We need more contributors to this blog! Rob is moving to a new job and so am I. If you love writing, are based in the Boston area and know something about science, we want you!

Please email me (c.lok at us.nature.com) and Matt Brown (network at nature.com) if you’re interested.

After nearly four years as an editor of Nature Network, I am leaving to become the Research Highlights Editor of Nature. I leave the site in very good hands. Matt Brown, who is a former Nature Network editor and currently a Community Leader with Nature Network London, is already filling in for me until my replacement is hired. And Ian Mulvany has just become NN’s product development manager. You can reach them at network@nature.com.

Although I’m looking forward to my new job, I am sad to be leaving NN as I’ve been with the site since its very beginning (2006!). It’s been a pleasure and privilege to have played a role in making Nature Network what it is today and I look forward to seeing it grow and flourish even more.

I’ll continue to be a part of the community here, including posting to this blog (I’ll remain in Nature’s Boston office).

If anyone is interested in applying for my job, please get in touch with Timo Hannay (t.hannay at nature.com). If you wanted to ask me questions about the job, please email me at c.lok at us.nature.com.

(I’m headed out of the country tomorrow on vacation so if I don’t respond right away, you’ll know why.)

See you on NN!

Traditional cancer therapies, such as chemo, are all about finding the middle ground between eradicating neoplastic cells and doing as little harm as possible to the rest of a patient’s normal cells and tissues. But this delicate balancing act is further complicated by the fact that no two patients are exactly alike. This introduces a degree of variability that makes finding the right dose or combination of chemotherapeutics for a given cancer very challenging.

Over at MIT, Michael Hemann and Michael Yaffe have focused their attention on the interplay of two famous proteins associated with a variety of cancers: p53 and ATM. Depending on the expression or lack of expression of these proteins, patients may exhibit significantly different responses to a particular chemotherapeutic regimen. If doctors can assess the expression of these proteins prior to the start of therapy, a regimen could be designed that is unique to each individual patient’s cancer type, enhancing the likelihood of success.

Personalized medicine is very quickly going from buzzword to reality. It is most certainly the future of healthcare.

This work will be presented in the August 15th issue of Genes and Development.

A new paper out of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) in Cambridge, delves into the hot question of how the enormous diversity of life on our planet came to be and continues to elaborate over time.

In the July 14 issue of Nature, de Aguiar and colleagues employ a systems biology approach to ask the question of how patterns arise out of remarkable diversity. From their introductory paragraph:

Our biodiversity results provide additional evidence that species diversity arises without specific physical barriers. This is similar to heavy traffic flows, where traffic jams can form even without accidents or barriers.

To examine the entire article go here.

[Ed. note – This post was intended to be presented in the format of a Q-and-A, but a mysterious and still unconfirmed electromagnetic pulse, issuing from some dark corner of the MIT campus, rendered the recording function of the author’s iPhone useless during his time with Dr. Kate Rubins. Nevertheless, the show must and will go on…]

Dr. Rubins is a Fellow at the Whitehead and leader of a team of scientists working on, among other things poxvirus biology. My purpose in visiting with her was to gather more information regarding her selection for this year’s NASA astronaut class. It is not everyday that a molecular biologist is chosen to join the ranks of the nation’s best and brightest space-farers.

It turns out there was not a lot that Rubins could say about NASA’s interview and selection process, since she was forced at gun point asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Even so, the broad stroke is that there were multiple rounds of interviews and assorted grillings culminating with an appearance before what I imagine to be something like the Jedi Council. This collection of elders numbers somewhere between 10 and 20 individuals, all of whom were certainly high power types bent on extracting the truth from tasked with properly vetting each candidate that sat before them. I was not expecting to be faced with a shroud of secrecy that conjures images of the 1950s CIA. Undaunted, I pressed on. Asked how she heard about this opportunity, Rubins replied that a colleague saw a posting on USAjobs.gov and immediately thought of Rubins’s long and abiding interest in space. As someone who has attempted (pretty unsuccessfully) to navigate the morass that is the Federal jobs portal, I was stunned and confused that this was one of the ways that NASA went about the recruitment process. In light of their seeming clandestine behavior, I think an uninvited knock on the door in the dead of night would be far more appropriate.

Rubins’s training to become an astronaut starts a little more than a month from now in mid-August. Over the next two years, Rubins will train to be a mission specialist who will ultimately endure long-duration flight aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The training includes, according to NASA’s webpage “scientific and technical briefings, intensive instruction in Shuttle and International Space Station systems, physiological training, T-38 flight training, and water and wilderness survival training.” In the very brief interim between now and the start of Adult Space Camp her vigorous, intense training, she must not only prepare herself for the challenges ahead but also find homes for the projects in her lab – and the people that work on them.

