CharonY

Think in terms of what you need to grow a whole organism out of everyone. Also compare spores to seeds.

Bias is one thing, blatant falsehood another. The question is what equivalent examples exist in the left-wing media? I usually stick to PBS nowadays and have not noticed blatant falsehoods reported there as fact yet (though I do not watch TV much). If these falsehoods are just lousy journalism, one would expect some kind equivalency.

Indeed. Fitness is a measure of reproductive success. It has to be noted that not the individual is meant with "survive" but in the most precise way it would refer to the alleles or maybe traits that confers a given fitness. In other words, alleles that confer a fitness survive within a gene pool over time and start to spread and may eventually lead to fixation.

That is what it means.

Genetic differences plus one exhibiting primary and the other secondary radial symmetry (depending a bit on which form of systematics you subscribe to).

Actually, scratch that. The easiest way would probably run biotinylated vs non-biotinylated samples in a gel. Or add streptavidin for stronger separation (due to larger size differences).

Without much thinking I would simply try a more standard approach and use streptavidin to extract biotinylated siRNA (i.e. performing affinity purification). The siRNA yield can easily be quantified and higher yield indicates higher biotinylation.

I would recommend reading Huxley's brave new world. Other than that, horrible idea for the most part. The overall achievement would be to create highly specialized ignorants. The most important thing is to provide a broad knowledge basis first then to specialize. Immediate specialization often lacks context. Also, the technical skills are at best, secondary. A scientist needs to learn to balance creativity with critical thinking, be proficient in organizing and teaching knowledge. I would argue that learning in broad areas requiring different thought patterns is more efficient than, e.g. teaching a 12 year-old which buttons to press on an HPLC.

Actually one should take the infrastructure in China into account. There are still a lot of (large) villages that are not or only have limited access to a central grid. Considering relatively low energy consumptions, building wind turbines in those areas could provide sufficient energy and be more economic than building a more productive coal plant. Remember, China has the unique potential that it can (and has to) create a completely new infrastructure in many areas. This gives them more flexibility compared to other more thoroughly industrialized countries that often are limited to optimization of existing (suboptimal) structures.

It is not a taboo, but rather due to the fact that more complex science makes bad soundbites. Unfortunately news outlets as well as their audience prefer the latter. You have to see it like that: a paper of, say, six pages of length, is often very condensed, using a language that is easily accessible to the target audience (other scientists in the field). In order to deconvolute it in a way that everyone understands it, one has to add more info, describe certain things in more detail, easily bloating up the whole info to even more pages. Now, how many people would read that, I wonder? Also it is somewhat less of a money problem, but rather one of methodologies. As the problems get more complex, one needs new approaches and not necessarily more bodies. Also, I would be surprised if there are more physicists than biomed researchers. The latter get recruited from a variety of fields, including biologists, biochemists, medical scientists, biophysicists and bioinformaticians, to name a few.

I am not sure whether visualization would help, however, start by describing what each of the letters means. What phenotype would follow each of the alleles individually and how would the combination look like? It is really just a matter of assigning letters to functions.

Well, it depends. Physicians themselves generally do not perceive themselves as scientists. However, there are MDs involved in certain type of studies, including e.g. epidemiological or clinical ones. Depending on their role they either see themselves as scientists (if they are the PIs) or see themselves in an advisory role.

It can be large differences, but it could also be small ones. E.g. when a certain allele combination is for whatever reason lethal. However, more the the point, you should look up speciation (especially allopatric speciation). Together with certain stochastic events and a certain base gene pool, speciation events can sometimes be relatively rapid.

Several good points. Ideally, the press release should undergo similar scrutiny as peer review. Maybe even more considering that it is there to inform non-scientists. Unfortunately few people (including the news outlets as well as the scientists themselves) tend to bother. Second thing regarding medicine: the problem is the biology. We not bits and pieces. In fact, we have gained an enormous amount of information. However, we are still unable to put everything together to have e.g. a working model of anything but the most simple processes. That is why people were pulling in informaticians, chemists and physicists to solve biological questions. While many of these approaches opened up new avenues of research, they were to date not much more successful as a whole. The idea is to build a foundation for systems biology and used that platform to accelerate research. However, for various scientific as well as political reasons this still fails to materialize. Another important point is that in humans (as already pointed out) only association or similar studies can be conducted. These generally only allow the detection of correlations, but not causations. Statistically, most of these studies (or rather their inferences) will eventually be proven wrong. Or to put it simple, biology is bloody complex.

Crystallization is tricky. I would go for a crystallization paper and try that protocol. However, generally you would need to purify it in relatively high concentration first (and with high purity), which is non-trivial, if using body fluids. In saliva you will find quite a number of different proteins. LC separation could work, though a single separation (e.g. reverse-phase) may be insufficient to get a pure fraction. Other possibilities include affinity purification, but most would rather use an overexpression system and purify it from there for crystallography studies.

Actually from what statistics I remember the number of scientist positions has not risen dramatically over the years. Also we are still lacking key breakthroughs that would set the trajectory for an accelerated path.

Bad comparison. At least we know how a computer works. In terms of cells we do not even know what we need to make one (much less a whole organism).

News outlets are not a science source. However, even scientific papers can be proven wrong. All things considered, it is more likely that most will be proven wrong or inaccurate given enough time. This is how science works. Science is all about understanding how nature works and not about simple answers.

Agreed.

Well, normal SEM prep usually involves pretty harsh conditions, effectively killing off the biological samples. Of course there are various fixation steps that are aimed to maintain structure, but they are also prone to generate artifacts. So one should be wary of these things.

The signal itself are action potentials. You need to understand membrane potentials and depolarization mechanisms (check out wiki and other sites, should be fairly well explained). These signals do not cross synaptic gaps (as the way they are generated prevents this). Instead the arriving action potentials result in the release of metabolites (neutransmitters) that travel the synaptic gap towards receptors. These can then trigger the formation of a new action potential that travels along the new (postsynaptic) neuron.

Or you can create plasma with an RF oscillating electric field. You may want to google ionized air glow.

Yes, that was why I was asking for a marker. If masses are found above the expected, chances are that it was not degradation. However, strongly degraded protein samples tend to give more smear-like images rather than the many bands visible.

I assume all lanes contain His-tag purifications? In the first pic the fifth lane appears to contain something else, whereas the rest could be just different dilutions. Also, a marker would be helpful. In the first gel the many bands may indicate incomplete purification (i.e. contamination with the proteome). Is the second pic a blot with FAA-specific antibodies?

There are also far simpler experiments for accelerated artificial evolution that can be easily reproduced in class. To reiterate: evolution is the change in allele frequency distribution within a population. A simple lab course involves plating bacterial cultures on more or less selective media. The media represent strong selective forces and by applying them, you weed out all cells and their offspring lacking it. The result is a population that in which this particular trait is fixed (as opposed to the original culture in which only a limited number of cells carried that trait). This can be done with without a mutagenic agent, for example.