That's a hell of a lot harder. Speciation involves many genes, and to my knowledge, we don't really understand the genes involved in any speciation event. Acheiving this would essentially be creating a brand new species. Quite a feat, and one I don't think we're close to. However, my background is animal biochemistry, not plant. Perhaps it would be easier in plants. I doubt it, though.
This is in fact what they do with most genetically modified crops right now. Well, sort of... the insert a gene that makes the GM crops sterile. However, this doesn't make people happy either, because now farmers can't save back some of their harvest to plant the next year (basically, they have to buy new seed).
Of course, that concern is less of an issue if a company is producing the GM crop for the purpose described in this article.
Unless you're someone with a good reason to keep your address out of the public domain!
When I was in college, I was stalked by someone I worked with. He threatened to kill me. I didn't take him too seriously until I found out he'd raped an undergrad he worked with in a previous position (all handled within the university, so no criminal charges, of course... just shunt him off to the next unsuspecting lab). When I moved away to grad school, he tracked me down and harrassed me in my new home. I was very, very careful about my contact details for several years after that.
This was many years ago, but I am still skittish about putting my name and address in the public domain. I wanted to give a chunk of money to Kerry (anyone but Bush....) this year. I've done well in life, so I could afford to give more than the cutoff for publication, whatever that is ($100? $200? No one seems to be sure.) This story has made me think twice. I'll probably still do it, because my stalker is ~10 years in my past. But I wonder how many people (mostly women) won't contribute because they hear about this.
On one hand, I agree with you... its good to keep the money in the open. On the other hand, I can see from personal experience how this can keep a group of people from contributing money to the candidates they believe in. I think the right thing is to publish names and zip codes, but not street addresses.
Sadly, its been my experience that very few people really think about the practical implications of the decisions to make addresses public. I'll confess I didn't think much about it until I looked out my window one night and saw the psycho from work outside my apartment building. Now I firmly believe that a private individual should be able to keep her address private no matter what.
This made me laugh out loud, so I figure I'll set the record straight, even though its probably too late for anyone to see it....
I live in southern California, where the measure of a woman's success is how good she looks in a bikini.
Regardless, I measure my success by how happy I am, and the is a combination of work and home life. And, lets be honest, a little bit of that bikini criteria. I have a PhD, lots of publications in my industry's literature, and a good salary... I think your post is the first time I've ever been accused of considering marriage the only indicator of my success. However, I agree with one of the other answers: I consider a good relationship to be a measure of success, because it tends to make me happy.
And by the way, I never said we got married, only that we're "living happily ever after". We're not married, but I hope we one day will be, because I think I've found the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.
I also never said anything about settling for a crap job (apologies to the happy meat packing plant floor moppers out there). I took a slightly different type of job that was available locally, rather than insisting on the exact sort of work I was doing and relocating. In short, I turned my career onto a different path, but I didn't abandon it. The original question was looking for advice about how to do just that, and I was annoyed to see a whole thread of posts advising him to tell his wife to deal with the city.
And for the record, I still have my nice high salary, and I've ended up really liking my new job. All while also considering what the other partner in the relationship wanted. See, like I said, we're living happily ever after.
Seriously, think about it. Presumably, he loves his wife and wants her to be happy. For whatever reason, she can't be happy in their urban/suburban environment. So he wants to make a move to someplace where she will be happy.
Who's making the most money has nothing to do with it.
And before you say I don't know what I'm talking about.... I made a very similar decision last year. I make almost twice as much as my boyfriend. I was laid off, and the jobs I was seeing in my field were all out on the east coast. Problem is, moving out east would have made my boyfriend seriously unhappy. So I looked for other opportunities. I did find something local, and we're currently living happily ever after. If I'd just said "screw you, I make the big bucks, we'll go where my career says we need to go", I doubt we'd be together. I certainly wouldn't stay with someone with that attitude. A marriage (or any long term relationship) is a partnership, and the person with the biggest salary should not use that to call all the shots.
He lost all credibility when he wrote that Ebola can be spread by a sneeze. This is just not true. None of the known strains that infect humans have ever been shown to spead via the air. It requires close contact with the infected persons blood or other secretions. There is a primate strain (Reston, I believe) that may spread via the air, but this is not proven, and the current theory is that if airborn transmission in fact occurred, it was due to lab conditions not likely to replicated in natural settings.
If people want to freak people out about infectious diseases, they should at least get their facts straight.
Personally, I'm far more bothered by our practice of including antibiotics in animal feed than by the existence of specialized research facilities to study particularly nasty disease. For the latter to make me sick, I have to have some really spectacularly bad luck. For the former to make me sick, evolution just has to do its thing....
I have no personal knowledge of the research done at Plum Island. However, they do have a website. Not that you are likely to believe what they say about themselves. I suspect the father of your childhood friend just got tired of explaining what he did to freaked out people like you, and don't really consider that anecdote evidence of some big coverup of the research that goes on there.
There is also no point in arguing over whether or not the US is still involved in bioweapons research. None of us knows for certain... and those that do, can't say, or aren't believed (when they say that there is no research aimed at developing bioweapons going on).
However, I don't think the two diseases you mention are likely targets for such research, if it is continuing. Nor is "escaped from a bioweapons research lab" the most likely explanation for the arrival of these diseases.
The disease that we call Lyme disease has been around in Europe for quite awhile. Here is a short history. You are correct that no one really knows when it showed up here, but given the tick-infested state of many of the early immigrants to America, I don't think we really need to invoke some governmental conspiracy theory to explain it. As many of the patient testimonials show, this is a difficult disease to diagnose, and I don't find it hard to believe that it existing for a hundred years or so in the US before anyone really noticed it. Furthermore, I don't think Lyme disease would be a likely target for bioweapon research. It requires a tick bite to transmit, and not even a bite by an infected tick is guaranteed to transmit the illness. And the disease doesn't quickly disable the infected person. So: flakely transmission and unreliable effects. Not the best characteristics for a weapon.
