all hallow's eve
Happy halloween, y'all...
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October 31, 2006
October 27, 2006
terror of the skies
October 25, 2006
phoenix smoulders
On Monday, I found out that I am but four points shy of being the second person in over ten years of biochemistry to pull off an "A" without having first taken organic chemistry - and the class average is rumored to be at least ten points below me. All I have to do is really crack down and blow away the next two tests and the final - and I can end this semester feeling that I have accomplished something worthwhile. The prof is even recommending another series of advanced genetics courses, and is encouraging me to apply for the medicinal genetics lab course taught at the hospital over the summer session. They only take five folks, so I'll have to be stellar - but the amusing thing is that it mostly sounds like playing through all of the roles laid out across the pharmbio labs back at Lexicon... which is all I really wanted to do in the first place, so I will have come full circle...
In the meantime, I am still trying to work out whether I want paleontology as a hobby or to potentially take it more seriously as a profession. It would be deeply personally satisfying, and there are few things in the world that would probably make me happier, but... I don't know that I am not just imagining things - and entomology is unquestionably still far more employable. More importantly, I've found a few things in entomology that really grab my attention and are starting to pull me in. Of course, the problem is that they have very little to do with my alleged thesis project working with thrips.
My advisor wants me to work on some form of ecological control, developing a growth curve on several different host plants at different temperatures - but while important, I find this intellectually dissatisfying. I remain more interested in the potential molecular aspects. I'd like to improve upon current identification methods and design a set of custom primers that could be used to ID several different ecologically significant species in the field with a quick PCR test. This would beat the heck out of the current method, which involves sending a physical sample for an expert to eyeball in either Gainesville, Washington DC, or Australia! Moreover, I suspect that one could probably use a simple tissue-lysate to get relative levels of populations within an individual plant sample by refining a QPCR or something to look at the ramp-up rate and guess how many individual copies were in the initial lysate. This beats counting them all by hand under a microscope, which is the current method. Of course, I am still far more interested in looking at the family trees to try and determine port of origin... knowing the invading organism's recent environmental history would tell you where the infection came from, and what critical resistances or tolerances that particular population might have developed at its last port of call.
Alternatively... Of late, I find that I really still like parasitoid wasps. For whatever reason (it has to be that slender petiolate waist!), I've always been fond of them (which might explain why I've been stung so many times) - but they have some really great aspects of biology to them... Most of them (but not all!) are haplodiploid breeders with really wild female control over sex-ratios, and they parasitize other organisms, which is always weird and interesting in a disturbingly intimate sort of way... to say nothing of the socials and kin-selection. I guess they just make a neat model organism for testing lots of different but significant theories of evolution, which only makes them more attractive.
So what do I do about it?
I could just grit my teeth and bear it until I get my master's, and then go do a doctorate somewhere else.
Of course, I've done that teeth-gritting thing before, and it didn't do anything for me except give me TMJ and a desperate sense of personal dissatisfaction. I know I could do it and survive, but somehow - I suspect that there is a better way. I could attempt to convince my advisor to change the focus of my project to something a little more molecular, or to let me study the effectiveness of several chalcidoid wasps as natural predators... or I start looking for a new and more compatible advisor who might have funding available for a student interested in their line of work. One of my professors is looking at a possible speciation event in his tiger beetles based on behavioral, environmental, and chronological differentiation. He needs someone to help him with the sequencing, and to find a good reporter region by which to distinguish populations. I'd like more practical experience with sequencing, and I'd end up working in the phylogeneticist's lab where I am beginning to spend a lot more of my time just hanging out with the guys talking about biology and stupid movies...
So this could be all sorts of good.
I don't know where it or I am going... I just know that for the first time in a long time, I actually feel like I am increasingly in control of my own life and fate - and darn it - I am consistently happy.
October 18, 2006
if there was ever any question that we were related...
Apparently when given suitable inspiration, my father fancies himself quite the poet:
An entomologist of caddisfly fame
with MS-FLA next to his name
had found his nirvana
with Gobind Khorana
translating the peptide chain.
But Old Holley intervened
and made quite a scene
and said their endeavor was folly.
"I hate to disdain
your nucleotide claim,
but your peptide ain't mono
it's poly!"
Eureka! they said
we'll try this instead,
Old Holley has made it explicit!
So the prize they received
(not quite as conceived)
was not just a double,
but triplet.
hope for me yet
Marshall Nirenberg was the recipient of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert Holley for their research exploring the translation of nucleotide-triplets on mature messenger RNA into specific amino acids linked along a polypeptide chain. Of further note, and of personal significance, Dr. Nirenberg recieved his master's degree in zoology at the University of Florida. His master's thesis focused on the classification and taxonomy of caddisflies.
He began his career as an entomologist.
There is hope for me yet.
October 16, 2006
I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike
"You just seem like the kind of person who would own a bike."
- Ben Ketcherside
And indeed, Ben - I am the kind of person who would own a bike. I would have owned it sooner, but I lived in Houston, a city that is particularly unfriendly to pedestrian traffic in a state already in love with the heavy truck. As of the afternoon of August 23rd, I was the kind of person who did own a bike. I would have owned it a whole day sooner, but a mixup at the shop sent it home with an individual who had purchased a similar model for his son. His eleven year-old son. Who realized his mistake the minute his son's legs had trouble reaching the ground. Turns out that tall people ride on taller rims.
My noble steed is a 2006 Trek Bikes' model 3900, and it has served me well for the past two months. I am in love with the flexibility and facility that it provides me as I travel from one side of town to another. Gainesville is a city designed for pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and I have gradually begun to explore this town in a slowly expanding radius that spokes outward from my apartment - with a few side-journeys down safe or potentially interesting thoroughfares. It carries me the three miles to biochemistry every morning by 8:30 in the AM, and takes me to the museum and entomology lab buildings in minutes. I haved used my car perhaps once a week since its purchase, and did not refill on gas for the entire month of September. I only wish I had purchased a bicycle sooner.
More importantly, I hope that no one steals my bike. While bicycle theft is not terribly rampant on campus, it is a problem. I even witnessed as one of my colleagues had his bike stolen one afternoon. The thief was so brazen in his disassembly - and even waved hello as I walked by - that I had to assume that he belonged here and it must have been his bike... I figured the only reason I did not know him was because I was still new here. The thief gradually disassembled my colleague's bike over a period of about an hour, and no one else in the department suspected anything was amiss until the true owner returned and found the remains of his frame still chained to the bike rack.
I have taken to fastening my bike as securely as possible, or should I plan to stay in one place for a long while, stashing it in a corner of my locked office. Let us hope that plan works - I have become remarkably attached to the vehicle.
October 11, 2006
greenspace
Amazing what kind of difference one week can make:
The water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes, was originally introduced to Florida's waterways to act as a natural biological filter, extracting pollutants and impurities from its waters. It was a successful plan, but perhaps too successful - without any natural predators, the hyacinth has since grown out of control. In certain moving bodies of water, manatees keep it in check, but in stagnant or enclosed bodies of water, it eventually covers the whole surface of the lake, choking off any and all sunlight to other plants.