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Right. in that case Germany could have gotten involved, if they wanted to. Though It would be a tough act after their their resistance to enter the war in the first place (and the resulting falling out with the US). More to the OP, however, at the time of the discussion there was not mandate to invade Iraq. Legally at that point the chancellor could not have provided troops, even if he wanted to. Note that he also supported ongoing inspections by the UN.

Though I have to add that bio is in decline, whereas biomed is taken over by medical sciences, biochemistry, engineering, bioinformatics and, yes, biophysics (though the latter is rather small addition). To me it appears that classical biology and genetics is in a rapid decline. More engineers are funded for the assessment of health effects of pollutants, for instance, than biologists. The reason is the same, though. Understanding biological principles does not quickly lead to applications (something that the NIH is strongly interested in).

Also the German constitution generally does not allow Germany to enter an attack war, unless it is under an UN mandate. Since this was not the case, the German government would not have a heap of legal troubles sending troops in (with the possible exception of medics). Theoretically they could have been allowed to conduct peacekeeping missions afterward, but the government could then be made complicit to an illegal war. The main point, however, is that without an UN mandate it would have been almost impossible for Schroeder to assent to sending troops in.

BibTeX is quite nice, Zotero (a firefox plugin) is free and very useful. Generally I found that indexing all read papers makes little sense as the library becomes so big that after a short while it is often faster to search for certain papers online again. I do have harddisks with several gigs of papers, though.

Well theoretically there is very little potential for active viruses that are beneficial. The reason is less in their destructive nature but due to the fact that their genomes are already extremely strained just by the necessary genes to replicate. In fact, they stack their genes and make use of slippery transcription to express them all. In order for them to be beneficial as such they would have to introduce new genes or alleles, for which there is little room. The only exception is the mentioned transduction event. While the result is a gene transfer event, usually it also renders the virus inactive (as part of the genes necessary for viral replication are replaced). However, integration of the virus into genomes themselves can lead to mutations that over long or short can result in a fitness increase. During longer co-evolution the viruses tend to become inactive, or at least less destructive. In terms of fitness from the viewpoint of the virus you can imagine it like this: - a virus that eventually kills its host and spreads aggressively will proliferate in short-term, but may run out of hosts - a virus that spreads passively and eventually becomes fixed in the genome will have maximum spread in the population but it takes longer

So you worked on half of the magnification as the others and did not notice it? That is all? One difference in grad school is that you are self-responsible for all the equipment you intend to use. This includes a basic understanding of how a microscope works and what the setup of the one you use is. This generally falls under common sense. Just because you are in lab, it does not mean that you are allowed to turn off your brain. If you think of it that way, you missed the point of doing a class.

Did the possibility that part of it may be on your end ever cross your mind?

The gold standard is generally to compare it to a placebo group.

1) It is going to depend on what organism you are using, and of course, none of them are truly safe. They are carcinogens. Generally I would go for UV (which is easier to handle, if one does not have a training with hazardous chemicals. This can easily be used on e.g. E. coli.

I can clearly see the rant, but I fail to figure out meaningful questions that I could answer. At least not in a way that would satisfy you.

Well, that is one of the main problems of species definitions. In prokaryotes sequence identity of 70% (IIRC) as detected by DNA-DNA hybridization was considered to be a gold standard to distinguish species. Nowadays this is corroborated using molecular biological markers. The morphological species definition is highly problematic and usually only works somewhat when certain traits are used that have been well characterized in a phylogenetic context. For most asexually reproducing organisms this is most likely not the case.

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.