This years’ Nobel Prize for an awesome achievement by a piece of lab equipment or reagent is awarded to SYBR Safe DNA gel stain.

SYBR Safe has revolutionized the way we do cloning in my lab, by making it possible to avoid not one but two horribly carcinogenic things, ethidium bromide and the UV box. God help all of you people who still use this stuff, switch to SYBR Safe as soon as possible, it’s not even that expensive and you can reuse the TAE buffer with SYBR safe in it.

This year’s Nobel Prize for a piece of lab equipment will be announced this evening at 9:35pm. Stay tuned!

More or less endearing because the process by which the winners are selected is completely baffling?

Any award that a stage lighting designer and a geomorphologist can win in the same year is insane. It’s like the lottery for intellectuals, and you didn’t even know you were playing.

who isn’t watching “Mad Men.”

This blog has gotten pretty pretentious lately; honestly, I think the format brings out the blowhard in us all, providing us a forum to sound off on all things science. Then again, not everyone paraphrases Chekhov in their entries, so maybe I’m just a weenie. Either way, I’m going to be pretentious one last time (this evening) and give a nod to Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” before posting about football again.

The nod: Keats was the one who wrote the famous line, “beauty is truth— truth, beauty,” and I want to talk about that in this post, because I think scientists are particularly enamored of beauty, and I find that interesting. I started thinking about it because I’m doing a lot of image analysis at the moment, and I can present the same data, with the same signals embedded— think about a pseudocolor map of activity in a particular brain region— with a lot of peripheral noise, or without the noise, and I swear you’ll find the noiseless one more compelling, even though the actual informational content hasn’t changed at all. Why?

Is it the same reason physicists try to hash out a “theory of everything,” a set of equations that can predict and explain all the phenomena in the universe, and the reason chemists tried to break down all substances into a set of indivisible elements? Pretty things make sense, and we like it when things make sense. Clean experiments generate clean effects and pretty pictures; beauty must be a reflection of some essential rationale. Nature, at least that which has existed for a significant amount of time, is as sleek and optimized as a new BMW, it seems. Is there anything that scientists have studied and found ugly, and not assumed that their understanding was simply incomplete? And don’t start responding with the names of other scientists here, it’s a rhetorical question.

The same basic things are true for easiness, I find. As an experimentalist, when you’re trying to develop a new technique or assay for something, I think you always have a “eureka” moment when you finally get a result that instantly tells you what you were trying to do is going to work. And when something is that easy to do, you believe it far more readily than when you have to wait with baited breath to see if your effect will disappear when you add the next two experiments to your dataset. You do it, you see it, you know what you’re seeing is real. I wish all experiments made you feel that way; I just keep hoping that I’m able to continue to address the questions I find interested in easy, beautiful ways. Maybe that’s why scientists are so impressed with those things— because they’re rare, and if you can get data that nice, you must be doing something right.

First, I would take a manuscript for a paper that isn’t the greatest paper in the history of science, but isn’t bad— solid, a paper like most papers that come out in an upper-middle-class publication, interesting enough, a fairly convincing amount of evidence provided for the conclusions, a few loose ends, leaves room for future experiments to further clarify things.

Then, I would like to be able to submit this manuscript 100 times to the same publication, and tally the kinds of reviews I get back. How many times, out of 100, would the paper have been rejected flat-out? How many times would reviewers ask for another year’s worth of experiments? What kinds of requests/complaints come up the most? How many times would it be accepted straight away, with minimal revisions?

The question I’m trying to address is, how much of what winds up getting into a particular journal is the result of luck and whose hands a paper falls into, and how much is actually based on the content of the paper? An assumption I’m making is that reviewers who are basing their conclusions about publication on the content of the manuscript alone should, if problems really do exist, bring up the same issues more often than not; since that’s been my experience, I think it’s valid. I suspect that most papers of the kind I’ve described would fall into the “will eventually get published” category maybe 40% of the time, and I think the variability you get from reviewer group to reviewer group—that is, the particular issues they have and requests they make— is going to be tremendous. This is the kind of stuff that makes publishing maddening. I think most scientists agree, experiments are fun, but writing and publishing a paper is really annoying, and a large part of the reason is that, like an unhappy family, every reviewer seems to be unhappy in their own way, to paraphrase Chekhov. And how do we improve the situation?

It’s kind of the way I feel about my college and grad school admissions processes— I’m glad they turned out the way they did, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want to have to do the experiment again.

These days, I generally avoid reading or otherwise taking in much about the political world. To be honest, I find it irritating at best, and depressing at worst, to listen to all of the garbage spewed out by our elected, or striving-to-be-elected, officials and the people who work for them and for our news organizations, and it’s never worse than in an election year (or the two years preceeding an election year, thanks to the Ironman ultra-marathon that election coverage has become). I don’t love generalizing, and I’m sure there are some great politicians and journalists out there, but I’d rather spend my brain-free time reading columns on college football and watching old episodes of “The Hills” on the internet.

I got my undergraduate degree in government at Harvard, and above all, the experience served to thoroughly sensitize my b.s. detectors— I sat through a lot of pretentious, hot air-filled discussions with professors and students alike, and it really made me sick of our whole democratic enterprise. These weren’t kids just vamping for a high grade, either; these were classmates who took their coursework in government seriously, who openly discussed the fact that they aspired to become governors and senators, as I’m sure some of them will. It wasn’t all bad— I really did enjoy a lot of the material we got to read, and the experience taught me how to work through any argument logically—but after sitting through four years of words, words, words, I didn’t want to go to law school or to Washington, D.C. anymore, as I thought I might when college began. I missed being in the lab, which I had left behind during the summer after my senior year in high school, and I was happy to move back into hard science.

And I’m still happy to be a scientist, and I still don’t have the desire to go to law school or work in Washington, D.C. But I have to admit, reading about the recent market turmoil has prompted me to think more about economics and political theory than I have in many, many years now. It’s made me think about the responsibility our government has to take care of its people, but also, the responsibility that we as citizens have to act responsibly and rationally. The government needs to make it impossible for companies to screw over the little people in this country, but the little people have to be smart enough to not get themselves in over their heads, or leave this world worse off than they found it, too.

Ultimately, it’s made me think about whether or not it’s right for me to sit back and wait for the world around me to make things better, or whether I should be taking a more proactive role in making things better myself. As much as scientists like to complain about not getting enough funding, or about the economy being bad, or about propositions against stem cell research, how many are attempting to do anything about guiding the way our world works outside the laboratory? Should we be smarter about making sure we’re taken care of, and also, about helping our government do a better job in times of need? Do we do ourselves a disservice by focusing on what goes on between the walls of our laboratories as much as we do? Heady questions for someone who watches “The Hills,” I know… makes me want to reread Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” anyway. Too bad I sold most of my humanities textbooks right before graduating college…

No? Then let me get back to you in a second with another post. Be right back.

I’m really good at trivia because I waste so much time at work reading the New York Times online and ESPN.com.

My cholesterol is very low, proably because I can’t afford to buy red meat or eat out very much.