Today I attended my favorite seminar series with no real idea what the topic was. Granted the free food is what really drew me to the seminar in the first place but now I’ve become quite attached to the whole series so I attend religiously. This particular seminar (focused on cancer research and treatment) is attended about 40/60 by PhDs and MDs and it has a major clinical slant to it in most cases. Today the topic was palliative medicine. I am not afraid to admit that I had no idea what this was before the seminar so I started off by learning something new. Palliative medicine is basically the step before hospice. If you have a very poor prognosis with not long to live they bring in medical professionals to help you deal with dying. The whole premise behind this seminar was that it is a form of medicine that should be enacted at diagnosis. Currently you call in the palliative doctors when someone has about 6 months to live. I got the feeling that the point of bringing the speaker in was that there is a possibility of implementing such a program into the new cancer center here.

Anyway, I found the seminar actually quite interesting but what I found most intriguing was that in a room in which I have never seen a vacant seat, about half the room was empty. Upon looking around I realized that the only people attending were hungry graduate students, postdocs and a few hard core supporters of the new caner center director. Not a stethoscope in sight. The more the seminar went on, the more it became clear to me that the clinicians must not think much of this whole palliative care thing. As someone who has lost a loved one to a very unexpected and fast progressing disease, I was offended. The seminar speaker from MGH explained a wonderful system where a patient sits down with both the oncologist and the palliative care physician and discusses what is going to happen. They meet with both the patient and the families on a regular basis to make sure they are coping well and that they have the best quality of life possible. Now, this may sound like psycobabble crap to a bunch of clinicians who don’t have time to even attend a seminar on the subject, but I found it to be fascinating.

I understand that MDs are very busy and lead hectic lives but I’m pretty sure they saw this seminar pop up on their Blackberries and hit ‘ignore’ as soon as they saw the word palliative. If anything, it was a good indication of how the physicians here would react to such a program were to be implemented here. I’d like to tell these people who didn’t show up “shame on you” but I have no right to. For all I know there was a Big Important Emergency meeting that they were all attending.

I moved to New England almost a year ago and I am still not totally accustomed to the climate. I’m improving, though. I have now completely changed my wardrobe to include five pea coats, two top-of-the-line waterproof windbreakers, a big furry Russian-like hat (complete with ear flaps), countless sweaters and six pairs of boots including rain boots. Over winter break I bought the final piece of the puzzle…a down coat. Now when I walk my dogs in the frigid cold I look like an Eskimo but, luckily, I feel like one too.

Today in a rather packed (lunch provided) seminar, I was unfortunate enough to sit next to a fellow down jacket owner. I believe that his coat deserved its own seat. He came in with a girl but there were no seats together so they sat on either side of a rather big name in cancer biology. During the seminar Down Coat invaded both mine and Big Wig’s personal space multiple times. He was sharing his lunch (which he was smacking with his mouth open) with his girlfriend on the other side of Big Wig. In general, he made it very difficult to focus on a seminar series that I very much enjoy.

I don’t really have a point here but I will say that I learned something today. Puffy coats are meant for Eskimo dog walking…not packed seminar rooms. I’m pretty sure I knew this already but I suppose now on Tuesdays when I know I have this seminar to attend, I will choose to wear one of my trendy pea coats and forgo the down jacket…or perhaps just take my coat off like a normal person.

I have mixed feelings about needing a female mentor. I love science, I am a woman, I lack appropriate female mentors, etc., etc. I have always worked for men and I tend to be the kind of girl that works well with men and it makes me wonder if I really need a female mentor. I am grateful to have been taught by men who treat me as equals and I wouldn’t really want anything different. The only time I feel I would really need a woman’s perspective on things is when I decide to have a family and a career. Along those lines I found a recent interview with some of the female Nobel Prize winners to be interesting. It provides two different perspectives (family or no family) from four different women. I found it very encouraging and very enlightening and it made me want to call up Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider and beg them to be my mentors. I guess my point here is that I DO want a strong, successful female mentor but I also want to be one of the guys and treated as such. Perhaps this is asking too much. Perhaps not.

Please excuse any typing errors in this post as I am trying to manage with an injured pointer finger. Of all the dangerous things I work with every day, it would be the simple act of pumpkin carving that would cause me the most harm. On Monday my lab and the one we share space with had a pumpkin carving party. It was great fun, especially since many people had never actually gutted a pumpkin before. I began the night touting my former position as a camp counselor where I taught knife safety. I think that is where I went wrong.

At some point in the night when I was trying to follow the BOO! pattern (a level three mastery level, mind you) I noticed that my pumpkin was a bit red. Hmmm. Curious. Then I noticed that my finger was also red. Hmmm. Turns out I had a pretty good gash (two actually) that I hadn’t noticed because the Swiss Army Knife I was using to carve (we had limited resources) was incredibly sharp. Good news was no pain. Bad news is only now, three days later, am I realizing exactly how deep these cuts are. So as I wait for the doctor to call me back and contemplate just grabbing some super glue and sealing these suckers up on my own, I thought I would share my experiences with you.

