June came and went. I noted its passing briefly on the 1st of July. When I look back in later years, I will find a large hole in my life where Science erased1 June2.
1 Please note segue. Thank you.
2 Would be funny if my name were June.
One minor quibble about the latest thing-that-used-to-be-thought-of-as-bad-for-you is actually good for you report. Since I can’t find the abstract online, the following quote will have to do:
A pint of the black stuff a day may work as well as an aspirin to prevent heart clots that raise the risk of heart attacks.
Drinking lager does not yield the same benefits, experts from University of Wisconsin told a conference in the US.
So, they compared a pint of guinness to a pint of lager. First off, that’s already misleading because goodness knows what sort of effect lager has compared to say, water, or wine, or tea. Well, maybe somebody does know; I’m just too lazy to do the citation search right now. But to give them credit where it’s due, people are probably more interested in knowing the comparison in health benefits of the category of drink (although you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who swings between lagers and stouts that often).
Thinking some more1, it occurred to me that Guinness has an alcohol composition of anywhere from 4% to 7.5%, and lager, depending on brand, has the same range of alcohol content. Alcohol has known blood “thinning” effects. For the study to have been well-controlled, they would hopefully have used two drinks with the same alcohol content.
On the back of that, curiosity about sugar content (or calorie count) entered my mind, which led me to debunk my lifelong prejudice against Guinness. There’s very little difference in caloric content between Guinness and say, an American Budweiser2 of the same volume. If anything, draught Guinness has fewer calories than Budweiser per volume. The prevailing thought throughout Uni years was that a pint of Guinness was the equivalent of a Mars bar at nearly 300 kcal per regular sized bar. Turns out it’s only just over half of that at 170 kcal/pint.
Quibbles about the research aside, this report at least opened my eyes to one of my ill-conceived objections to Guinness. Now, if only they could do something about that nasty taste…
1 Yes, I’m work-avoiding again.
2 Not that I admit to drinking that insipid excuse for a beer.
Sometimes I wonder where the breakdown in communication between scientists and journalists lies. In this article about a recent study on a DNA damage checkpoint enzyme, the Beeb describes the study as such:
Research into how the human body repairs damaged DNA has been described as a “major breakthrough”.
The way that cells protect themselves from diseases like cancer has been the focus of a study by scientists at Dundee and Leeds Universities.
The enzyme studied1 indeed has a crucial role in DNA damage repair, a mechanism that prevents the DNA in cells from getting more and more mangled with every replication cycle. But to conflate a study on structural analysis of a bacteriophage2 enzyme with cancer in humans annoys me a little. It’s sexing up the topic beyond its current reach3.
Some of the responsibility for conflation of basic science with translational/clinical applications lies with scientists. We have to justify what we do: to the funding agencies, to our peers, to the editors of journals, and to the public that ultimately funds our research by taxation. So everything we do has to somehow, however tenuously, be tied in to some disease or some way to make human life better4. So every time we publish our findings, we make that link, however thin, to some major health concern: cancer, heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes, cancer, auto-immune diseases, cancer, blah blah blah. And the journalists, with their need to write an interesting article, take a lot of our fatuous crap on faith. Don’t ask for solutions. I have none. I am guilty of the same damn crime.
1 Sorry, it’s not open access. You’re unlikely to be able to read the full thing outside of a first world university/college. It’s a bugger isn’t it? Incidentally, does anyone else get annoyed that they don’t link to the studies in PubMed or even list the first author? Then again, if they had, I wouldn’t have seen via PubMed that one of the authors, David Lilley, has published in both Nature AND Science in the space of a week. That’s rare.
2 Bacteriophages are a type of virus that “infect” bacteria. Yep. Even bacteria get viral infections. Isn’t nature amazing?
3 Don’t get me wrong. I think this structural analysis of the protein is a great step forward in understanding how DNA damage repair works. The next step may happen yet. I just don’t think the next immediate step is preventing cancer.
4 Caveat: I refer here to research funded by the Medical Research Council in the UK or the various National Institutes of Health etc in the US. My world is very narrow.
All the elements of a good article: a horror story, some recent headway into the problem and written in plain English, albeit with the occasional technobabble.
Plain english synopsis here.
What the great one says, with research substituted for writing.