Last I heard, the theory for how West Nile came here was via airplane: either a mosquito or two hitched a ride, or a person on board was infected. Since many infected people never really think they have anything worse than the flu, this is not unreasonable.
West nile is also not the big scary disease it is often made out to be, and again strikes me as an unlikely target for bioweapons research. According to the cdc:
"From 1999 through 2001, there were 149 cases of West Nile virus human illness in the United States reported to CDC and confirmed, including 18 deaths. "
Compare that to these numbers for deaths from the flu: somewhere in the 20,000 to 30,000 range EVERY YEAR.
It also presumes that the survival of any single lobster is due to some positive genetic component, and not just random chance or subtle variations in the freezing technique/time frozen. The article doesn't really have enough detail to tell whether or not their techniques are rigorously standardized.
I don't know enough about lobsters to know whether there is a plausible genetic component. I do know that certain types of deep sea fish have proteins that bind to ice particles in their blood, thereby allowing them to live happily in very, very cold water. The proteins are called antifreeze proteins. A quick search on PubMed turned up no mention of whether or not they exist in lobsters, but they do seem to exist in bacteria and plants as well as the arctic fish I was originally thinking of.
So what are all of the scientists employed by pharma companies doing? Playing tiddlywinks?
Come on... its not a perfect industry, but its not populated by evil people who want to watch people die, either.
If a drug company has developed a drug that actually works, they're not going to sit on it. If its not cost-effective for them to take it to market, chances are they'll out-license it. The problem is, developing a drug that actually works is hard and expensive. Once you have a drug that seems to work, actually proving that it is safe and effective (i.e., getting FDA approval) is also hard and expensive.
In my opinion, without IP protection, no one would ever do it. The primary output of a pharma company isn't the little pill you swallow: its the knowledge that making a pill with those ingredients produces a good medicine. Getting that knowledge is expensive... producing the pill is not. This is why generics are so much cheaper. If you don't let the people who spent the money to get the knowledge benefit from it... well, you aren't going to get many new medicines.
I'm NOT saying drug companies are paragons of virtue. But really, villifying them isn't going to solve the problem. There are real market forces at work here. Any solutions you present must take these forces into account, or its no solution at all.
Er, your nerves aren't what is keeping you from doing the splits, except in that they are what is relaying the pain caused by attempting to stretch your tendons and/or muscles beyond their threshold.
IF this technology turns out to have a medical use, it would most likely be to replace damage nerves.
I don't really see a use for performance enhancement in athletes. Even if there is, there are far easier and less detectable ways for athletes to enhance their performance. What they do right now is get a chemist to synthesize them a new steroid that evades the current testing, but still mimics the effects of natural steroids. Unless we come up with a much more general way of testing for steroids, I suspect this avenue will continue to work for quite some time.
However, as others have said... if they can make this work, it would be a new way to treat people who have nerve damamge.
Er... the virus isn't TRYING to make you sick either. It's not "trying" to do anything. All it does is replicate itself. The fact that you get sick is a byproduct of that (a combination of the facts that the virus is using up your cells' resources, the virus is killing some cells, and your immune system is also killing cells as it fights the infection).
Theoretically, all an ancient virus needs to do to infect you is have some way of getting into your cells and a mechanism by which to copy itself (or co-opt your cells' into copying it).
30-45 is not young when you consider that life expectancy was once much lower than it is today. Google it for yourself. Here is one blurb that puts the life expectancy in the 1800s at ~30
And have ever looked at laborer fashions from the 1700s? I haven't but, I suspect the women at least weren't showing much back. You can disregard the fashions worn by the nobles, because they stayed out of the sun (being tanned was considered coarse).
The final piece of information you aren't considering is the fact that most people native to regions with lots of sun have darker skin. This adaptation protects their skin from the damage caused by UV (incidently, it also makes it harder for them to produce the vitamin D they need from sunlight, but that's another story.) My ancestors were all from northern Europe, but I grew up in Arizona and live in southern California. I am not adapted for my current environment: I'm adapted for a place where the sun barely shines half of the year!
The real trouble started when us fair-skinned northern European types started moving to the sunnier areas, stripping down to our skivvies, and hanging out at the beach.
I never said I had all of the answers. But you don't appear to have any facts.
The most likely reason we are only now seeing large numbers of melanomas is that people used to die of other things before the melanoma had a chance to appear. Our cells have natural defense mechanisms from DNA damage caused by UV rays, but these are not 100% perfect and mutations can occur. Most of these are benign. However, as we age, the mutations accumulate, and eventually you can get unlucky and have a harmful mutation.
Also, the practice of lounging half-naked in the sun for days on end in relatively new. In the olden days, people wore clothes when they worked outside, not swimsuits.
The link between UV rays and DNA damage is so well-documented that research scientists use it in the lab: they use UV light to fragment DNA or randomly introduce mutations into cells they are studying. Get any basic biochemistry or cell biology book to check my facts if you want.
Yes, we need some sunlight, but not nearly as much as most of us get. In the opinion of this fairly skeptical scientist, the link between sun exposure and melanoma is very strong. I wear my sunscreen.
No, they aren't spending as much on this as they spend on cancer, impotence, obesity, and other "western" diseases, but drug companies are COMPANIES. Which means they have to try to make money. If you want more money spent on diseases that primarily affect people who can't pay for drugs, you can give money to the Gates Foundation or lobby your government to spend more of your tax money on research into these diseases. You can't expect a for profit company to spend huge amounts of money researching drugs that are unlikely to make them a profit. They aren't charities, and I suspect that if they started acting like charities, they'd get hauled in front of the SEC for defrauding their investors.
