CharonY

I cannot really say which of the compounds I am working was the most hazardous. But on a different note: we got a lab safety update recently and within the memo there was the info that a lab assistant at UCLA died while handling t-butyl lithium. From the report the major burns were on hands and arms and secondary to the body (due to a synthetic sweater and NO labcoat). Overall 40% burns which proved to be fatal.

Sounds like an ethics questions to me. Depending how the thread goes I am inclined to move it into the Bioethics section.

Well technically this is the way it is done for any antibacterial compound. In fact you could add the label "with the exception of resistant strains and species" to all but the the harshest antibacterial compounds.

I would be surprised if that was true. From what I know clinical immunologists without an MD are usually analysts or supervise analysts. The could even supervise a department that does the respective analyzes. However, while they can give recommendations I do not think that they may actually treat patients. I may be wrong, of course but I never heard of anything like it.

The test in question is an (Japanese) industrial standard test, using E. coli and S. aureus. It is of course virtually impossible to create a standardized test that can account for any potentially pathogenic bacteria, so for his purpose it is perfectly reasonable to use a standardized tests.

There is a fast track for academy members (I knew one who had fast-tracked his papers that way). The trick is that you need to secure favorable reviews, but you can choose the reviewers yourself. "Hey Dan, could you just write up that you like the MS?". So, in theory there is a peer-review, only in a way that makes rejections very hard. The good thing is that those papers have something like "Contributed by Member x" on it. Generally it can give young scientists quite a boost if the advisor is an academy member, because the article is published with a rather high profile. Just to add, a while back a student of the above mentioned advisor got his paper into PNAS (using that inside track) and he would not stop bragging about it in front of my PhD students (we had a common brown bag meeting once in a while). So I made a rough calculations and somewhere between 70-90% of all inside track submission get published, whereas the rate for the "normal" way is below 20%. That shut him up and two days later there was a cake with my name on it in the break room. I shared it with the others, just in case it was poisoned.

Well, technically the libraries are not allowed to keep electronic copies, but they will have to maintain subscriptions for the particular years to allow access. Some (many?) journals even cancel all access once your subscription runs out, even for the years that you actually had subscriptions. Yupp. The most expensive one had two color figures, though. Without those I would still have been above 2k. Some of the publications of my wife were even more expensive (because they were longer). Common rates are often between 60-250 $ per page for print journals. BMC for instance, is free, if your institute is member (of if you are), otherwise it is still around 1k$. h

Actually some PNAS papers are published completely without peer review. Members of the academy can publish a certain number of publications without going through the process. Also I recently read in a environmental health journal a study that had a n=2 with enormously low p. Which technically actually is not possible. Sometimes reviewers (especially if they do not find some specialist on the particular field) just miss obvious flaws, unfortunately.

That is true. But the same is true for PNAS (though admittedly they it is kind of an unusual journal).

It is nothing really exceptional, except that it has come to the attention of a number of news outlets. If you recall, recently there the Nobel price in chemistry was given to researchers involved in the development of GFP as a major tool in biochemistry and molecular biology. Interestingly the guy who first cloned it was left out. Instead of getting the Nobel he is a courtesy van driver. Why so? The article gives a nice spin on academic careers with a focus on Douglas Prasher, the guy who did the cloning. http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_02_13/caredit.a0900021 As I mentioned, these kind of things (though usually less spectacular) are commonplace in academic sciences. For the record, I am only a lowly postdoc and not a faculty member, so I do not have a good general insight into faculty matters. Except what faculty tells me, of course. Even so I have already seen a number of quite productive faculty members (equivalents to assistant professors) being forced to leave sciences after a bad streak with grants. Mind you, they were well in their 40s and their chances of getting a new tenure track were minuscule. Things are getting worse (at least in the US) for the moment as many universities have budget freezes due to financial problems. I have also known quite a number of postdocs that had trouble scoring a faculty position and being trapped in a kind of career limbo. Being a bit too old for many industrial positions and further postdocs, but not being faculty either. In the article this situation is compared to rock stars or professional sports. While I still think that the chances in sciences are still better than in either of the other careers, I would like to know what you think, based on your own experience in academic life. How do undergrads and grads see it? How about postdocs or faculty? Is your experience different (or do you think it is different)? How so? Edit: the situation is of course even more complicated for those that are from a different country as their work is additionally tied to a Visa of some sorts. Depending on the country the regulations can be quite crippling.

10 Make some good coffee 20 Worry about everything over the coffee 30 Drink coffee 40 Goto 10 Applies to any situation, including zombie infestation.