You don’t live there always when you write. Mostly it’s a long hard walk. Sometimes it’s a trudge through fog and you’re scared you’ve lost your way and can’t remember why you set out in the first place.
But sometimes you fly, and that pays for everything. –Neil Gaiman, genius.
True of any creative field, I suspect. Science to outsiders may not seem as creative as, say, painting or writing. But it is an artform in a way. And every day, we have to find creative solutions to problems1. It’s a hard, hard slog; sometimes with no end in sight (like right now!). But the occasional insight into the functioning of the universe makes it all worthwhile.
1 Whether hypothetical or simply practical in terms of lab practice
Walking the dog a couple of nights ago, we passed a sign1 that made me smile. And I just couldn’t resist using it. So there. The damage is done. Tell me if I should undo it.
1 I’d like to credit the corny genius behind the sign-tist chain of sign shops for this.
While we’re blathering about science, the recent award of a Nobel prize to Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies made me remember how much I used to curse their blasted brains during the PhD years. You guys deserve a Nobel prize for making 3 years of my nascent scientific life hell. Then again, without your pioneering work, there’d be no work for the skill-less people in the world like me.
I’ve been thinking about the future1, my place in it, and my place in scientific research. Having bored myself silly with self-centeredness, I looked further afield. Back in July2, Professor Greenfield was deploring the lack of female scientists in the higher echelons of her profession. She makes a few fair points, but, as can only be expected with such a complex problem, has no solutions. I’d only add that many male scientists face the same problems as female scientists3: publish or perish, wave farewell to a life outside the lab, bid your aging reproductive organs good day and goodbye4, watch all peers ascend on the property ladder while you slum it out, suffer from intense self-doubt5, blah, blah, moan, whinge, whine. Oh, we’re back to self-centeredness again. Regardless of the problems and lack of solutions, I got a darn good laugh out of this comment to Prof. Greenfield’s article:
“Maybe women scientists are that much more intelligent so they realise that as a career, scientific research is a joke?” –WinstonTheChair
So true.
1 And no, it’s not orange.
2 When my head was so far down a microscope there was no light input save that of the very expensive laser. And no, it wasn’t orange either.
3 I should know; I live with one.
4 Granted, this is more a problem for XX than XY. But without XX, XY in a partnership with a scientist XX can’t do much about it.
5 Believe me, even the most arrogant of scientists has moments of self-doubt. There is perhaps, though, a reciprocal relationship between success in science and self-doubt.
BBC picks up on the hot jet-lag study of the day: Sildenafil accelerates reentrainment of circadian rhythms after advancing light schedules, PNAS U S A, 2007.
Some initial thoughts:
Maybe more on this later. While the world gets excited by yet another use of the blue pill, I still have to ask people for money to fund my somewhat less titillating work. Hmm… Maybe I can incorporate this into my grant application. But somehow, I think jumping on the bandwagon will not go down so well. If only I could think of a clever selling ploy to convince reviewers of the importance of my work4.
1 This is just one of many examples; I’m too lazy to dig them all up right now.
2 For interesting, read: involving sex, drugs and rock and roll. Titillation galore!
3 Well, the thought struck me when I read a colleague’s paper on our common model and he mentioned how Viagra worked via the same pathway as the molecule we work on. But I didn’t act on it because… I am not as inspired as these clever folk down South.
4 It’s perhaps not commonly known (or rather, I didn’t know this when I was a lot younger and a lot more naive) that scientists also have to be good salespersons. It’s obvious once you get to the post-graduate level (or before if you’re somewhat less cossetted), but the more I get into this, the more I wonder about whether the amount of bullshitting that is done is actually detrimental to the science (even though it is currently the default; no bullshit, no funding). But this mini-rant deserves a full post at some point. Not now. Not until I’ve finished prostituting my work.
Further kick in teeth: I am, as of yesterday, not an official employee of the university. My contract expired, and I fell through the cracks. I am persona non grata.
So while I’m still expected to work all hours, I cannot access my lab out-of-hours or on weekends. Ah ha ha ha. I will not get paid this month. Again. (I didn’t get paid for three months when I first arrived because everyone was too busy and overworked to put me in the system. Not that a foreigner spending a small fortune to pack and store her entire life, fly herself to a new country and pay several months’ rent upfront in LA needs any money…)
Will the constant insults never end?
