I happen to be on the other end of this. The lab I work in participates in a youth apprenticeship program with the local school district, and one of the options for the gifted and talented students that get into the program is biotechnology. For the last year and a half I've had a high school student assisting me (16 hours a week, full time in summer) on some of the research projects I'm working on (I'm a postdoctoral research associate in entomology). Through his lab work and a weekly 4 hour lab course he's learned quite a few skills. Cloning techniques, site-directed mutagenesis, how to do SDS-PAGE and acrylamide gel electrophoresis (non-bio people: put gene of interest into vector and then into bacteria, make specific mutation in gene, separate out proteins and DNA fragments by size), how to make up solutions, sterile technique, a bit of raising insects, and other basic molecular biology techniques. That and of course fill tip boxes and wash and autoclave labware, which is just as fun as it sounds. I try to keep it non-repetitive and introduce new things when he's mastered old, and his doing of more grunt work gives me time to do other things once I'm sure he's okay on his own for a given technique. Not many high school students are capable of operating at the level he's at. However the lab's been doing this for quite a few years now and all of the students leave with at least a good introduction to basic molecular biology techniques and what science is really like: if you only had to do it once it'd be search, not REsearch. I don't think they've ended up as authors on papers as of yet, but they do help keep the lab running. Some have been given mini-projects that have been of backburner project interest level, some of which now are being pursued by graduate students. So yes in the right environment high school students can make a contribution to real research.
"I'd think there's going to be significant push-back getting used to the idea of drugs coming from a bunch of guys in their garages."
How about from a bunch of guys working in a warehouse in one of the bad parts of town? I ask in all seriousness because a friend of mine is doing exactly this in a biotech startup and apparently attracting venture capital hasn't been too rough. Sure I kid him about being in the drug business on the bad side of town but nobody will ever really know if something looks promising enough to partner with a big company to push through clinical trials. In any report you'd probably just see the startup corporate name and logo (I hope my friend didn't draw it because then it'd be a cartoon chicken humping a moose or something) and "in partnership with MegaBuck$ biotech giant NASDAQ symbol ASDFAS."
I've been doing research in the biological sciences for 12 years now, including some work that was at least tangentially related to human health. I am not in it for the paycheck--if that's all I wanted, my friends and I joke that we'd go to KFC School of Business Management and be assistant managers at fast food restaurants making more than we do in science. I, and the majority of the people I know, don't want to be professors either. It's extremely rare for a professor to actually do any lab work themselves, but if you ask they'll tell you they miss it. Besides there are 300 people applying for each professorship at a decent university. Then if you are unlucky enough to get the job, you have to successfully fight in a viciously competitive funding environment to get tenure and not lose your mind or your liver in the process. It's actually hard enough to keep a job in academic science, period. My boss and I are applying for grants. Hers are in part to keep my position funded, she's got one out and is writing a second. I've got one out, and am applying for two or possibly three more. Contrary to what you wrote, my grants are largely my ideas and my writing, and should I get funded is my money, not the boss's. However science funding is so obscenely bad (most grants have ~5% success rate, the best one I'm applying for has ~25%) that I'm also going to look for a new job, with the boss's full knowledge and support, even though we'd both very much like me to stick around for another couple years and get our proposed butt kicking science done.
So why do it if there's nothing but nonstop stress, Burger King assistant manager pay, and institutionalized job insecurity? I get to solve problems. I get to figure things out. I get to do things (sometimes, not often, but sometimes) that nobody has ever done before, see things nobody else has ever seen before. Work in a small way on projects that could impact millions of people's lives. I'll never be famous, which is fine with me. I'll never be rich, which, well, I can tolerate. I might not ever have job security...which okay, I'll admit is seriously grinding down my enthusiasm and idealism. But the things I've gotten to do--even paid a pittance to do--I wouldn't trade. Catching jellyfish off the docks in Oregon. Turned loose on a billion dollar synchrotron, unsupervised at 3 am to understand how an enzyme known to be a virulence factor in several diseases functions at an atomic level. Making radioactively labeled mosquitoes to understand lipid trafficking, working with cell culture (It's a cell from an insect's midgut...that under laboratory conditions can endlessly propagate itself. How cool! And here's my what I'm going to do with it...), genetically engineering fluorescent organisms, using high-throughput screening to find new drug lead compounds. A lot of hard work, but sometimes that's damn good fun. Plus along the way you get to understand phenomena on a level that most people don't even know exists. I'm of course not claiming god-king knowledge here, but I could spend a long time talking about the terrible beauty of host:pathogen and vector:pathogen relationships for example, or protein structure, or anything else I've studied a while, just like any other scientist. That's fun too, although not cool in most of society. But my mom still thinks I'm cool. Ok, no, she doesn't.
