I got the flu.

But the title of this post does not refer to my symptoms, which I’m pleased to report have been relatively mild ¹. It refers instead to what the people responsible for making, distributing, and rationing the H1N1 vaccine must be going through at the moment.

Honestly, there’s no pleasing some people – first they were complaining about the government approving the vaccine before it had been tested to their satisfaction (apparently unaware that it’s being made in essentially the same way as every other flu vaccine for years), and now they’re complaining that it wasn’t approved quickly enough, and are crying conspiracy! over the news that the manufacturers can’t maintain a steady rate of production. Add to this the normal levels of anti-vaccine hysteria, and I don’t envy the people tasked with this job one little bit.

Yes, there have been manufacturing problems – but what do you expect when dealing with a biological system? Biology is messy. It’s not like a manufacturing plant where the rate of input of parts determines the rate of output of product – anyone who’s ever worked in a lab knows that sometimes things just don’t work like they should. Cells don’t grow, antibodies don’t bind, plasmids don’t ligate. Why else would otherwise rational human beings wear lucky socks on important experiment days, or keep a lucky troll on their bench?²

The government and the vaccine manufacturing companies need to do a better PR job and get this kind of information out there.

They can leave out the part about the lucky socks, though.

Any typos or grammatical errors in this post can be written off as a symptom of the flu

¹ The fever and aches started at 5 am on Saturday, and were almost completely over by Monday morning. I’m still coughing very painfully, and I have very little mental and zero physical energy, but I can breathe more freely than I could even yesterday, and should be on my flight to Varadero on Saturday night as planned (assuming my husband doesn’t get it – but he has the constitution of an ox, rarely gets sick, and gets over things very quickly when he does succumb).

² Socks mine, troll labmate’s.

As with most other fields of biology in which I’ve had no formal training, I know just enough microbiology and epidemiology to be dangerous.

In this particular case, it’s my peace of mind that’s at risk. I’m going on holiday in 11 days, and spending far too much time thinking about the incubation period of the swine flu.

This may be a reaction to my last holiday being spoiled by a norovirus that swept through the household, hitting me at 11pm on Christmas Eve, or maybe just sheer desperation for a break of a magnitude I’ve not felt since the last year of my PhD; I’m really not usually so paranoid. I mean, I always wash my hands thoroughly, and I handle raw meat with the respect it deserves. But I usually wouldn’t be using hand sanitiser every hour or two, or thinking about missing a house party because the host said “sniffle sniffle, oink oink” on Facebook (turns out she just has a cold… probably), or considering trying to jump the queue for the just-approved vaccine (health care workers – which includes me, apparently – are set for shots in phase 2, which will come too late for my holiday).

I really don’t mind if I get sick NOW, because at least then I’ll be fine by the time we leave. I mean, I hate being sick as much as the next person, but I’d rather hit that window of opportunity than be actively sick and infectious on our departure date, and not be able to fly. But my days of thinking “if I get sick NOW I’ll be OK by then” are drawing to a close…

Does anyone know just enough behavioural psychology to be dangerous know how to get me to stop worrying?

Well, the big autumn grant deadline cluster is finally behind me. Thank goodness for that. Now I can get to the rest of my to-do list: it’s four days until a big meeting with some international collaborators, eight days until a progress report for another grant is due, and a mere 23 days until the onerous task of lying on a Cuban beach drinking a mojito.

One of the other things I’m working on is my department’s new website. It’s very much a work in progress – we only just got permission to set up this WordPress-based site a few weeks ago (after struggling with the rigid page formats and ridiculously clunky back-end of the official website for several years), and I’ve been scrambling to create content in between all the grant application work I’ve been doing.

It has been surprisingly difficult to persuade the department’s students and postdocs to provide me with text and photos for their profile pages; I anticipate much hurried page creation when they finally decide they need an online presence to facilitate their future job searches. But trying to get people to contribute to the blog? It’s like pulling teeth.

I’ve circulated the Nature Methods editorial encouraging scientists to blog. I’ve suggested general themes and topics for posts, and loose guidelines related to blogging your own or others’ unpublished data. I’ve provided links to Nature Network and ScienceBlogs. My boss is keen and supportive. But I still don’t have a single solid response to my request for blog post ideas, although a couple of people have expressed general interest, and have contributed to other pages on the site (thanks, Darren!). In fact, I’ve resorted to asking individuals to write posts on topics that I’ve thought of… and I still don’t have any posts to show for it.

I never manage to make it to any of those science blogging conferences; they’re always too far away, and thus too expensive and time consuming to get to. But I know a lot of NNers have been to one or more of these conferences, and have attended sessions on how to encourage scientists to blog. I’d really appreciate any ideas you encountered at said events, or just in general!

p.s. yes, I know everyone’s busy. But writing a blog post takes no longer than going for a coffee or extended lunch.

Um… Bob?

What have you been up to?

You told us you adopted The Beast from an Australian postdoc. Now, tell the truth: are you actually planning to invade Germany with an army of undead cats?

I didn’t realise how prophetic Brian’s poem was…

(explanation after the jump)

I have clearly spent far too much time looking at LOLcats.

In trying to clear a massive backlog of New Scientist magazines from my house, I was reading a little too quickly yesterday when I reached this snippet at the end of a page:

At first reading, I thought the headline was a question from a pilot uncertain about his/her future career prospects.

I do enjoy the reader comments on the CBC News site.

As with many (most?) similar sites, the comment threads are populated chiefly by people who harbour opinions on the more extreme ends of whatever spectrum is at issue. There are also a lot of single-issue folks on the BC site, who will blame ANY problem on the provincial government / its leader, Gordon Campbell / the Olympics / the Vancouver Police and their trigger-happy Taser fingers.