Sorry to be so harsh, but the problem won't be solved until we start looking for a solution that is actually possible. Personally, I give money to charities that are funding research.
No, it is not "simply a matter of insufficient international research funding" that is slowing the development of anti-malaria drugs.
This is certainly a problem, and more money for malaria research would definitely help.
However, you could throw all the money in the world at the problem, and still not get a good drug as quickly as you'd like. To get a drug that is effective against a disease without also killing the host, you need to exploit differences between the host and the disease-causing organism. Malaria is caused by a eukaryotic parasite. Our cells are also eukaryotes. (Eukaryote = cell has a nucleus.) Diseases caused by eukaryotic parasites are difficult to fight, because many of the cellular mechanisms are very similar to those in the host cells. Many antibiotics (which kill bacteria, which are prokaryotes) work by disrupting things our cells don't have (like a cell wall), or by interfering with processes that are quite different in the bacteria. For instance, some antibiotics work by interfering with the protein synthesis mechanism in bacteria, which is fairly different from the protein synthesis mechanism in eukaryotes like humans.
Chloroquine was effective until the malaria parasite evolved resistance to it. All of these disease causing organisms are constantly evolving, and developing drugs that the organism can't "evolve around" only complicates the drug discovery process: you not only need to target a process that is different in the disease-causing organism than it is in the host, you also need that process to be so essential that the organism can't evolve a way to survive without it.
And by the way... we don't have an effective anti-SARS drug. Doctors were using antivirals developed to fight other diseases. There was some controversy over whether these drugs were helping or not. I can't remember how it turned out. Viruses are also difficult to combat with drugs, because they mostly use host cell resources to replicate.
I grossly oversimplified in much of this post, but you get the idea.... Yes, more money would help, but it wouldn't remove the challenging biological problems slowing drug development. It would just pay more people to try to think of ways to get around them.
Re:Interview questions.
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Beyond Pay?
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· Score: 1
This company has HR issues, but since your friend was offered the job, I doubt he has a court case. It is my understanding that the questions aren't necessarily illegal: discriminating against someone on the basis of the questions is. Therefore, companies have policies against these sorts of questions, so that if they do not hire a candidate, they are not open to nasty lawsuits.
One HR person at a previous company provided us with a helpful "no-no" list, which included questions about:
birthplace citizenship, nationality, or ancestry the manner in which an applicant learned a foreign language race and color criminal records (leave it to HR!) marital and family status residential issues (whether they own or rent, how long their commute would be, etc.) pregnancy religion or social affiliation sexual preference handicaps, medical conditions, or general state of health prior worker's comp claims (again, this is best left for HR) age financial affairs (although HR at my current job did a credit check....)
Here is an interesting quote from the document my HR person provided: "No matter what your motives, the crucial issue is the effect of your questions on the candidates. If the effect of your interview is to limit the numbers of women and minorities hired then chances are your are vulnerable to complaints."
It seems to imply that even if you don't discriminate based on the answers to your inappropriate questions, you could be open to a problem, since you may "scare off" women and minorities by making your company look like a bunch of racist neanderthals.
For what it's worth, I'm a (single, childless) woman and have often been asked about marital status and whether or not I have children. I dodge the question, but I always wonder why they are asking and if I would be hired if I said "well, I have 15 kids, but my husband stays home and takes care of them."
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read your opinion about what most drug research is nowadays.
While it is true that there are a few small companies working on rehabilitating compounds dropped due to side effects.... this is NOT where most of the research dollars get spent. And even if it was, there are so many more ways to get nasty side effects than the problem you describe (enantiomers, if I understand your post correctly) that there are entire textbooks written on the subject.
And most people working on computer-assisted drug design have PhDs in an appropriate field (such as computational chemistry).
This isn't to say that there aren't good niche options out there for an MD with computer knowledge, but most of the posts in this thread are pointing this doctor at fields that generally require a PhD. Even bioinformatics jobs, which once were accessible with a bachelor's in bio or chem and some IT geek leanings, now usually want a PhD or years and years of experience.
Also, bioinformatics is NOT a hot field. There have been massive layoffs in the field recently. I should know, its my field. And yes, I was laid off last year. I have a new job now, but I know many talented bioinformatics folks (with the requisite PhDs and years of experience) that have yet to find a new job. This "bioinformatics is hot" nonsense is several years out of date now. There are still jobs combining computers and biology, but they are not as easy to get as they once were. The bioinformatics "boom", during which anyone who knew what a gene was and had heard of Perl could get a job in the field, roughly coincided with the dot-com boom. It is most decidedly over now.
I do know one or two MDs in the field. They work in academic positions (less money than industry, but more freedom to do what you want). I think they switched in during the boom years, though.
Actually, the field that a physician with computer expertise would be extremely well-qualified for is medical informatics.
This is very, very different than bioinformatics or computational biology, both of which might use "supercomputers to solve biology problems".
Actually, there is talk that medical informatics and bioinformatics might be coming together. There is a relatively young field called pharmacogenomics, which is the study of how each individual's distinct genetic makeup affects how the drugs we take work.
With a little luck, and a few courses, I suspect that an MD might be able to get into this field without getting a CS degree. However, I am not all that familiar with hiring practices in the field (I'm more on the bioinformatics side), so it would be best to find someone in medical informatics to ask.
A particularly hot area right now (no guarantee it'll stay this way) is the management of clinical trial data. I get a lot of recruiters contacting me looking for people with this sort of expertise.
And while we're at it, we solve world hunger and bring peace to the entire world.... sounds like an excellent beauty contest speech.
First of all, we don't even know how many genes are in the human genome. We're still arguing over that, although best estimates are ~30,000.
Even if we did have a catalogue of all the genes, we don't have ANY clue what ~30% of them do. And there are many, many more where the most we can say is "this looks like a protease" (protease = protein that cuts up other proteins, if you're curious). Or "gene upregulated in stomach cancer". Not very helpful.
