd case because it's an Evangelical Free Church, but unlike the typical evangelicals in the US, they're pretty neutral politically and even open to what Americans usually consider left-wing issues. Last year there was a sermon on "The Future" and my reaction to the title was Oh groan they're going to talk about Revelation, but instead the pastor invited a UW professor to talk about climate change =D

Anyway, last weekend there was a seminar on science and Christianity which I attended. I ran into a few people I didn't expect, including a kid called Rob in my molecular biology techniques class. Descriptions of the speakers are here here.

The five speakers included three current and one emeritus UW professors, one of whom was Rick Lindroth, the entomology prof who did the "Al Gore" talk mentioned above =D

The other two UW professors are Jeff Hardin, in Zoology, and Stuart Knechtle, a professor of transplantation. Hardin is in developmental biology, which is really cool. Dev bio is also one of the areas that's very much dealing with the "where did life come from" question.

The retired prof, Wayne Becker, is a biochemist. He did a cute little gimmick of literally wearing different hats as he described positions along the creation/evolution continuum: Young Earth Creationists (Henry Morris), Old Earth Creationists (Hugh Ross), Theistic Evolutionists (Francis Collins - the Human Genome Project guy, and me), and Naturalistic Evolutionists (Richard Effing Dawkins).

I was saying something to someone today about Francis Collins and I said Michael Collins by mistake...wait...not the astronaut dude. =D

The one non-UW faculty member is John Walton, a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton, who talked about reading the OT in the light of ancient Middle Eastern thought...comparative literature I guess. I ended up buying one of his books on the subject, message me if you're interested in reading it.

In sum, it was definitely worth getting up early on Saturday (after staying up till 3am reading Terry Pratchett's "Thud" =PPP I needed to catch up on Sam Vimes.)

Ultimately my position as a Christian and a scientist is based on faith. I'm trusting that a) God exists and b) made a world which is systematic and c) gave us rational minds, I'm not going to go into by what mechanism here and d) loves us enough not to mess with our minds too much. If those four assumptions are correct, nothing the Bible says should contradict the findings of reason and observation, and vice versa. There ya go.

To close, a note from St. Augustine:

"Since, then, in those situations where such things are appropriate, some perish to make way for others that are born in their room, and the less succumb to the greater, and the things that are overcome are transformed into the quality of those that have the mastery, this is the appointed order of things transitory. Of this order the beauty does not strike us, because by our mortal frailty we are so involved in a part of it, that we cannot perceive the whole, in which these fragments that offend us are harmonized with the most accurate fitness and beauty." (City of God*, Book XII, Chapter 3.)

I think Augustine would have been a TE =)

ARGH I HAVE HOMEWORK AGAIN. At some point I'll get around to posting the theory I came up with for my last Path 750 assignment. I got fifty out of fifty marks for writing about Devil Facial Tumour Disease (I guess "tumour" ought to be spelt with a u, since it is an Australian animal) and I'm very pleased with it. At the rate I'm going with this second one, it may be somewhat less pleasing.

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*Unfortunately Augustine's books are no longer on Gutenberg.org. They're now in the CCEL, which you can access for free but have to register.

Raptor!

No, not the Jurassic Park kind...although that's where I first learned the word from. That book can scare the crap out of a ten-year-old kid.

Recently my sis FlowerMoonFish who's interning at theSun was assigned to cover Raptor Watch. It's spring migration now, so they're all going back to their breeding grounds in China or Russia or whatever from their winter holiday in M'sia.

Anyway, I was at Blackhawk Church's Science & Christianity seminary today (I'd like to say "more about that later", but more than likely I'll be too lazy to do a proper write-up). Rick Lindroth, who's a UW-Madison professor of entomology, was talking about environmentalism from a Christian perspective (a.k.a. creation care). He noted that one reason we're pretty apathetic about what happens to nature is that we're unfamiliar with it - walk down the street and you'll probably recognize most of the corporate logos you see, but very few trees. (Hinthint, the one that looks like the Canadian flag in autumn is a maple. =)

[Is it just me, or does he look like a less horsey version of John Kerry?]

Also, I've been rereading Joey Slinger's Down and Dirty Birding, which I picked up last year at the Singapore National Library booksale. It's a humorous and accessible guide for the beginning birder, insightful but not heavy, and mentions characteristics of birds you're likely to see in North America. As it's written by a Canadian, the particulars of birds mentioned in the book are pretty unhelpful for Malaysians (except for worldwide invasives like the pigeon...groan).

