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There seems to be an increasing number of TV shows that promote a positive view of science, the scientific method, and a sceptical world-view: it cures people on House, solves crime on CSI and Bones, and entertains on The Big Bang Theory. Even math is useful in the Numb3rs universe. But, when scientists see these shows, they often get hung up on the inaccuracies and misperceptions (I know I do). There’s a lot to complain about, but in the end I think they are a net positive for science because they reach a broad audience and tend to put science in a positive light. Compare these to X-Files, a show I enjoyed. In every episode, the sceptical scientist-type Skully is basically portrayed as a close-minded party pooper to Mulder, the uncompromising truth seeker who sees, and in the show finds, paranormal activity everywhere. This couldn’t be illustrated more succinctly than in the show’s tag line: I want to believe.
Still, if the current offerings don’t satisfy you, there’s now a way you might be able to help. Just contact the Science and Entertainment Exchange and let them know your field of expertise and willingness to consult with writers eager to get their science right. Jennifer Ouellette, science writer and blogger is now the director of the National Academy of Sciences program.
Jennifer gave a very entertaining talk introducing us to some shows that feature science prominently and she picked out a few great examples to illustrate her points. A lot of them made me cringe, but I also saw some truth in them. As she says, TV shows sometimes reflect life through a funhouse mirror: it may distort and exaggerate what you see, but it’s still a reflection of reality. This is true of Brennan’s habit of using too much jargon when trying to communicate her findings on Bones. It always annoys me and part of me wishes the writers would cut it out, but then I remember how often it happens in reality and I wonder if there’s any exaggeration at all. At least the main character doesn’t look like Einstein in a lab coat!
So far I’m very impressed by the level (and amount) of biological physics at the March meeting. There’s even more to be excited about this year than in previous years and I think it reflects physicists’ growing excitement about biology and a larger group of scientists realizing that they have things to talk about with physicists. It’s great to see.
One of the talks this morning was about how ants search when exposed to a new environment. When they find themselves in an empty, uniform, flat box, they seem to initially walk in a directed way away from the point of origin and then start a random walk to explore the new space. These experiments by William Baxter from Penn State have the appeal of simplicity, and they already yield interesting results. If one ant performs a random walk after a dash to a new area, what do two ants do? Do they avoid each other to make the search more efficient? So many great things to do. This also reminded me of a profile in em>Science (subscription required) last week that I wanted to write about anyway. If you have access, have a look. Awesome stuff.
There was also a nice talk by Elijah Bogart in Carl Franck’s group at Cornell. They’re using dicty as a model to study the lag phase of cell growth that precedes the exponential phase. Check out their paper in PRE and stay tuned for new results.
Finally, Greg Grason gave a beautiful talk on filament bundling and twisting. Bundles form when filaments are attracted to one another and this favours a hexagonal packing. In the absence of other factors, this should lead to infinite width bundles because the system could always reduce its free energy by adding another filament to the bundle. But, of course, there are other factors. One of those that Greg illustrated so nicely is that biological filaments are chiral, and that these chiral, twisted filaments would prefer a slight tilt when they pack together. This effect can lead to the formation of twisted bundles to accommodate this preference, but in this case, the filaments must bend and this has its own energy cost. Using mostly geometric arguments he was able to come to some neat conclusions about bundles. He and former postdoc advisor Robijn Bruinsma published some of this work in PRL and Greg has a new paper extending this work on the arXiv. This could be a link to the more recent paper, but I can’t check because I’ve been denied access to the arXiv using the convention center wireless:
Accesses from your site have triggered our automatic robot detection system.
Presumably the large concentration of physicists here has confused the server!
I’m at the American Physical Society March Meeting in Pittsburgh and, as there was at BSM a few weeks ago, there’s free wireless. That’s two for two at big meetings this year, so kudos to the organizers!
I didn’t get to a lot of talks today because I had two to give myself (one on my work on myosin filament structure using TIRF/AFM and another on Florian Rehfeldt’s work on stem cell mechanics in 2D and 3D), but now I’m at the session on nucleic acid packaging and it looks good so far.
If you happen to be in Pittsburgh, I actually have two more talks to go so please come and check them out. The next one is on Rich Tsai’s work on phagocytosis and how macrophages know that some cells are “self” and should not be eaten and other cells are “foreign” and should be eaten (hint: it’s CD47). That talk will be tomorrow at 9:48AM in the H40 session “Biological Physics I.” I was reading Rich’s paper in the train on the way here so I’m hardly an expert, but it’s quite an interesting story and I’m looking forward to sharing it. My last talk is on work I’ve been doing on blood clot mechanics that I’m really excited about. We’ve been able to get quite a lot of information on the processes that allow clots to stretch so far from the nano- through micro- to the macroscale. That talk will be on Thursday morning at 10:12AM in the V40 session on “Mechanics of Biomolecular Systems II.”
If you’re here and haven’t given your talk yet, here’s some timely advice from Physioprof on how to give a short talk. His advice is good for a 15 minute talk and is probably even more important at the APS with the insanely short 10 minute talks.
Comment [2]
As you may have heard, a letter by Mathias Osvath from Lund University in Current Biology [summary] describes a Swedish chimp that planned attacks by stockpiling rocks or chips of concrete from its enclosure in a calm state and later throwing them at visitors while performing dominance displays. “Such planning implies advanced consciousness and cognition traditionally not associated with nonhuman animals.” This is an interesting finding and I can’t help but side with the chimp in railing against his viewers.
But this also brings another recent news story on chimps into sharp relief. As reported in today’s Science, the Humane Society of the United States is claiming that they have evidence of 338 possible violations of the Animal Welfare Act taking place at the New Iberia Research Center in Lafayette. I think most people have a sense of recognition when looking at great apes and this is one factor that makes them such controversial research subjects. One researcher was quoted in the Science story saying “We can’t afford to support an across-the-board ban. There are diseases that can only be studied in chimpanzees.” Bearing in mind that this is a one line quote in a news story, it is of course not sufficient justification in and of itself. There are lots of experiments that could only be done in people, but out of the possibilities, we rightfully accept only a small subset as ethical. Ajit Varki of UCSD (who doesn’t do invasive research with animals) gets it about right in my opinion:
He says no research should be done on chimps that we would not do on humans. “On the other hand, I would no more think of banning all research on chimpanzees than of banning all research on humans,” says Varki. “That would be a bad idea for the future of either species.”
This may be important to keep in mind, because a bill is in committee that would ban invasive research on chimps, where invasive includes “any research that may cause death, bodily injury, pain, distress, fear, injury, or trauma.” Again from the article:
Neuroscientist Todd Preuss of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta complains that the bill defines “invasive” too broadly. It would prohibit his and other groups from sedating chimpanzees to perform brain scans or drawing blood for behavioral experiments and endocrinology studies. He calls these interventions “minimally invasive.”
I can’t decide how I feel about this right now and I certainly can’t predict what my future mental state might be! Maybe I’m more like a squirrel than a great ape. I think I’ll go stockpile some food.
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.