Well our opinion in restriction the dissemination of our results should be pretty obvious, shouldn't it? I assume the point the publishers make is not that they own the research data, but rather the finalized paper. You are essentially free to post your data all over the net (once it has been published) but woe you if you post the article as a whole somewhere. Truth is, of course that many people do regardless and that this kind of copyright violation is rarely, if ever, persecuted. I have no idea how likely it is that this bill will pass, but given the fact that quite a number of the big science journals allow the authors to at least make their unedited manuscript publicly available (even though sometimes with as much as a 6 month delay) it does not really reflect the science publishing reality anymore. Even if the NIH is not allowed to force you to put your paper in Pubmed Central, many journals will allow you to do so. And not allowing you to propagate you results will harm the journal itself in the long run (due to declining impact factors).

To be honest the article looks a bit like a hoax to me. Even the simple experiment of making bacteria express GFP would require more than described in the article. Not even considering the high probability of failure if they had the equipment at home. Edit: Ok it appears she is actually serious about it. However her approach is flawed. While it is not a bad idea, she actually requires a promoter region as well as regulators that react to melamine instead of the protein that actually degrades it. This is because expression is usually not directly controlled by the enzyme itself. While I kind of like that idea it also shows that one needs a bit more info that you get on the web to makes something work. Also careless use of resistance carrying plasmids in the household may allow an even faster spread of resistances than what is already happening (in the lab you autoclave everything before you dispose it). Regarding the project in the OP. as Mokele pointed out, there is hardly a way to ascertain which manipulation would actually result in a growth increase. That basically rules out targeted genetic manipulations.

I do not want to complicate matters, but some bacterial consortia can utilize methane under anaerobic conditions (yes, I have been around microbiologists for too long).

Guess this thread is going down towards copyright discussions. But I'd like a coffee, too. But as we are already OT: some journals actually have the authors sign over the copyrights to them. A couple of years back it was quite customary only to be allowed to send reprints of your own paper (which kind of now belongs to the journal) that you (as author) have bought beforehand. Good thing that this has changed for most journals (at least those that I have published in).

I had a discussion with an Italian colleague on this and he was pretty sure (and apparently it was also discussed that way in Italian newspapers) that Berlusconi used this as a test run to extend his powers by issuing fast-track decrees. If this decree is upheld one is expect to see more suchalikes in the future. And the sad thing is that everyone knows that he is a crook and yet they elected him...

jorge, yes, I mistranslated the German word. However, check the OP. 10 survivors are indicated there. In his subsequent post he erroneously compared the original numbers E. coli with those of S. aureus.

Generally in these cases the running conditions are not stringent enough (e.g. buffer, too low annealing temp, too many cycles etc.). Or there are DNA contaminations.

Actually you are not as the peer reviewers do not get paid either. The only things that take money are the editorial staff, editing, and publishing itself. Regardless whether it is open access or not, the author has to pay for the publication (the highest cost I had was around 5000$). But in any case, it is unfortunately in their power to restrict dissemination (which is especially frustrating for the author). It is good that many open source journals (which sometimes are pretty expensive to publish in, though) are rising in their impact.

Off-topic: Why is Einstein's name so often misspelled?

Italy went downhill since Berlusconi and his cronies decided to try out politics (according to my Italian colleagues-- weird enough I have more European colleagues here than in Germany, excluding Germans, of course.).

Ack I noticed that I was still ambiguous. The ratio you get is the percentage of survivors. To get the kill rate you will have of course to subtract that value from 100%. I suppose that is what you calculated above but the value should be even higher. That is another reason why often the logs are used. Something like 99.995% suggests a higher accuracy than the test could possibly give. Looking at the log distances gives a better idea.

Nope. I may have phrased it wrongly. Initial bacteria in this case are the bacteria in your untreated control (the amount that live without bamboo kun). (190000) and the survivors are those that still live after treatment (10). So it is 10/190000*100.

I have not heard from bamboo kun before but from what I read it is supposed to be a bacteriostaticum. That is, it prevents bacterial growth, but does not actively kill. Based on that it is kind of weird that the titer is going down after 24 hours. So according to this result it rally killed bacteria. To get the percentage you need simply to calculate: (surviving bacteria/initial bacteria)*100. The antimicrobial activity is simply another way of easily expressing this ratio. Here the difference of the log10 values before and after treatment is indicated. It is a simplification because the titers are usually so high that it is easier to operate with log values.

Indeed. I recall a documentary about a British Airways flight that went through volcano ash which subsequently killed all engines of the 747. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9 Actually the whole appeared to be extremely calm regarding the circumstances. Although, they had the advantage of being British.