Also, IT'S EFFING SPRING! You'd have to be blind and deaf to not notice all the birds showing up (blind birders listen for songs and calls).

The cool thing happened later. I'd gone to lab after the seminar around 5pm to check on some cells. As I was unlocking my bike at the side of the building, a crow-sized bird bombed out of the crabapple tree next to the bicycle rack, swooped across the lawn, and ended up in a big tree (yes, I don't know what kind of tree it is) with a chipmunk in its talons. At least, it had something in its talons and a still-twitching chipmunk tail was hanging out.

After it moved to a higher branch to get slightly further away from my kaypoh staring, it began to eat. You could hear the crunchy noises.

It was mostly light brownish-grey, with brown stripes across the tail, and the top of its head was darker. A bit like this fellow. I went home and looked it up on eNature and I think it was either a Cooper's or a Sharp-Shinned Hawk (both the Animal Diversity web pages and Slinger say they're easily confused).

ADW on their feeding habits:

When hunting, Cooper's hawks usually perch in a hidden location and watch for prey. They wait until their prey is unaware of their presence, then quickly swoop down and seize it. Bobwhites, starlings, blackbirds, chipmunks, and squirrels are common prey for Cooper's hawks.

Sharp-shinned hawks are opportunistic hunters. They often hunt from a perch and dart out from hiding to catch prey. Their long, sharp talons help them to grab onto prey and their short bursts of high-speed flight help them to catch their prey.

There ya go.

Things I've learned in lab this week

Things I've learned in lab recently, in no particular order:

• Powdered gloves + black pants = more laundry
• Cells don't like being tossed into a liquid N₂ tank all of a sudden.
• Chicken embryos look like little chickens, but with enormous heads. They're kinda like Grays.
• If you run a very old centrifuge faster than it likes, the drive belt will melt =(
• Hot glassware doesn't look hot. [Yes, I stole that, but it's a classic.]

Augustine on Evolution

I've quoted St. Augustine on ecology before. Here's what he might have to say about the current evolution-vs.-creationism flap. I'll let the great man speak for himself. *grin* This is a link to the entire book in plaintext if you want it.

[From Book XII]

Chapter 4.--Of the Nature of Irrational and Lifeless Creatures, Which in Their Own Kind and Order Do Not Mar the Beauty of the Universe.

But it is ridiculous to condemn the faults of beasts and trees, and other such mortal and mutable things as are void of intelligence, sensation, or life, even though these faults should destroy their corruptible nature; for these creatures received, at their Creator's will, an existence fitting them, by passing away and giving place to others, to secure that lowest form of beauty, the beauty of seasons, which in its own place is a requisite part of this world. For things earthly were neither to be made equal to things heavenly, nor were they, though inferior, to be quite omitted from the universe. Since, then, in those situations where such things are appropriate, some perish to make way for others that are born in their room, and the less succumb to the greater, and the things that are overcome are transformed into the quality of those that have the mastery, this is the appointed order of things transitory. Of this order the beauty does not strike us, because by our mortal frailty we are so involved in a part of it, that we cannot perceive the whole, in which these fragments that offend us are harmonized with the most accurate fitness and beauty.

Haha, he said "fitness" =D

... But they forget that this very light which is so pleasant to them, disagrees with and hurts weak eyes; and in that heat which is disagreeable to them, some animals find the most suitable conditions of a healthy life.

He must have been thinking of Strain 121.

Nanoboobs!

[22:15] Steve: and i might get yelled at by my prof
[22:15] Steve: oh well
[22:15] Steve: he knows how i work.
[22:15] me: yelled at for what?
[22:16] Steve: doing little work
[22:16] Steve: last year i procrastinated till the last possible minute for a paper for his class
[22:16] Steve: then i stayed up till 3am and made a very very good paper i'm proud of
[22:17] *** Steve is trying to send you "Dual_Photon_Microscopy.doc".
[22:17] * Steve wants hwa to see
[some time later]
[22:30] me: i just looked up one of the papers you cited in the 2 photon microscopy paper
[22:30] me: figures...guys...
[22:31] me: all this cutting edge nanotech and what do they make? boobies [PDF, see p. 3].
[22:31] Steve: what?
[22:31] Steve: rofl
[22:31] Steve: hahaha
[22:31] Steve: yes, i remember that one

InterVarsity last night

Steve and I went to the IV grad Christian Fellowship meeting last night (they're fortnightly). At the end of the meeting we split up into groups by fields of study to pray.