Even if we manage to work out what all the genes do, we don't know how they interact.
Even if we knew how they interacted, that is a far cry from being able to accurately model the normal and pathogenic states associated with these genes and their interactions.
Even if we could generate the models, we don't necessarily know how to create a small molecule drug that will intervene in the pathogenic process and set things right.
People are working on all of these issues, but I think most scientists would agree that we are years, in fact decades, from being able to solve "virtually every possible disease pathway through computationally generated cures".
As for making perfect copies of our DNA at birth... a lot of the "errors" are really polymorphisms that you are born with. Environmental effects determine whether or not the "error" is a problem for your health. Or you pick up one more mutation during life, and that together with the already existing polymorphism leads to cancer or whatnot.
So in short... its not that easy. Not even remotely that easy.
I know some excellent software developers in biotech who do not have any biology background. But they faced a sharp learning curve. In addition, many scientists are inherently suspicious of programmers bearing programs to "solve all of your problems", because they've been burned before. Biology is a very messy science. The rules governing the data are often unknown... that's what the scientists are doing research to discover! This is a very difficult area to address without including someone with both a background in biology and a reasonable understanding of the software development process. (Of course, I am biased, because being this "translator" is how I make my living....)
Also, I've gotten a lot of calls from people fleeing fields like telecom, wondering if biotech is a "safe" harbor. Yes, and no. It is certainly growing, but much of biotech is inherently boom-and-bust: most companies are venture funded and most of them don't make it. So while you can manage to create an excellent career at the interface of biology and IT, you almost certainly will go through several lay offs and company failures.
Biotech software developers are also not immune to the forces affecting the rest of the field: Accelrys, one of the most successful companies selling software to life sciences/pharma now does much of its development to India. Lion, another big player, recently laid off a lot of people, too. And these are the successful companies!
None of this means I disagree with the grandparent post... there IS a lot of interesting work to be done with biological data. But please don't think this is a hot, easy field to get into. The cost of entry is high (significant knowledge of biology) and the customers are hard to win over.
You don't get the job because of the contact. You get the interview because of the contact.
You can still blow it in the interview. Conversely, when you get the job, its because you are good at what you do.
Also, most people will not recommend someone for a job unless they thing that person is good at what he/she does.
I suggest changing your outlook on networking: its not getting a friend's dad to call up his buddy and say "you should talk to this kid". Its knowing people in your profession, and knowing them well enough that they feel they *could* recommend you for a job.
When I am hiring people, I don't place much importance on a recommendation from a random person who happens to know me and the candidate. I place importance on a recommendation from a person in the field whose opinion I respect and who says that the candidate knows how to use all the tools represented by the buzzwords on his resume.
So don't think of networking as "sucking up". Think of it as getting to know people, so that they will be able to honestly say they think you know your stuff when the time comes.
I agree user groups and the like are the best sources of contacts. But they work best if you join and go to a few meetings BEFORE you're looking for a job. (:
Seriously, I consider being active in my particular professional community to be a part of my *work* life, not my social life. Its nice when I meet people I actually like and would want to hang out with at these functions, but the reason to go is professional, not personal.
I apologize for continuing my rant... It sounds like you already know all of this. I am a scientist/database person, and dependent on "purer" computer geeks to do my job. I hate the fact the best geeks don't always get the job. The loser IT guys and programmers who schmooze their way in without really knowing what they are doing cost me time and cause me massive headaches! I want to see the better geeks land the jobs... but know that in the real business world , schmoozing counts. Hence my rants.
Re:Another day, another batch of applications
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Joel Rants About Resumes
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· Score: 2, Informative
Last time I was out of work, it was because I'd been laid off. My severance package included outplacement services. At the "how to get your next job" class that was part of those services, they said that ~70% of the time people land jobs via networking. The remaining 30% is split between things like Monster, applying to newspaper ads, and the like.
They didn't cite a source, but I don't think they really had any reason to lie to us. They already had my former employer's money, so the only other reasons to point everyone towards networking are (1) it is in fact the most successful way to get a new job, or (2) they are sadists who enjoy telling techie types to make phone calls to people they hardly know.
Re:Another day, another batch of applications
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Joel Rants About Resumes
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The comment about networking is dead on.
I've ranted, er, posted, about this in the past. Geeks need to learn how to network! The crap IT guys know how to network, and that's how they end up getting the jobs for which the real geeks are far more qualified.
Networking does NOT mean calling up everyone you know and asking them for a job.
Networking means that you: 1. Spend time developing a good 30 second description about the type of job you want and why you will be good at it.
2. Make a list of people you know who might know something about the jobs you want OR know someone else who knows something about the jobs you want.
3. Contact these people, give them your SHORT description of what you're looking for, and ask them if they have any advice or know anyone else that you should talk to. If you hat making cold calls, e-mail is fine for the initial contact. Just make it short, to the point, and use the spell checker.
4. Since you didn't waste their time or make them feel uncomfortable by asking for a job, they are likely to refer you to people they know.
5. Repeat as necessary.
This really works. I have gotten every job I've ever had via networking. The parent post is right: once you have an "in", you don't have to agonize so much over the cover letter. Your time is far better spent on networking than on sending out hundreds of resumes to every company you think might possibly hire you.
If you're fresh out of school and don't have many contacts yet... try your alumni association. Really. I occasionally get contacted from my alumni association, and I'm always happy to try to help. Heck, some weeks, if it gives me an excuse to get out of the office and have a nice lunch, I'd give job hunting advice to my arch enemy. I'll certainly do it for some kid fresh out of school, and I'll probably even pay for lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a hell of a lot harder. Speciation involves many genes, and to my knowledge, we don't really understand the genes involved in any speciation event. Acheiving this would essentially be creating a brand new species. Quite a feat, and one I don't think we're close to. However, my background is animal biochemistry, not plant. Perhaps it would be easier in plants. I doubt it, though.
