CharonY

I do not understand what you are trying to propose. Could you provide context and explain what you mean a bit more?

Actually I I would like to add some points with regards to meetings. To me it is not so much a matter of size, but rather one of organization. If you prefer 1-on-1 and you have the time to do so, go ahead, but I would give them a schedule as opposed to surprise meetings. That way the person can organize his/her thoughts/project/data and no one is singled out by chance or intent. I agree that large meetings are useless, that is why I mentioned project meetings. To give a practical example: in one of my postdocs our group consisted of about 20 people, divided in about six projects. In addition, the topic of a meeting were deliberately limited so that no more than 3-4 people plus boss were involved in each. For instance the topic of a meeting could be finalization of a manuscript and only those involved in writing the draft (as opposed to the larger project group) would attend. he large meetings were reserved to issues like need for lab=ware or other general interest issues and were generally kept to about 20 mins each Monday morning. The disadvantage was that the boss and certain key personnel still had a larger meeting load, but overall I found them more productive than huge big table meetings.

On the employee side (and again, academic setting), I work best when I am left alone as I am usually pretty good at identifying issues. I compile them and go to the boss to discuss them. It works for me better as I need to compile the issues in a streamlined way before I can discuss solutions efficiently. I have worked with a boss once who would walk into my office on a regular basis (or when he was bored) and ask for updates, which I would give him, but I never felt that in these interactions anything worthwhile was accomplished for the project. Instead the main purpose appears to be to provide the boss with positive feelings about progress. To me, these were more disruptive than anything else. If one has the need to keep in touch outside of meetings, coffee and lunch breaks tend to work (depending on group structure, obviously). If anyone brings something up it is a great pressure-free situation to discuss matters, if not, one could assume things are going well until the next meeting.

I would say this is indeed the case. There also has been a discussion how much gender stereotyping in childhood may influence it (e.g. the being afraid of maths part).

Excellent and concise post.

You can be arrogant all alone. But if you do not interact (including body language) with anyone, no one would know. But as others mentioned, I do not see how one relates to the other. You can be an arrogant idiot or a humble genius. Some may argue that the former is far more prevalent.

Funny, form my experience (in a science setting) the way I approach the situation often determined the outcome. I would also hazard that the dynamics of the interactions will be the determining factor.

Think in these terms: - you have the info of two strands. Can one be used to figure out the sequence of the other? - If you have the complete sequence, how would you translate it into the amino acid sequence? - In order to re-assemble something from fragments, what do you need to know the order that they appear?

While I agree that people should choose what they have interest in, I wonder about the "naturally inclined" part. Why would a preference to a specific natural science be "natural"? There is certainly perception involved but I would think this has societal rather than natural causes.

In the article it was noted that apes are bad at learning the meaning of pointing, however other research contradict this notion. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2151757/

I would be careful to invoke the natural progression of things to this matter. The fertilized egg develops into a complete organism if thousands of things do not go wrong. Fertilized eggs can be aborted before the mother actually knows that she is pregnant. Of course that rate is not known but estimated to be around 30-50%. The reasoning behind this is that miscarriage rate with known pregnancies is still 15-30%. With a progressive drop over time. In other words, if we talk about natural reaction, we have to figure in that it only happens slightly more than 50% of the time. Note that biology does not care about our definitions, it is a bunch of progressive, somewhat stochastic processes we are talking about. Not a straight line from A to B and there are no clear delineations. As such the (somewhat arbitrary) definitions exclusively make sense in the context of the discussion e.g. policy, ethics or teaching. What we cannot do is to invoke biological laws to create the context for us. The only straight biological answer we can provide is that every freaking cell is alive. And that is quite silly to base policies on. And even that is not quite clear as there is no clear-cut definition for life, either. There are entities that have certain functions and we decide, based on one property or another that a group is alive and a other is not (e.g. viruses vs cells). Yet nature does not do these distinctions.

