Arbitrary Friday: The Easiest Nobel Prize?

Let's say you're 18, you're just entering college, and you have decided that your life's goal is to win a Nobel Prize. You don't care which, you just want to taste that sweet Swedish gold. So, what's your best bet? Which is the easiest prize to get?

I'm going to rule out physics, chemistry, and medicine right off the bat. That may be my biophysics science bias showing, but seriously. I don't think you can count on any of those as a good bet. The odds are really astronomical, even if you're fucking brilliant to begin with.

I'm also going to rule out economics, because it's a fake Nobel prize. We're talking the real thing here.

That leaves us with Literature and Peace. I've done my share of writing (including several chapters of a never finished book, and two ten minute plays, one of which was a musical about the life of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, titled Uraniborg), and it's really hard. And I've gotta say, when I read really good writers, I'm usually just left drained, unable to comprehend how they quite do it. Like Michael Chabon, or David Foster Wallace. You can't emulate that, you can't fake it. Writing is hard, certainly hard in a different way than physics, but I think it's even harder to get good at than physics is. I think you pretty much have to be born a writer, there's no two ways about it. You can't just work really hard and get really good at it.

So, that leaves us with Peace. I would say, based on the history of the Nobel peace prize, Peace is definitely the way to go. If Yassir Arafat and Henry Kissinger can win the Nobel peace prize, I think it strongly suggests that there is a serious dearth of people out there trying hard enough, and there must be a few openings. In fact, if you consider the aggregate contribution to overall peace, I think you would probably rank higher than Yassir Arafat if you simply consistently opened doors for old ladies. And let's not forget Mother Teresa, that sainted old lady who won the Nobel peace prize for denying the poor the one thing that would have really actually helped them, which is to say birth control. So, given some of the less than stellar contributions made by these people, I think you've gotta put your money on the peace prize. There seem to be a few different ways to go about it, but I think that if you're genuinely interested in trying to bring peace to the world (or at least genuinely interested in trying to win a Nobel prize), and aren't too worried about material wealth, the field is pretty much wide open. You just pick a cause and run with it until you're out of breath, and hope that people notice.

Sick Day

[Editors note: This got stuck in my draft queue and didn't get uploaded. I'm feeling better today, but am still having some stomach issues. Hopefully I'll be okay by the weekend.]

Been at home clutching my stomach for most of the morning, but I'm now sitting upright and eating cereal, and think I might be able to go into the lab in the afternoon. Meanwhile, I share with you: Acoustically driven programmable liquid motion using resonance cavities, in PNAS.

One of the problems with microfluidics is that, no matter how micro you make the fluidics, you still need big computer controlled pumps to run everything. The above paper has attempted to solve this problem in a very elegant fashion, using resonant cavities to apply pressure, with the pressure controlled by externally generated sound waves, allow you to control your microfluid device with a veritable symphony:



Of course, if you had six or eight of these things in your lab, it might quickly turn into a cacophony, a la the acoustic memory scene in Cryptonomicon.

Recent Literature

Some recent entries of interest in the single molecule literature:

• A former colleague of mine, Anne Gershenson, now a professor at Brandeis, has written a review of single molecule enzymology for Current Opinion in Chemical Biology. It holds up as an example the work on HIV-RT done by Elio Abbondanzieri, formerly of the Block lab, now at the Zhuang lab. But it's a good examination of the state-of-the-state-of-the-art.
• The Bustamante lab has published new work on optical trapping of frameshifting psuedoknots in PNAS. People have been working for some time to understand what exactly is the origin of psuedoknot frameshifting efficiency, with mixed results, but figure five is where the money is here, strongly suggesting a relationship between unfolding force and frameshifting efficiency. I haven't read the whole thing, though, so I will reserve further comment.
• Helicos has a paper in Nature Methods reporting on a "virtual terminator nucleotide" for sequencing. These appear to be nucleotides that can reversibly terminate elongation, like a di-deoxy nucleotide that can be un-di-deoxied, if you will. This ensures that the next base added in a single-molecule addition assay is really only a single base, but that further bases can still be added afterwards, elegantly fixing accumulated off-by-one errors.
• Also, Hagar Zohar from the Muller lab at Berkeley writes in with news of their new web page of links to resources for single molecule biophysics, put together by a grad student organization called the CharISMA Idea Lab. I added a link on the right as well.

Arbitrary Friday: Danger Edition

People often think of scientists as men in lab coats and wire rim glasses living lives of quiet desperation. While the quiet desperation is true in most cases, the idea of scientists as nerdy milquetoasts has remained pretty well embedded in our cultural consciousness (see, for instance, the execrable TV show "Big Bang Theory" for countless examples), in spite of a plethora of counterexamples. Richard Feynman was of course famous for his womanizing, lock picking, adventure seeking, and numerous practical jokes. The late great David Schramm was a 240 pound red haired demon who climbed mountains and tragically died at the fairly young age of 52 while flying his own single engine airplane. But, even apart from the famous and infamous, scientists that I know are generally a sensitive, artistic, and adventurous lot. They play piano, banjo, and rugby, they dance the salsa, they climb mountains, and that's just counting the people in my lab.

On the other hand, scientists are, by and large, a careful lot. They calculate, they consider, they assess risk, and they eschew it in most cases. I grew up in a Jewish household in the suburbs, where danger seemed to be all around, where taking the bus to the mall seemed fraught with opportunities for death and dismemberment, and where even a jungle gym presented terrifying, murderous possibilities.

