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Hooray! Jorge Cham of PHD Comics fame is coming to Toronto to give a lecture in the Faculty of Medicine!
Wait, what’s that? It costs $10 to see Jorge Cham’s talk? The same Jorge Cham who has become grad-school famous for joking about the plight of graduate students, most of whom are pretty short on spare cash?
And his talk is in the Faculty of Medicine, a faculty known far and wide as being fairly flush with money?
You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t rush to buy a ticket.
Comment [2]
I was surprised the read, over at Incoherently Scattered Ponderings, about the difference The Ponderer sees in hiring a graduate student or a postdoc. Of particular interest were the anecdotes regarding a postdoc who didn’t care to do any of the ‘grunt’ work (soldering), or another postdoc who didn’t want to do any data analysis, favouring undergraduates to do both tasks:
A postdoc in my group wanted to “outsource” most data analysis to an undergrad – which we did (I was lucky to have several talented undergrads) – mostly because postdoc did not want to get heavy into MATLAB. In retrospect, this was a mistake, because now every time we/I had a new idea for data analysis, postdoc had to go looking for undergrad, who was busy with classes, etc. When I was a postdoc I did all of my data analysis – no matter how mind-numbing it was (even though I was often grumpy about it too).
We all like and dislike different aspects of our research. In my field, lots of people hate having to realign lasers, or construct flow cells, or from my old life, pull micropipettes. But I have yet to find someone (other than The Ponderer and his postdoc) who doesn’t love playing around with their data, data that is usually only collected after a significant struggle in the lab. Compound this with the importance of being able to trust and repeat the manipulations you do to tease our important parameters from your data, and I can’t understand why anyone would want to hand off the analysis to someone else. I would prefer to analyze data in lieu of basically any other lab task I can think of.
Comment [4]
The recent redesign here at Biocurious resulted in a return to our roots, so to speak, with Escherichia coli once again adorning the banner at the top of every page. This image is from David Goodsell‘s newly released second edition of The Machinery of Life, a book for the biocurious if there ever was one.
The Machinery of Life is a short (167 pages) and accessible introduction to life at the molecular scale. A more readable approach than found in a textbook, we are led through the various kinds of molecules you will find in biological systems (nucleic acids, proteins, lipids, and sugars), how these molecules are created, how energy is harnessed to power living things, and how living things protect themselves at the molecular scale. Along with clear explanations, images of molecules for which David Goodsell has become famous are used to illuminate concepts from the text. A favourite of mine is reproduced below (Fig. 2.2), which shows how enolase, an enzyme composed of two subunits which is involved in glycolysis, is held together by hydrogen bonds (the blue-red lines).
After introducing the molecules and their roles, we get a tour of cellular interiors, starting with the simple and relatively unstructured bacteria, specifically E. coli, the workhorse of molecular biology. E. coli shows us how crowded cellular interiors really are, and how such biological processes as protein synthesis, nucleic acid repair, and cellular locomotion via flagella occur. A particularly beautiful example of the crowded bacterial cellular milieu can be seen in Fig. 4.3, where the density of water and other small molecules (shown in green, pink, red, and yellow) surrounding proteins and nucleic acids (in blue and purple, respectively) is shown with particular clarity.
The book then turns to the study of human cells and the way our cells interact to form components of our bodies. This is largely an introduction to the different compartments found within eukaryotic cells (in contrast with the unstructured bacterial cellular interiors), and the cooperation, or at very least interaction, between cells that gives rise to muscles, the role of blood in the body, clotting (perhaps the 3rd edition will reference Andre’s PhD work), and the nervous system. The image detailing a nerve synapse (Fig. 6.10) is truly remarkable for those of us not used to the complexity of living things.
The latter third of the book then features various aspects of personal health, such as cancer, aging, viral infections, antibiotics, etc. This section is particularly apt to read now, given the current worldwide panic over H1N1 influenza. My own PhD molecule of interest, rhodopsin, also makes an appearance. It is at the end of the book where you can also find the relevant data for PDB entries which were used to generate all the figures containing molecular structures, as well as a list of additional references to continue the study of life at the molecular scale.
We’ve long been fans of David’s work here at Biocurious, and I was not let down with The Machinery of Life. In addition to the clear presentation of ideas, the physical quality of paper and binding are excellent, exactly as I was hoping for a book filled with such wonderful imagery. The price for such a book was also a welcome surprise (maybe I’m too used to academic prices!), at about $25 in Canada.
If you do pick up the book, click here for a small list of errata, or you can browse through reduced-size versions of all the figures, sans figure captions. For those you’ll need to buy the book, which is in my opinion well worth it.
Comment [1]
David Griffiths is best known as the author a fantastic series of textbooks. His book on electrodynamics is a classic in North American undergraduate education, although I’ve been disappointed to learn that it’s not as well known in Europe. Since I enjoyed reading his texts so much, it was nice to see that he has an article in the latest edition of Physics World and even nicer to read it. Now that he’s retired, I get the impression that he’s just calling it like he sees it and it makes for a good read.
My parents were professors (history and zoology), and they firmly believed that the purpose of education is to show students “how to think”. When I began teaching, I quickly discovered that many of my students could think much better – or at any rate much faster – than I could. What distinguished me from them was that I knew things that they did not, things they had been led to believe they ought to want to learn. I adopted a less-exalted goal: I think the purpose of education is to pass along to the next generation the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of humankind, and my role as a teacher is to make that process as efficient and palatable as possible.
I have known people who are in some sense too smart to be clear; they cannot remember what it was like not to understand something, because, I suppose, they never had this experience. They may be outstanding physicists, but they do not belong in the classroom. (There are exceptions: the most brilliant physicist I ever encountered, the late Sidney Coleman, was also – by far – the best and clearest teacher.)
Interestingly, another of Sidney Coleman’s graduate students, Phil Nelson, also has a knack for clear and engaging textbook writing and lecturing. Apparently something of Coleman rubbed off on them both.
Read the rest of Griffiths’ polemic for the full story. I can’t resist one more quotation:
I can explain the conservation of momentum in 15 minutes, but three hours in the lab would only convince an honest student that the law is false.
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