As already mentioned, the main criticism of OP is that it lacks specificity as well as novelty. The use of bioagents for cancer control has been under investigation for well over a decade or so. OP does neglect all the issues with using them in a clinical setting as well as their general limitations (e.g. that it only works, if at all on certain types of solid tumors). In research throwing ideas around is really the cheap part. Over a coffee you will easily collect a few dozens of them. It only gets interesting if you manage to identify challenges and strategies to overcome them. And no, declaring that there will be something without any specifics is not worth a damn.

Companies may be a bit different as the workers there seem to view themselves less in a training situation as compared to academia. In these situations the most common strategy I have heard is to request updates or have project meetings rather than making the round. The latter is sometimes understood as a matter of exerting dominance and/or favoritism. It does boil down to having milestones against which progress can be benchmarked. That way it is easier to spot when someone needs assistance, even if the person may not actually be aware of. If there is no specific set goal bringing up performance or trying to help someone getting back on track may be perceived as criticism as the goal now appears to be arbitrary. But more specific to the question, if you need to keep tabs on things, a formalized setting (i.e. meeting) is better as it allows people to prepare themselves and individuals are not singled out. Creating good meetings (as opposed to massive time-destroying wormholes) is an art in itself, though. Just to reinforce (and of course, this is just my experience), in a setting where there is a power imbalance (i.e. boss vs. employee) and beyond a certain group size, walking up on them is almost never perceived in a positive way, unless you are super charismatic and have a fantastic group dynamic going on. In your mind it may appear that you swoop in and boost everyone's morale and increase productivity. However, if they are already reluctant to ask for help, then it is more likely that it is perceived as criticism and meddling.

No, the do not actually use the bacterium but rather introduced the gene that codes for that specific protein into the plant. Once integrated into the plant genome it will be produced just like any other protein.

Actually in some areas they actually do, to some extent. More commonly papers that rely on modeling and/or statiscs get replicated in silico,e.g. using different test or validations sets.

A friend of mine (who works in a company in a non-science role) basically said that the reason why academia is so ineffective is because many foster infighting (who gets on which paper, who gets to evaluate which data, whose name is on grants. who is allowed to write grants) rather than creating win-win situations. If everyone benefits from everyone else, being an arsehole just hurts yourself.

Unfortunately availability cannot always be guaranteed (in one of my jobs I met my formal supervisor roughly four times a year, though for me it actually worked), depending on their role and available infrastructure. However, you also raise an additional number of important points. One keyword is expectation. Manage and communicate expectations well. This goes both ways, i.e. what postdocs and phds may want from you as mentor (which usually boils down to help them along in their careers) and what your expectations are to them. Never assume that things are obvious (as I already mentioned, really that can kill projects like nothing else). Another, even more complicate aspect is managing group dynamics. Considering the size of the group mentioned in OP one has to be careful that no cliques are formed. Animosity between sub-groups or even individual can break a group and reduce productivity pretty much to zero. Strive to create (realistic) scenarios in which the success for a given member translates to the benefit for the whole group (this goes back to negotiating expectations). There are PIs who think it is a good idea to foster competition within a group. I wholeheartedly disagree. Another aspect to remember is that often in scientific settings you may get divas. Managing these persons can be very tricky. Also, while managing people one has to be aware that technical competence is not the only thing you look out for when hiring. The potential group members should have basic sets of soft skill or demonstrate willingness to acquire them. Having a group if highly competent people that use their intelligence to mob each other is barely more productive than hiring a bunch of badgers with diarrhea.