This is in fact what they do with most genetically modified crops right now. Well, sort of... the insert a gene that makes the GM crops sterile. However, this doesn't make people happy either, because now farmers can't save back some of their harvest to plant the next year (basically, they have to buy new seed).
Of course, that concern is less of an issue if a company is producing the GM crop for the purpose described in this article.
Unless you're someone with a good reason to keep your address out of the public domain!
When I was in college, I was stalked by someone I worked with. He threatened to kill me. I didn't take him too seriously until I found out he'd raped an undergrad he worked with in a previous position (all handled within the university, so no criminal charges, of course... just shunt him off to the next unsuspecting lab). When I moved away to grad school, he tracked me down and harrassed me in my new home. I was very, very careful about my contact details for several years after that.
This was many years ago, but I am still skittish about putting my name and address in the public domain. I wanted to give a chunk of money to Kerry (anyone but Bush....) this year. I've done well in life, so I could afford to give more than the cutoff for publication, whatever that is ($100? $200? No one seems to be sure.) This story has made me think twice. I'll probably still do it, because my stalker is ~10 years in my past. But I wonder how many people (mostly women) won't contribute because they hear about this.
On one hand, I agree with you... its good to keep the money in the open. On the other hand, I can see from personal experience how this can keep a group of people from contributing money to the candidates they believe in. I think the right thing is to publish names and zip codes, but not street addresses.
Sadly, its been my experience that very few people really think about the practical implications of the decisions to make addresses public. I'll confess I didn't think much about it until I looked out my window one night and saw the psycho from work outside my apartment building. Now I firmly believe that a private individual should be able to keep her address private no matter what.
This made me laugh out loud, so I figure I'll set the record straight, even though its probably too late for anyone to see it....
I live in southern California, where the measure of a woman's success is how good she looks in a bikini.
Regardless, I measure my success by how happy I am, and the is a combination of work and home life. And, lets be honest, a little bit of that bikini criteria. I have a PhD, lots of publications in my industry's literature, and a good salary... I think your post is the first time I've ever been accused of considering marriage the only indicator of my success. However, I agree with one of the other answers: I consider a good relationship to be a measure of success, because it tends to make me happy.
And by the way, I never said we got married, only that we're "living happily ever after". We're not married, but I hope we one day will be, because I think I've found the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.
I also never said anything about settling for a crap job (apologies to the happy meat packing plant floor moppers out there). I took a slightly different type of job that was available locally, rather than insisting on the exact sort of work I was doing and relocating. In short, I turned my career onto a different path, but I didn't abandon it. The original question was looking for advice about how to do just that, and I was annoyed to see a whole thread of posts advising him to tell his wife to deal with the city.
And for the record, I still have my nice high salary, and I've ended up really liking my new job. All while also considering what the other partner in the relationship wanted. See, like I said, we're living happily ever after.
And you guys wonder why you're single...
Seriously, think about it. Presumably, he loves his wife and wants her to be happy. For whatever reason, she can't be happy in their urban/suburban environment. So he wants to make a move to someplace where she will be happy.
Who's making the most money has nothing to do with it.
And before you say I don't know what I'm talking about.... I made a very similar decision last year. I make almost twice as much as my boyfriend. I was laid off, and the jobs I was seeing in my field were all out on the east coast. Problem is, moving out east would have made my boyfriend seriously unhappy. So I looked for other opportunities. I did find something local, and we're currently living happily ever after. If I'd just said "screw you, I make the big bucks, we'll go where my career says we need to go", I doubt we'd be together. I certainly wouldn't stay with someone with that attitude. A marriage (or any long term relationship) is a partnership, and the person with the biggest salary should not use that to call all the shots.
He lost all credibility when he wrote that Ebola can be spread by a sneeze. This is just not true. None of the known strains that infect humans have ever been shown to spead via the air. It requires close contact with the infected persons blood or other secretions. There is a primate strain (Reston, I believe) that may spread via the air, but this is not proven, and the current theory is that if airborn transmission in fact occurred, it was due to lab conditions not likely to replicated in natural settings.
If people want to freak people out about infectious diseases, they should at least get their facts straight.
Personally, I'm far more bothered by our practice of including antibiotics in animal feed than by the existence of specialized research facilities to study particularly nasty disease. For the latter to make me sick, I have to have some really spectacularly bad luck. For the former to make me sick, evolution just has to do its thing....
I have no personal knowledge of the research done at Plum Island. However, they do have a website.
Not that you are likely to believe what they say about themselves. I suspect the father of your childhood friend just got tired of explaining what he did to freaked out people like you, and don't really consider that anecdote evidence of some big coverup of the research that goes on there.
There is also no point in arguing over whether or not the US is still involved in bioweapons research. None of us knows for certain... and those that do, can't say, or aren't believed (when they say that there is no research aimed at developing bioweapons going on).
However, I don't think the two diseases you mention are likely targets for such research, if it is continuing. Nor is "escaped from a bioweapons research lab" the most likely explanation for the arrival of these diseases.
The disease that we call Lyme disease has been around in Europe for quite awhile. Here is a short history. You are correct that no one really knows when it showed up here, but given the tick-infested state of many of the early immigrants to America, I don't think we really need to invoke some governmental conspiracy theory to explain it. As many of the patient testimonials show, this is a difficult disease to diagnose, and I don't find it hard to believe that it existing for a hundred years or so in the US before anyone really noticed it. Furthermore, I don't think Lyme disease would be a likely target for bioweapon research. It requires a tick bite to transmit, and not even a bite by an infected tick is guaranteed to transmit the illness. And the disease doesn't quickly disable the infected person. So: flakely transmission and unreliable effects. Not the best characteristics for a weapon.