Asked about the mood in the lab on hearing the news that Rubins was closing shop for a space shot, she said that her colleagues were extraordinarily excited for and supportive of her. Rubins also explained that, because of the nature of her extensive collaborations both within and without the Whitehead, that all of her charges would not be wanting for gainful employment. Equally important, years and much passion and dedication have been accorded to these various projects and the fact that they will continue is crucial, she said.

But what are Dr. Rubins’s wildest dreams regarding the future of space exploration? She was measured in her reply. She believes the ISS will create a new kind of science that exemplifies the dream of collaboration across borders, disciplines and cultures. In fact, Dr. Rubins views the nature of the ISS to be better than a University. That is, though everyone may possess starkly different forms of expertise, the focus on the task at hand generates a sense of being on the same team and promotes progress as a result. [Ed. note to university administrators: If you are having issues with negative competition between members of your faculty, it may be even more satisfying than you think to send them into orbit.]

Addtionally, she sees space biology (and presumably astrobiology) as a legitimate career choice for the coming generations as we extend our reach further into space and finally make use of the ISS. Contrary to conventional presumptions, Rubins is not immediately interested in expanding her work with viruses into the sphere of space. Her goals are fixed instead on the important step of showing that biology can be done in orbit. This includes an interest in instrumentation and microfluidics. That is, how do experiments such as electrophoresis and other modes of molecular biology behave in microgravity? These are the kinds of questions that must be answered if biological experiments are to be successfully carried out in orbit and beyond. In the final analysis, it is clear that Dr. Rubins is at the vanguard of what science will be in the 21st Century.

Last night saw what was reported to be the largest gathering yet of the Boston Skeptics in the Pub. The second floor of Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square was packed to the beams. The crowd came to find out more about CERN’s doomsday device supercollider (LHC), a project that has been the focus of headlines that question the safety of a machine designed to recreate conditions at the moment of the Big Bang. This uncertainty has gone Hollywood in the form of the recent Ron Howard/Tom Hanks offering in which a completely unreasonable amount of anti-matter produced by the collider is stolen and used as fuel for a bomb to explode the Vatican.

It seems that CERN is quite concerned with the fallout, as it were, from Dan Brown’s book. Even on this night, the majority of the debunking presented in Dr. Shulamit Moed’s fantastic talk was about this very question. Up until that point in the lecture (at about the one hour mark), Dr. Moed discussed particle physics in a way that had me fooling myself into thinking this isn’t so bad… Perhaps I can have a decent handle on the subtleties of Top quarks and lucky charm quarks and gluons and muons and so forth. My confidence was eventually dashed by the appearance of a terrifying slide riddled with formulae. These kinds of greek-letter-infested ciphers ensure the integrity of the physicist mystique.

To hell with the dangers of anti-matter. I wanted to hear about the vicious murmurings of black hole creation! There is a supposed danger, in the popular imagination, that proton collisions at the LHC will yield microscopic black holes that will grow astonishingly fast and suck us all into oblivion. In fact, this possibility was placed front and center on the Skeptics event horizon announcement and I was disappointed that Dr. Moed did not address it in her talk. So, here is what the folks at CERN have to say on the matter:

Speculations about microscopic black holes at the LHC refer to particles produced in the collisions of pairs of protons, each of which has an energy comparable to that of a mosquito in flight. Astronomical black holes are much heavier than anything that could be produced at the LHC.

According to the well-established properties of gravity, described by Einstein’s relativity, it is impossible for microscopic black holes to be produced at the LHC. There are, however, some speculative theories that predict the production of such particles at the LHC. All these theories predict that these particles would disintegrate immediately. Black holes, therefore, would have no time to start accreting matter and to cause macroscopic effects.

Oh! Einstein says it’s okay. Nevermind then.

It is clear that too much has been made of the various dangers of the LHC for purposes that range from sheer paranoia to attention mongering. The physics, what we know about the behavior and order of the natural world, is consistent with the LHC being as safe as any collider that currently exists. Even still, there is a small, mischievous part of me that muses darkly about the timing of when the LHC will reach full operation after all the set-backs. 2012 is just around the bend.

We’ve all done it, haven’t we. There was an meeting exam looming and, for one reason or another, studying just didn’t happen in a timely manner. So cramming ensued and the exam was taken in a caffeine haze. But what happens to the memory of that biological pathway stuffed into your brain in a panic-frenzy at 4:45am? Odds are it doesn’t stick around much longer than the exam period…if that long. But why how?

Susumu Tonegawa and colleagues at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have demonstrated some molecular reasoning for how sleep is critical for the formation of long-term memories. In a study that is to be published tomorrow in Neuron, the authors show that, during sleep, mice “consolidated” short-term memories into long-term ones by “replaying” decisions made during the negotiation of a maze. They found that this process was entirely reliant upon a particular hippocampus circuit (the trisynaptic pathway) and without this functionality, the memories of the day were not consolidated during sleep. As a result, long-term recall of those same memories was impaired.