This is not easy to answer, it really depends a lot on the personalities involved as well as the types of projects the groups are working on. If you are not very amiable as boss, being around too much can put too much pressure on them (though being too friendly can also have detrimental effects). Another critical element is the type of deadlines/milestones/deliverables as well as how hard and specific they are. The very same group composition may have to be managed very differently if you have short-term specific goals or log-term exploratory ones, for example. From my viewpoint (academic position) the strategy that works best for me to be as hands-on as necessary, as hands-off as possible. This requires that you (the boss that is) have an idea about how the persons are working and tweak accordingly. I tend to have group as well as project meetings. The first is usually short and deals with stuff that everyone may need (e.g. supplies) the project only has those people that are involved (or are interested). I create negotiate workplans and milestones with everyone involved in a particular project and ask to be notified if something unexpected happens. I keep a closer tab (with more defined and closer milestones) for new/inexperienced group members, and provide more open plans for those cases where I know in what pace they work. Outside of that I generally let them do their thing and only step in if I think that someone is losing track. I try not to micromanage them (which especially bugs more experienced researchers), but I always expect them to come to me when they hit a snag. It is often really hard not to micromanage, especially if you see that you could solve a particular problem much faster, but that defies the reason of having a group. At some point you just have to let go. I have colleagues in companies that work on much shorter projects. For that they tend to have daily meetings in the morning where the jobs for the day are distributed (or just to re-affirm distribution) as not to waste time. In area where processes are established there is much more micromanaging (or rather, auditing) to ensure everything is followed to the letter, etc. Unfortunately, this is really more an art than anything else, but a few (trivial and random) things to keep in mind are: - never criticize an individual in front of the group. Nothing good will ever come from it - do not micromanage, it will eat up your time, create dependency and decrease morale (usually) - be approachable, try to be a mentor (tell them what you wished you knew when you had their position), but do not a boss or a friend - do provide criticism in a positive way - negotiate goals. That way the other party is also invested in reaching it (i.e. they are not just doing it because you said so) - have realistic goals, tweak to the ability of the worker (push but do not crush) - never assume things (e.g. assume that a phd student had certain degrees/courses and thus should know about a certain aspect). Communicate and make sure. - if there cross dependencies between different people, make sure that both see that their input is valued and important. Never have a favorite.

As hypervalent_iodine mentioned, non-enzymatic hydrolysis is not going to work in the given environment. Also, enzymatic degradation is not quite trivial as glycogen is highly branched. The whole process is a bit more complicated. The glycogen phosphorylase releases G1-P from linear glucosidic bonds (1->4 bonds), but is not able to work near the branches (1->6 bonds.) Here, another enzyme has to act (debranching enzyme) in order to create a debranched limit dextrin, which allows the glycogen phosphorylase to act again.

I think that pretty much proves my point.

These kinds of plants have been around for quite a while. Generally insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thurigiensis are being expressed by the plant. These proteins are known to be harmless to humans. In fact the bacterium and its toxin have been used widely for pest control before the production of GMOs.

I think that has something to do with the fact that males are much better are prioritizing the important things. I mean, I know women that see something on the internet that is wrong and do not care. Something wrong! On the internet!!

There are quite a few different ways to classify proteins, but whatever you choose, you should be consistent. The first examples indicate that you wan to use the form of iron moiety to categorize. However, cytochromes actually contain heme, whereas iron transporters usually do not contain iron at all. Edit: I should add, with transporters I meant transmembrane trasporters of iron, but I realized that you may mean iron storage proteins. In any case that would be a functional classification.

Indeed. Also most definitely speculations.

That is actually quite an interesting point. In many biology programs at the undergrad level there is a female majority. Some groups are completely female even on the graduate level. However, there are still more male than female PIs. And I think you will see that almost everywhere higher positions have a lower f/m ratio. There are numerous reasons for that and but one (in academia) is possibly that pregnancies can delay progression for women a little bit. Some older (mostly but not exclusively male) faculty in conservative departments see taking a time-out to care for the child as a lack of dedication to science. And there are cases where female Profs are basically back at their desk a day or two after giving birth. This is a bit silly considering that one of the advantages of academia is that outside of teaching you have in theory more liberties than at other jobs (exempting ubiquitous self-exploitation). The good thing is that the mentality is changing in that regard and having a work/life balance is more and more accepted. I should not comment on that, however, as I am not really good at it, either. Edit: Just found an interesting article indicating that in the younger markets females are more commonly found in senior positions in companies (up to 51% in China, compared to 20% in the USA). Source