At the BSDB meeting, Michael White (University of Manchester), pioneer of the imaging of gene expression in living cells, gave one of his customarily sound, interesting, inspiring and enlightening talks in which he discussed his work on the dynamics of NFkB expression and its regulatory consequences. The accumulation of measured variables and the dynamic nature of the information gathered by his experiments demand models and, in the course of the talk, he managed to slip some statements about why do we need models in Biology. And I do not think he meant Cell/Nature or Science Figure 9 models (a collection […]
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Stem Cells in Developmental Biology: a debate at the BSDB
Last week the BSDB (British Society for Developmental Biology) celebrated its annual gathering at Warwick. Always a good place to go for quality developmental biology which is enhanced by the arrangement of holding the meeting together with the BSCB (British Society for Cell Biology): these days there is much cell biology in developmental biology. One of the BSDB sessions focused on Stem Cells and highlighted the clear connection between this area of research and developmental biology, or so it seems to some of us but ……perhaps not all. The AGM of the BSDB had, for the second year running, a […]
Continue readingWhat’s in an asterisk: the power of Nature
A recent decision by Nature to restrict the number of joint first authors to three and not to have joint senior authors (see *) is another step of this (and other HIF journals) to accumulate power in running science. They already influence decisions about position and grant income through what and who they allow to publish, they also determine the content and the timing of publications through the lengthy review process. It could be said that these effects are indirect and that we contribute to the mechanisms that foster this meddling into our affairs, but their new policy is unilateral, […]
Continue readingOn epistasis, or how genetic analysis can mislead us about biological processes.
As I am about to embark on my brief lecturing stint in the department, thoughts about the subject matter come to mind. One that always concerns me is the value of epistasis (the exercise to create functional hierarchies of genes through the analysis of the phenotypes of double mutants) to learn about processes in developmental biology. The problem is simple. Genetics is to Biology what mathematics is to Physics: a formal language that allows us to pose questions and find answers. A mutant screen is, in many ways, the formulation of a problem: what controls the decision of a bacterium […]
Continue readingThe end of the biological sciences…..as we knew them
In his book “The end of Scienceâ€(1997), James Horgan explores in depth what is left to be known about Nature and the Universe at the end of the XX century. It is an interesting question and one that lies at the heart of the scientific endeavour. Advances in the Physical Sciences, in particular, give the impression that all there is left to know are a few footnotes and, yes, there was the Higgs Boson……. But what about Biology? It has been said that Science will end when we learn more and more about less and less and while Physics has […]
Continue readingMaps: resolution and insight in biology
(thoughts after reading Simon Garfield “On the map: why the world looks the way it does†Gothan books 2012 ) Much of Biology is about maps . Maps of genomes, of cells, of genetic interactions, protein interactions, of the brain, networks. Maps are essential because they orient us, guide us, help us find relationships between objects of the same kind which are otherwise invisible, and reveal how global pictures emerge from components. But how accurate are our maps? How good are our current biological maps as representations of the reality they try to capture? I often worry about these […]
Continue readingCongratulations to Jamie Trott
Congratulations to Jamie Trott for defending his thesis work on “B-catenin signalling and lineage commitment of mouse ES cells: a single cell analysisâ€
Continue readingCooperation: is there a problem?
There was one more lab meeting before the break and it fell to Adrian Friday to do it and to continue the evolutionary theme that we had began on our Christmas celebration. A few months ago a discussion broke up in the field of evolutionary biology. It was (and still is) a riot of a discussion which has engaged the minds and the hearts of people in the field. It spilled into the newspapers and you can read a nice (though biased) account of it by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker (“Kin and kindâ€, March 5 2012). At the […]
Continue readingOur Christmas lunch
A wintery visit to the botanic gardens (Cambridge, UK) was the beginning of our Christmas celebration which was organized by Lenka Filipkova. It was a typical gray and ‘about-to-rain’ Cambridge morning when we gathered for a walk around the gardens. Lenka acted as tour guide with a wealth of information and patience as the different contingents pulled in different directions with the British, not minding the drizzle and the cold, moving in search of trees and barren flower beds, and the more continentally minded looking for the shelter of the green houses and the tropical exhibits. It was a great […]
Continue readingA visit to Madrid
A week ago, courtesy of my colleague Nicole Gorfinkiel, I visited the Centre of Molecular Biology (CBM) Severo Ochoa in Madrid. Many people will not have heard of this place but for those toiling with Drosophila it is here that, in the 1970s and early 80s, Antonio Garcia Bellido and his students taught the world how to do lineage analysis with mutants and thereby brought together genetics with cell biology to study the development of organs and tissues. Of course, today this type of approach is routine in all labs and in all organisms, but it originated in Madrid. It […]
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