So…beware your next lab outing. It could be more dangerous than lab itself although it does seem that science is becoming more socially dangerous than I had ever thought possible. I am referring, most immediately, to the small blurb on cnn.com the other day about the sodium azide poisonings at Harvard. This isn’t the first incidence of lab coffee poisoning that I have heard about either. It seems the break room may be one of the more hazardous environments in high stress labs.

And now I must go to urgent care and get glued back together. Take me as a bad example and please stay safe this Halloween!

So maybe it’s a little cruel to compare recommendation letters to goulash or whatever that mess was that Oliver Twist couldn’t get enough of, but it just seems so appropriate. I have been busy writing about a billion postdoc fellowship applications lately. Now, it is true that once you write one, the others sort of fall into place. Actually, writing them hasn’t been such an issue for me, it has been the begging for more and more recommendation letters. I suppose that my previous observation could be said for rec letters too. Once one is written, you just upload it over and over again. But if this is true, then why do I feel so guilty? I know this is part of the job. When you become a professor you know you will have to do this. I get it. But I really feel like at any moment one of my references is going to flip out and drag me down the streets of New Haven ringing a bell and singing “postdoc for sale!!!”. Seriously, though. I cringe every time I have to send ANOTHER email to one of my referees. I was actually happy to see that the ACS and the Susan G Komen foundation just ask you for email addresses and they send your emails for you. Then I thought “is that rude? letting the foundation do your dirty work for you?” And then I lost more sleep at night. It seems so strange that now you don’t even have to communicate directly with someone who is (hopefully) going to write a letter waxing on and on about how wonderful you are. I have submitted three (maybe four, I forget) fellowships since July and I can’t help but feel a simple “thank you” email is not enough. In fact, after the previous round I wrote real thank you notes and sent them in the (get this!) snail mail. And then I had to ask for another round…or should I say the automated ACS system asked for another round. And in November the Susan G Komen automated system will ask for them…and then another in December. When will it stop?! How can I ever repay these great men of science for devoting so my time to my well-being? I suppose all I can do is hope that (1) stop being so dramatic, (2) actually get a fellowship soon so I can stop bothering people and (3)some day be lucky enough to be so revered as to be constantly bothered by graduate students and postdocs of my own. (and maybe I should buy my own bell and brush up on my singing voice…just in case)

It happens to the best of us, sometimes more than once. For me it was as a first year graduate student. I was rotating in a lab where the second year had just passed his qualifier so the lab went to lunch. I was honored to be invited to come along as I was a mere roton (as I’ve been told rotation students are often called: rotation + moron). I hopped jollily into the car with my mentor and the lab manager. Then they told me they had to stop by the bank first. They? Then they started to bicker…almost like they were married. When we got back to lab I mentioned it to the aforementioned second year and learned, with much shock, that they were, indeed, MARRIED! How could I not know? I felt so stupid. Then I told my friend and she told me her story. She was complaining about how her boss was being picky and the research associate professor in lab said “oh he’s like that at home too.” BAM…MARRIED! Maybe it’s more common for people in science to be married because we spend our more formidable years stuck in labs. Or perhaps it’s just more surprising to us because women in science tend to keep their maiden names. Of course Dr. Smith and Dr. Jones are married! How could we not have known? Silly us. Mind you I’m not saying this is a problem, I’m just putting it out there to see if any of you have had similar experiences. I may start a collection of essays on the topic (don’t worry, I won’t).

That sums me up pretty well. I hope you all are somewhat entertained by my musings in this semi-sciency blog. I was born and raised in Arkansas and lived a stint of real life in Boulder, CO working as a chemist. Then I took shelter in the safe confines of graduate school for a few years at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. As a graduate student I studied helicases and developed an inordinate fondness for mass spectrometry. Now I am a postdoc at Yale in New Haven, CT, USA. I absolutely hate the town of New Haven but, not surprisingly, I love Yale. I do research involving the regulation of epigenetics as related to cancer. My specific project revolves around a protein known to be up-regulated in breast cancer but not in normal tissue. I have two dogs that have much more control over my comings and goings in life than any dogs should. The name of my blog is inspired by said mutts (Lucy and Samoa) and a pub that I encountered at an epigenetics meeting in Aspen this summer, The Two Dog Pub. Actually both the service and the beer at the pub sucked but it still had some sort of lasting effect on me. Anyway, I won’t bore you too much in this early entry. Just wanted to introduce myself. Here I am…ta da!

Welcome to my blog. I am a postdoc at Yale University and this is supposed to be my ‘get to know you’ blog entry but given the recent events here at Yale, I feel it an inappropriate time for me to yammer on about myself. In this blog I hope to address many of the issues facing young scientists today. Unfortunately, I did not think that these issues would include the tragic events that have unfolded at Yale in a completely secure environment accessible only to scientists. As part of a larger family of academics, where collaboration is key, it is especially disconcerting that ‘one of us’ could do such a thing. I would like to say that my thoughts are with the family and friends of Annie Le, may she rest in peace.