Last I heard, the theory for how West Nile came here was via airplane: either a mosquito or two hitched a ride, or a person on board was infected. Since many infected people never really think they have anything worse than the flu, this is not unreasonable.
West nile is also not the big scary disease it is often made out to be, and again strikes me as an unlikely target for bioweapons research. According to the cdc:
"From 1999 through 2001, there were 149 cases of West Nile virus human illness in the United States reported to CDC and confirmed, including 18 deaths. "
Compare that to these numbers for deaths from the flu: somewhere in the 20,000 to 30,000 range EVERY YEAR.
It also presumes that the survival of any single lobster is due to some positive genetic component, and not just random chance or subtle variations in the freezing technique/time frozen. The article doesn't really have enough detail to tell whether or not their techniques are rigorously standardized.
I don't know enough about lobsters to know whether there is a plausible genetic component. I do know that certain types of deep sea fish have proteins that bind to ice particles in their blood, thereby allowing them to live happily in very, very cold water. The proteins are called antifreeze proteins. A quick search on PubMed turned up no mention of whether or not they exist in lobsters, but they do seem to exist in bacteria and plants as well as the arctic fish I was originally thinking of.
So what are all of the scientists employed by pharma companies doing? Playing tiddlywinks?
Come on... its not a perfect industry, but its not populated by evil people who want to watch people die, either.
If a drug company has developed a drug that actually works, they're not going to sit on it. If its not cost-effective for them to take it to market, chances are they'll out-license it. The problem is, developing a drug that actually works is hard and expensive. Once you have a drug that seems to work, actually proving that it is safe and effective (i.e., getting FDA approval) is also hard and expensive.
In my opinion, without IP protection, no one would ever do it. The primary output of a pharma company isn't the little pill you swallow: its the knowledge that making a pill with those ingredients produces a good medicine. Getting that knowledge is expensive... producing the pill is not. This is why generics are so much cheaper. If you don't let the people who spent the money to get the knowledge benefit from it... well, you aren't going to get many new medicines.
I'm NOT saying drug companies are paragons of virtue. But really, villifying them isn't going to solve the problem. There are real market forces at work here. Any solutions you present must take these forces into account, or its no solution at all.
Er, your nerves aren't what is keeping you from doing the splits, except in that they are what is relaying the pain caused by attempting to stretch your tendons and/or muscles beyond their threshold.
IF this technology turns out to have a medical use, it would most likely be to replace damage nerves.
I don't really see a use for performance enhancement in athletes. Even if there is, there are far easier and less detectable ways for athletes to enhance their performance. What they do right now is get a chemist to synthesize them a new steroid that evades the current testing, but still mimics the effects of natural steroids. Unless we come up with a much more general way of testing for steroids, I suspect this avenue will continue to work for quite some time.
However, as others have said... if they can make this work, it would be a new way to treat people who have nerve damamge.
That's BS. There's a cap, and its been met for this year already.
Universities can apply for more H1s, but companies can't. University H1s are primarily for research jobs, I think.
Er... the virus isn't TRYING to make you sick either. It's not "trying" to do anything. All it does is replicate itself. The fact that you get sick is a byproduct of that (a combination of the facts that the virus is using up your cells' resources, the virus is killing some cells, and your immune system is also killing cells as it fights the infection).
Theoretically, all an ancient virus needs to do to infect you is have some way of getting into your cells and a mechanism by which to copy itself (or co-opt your cells' into copying it).
30-45 is not young when you consider that life expectancy was once much lower than it is today. Google it for yourself. Here is one blurb that puts the life expectancy in the 1800s at ~30
And have ever looked at laborer fashions from the 1700s? I haven't but, I suspect the women at least weren't showing much back. You can disregard the fashions worn by the nobles, because they stayed out of the sun (being tanned was considered coarse).
The final piece of information you aren't considering is the fact that most people native to regions with lots of sun have darker skin. This adaptation protects their skin from the damage caused by UV (incidently, it also makes it harder for them to produce the vitamin D they need from sunlight, but that's another story.) My ancestors were all from northern Europe, but I grew up in Arizona and live in southern California. I am not adapted for my current environment: I'm adapted for a place where the sun barely shines half of the year!
The real trouble started when us fair-skinned northern European types started moving to the sunnier areas, stripping down to our skivvies, and hanging out at the beach.
I never said I had all of the answers. But you don't appear to have any facts.
The most likely reason we are only now seeing large numbers of melanomas is that people used to die of other things before the melanoma had a chance to appear. Our cells have natural defense mechanisms from DNA damage caused by UV rays, but these are not 100% perfect and mutations can occur. Most of these are benign. However, as we age, the mutations accumulate, and eventually you can get unlucky and have a harmful mutation.
Also, the practice of lounging half-naked in the sun for days on end in relatively new. In the olden days, people wore clothes when they worked outside, not swimsuits.
The link between UV rays and DNA damage is so well-documented that research scientists use it in the lab: they use UV light to fragment DNA or randomly introduce mutations into cells they are studying. Get any basic biochemistry or cell biology book to check my facts if you want.
Yes, we need some sunlight, but not nearly as much as most of us get. In the opinion of this fairly skeptical scientist, the link between sun exposure and melanoma is very strong. I wear my sunscreen.
And another thing: drug companies ARE researching malaria and other diseases that are most common in poorer parts of the world.
Novartis opened an institute for the study of tropical diseases a couple of years ago.
No, they aren't spending as much on this as they spend on cancer, impotence, obesity, and other "western" diseases, but drug companies are COMPANIES. Which means they have to try to make money. If you want more money spent on diseases that primarily affect people who can't pay for drugs, you can give money to the Gates Foundation or lobby your government to spend more of your tax money on research into these diseases. You can't expect a for profit company to spend huge amounts of money researching drugs that are unlikely to make them a profit. They aren't charities, and I suspect that if they started acting like charities, they'd get hauled in front of the SEC for defrauding their investors.