If you expect to get rich and famous doing science, no wonder your post seems bitter. It isn't going to happen and isn't a right reason to do science in the first place. Those pie-in-the-sky ideals are.
"Unlike the House rules, however, the senate requires 60 votes to get anything substantial done."
No. The senate requires exactly 50 votes plus the Vice President to get anything substantial done. The Democrats need to grow a spine and tell the Republicans to go ahead and filibuster. Sure it would delay passage of anything for about a month, but after that spectacular Republican self-destruction the Democrats would have the necessary political clout to over-ride any further obstruction.
"Many universities sit on huge sums of money and still get government help so I'm not losing sleep over that one either."
According to this page, The top public university system in terms of endowment is (surprisingly) the University of Texas system (that's all the UofT campuses) with $10 billion. I imagine post-crash it's closer to half that. My own system (University of Wisconsin) had as of 2004 just under a billion. Sounds like we ought to be sitting pretty, uncorking the champagne, eating caviar, and lighting our cigars with $100 dollar bills, eh? Not so. That's the value of the endowment--the principle of which can't ever be touched. You have a global recession so any university that had plans for income from the endowment has to put those plans on hold. Plans like deferred maintenance, a critical problem at every university in the country. Or replacing obsolete buildings. After World War 2, there was a huge surge in construction, that picked up again in the 60's and 70's. There's now a glut of cheap and hastily constructed buildings from the 50's to the 70's that are in dire need of replacing. Or simply running the university: state governments have been slashing funding of their university systems for years. Chronic underfunding of universities also has the inevitable result of skyrocketing tuition which means that a university education is becoming unaffordable even to the middle class. This at a time when American businesses complain about lack of qualified job applicants. All this makes it sound like funding of education and the universities ought to be a high priority in any stimulus package. Unfortunately, it got cut by a handful of short-sighted Senators.
The electron storage ring at APS has a circumference of 1104 meters. The Experiment Hall wraps around it and is where all the beam lines where most of the work is done are at. Even though I've been a site user there several times I couldn't tell you what sort of lights are used, other than they seemed to be large lights like what a warehouse would use, and were harsh. APS has a picture. Yes brilliant scientists could have put in nice soft full spectrum lights that didn't hum. But they cost money which is in very short supply and high demand. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost for replacing the lights (initial bulb/tube cost, labor, plus any rewiring) in a building that big would be greater than the cost of a brand new detector at a beamline ($million plus). The detector is a major component in what allows us to do work. Lights on the other hand, as long as you don't need a flashlight, suck it up.
I remember visiting SSRL about five years back as a site user. Protocol at the time was that you pretty much ate, slept, and worked at the beamline you were assigned to in 16-N hour shifts until your time ran out. Consequently there was food trash all over...and a huge ant infestation. Near the end of the time I joked that we ought to put one of the ants in the beam. About a year later, a study came out in Science investigating tracheal respiration in insects using synchrotron radiation.
"Not sure how it works in most fields, but in the one I'm in, it's your boss that gets the funding, not you."
In academia, that depends on what level you're at too. Undergrads very rarely have their own money, if they do it won't exceed at most a couple thousand dollars. Masters students in sciences sometimes pay their own tuition, other times are paid by the prof, and occasionally will have their own money. Ph.D. students usually are supported by the prof but sometimes in cash-strapped departments must have their own support for salary (and many are encouraged to apply for small grants of their own at least). Post-docs sometimes as a condition of being "hired" by a professor must come with their own grant covering 100% of salary, a bit of travel money for conferences, and cover a portion of lab supplies. Since post-docing is still viewed as training for becoming a professor, it makes sense that if you can't get a grant to support yourself you'll never survive the tenure process.