The best part is the ability of commenters and lurkers to “Agree” or “Disagree” with each comment. If you’ve ever got a few minutes to spare, try leaving a comment, and see how long it takes for someone to disgree with:

a) a quantitative question (i.e. not one with a yes/no answer, but rather “how many?” or “which year?”)
b) a factual, objectively correct statement backed up with references
c) a completely innocuous or obvious comment (“my sympathies to the family”, “murder is bad”, etc).

Extra points if someone replies to your comment and mentions the government / Campbell / the Olympics / Tasers.

The only time I ever wade in (other than hitting “Agree” or “Disagree”) is when the news concerns a scientific issue, and commenters are asking specific questions or spreading inaccuracies. For example, I remember leaving a comment on one of the (still unsolved) mystery-of-the-floating-feet articles, explaining why DNA analysis can’t tell you someone’s race.

The comments on today’s sciency articles gave me a couple of big belly laughs. But I don’t think I’ll be responding.

How to even begin to craft a response to this comment on an article about the H1N1 flu?

Of course it's hit B.C. schools. It's a man made virus, released into the public, to be controlled by a man made vaccine, whenever they have it ready. How else can they make their pandemic real? This so called pandemic has been hyped up in the news ad naseum, but with a purpose. To incite fear and population control. Do I believe it's going to be bad? Absolutely. Just as planned. Do I believe a lot of people will die from the vaccine. Absolutely. Maybe even more than from the flu.

And how to possibly, ever, better this comment on an article about the (alleged) end of the devastating pine beetle infestation?¹

The last time there was this much speculation about whether or not a beetle was dead it was Paul. Koo Koo katchoo

Genius.

¹ If true, it’s only because they’ve run out of trees to kill.

Being scooped is every researcher’s worst nightmare.

It happened to me, once; less than three days before submitting my first paper from my postdoctoral lab, I spotted a new paper in press at my target journal, with substantially overlapping conclusions. Luckily I was so close to publication myself that there could be no doubt the work was independent – and there were some conclusions that were unique to my paper. This meant that we did still get the paper published (in a different journal), but not without some very stressful times. One of my labmates was not so lucky a year later; he was completely scooped (by a different lab to the one that got me), and didn’t get a chance to even submit his paper.

So my heart goes out to Professor Laura Bierut at Washington University in St. Louis, the victim of a scoop that made the news section of Science this week.

For those of you who don’t have access to the original article, the story is that Professor Bierut had contributed data to a shared database. The federally funded project had a publication embargo in place, so that while other researchers could access and analyse the data, the contributors would get the first shot at publication. However, a researcher at a different institute breached the terms of this agreement, and submitted a paper based on Professor Bierut’s data a full six months before the embargo was due to expire.

The offending paper has since been retracted, but it can’t be unpublished, and it remains available in the journal’s online archives. The NIH are investigating, and have frozen the other researcher’s access to the shared database until their review is complete.

There have been some discussions of data sharing around these parts recently (see Bob’s recent post for an example). There is obviously a great reluctance that needs to be overcome before free and open data sharing becomes widespread, and incidents like this one (even if unintentional) represent a major obstacle.

So, assuming that data sharing is A Good Thing, who should shoulder the responsiblity of protecting the people who generate the data?

• The goverment and its funding bodies? Well, it seems as if they tried in this case.
• The journals? Can they really be expected to vet every single submission to ensure that no embargoes were breached?

A better system for removing retracted papers from the literature might help, but what’s the point of treating the symptoms?

My feeling is that researchers will be keeping their cards close to their chests for the forseeable future.

This video popped up on the Best of YouTube podcast. The developers describe the system as follows:

a prototype musical instrument capable of generating sound in real time from the lines of doodles as well as from the contours of three-dimensional objects nearby (hands, dancer's silhouette, architectural details, etc). There is no camera nor projector: a laser spot explores the shape as a pick-up head would search for sound over the surface of a vinyl record - with the significant difference that the groove is generated by the contours of the drawing itself.

I don’t pretend to understand the underlying technology – I just know that

a) The “music” needs some work.

b) I want one anyway.

c) So do my cats.

I saw this freak of nature on PZ Myers’ Pharyngula blog, and since I don’t want to be the only person with nightmares, I thought I’d share the photo.

(beyond the jump so as to protect the squeamish)

Another day, another science typo: this time, I emailed a colleague to ask for a “letter of collaboratino”.

(Well, I almost did – previous experience caused me to activate Outlook’s “always check spelling before sending” option long, long ago).

I wonder what a collaboratino might look like. Clearly, it’s a subatomic particle that facilitates interactions between larger entities. But is it involved with weak or strong forces? Is it ever possible to simultaneously measure both its motivation and its benefits? How much spin is involved?

What I do know is that when a collaboratino meets an anti-collaboratino, the effects are sure to be more devastating than Dan Brown could ever imagine.

And what adjectives might one use to describe a collaboratino?

Drafting another letter for a different project, I started with the suggested phrase “I am delighted to collaborate with you on your grant application titled ‘really important science’”. It is indicative of the importance of measuring collaboratino spin that the word “delighted” cropped up again in the next paragraph. Unable to come up with an appropriate synonym on the spot, I hit shift-F7 for suggestions – but didn’t think that “charmed”, “enchanted”, “thrilled”, “elated”, or indeed “overjoyed” were quite suitable.

I was pleased to finish that draft and send it off for long-distance approval; a quantum of solace in a frantic and over-caffeinated week.