Biology is a young science and this is easy to forget. For all the hype and glamour of modern conferences and publications, we still are in the midst of empirical data gathering. A bit what astronomers and tinkerers were doing in the XVII century. We have changed collecting and classifying beetles and butterflies for genes and regulatory regions, but the method has not changed that much: systematics. This aside, there are, let us say, three issue in Biology: how a system builds itself, how it works and how it evolves, We know a lot about the second, have a good […]
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New publication on “symmetry breaking in ensembles of ES cellsâ€
New publication on “symmetry breaking in ensembles of ES cells†Progress on our attempts to understand the connection between genes, signals, cells and embryos have just been published in Development. In a first paper we describe a new experimental system in which we coax mouse Embryonic Stem cells to make structures with an anterior posterior axis and a germ layer organization that resembles that of an embryo (http://dev.biologists.org/content/141/22/4231.full). In a second paper we use this experimental system to gain some insights into the emergence of the spinal cord (http://dev.biologists.org/content/141/22/4243.full). You can see a movie and some thoughts on the experiments […]
Continue readingA lesson from William Harvey in the XVII century on the value of model organisms
It is well known that history repeats itself but, as we have limited memory and a tendency to think about ourselves and our times, we forget the lessons from the last time it came around. Let me tell you a story. Like many of you I associate William Harvey with the wondrous discovery of the circulation of the blood and the identification of the heart as the pump that keeps this movement going. I also was aware that he performed the first proper or recorded measurement in biology as the amount of blood going around the body in a given […]
Continue readingSummer Musing
What is your favourite experiment? This is a question that is bound to come up in conversations of scientists, class rooms or retreats. It is sort of like: what’s your favourite novel or your favourite painter. It is always difficult to answer because one is bound to be wrong with what it is said on the spur of  the moment. Whatever one  says –and you will know if you have been here- you will change your mind later, because what you have said is what you remembered. Given time you are likely to come up with a list of experiments […]
Continue readingPublish: What? Why? Where? How? – Part II: Solutions?
These are notes for a lecture given by AMA in a workshop about Responsible Research held at LMU in Munich (Germany) on 24 July 2014 (www.responsibleresearch.graduatecenter.uni-muenchen.de/index.html). The lecture is broken into two parts, the first one dealt with biomedical publishing, its origins and current state. This is the second instalment on solutions. Videos of both the lecture and the subsequent panel discussion are available at www.responsibleresearch.graduatecenter.uni-muenchen.de/presentations/videos/index.php The problem is, to a certain degree, clear. Let me recap. What was conceived as a way to communicate between scientists and between scientists and the public has become a measure of success, a ruler […]
Continue readingPublish: What? Why? Where? How?
These are notes for a lecture given by AMA in a workshop about Responsible Research held at LMU in Munich (Germany) on 24 July 2014 (www.responsibleresearch.graduatecenter.uni-muenchen.de/index.html). The lecture is broken into two parts, this one deals with biomedical publishing, its origins and current state. A second instalment on solutions will follow. Videos of both the lecture and the subsequent panel discussion are available at www.responsibleresearch.graduatecenter.uni-muenchen.de/presentations/videos/index.php The answers to the title of this talk should be obvious. You want to publish your work in the most appropriate journal/place so that people know what you have done, use it in their research […]
Continue readingThe unbearable lightness of being a developmental biologist at the start of XXI century
Let us play a game. Here you have three selections from the recent indexes of three famed journals publishing in the area of Developmental Biology. See if you guess which belongs to which (sure you can put the titles in PubMed and you will find them, but try to do it blindly): Index 1 1. Large hypomethylated domains serve as strong repressive machinery for key developmental genes in vertebrates 2. Homeotic Function of Drosophila Bithorax-Complex miRNAs Mediates Fertility by Restricting Multiple Hox Genes and TALE Cofactors in the CNS 3. KFoA, a ß-catenin interacting protein linking canonical and non-canonical Wnt signalling […]
Continue readingNew Paper
Our manuscript “An interplay between extracellular signalling and the dynamics of the exit from pluripotency drives cell fate decisions in mouse ES cells†in out in Biology Open (http://bio.biologists.org/content/early/2014/06/13/bio.20148409.full). We tried a more ‘conventional’ journal but we were told, basically, that there were no new genes. As the editors of this august journal were correct, we opted for actually publishing our findings and submitted to Biology Open where we got an effective, fair and constructive review process. The manuscript has much that is new and of interest as we use an integrated approach with different experiments to understand how […]
Continue readingModern Biology and its tower of Babble
Reading the index of some glamour journals made me think about the Tower of Babel. The famous story starts when life on earth had got under way after The Flood and the surviving human beings decide to build a very large tower that reached into Heaven to challenge God. There is a lot of Biology in the Bible and it is stated that, at this time, all human beings –being derived from a founder effect due to the ‘Noah population bottleneck’- were similar, spoke the same language and shared purpose. Not to digress, the work goes well, helped by […]
Continue readingA new forum for Physics and Biology in Cambridge
The Theory of Living Matter is a new discussion group in Cambridge led by young physicists from the Theory of Condensed Matter (TCM) group in the Cavendish (Cambridge). The idea behind the group (www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/tlm/) is to promote interactions between theorists and experimentalists in the realm of the biological questions and serve as a forum and a local hub for this topic. There have been two meetings to date with a fair amount of success. This is a very good time for physicists to get into Biology and for biologists to deal with physicists. The main reason for this is that […]
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