But, lately, I've definitely taken a turn for the more dangerous. For starters, as bland as it seems, moving to California was an adventure for me in a lot of ways. I was moving far from my family, far from any of my friends, to a place I had never lived, with a lot of distinct cultural differences, and with very little context to guide me. And, in a lot of ways, my Grand California Adventure has been a fantastic success. I've taken all sorts of risks and experienced all sorts of new things (some of which are not really appropriate for discussion here.) But, I have also definitely started to incorporate danger into my life in more tangible ways.

About six months after moving here, for instance, I finally went and bought my first motorcycle, a 1997 Harley 883 Sportster (which you will find pictured to the right.) Hardly the most dangerous motorcycle in the world (it has trouble getting above 80 miles an hour), but a significant departure for me. Of course, I didn't just go out and buy it: I started even before I moved by taking a course from the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, and simultaneously studying up on motorcycles, riding, and what kind of bike I should get as a beginner bike. (Motorcycles for Dummies suggested the Sportster as a good intro bike, and I've been happy with it in that respect, although I'm starting to feel like it may be time to get something with a bit more oomph, that handles a bit more solidly.) Which is to say, I didn't plunge into it with abandon: I carefully selected and pursued my choice of danger, and mitigated the unecessary risk.

Not long after that, I was driving up to San Francisco, and passed by Fort Funston. All of a suddent, I realized that hang gliding was not just something that people did in movies: I was in California! There were mountains! If you had the desire (and the money!), you could fly. And so I got myself a block of lessons, and, well, the rest is history:


So, the question I ask myself is: why? Why live dangerously? My parents certainly ask me that. Is it just to impress the babes? (I hope not.) Is it because I'm some sort of thrill junkie? Honestly, I don't feel like the risks I'm taking are that unreasonable in a visceral sense, even if they are statistically more likely to result in me dying in a horrible accident than if I were to not pursue them. Therein, though, lies the answer, I think. William Gurstelle, and author and recent guest poster on BoingBoing, was discussing his new book, Absinthe & Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. He hypothesizes that "the golden third", living in ways that are more dangerous than average, but still short of making pipe bombs out of match heads, is correlated with overall happiness and contentment. Fair enough, it seems like I'm toeing that line. But, still: why? Why does it make me happy? Why do it?

I don't really know the answer, but I suspect that there is an element of control involved, or, more precisely, lack of control. Most of us spend a lot of time exercising control over our lives, and, as discussed above, scientists want to control everything. (Even our experiments are sometimes called "controls"!) But sometimes, it pays to let go of that. It pays to intentionally step out over the ledge and look over. Because, not everything in life can be controlled. And if you spend all of your time in your bubble of control, in your circumscribed safe space, then what the hell are you going to do when the shit hits the fan? How are you going to cope? How are you going to deal when you're not in control? I've gotten into near accidents on my motorcycle; I've had the wind shove my glider around and nearly lost control; and it's pretty damn scary. But, your blood gets pumping, and your heart takes over, and you learn a little lesson about yourself, and how you react, and you internalize that. Flying is fun! But sometimes you crash, and in life, the decisions with the most importance almost never happen when you're in control, they happen when things are flying off the handle, and you don't have the time for sober reflection.

Total internal pedantry

Glancing over some new articles on single molecule stuff, I came across the following curious title:
"Ultrastable combined atomic force and total internal fluorescence microscope." Surely, this had to be a mistake, but no, the article actually uses the term "total internal fluorescence". Now, certainly, I have been accused of being a pedantic word nerd at times, but this construction really irks me. For those of you still scratching your head, the correct term is "total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy", or even just "total internal reflection microscopy." But, the the term "total internal" refers to the reflected excitation light, not the fluorescence emission. "Total internal reflection" (TIR) is actually a quite common phenomenon in physics and has applications far beyond fluorescence microscopy (for instance, fiber optics are based on TIR.) "Total internal fluorescence" on the other hand seems like it would be useless: the fluorescence is totally internal, and never gets out, so what's the signal?

Just to make sure I wasn't smoking crack, though, I checked around the intergoogles a bit. On Pubmed, for instance:
"total internal reflection fluorescence": 629 hits
"total internal fluorescence": 11 hits

But, this hit in particular startled me. It lists in the references:

E. Sund and D. Axelrod, “Actin dynamics at the living cell submembrane imaged by total internal fluorescence photobleaching,” Biophys. J. 79, 1655–1669 (2000).

If no less a luminary that Dan Axelrod, the GODFATHER of TIRFM, could use the term "total internal fluorescence", then clearly I was way off base. Fortunately for me, clicking through the link reveals that in fact the authors had misquoted the title of the paper! The actual title, as you might imagine, is "Actin dynamics at the living cell submembrane imaged by total internal reflection fluorescence photobleaching."



In other news, I have heard tell around the water cooler that certain Block lab associated people have been selected for various Biophysical Society awards at the 2010 meeting, but since the BPS website doesn't have any info on it, I'll keep a lid on it until a formal announcement is made.

OMG ROTFLMAO LOL NIH NCBI HIV TAR

Via boingboing: from the land up north, we get NCBIROFL.COM, a collection of published bioscience papers that are probably only slightly more absurd than your own research. Although I must point out that they're a bit behind the curve: the June 30th entry has already been widely hailed, having won the 2003 IgNobel prize in physics.