So if an all-nighter is unavoidable because of perhaps ill-considered extracurricular activities, get some sleep as soon as you can and maybe some of that information will still be around for the quarterly presentation final.

To take a look at the work itself, you can go here (subscription, institutional or otherwise, required).

Following the lead of the fine folks at the Nature Network hub located in that lesser phenomenal city to the south, NN Boston has now established a Twitter presence.

We plan on using the exceptional super-powers afforded to those who Tweet and Re-tweet to bring you news and events happening in Beantown’s science scene. There is also a dodgy plan to live blog certain events via Twitter, as circumstances warrant, to bring You, dear NN reader, as close to the experience as possible without leaving the lab.

In addition, if you have an event or a news item that you would like to get out to the folks that follow NN Boston, send a link or item to me at rpinsonn@gmail.com.

So come on over, check us out. Follow us too, if the mood strikes. You never know where we might end up next. Okay maybe you will sometimes.

Earthrise was the inspiration behind the Perspective Is Everything tagline of the Apollo 11 40th Anniversary symposium at MIT. This is no banal linkage. Seeing Earth from space changed it all. At the time, that spectacular image brought into sharp relief our planet’s seeming fragility and, it is argued, inspired the environmental movement of the 1970s that expanded and continues to this day. The goal of the symposium was not only to celebrate the achievements of the past, but also to analyze the current state and what space will mean going forward. In a “what have you done for me, lately” world, the average citizen could be forgiven for thinking that space exploration just ain’t what it used to be. The people at this gathering were hell-bent on banishing that perception.

If there was a watchword for the symposium it was energy. Combined with environmental concerns, energy was the prime preoccupation of nearly every participant. Any why not? Energy sustains life. The search for it and the procurement and protection of it are at the center of our economic, environmental and political circumstances. That pretty much runs the gamut doesn’t it? The space race provided the raw materials, both in terms of material invention and human ingenuity, that revolutionized innumerable aspects of our daily lives. And now many, including those at this symposium, believe that space may once again hold answers for some of our most vexing challenges. One is a plan to employ a combination of manned and robotic space missions to gaze back at Earth to better understand our environment and weather. Another is human exploration of Mars and beyond in hopes of discerning the particulars of planetary composition and evolution. This would not only provide potential new sources of raw materials but also allow us to perhaps peer into the past of what Earth was or to the future of what we may become.

Yet NASA has a PR problem. Even in light of the accomplishments and precedents of the Apollo program and the mind-blowing advancements since, there are still significant numbers of Americans that view our adventures in space as a waste of both time and money. This yawning chasm between the public perception of space mission utility and actual progress needs to be addressed if NASA’s (and humanity’s) goals are to be reached. Ted Sorenson, former counsel and speechwriter for President Kennedy argued that we need to find solutions that fit today. It is a problem of wrong analogy, he said. Simply stating that the United States must embark on an Apollo or Manhattan Project or Marshall Plan style effort to solve our environmental and energy needs is not sufficient. Sorenson, and several others at the symposium, are well aware that new rules must be written to appeal to the next generation of scientists and leaders. Without public support and in the absence of inspiration, the promises of space may never be fully realized.

Things are not looking good over at Harvard. The endowment has taken an unprecedented hit and because the university depends so heavily on its endowment to pay for basic operations, administrators are still looking for more ways to cut costs. While Harvard is aiming to get its spending down to the levels of just four years ago, the university has expanded so much during that time, especially in the sciences, that cost cutting is turning out to be quite painful.

The latest casualty: faculty. According to this Boston Globe article, retiring professors and those being lured away by other universities likely won’t be replaced. The article quotes the chair of the physics department saying that five of his professors have been approached by other schools. Classes and seminars are also being cut and one library has been closed.

How did this happen? Forbes magazine came out a few months ago with this article detailing how Harvard’s endowment managers engaged in some risky practices to milk more money out of the school’s investments. It describes, for example, how Harvard’s chief money manager in the 1990s ran his operation almost like a hedge fund.

As banks and other corporations are reeling and (hopefully) adjusting the way they do business, it will be interesting to see if universities—many of which have seen their endowments plunge—will also re-examine how they finance future construction projects and program expansions.

For now, Harvard’s financial struggles are symbolized by the large construction site in Allston, where building has slowed recently. It was supposed to become a large science complex. For now, it’s a hole in the ground—and a question mark. This article from the Crimson, examining how the Allston expansion is faring in this financial mess, quotes the COO of Harvard’s Allston Development Group saying that it’s “extremely unlikely” that construction of the science complex will stop forever. But the article goes on to say that “he would not say for certain.”