Sorry to be so harsh, but the problem won't be solved until we start looking for a solution that is actually possible. Personally, I give money to charities that are funding research.
No, it is not "simply a matter of insufficient international research funding" that is slowing the development of anti-malaria drugs.
This is certainly a problem, and more money for malaria research would definitely help.
However, you could throw all the money in the world at the problem, and still not get a good drug as quickly as you'd like. To get a drug that is effective against a disease without also killing the host, you need to exploit differences between the host and the disease-causing organism. Malaria is caused by a eukaryotic parasite. Our cells are also eukaryotes. (Eukaryote = cell has a nucleus.) Diseases caused by eukaryotic parasites are difficult to fight, because many of the cellular mechanisms are very similar to those in the host cells. Many antibiotics (which kill bacteria, which are prokaryotes) work by disrupting things our cells don't have (like a cell wall), or by interfering with processes that are quite different in the bacteria. For instance, some antibiotics work by interfering with the protein synthesis mechanism in bacteria, which is fairly different from the protein synthesis mechanism in eukaryotes like humans.
Chloroquine was effective until the malaria parasite evolved resistance to it. All of these disease causing organisms are constantly evolving, and developing drugs that the organism can't "evolve around" only complicates the drug discovery process: you not only need to target a process that is different in the disease-causing organism than it is in the host, you also need that process to be so essential that the organism can't evolve a way to survive without it.
And by the way... we don't have an effective anti-SARS drug. Doctors were using antivirals developed to fight other diseases. There was some controversy over whether these drugs were helping or not. I can't remember how it turned out. Viruses are also difficult to combat with drugs, because they mostly use host cell resources to replicate.
I grossly oversimplified in much of this post, but you get the idea.... Yes, more money would help, but it wouldn't remove the challenging biological problems slowing drug development. It would just pay more people to try to think of ways to get around them.
This company has HR issues, but since your friend was offered the job, I doubt he has a court case. It is my understanding that the questions aren't necessarily illegal: discriminating against someone on the basis of the questions is. Therefore, companies have policies against these sorts of questions, so that if they do not hire a candidate, they are not open to nasty lawsuits.
One HR person at a previous company provided us with a helpful "no-no" list, which included questions about:
birthplace
citizenship, nationality, or ancestry
the manner in which an applicant learned a foreign language
race and color
criminal records (leave it to HR!)
marital and family status
residential issues (whether they own or rent, how long their commute would be, etc.)
pregnancy
religion or social affiliation
sexual preference
handicaps, medical conditions, or general state of health
prior worker's comp claims (again, this is best left for HR)
age
financial affairs (although HR at my current job did a credit check....)
Here is an interesting quote from the document my HR person provided: "No matter what your motives, the crucial issue is the effect of your questions on the candidates. If the effect of your interview is to limit the numbers of women and minorities hired then chances are your are vulnerable to complaints."
It seems to imply that even if you don't discriminate based on the answers to your inappropriate questions, you could be open to a problem, since you may "scare off" women and minorities by making your company look like a bunch of racist neanderthals.
For what it's worth, I'm a (single, childless) woman and have often been asked about marital status and whether or not I have children. I dodge the question, but I always wonder why they are asking and if I would be hired if I said "well, I have 15 kids, but my husband stays home and takes care of them."
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read your opinion about what most drug research is nowadays.
While it is true that there are a few small companies working on rehabilitating compounds dropped due to side effects.... this is NOT where most of the research dollars get spent. And even if it was, there are so many more ways to get nasty side effects than the problem you describe (enantiomers, if I understand your post correctly) that there are entire textbooks written on the subject.
And most people working on computer-assisted drug design have PhDs in an appropriate field (such as computational chemistry).
This isn't to say that there aren't good niche options out there for an MD with computer knowledge, but most of the posts in this thread are pointing this doctor at fields that generally require a PhD. Even bioinformatics jobs, which once were accessible with a bachelor's in bio or chem and some IT geek leanings, now usually want a PhD or years and years of experience.
Also, bioinformatics is NOT a hot field. There have been massive layoffs in the field recently. I should know, its my field. And yes, I was laid off last year. I have a new job now, but I know many talented bioinformatics folks (with the requisite PhDs and years of experience) that have yet to find a new job. This "bioinformatics is hot" nonsense is several years out of date now. There are still jobs combining computers and biology, but they are not as easy to get as they once were. The bioinformatics "boom", during which anyone who knew what a gene was and had heard of Perl could get a job in the field, roughly coincided with the dot-com boom. It is most decidedly over now.
I do know one or two MDs in the field. They work in academic positions (less money than industry, but more freedom to do what you want). I think they switched in during the boom years, though.
Actually, the field that a physician with computer expertise would be extremely well-qualified for is medical informatics.
This is very, very different than bioinformatics or computational biology, both of which might use "supercomputers to solve biology problems".
Actually, there is talk that medical informatics and bioinformatics might be coming together. There is a relatively young field called pharmacogenomics, which is the study of how each individual's distinct genetic makeup affects how the drugs we take work.
Here is a PubMed link to an article about the potential for collaboration between bioinformatics and medical informatics. The abstract is free on PubMed, but unless you have access to a subscription to the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the article will cost you $5.
With a little luck, and a few courses, I suspect that an MD might be able to get into this field without getting a CS degree. However, I am not all that familiar with hiring practices in the field (I'm more on the bioinformatics side), so it would be best to find someone in medical informatics to ask.
A particularly hot area right now (no guarantee it'll stay this way) is the management of clinical trial data. I get a lot of recruiters contacting me looking for people with this sort of expertise.
And while we're at it, we solve world hunger and bring peace to the entire world.... sounds like an excellent beauty contest speech.