I noticed something really funny: completely contrary to the layman's belief that science and reason have[are] abolished[ing] religion, the engineering and math group had the most people in it, followed by physical sciences, biology, social sciences (a.k.a. "people who think P<0.3 is good"), and last of all, arts and humanities.

Tim, who's the advisor of Lawrence University's CF, commented that he thinks the arts are the most hostile to Christianity. Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works wrote that the reason modern art holds little interest for the lay public is that it's really an esoteric status competition among artists and aficionados that really has little to do with what the human brain tends to find beautiful.

So there we have our explanation, ladies and gentlemen: professional artists are a bunch of wankers. >D

My twisted mind

I participated in a study on diffusion tensor imaging of the adult brain today. It was the first time I've ever been for an MRI...lying still for an hour and a half in a noisy tunnel is quite the Jedi experience. The machine makes different noises as it does different kinds of scans. There was one sound that reminded me of the guitar riff at the beginning of a Smashing Pumpkins song.

My first younger sister also had an MRI recently because she signed up for a sleep deprivation study (college students are great subjects, because for the most part we're young and healthy and willing to do almost anything for cash). "They made us stay up all night then you have to do cognitive tests in the MRI. I fell asleep in the MRI and the voice kept saying "Please respond...please respond..."

Here's a picture of my twisted little mind:

Bioplast woes

A few days ago I ordered a Bioplast labret stud from eBay (don't ask why). It seems to be one of the increasingly popular polymers for body piercing, like Teflon (really polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE, as it's not brand-name) and silicone. Strangely, it seem to be popular for making long barbells for pregnant women's navels, as the kids who hopped on the bellybutton piercing wagon in the 90s are now growing up and having babies. But it's bloody next to impossible to find any useful information on what it actually IS.

Googling results in several definitions:

• What the android Data's skin is made of in Star Trek.
• A trademarked biodegradable form of polyethylene or polypropylene.
• A substrate heater for aquariums.
• A tiny mass of bioplasm, in itself a living unit and having formative power, as a living white blood corpuscle; bioblast. - Webster's Dictionary. (ok, by analogy with "chloroplast" I guess...)

A PubMed search revealed two materials called "bioplast" which seem to be quite different. The most common meaning is a biodegradable, fibrin-containing plastic, which would be very bad for piercings for obvious reasons. The other is "a polyvinylacetate polyethylene" which can be used to make mouthguards and orthodontic braces (!) which seems to be more like the kind of stuff you'd make body jewellery out of. But on the website of a manufacturer of Bioplast jewellery, it says "polysulfone" but when you Google polysulfone it turns out to be a quite rigid material, like polycarbonate (that's what the popular Nalgene bottles are made of, for you non-scientists).

Actually, one of the PubMed abstracts from a Hungarian paper had pretty funny Euroglish:

During the operation we have noticed a wallment size mass of scar between the uterus and the bladder expanding to the height of the orifice of the uterus. The scarily fixed bladder has been separated from the cervix and the scarry wall of the fistula has been cut out. We have brained the cervix towards the vagina and then we've sutured the cervix and the bladder with Dexon 'O' treat, as well.

Yeah, vesico-uterine fistulas are pretty scary, I totally agree...

So can someone please tell me, WHAT exactly am I about to poke into my ear piercing???

(Maybe I should stop doing peculiar things to my body. I dyed the lower half of my hair a weird shade of purplish red today and it looks like I'm wearing a fluffy scarf because it's too unnatural to have grown out of my head.)

Red science

Scientific American: Open Access to Science Under Attack

PubMed Central, published by the NIH—a federal institution—has come under especially intense fire. Their efforts have been dubbed "socialized science," by Rudy Baum, editor in chief of the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Chemical and Engineering News. "Open access, in fact, equates with socialized science," he wrote in a 2004 editorial. "I find it incredible that a Republican administration would institute a policy that will have the long-term effect of shifting responsibility for communicating scientific research and maintaining the archive of science, technology and medical (STM) literature from the private sector to the federal government."

So if you support open-access scientific journals like PLoS or databases like PubMed Central that means you're a Commie? What la. >(

More and more scientists now are part of the generation that grew up with Kazaa and BitTorrent...it's hardly a stretch to guess that open access will gain support over time rather than dying out.