First of all, we don't even know how many genes are in the human genome. We're still arguing over that, although best estimates are ~30,000.
Even if we did have a catalogue of all the genes, we don't have ANY clue what ~30% of them do. And there are many, many more where the most we can say is "this looks like a protease" (protease = protein that cuts up other proteins, if you're curious). Or "gene upregulated in stomach cancer". Not very helpful.
Even if we manage to work out what all the genes do, we don't know how they interact.
Even if we knew how they interacted, that is a far cry from being able to accurately model the normal and pathogenic states associated with these genes and their interactions.
Even if we could generate the models, we don't necessarily know how to create a small molecule drug that will intervene in the pathogenic process and set things right.
People are working on all of these issues, but I think most scientists would agree that we are years, in fact decades, from being able to solve "virtually every possible disease pathway through computationally generated cures".
As for making perfect copies of our DNA at birth... a lot of the "errors" are really polymorphisms that you are born with. Environmental effects determine whether or not the "error" is a problem for your health. Or you pick up one more mutation during life, and that together with the already existing polymorphism leads to cancer or whatnot.
So in short... its not that easy. Not even remotely that easy.
I was just going to say something similar myself.
I know some excellent software developers in biotech who do not have any biology background. But they faced a sharp learning curve. In addition, many scientists are inherently suspicious of programmers bearing programs to "solve all of your problems", because they've been burned before. Biology is a very messy science. The rules governing the data are often unknown... that's what the scientists are doing research to discover! This is a very difficult area to address without including someone with both a background in biology and a reasonable understanding of the software development process. (Of course, I am biased, because being this "translator" is how I make my living....)
Also, I've gotten a lot of calls from people fleeing fields like telecom, wondering if biotech is a "safe" harbor. Yes, and no. It is certainly growing, but much of biotech is inherently boom-and-bust: most companies are venture funded and most of them don't make it. So while you can manage to create an excellent career at the interface of biology and IT, you almost certainly will go through several lay offs and company failures.
Biotech software developers are also not immune to the forces affecting the rest of the field: Accelrys, one of the most successful companies selling software to life sciences/pharma now does much of its development to India. Lion, another big player, recently laid off a lot of people, too. And these are the successful companies!
None of this means I disagree with the grandparent post... there IS a lot of interesting work to be done with biological data. But please don't think this is a hot, easy field to get into. The cost of entry is high (significant knowledge of biology) and the customers are hard to win over.
You don't get the job because of the contact. You get the interview because of the contact.
You can still blow it in the interview.
Conversely, when you get the job, its because you are good at what you do.
Also, most people will not recommend someone for a job unless they thing that person is good at what he/she does.
I suggest changing your outlook on networking: its not getting a friend's dad to call up his buddy and say "you should talk to this kid". Its knowing people in your profession, and knowing them well enough that they feel they *could* recommend you for a job.
When I am hiring people, I don't place much importance on a recommendation from a random person who happens to know me and the candidate. I place importance on a recommendation from a person in the field whose opinion I respect and who says that the candidate knows how to use all the tools represented by the buzzwords on his resume.
So don't think of networking as "sucking up". Think of it as getting to know people, so that they will be able to honestly say they think you know your stuff when the time comes.
I agree user groups and the like are the best sources of contacts. But they work best if you join and go to a few meetings BEFORE you're looking for a job. (:
Seriously, I consider being active in my particular professional community to be a part of my *work* life, not my social life. Its nice when I meet people I actually like and would want to hang out with at these functions, but the reason to go is professional, not personal.
I apologize for continuing my rant... It sounds like you already know all of this. I am a scientist/database person, and dependent on "purer" computer geeks to do my job. I hate the fact the best geeks don't always get the job. The loser IT guys and programmers who schmooze their way in without really knowing what they are doing cost me time and cause me massive headaches! I want to see the better geeks land the jobs... but know that in the real business world , schmoozing counts. Hence my rants.
Last time I was out of work, it was because I'd been laid off. My severance package included outplacement services. At the "how to get your next job" class that was part of those services, they said that ~70% of the time people land jobs via networking. The remaining 30% is split between things like Monster, applying to newspaper ads, and the like.
They didn't cite a source, but I don't think they really had any reason to lie to us. They already had my former employer's money, so the only other reasons to point everyone towards networking are (1) it is in fact the most successful way to get a new job, or (2) they are sadists who enjoy telling techie types to make phone calls to people they hardly know.
The comment about networking is dead on.
I've ranted, er, posted, about this in the past. Geeks need to learn how to network! The crap IT guys know how to network, and that's how they end up getting the jobs for which the real geeks are far more qualified.
Networking does NOT mean calling up everyone you know and asking them for a job.
Networking means that you:
1. Spend time developing a good 30 second description about the type of job you want and why you will be good at it.
2. Make a list of people you know who might know something about the jobs you want OR know someone else who knows something about the jobs you want.
3. Contact these people, give them your SHORT description of what you're looking for, and ask them if they have any advice or know anyone else that you should talk to. If you hat making cold calls, e-mail is fine for the initial contact. Just make it short, to the point, and use the spell checker.
4. Since you didn't waste their time or make them feel uncomfortable by asking for a job, they are likely to refer you to people they know.
5. Repeat as necessary.
This really works. I have gotten every job I've ever had via networking. The parent post is right: once you have an "in", you don't have to agonize so much over the cover letter. Your time is far better spent on networking than on sending out hundreds of resumes to every company you think might possibly hire you.
If you're fresh out of school and don't have many contacts yet... try your alumni association. Really. I occasionally get contacted from my alumni association, and I'm always happy to try to help. Heck, some weeks, if it gives me an excuse to get out of the office and have a nice lunch, I'd give job hunting advice to my arch enemy. I'll certainly do it for some kid fresh out of school, and I'll probably even pay for lunch.