I don't care what "dangerous" chemicals terrorists or any other boogeyman can get their hands on in general. Thats because context matters: that's what compound(s), time, location, amount, etc. We can be reasonable about which chemicals are banned for the home hobbyist, which are restricted (by amount, or maybe a background check) without practically banning dihydrogen monoxide like we are now. Besides everyday household products can contain large amounts of dangerous chemicals anyway. If I want to make home-brew napalm without using any illegal chemicals, it'd be pretty easy to do (dangerous, but easy). Freedom is 100% dead long before you can get 100% security...which doesn't exist anyway.
We don't have 5-fold symmetry. We're bilaterally symmetric; we have a top, bottom, left, and right. A starfish has a top and bottom, but no left or right. For what it's worth, not even a five-armed starfish has exactly 5-fold symmetry. They are considered radially symmetric, but are thought to have evolved from bilaterally symmetric organisms and have some structures that show this.
I guess you've never heard of the Clergy Letter Project then. It's specific to evolution but a requirement for the theory of evolution is an ancient earth. The text also explicitly supports modern science in general, which would include geology anyway.
"A member of the armed forces (a GENERAL!), a policeman, a firefighter, the owner of a barbershop, a barman, a sailor, just-from-frisco-but-not-gay, capitan of the school's wrestling team."
But what about the construction worker, indian chief, cowboy, and biker?
51% isn't enough. 100% isn't enough either (heh--Lieberman?). It has to be at least 51% freedom-loving Constitution-supporting senators, regardless of political party. Unfortunately you seldom get a senator who supports all of the Bill of Rights. Democrats have a bizarre hatred of the second amendment, Republicans aren't particularly fond of the 1st and 4th amendments. This FISA bill shits all over the 4th amendment, so every single Republican senator reliably goose-stepped up to vote for it (McCain and Sessions didn't vote, but were expected to vote for it. 22 Dems likewise betrayed their country including Obama). Every patriotic Nay vote came from Democrats plus Bernie Sanders who caucuses with them. So a point to Dems for being slightly less treasonous. Huzzah.
IIRC the first chemical synthesis of a gene was by Khoran in 1970. What these guys have done is replace the four bases of DNA with different ones, and with a different attachment to the ribose group (having a carbon-carbon triple bond instead of normal DNA's carbon-nitrogen single bond), and have demonstrated double-stranded helix formation. The phosphate deoxyribose backbone is still present in it's usual way. Other groups have modified the backbone of DNA; probably the most famous is peptide-nucleic acid where the backbone is like that of a protein backbone. Also non-standard bases have been introduced by many groups and have been used for years. The paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society also references these modifications plus some others, notably work simultaneously replacing bases and modifying the sugar groups in the backbone. Still replacing all four bases, changing the base-ribose linkage, and having the resulting product form right-handed duplexes, all of that at the same time, that's pretty cool.
"The Bush docterine has in fact, been highly successful. We have not been attacked at home again since 911. There is no getting around that fact. "
In the 9/11 attacks 2,998 people died and over 6,000 were injured. The world responded with a huge outpouring of support and quickly became allies in ousting the Taliban. In the Iraq war, there have been 4,102 American military deaths, and another 313 military deaths from other countries. 29,978 Americans have been injured by tally from iCasualties. Over 900 contractors have been killed and 12,000 wounded by May 2007. Iraq Body Count, which probably has the most stringent standards (ie certainly will under-report) in reporting Iraqi deaths has an estimated 85,060 to 92,787 fatalities. The in/famous Lancet studies estimated 654,965 Iraqi fatalities through the end of June 2006. In addition to the carnage, we've got a military in a shambles that will take a decade or more and hundreds of billions of dollars to refit and rebuild. Our deficit has swelled. Our economy is staggering around punch-drunk. We've pissed off the world in a way that has never been done before. We've taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and the Taliban are regaining strength both there and in nuclear-armed Pakistan. It is indisputable that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, indeed Saddam was an enemy of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Iraq is now a terrorist breeding ground.
And the evidence that this is protecting us, rather than killing, maiming, bankrupting, and making us less safe is that there hasn't been another attack on (excluding the frequent mortar and rocket attacks on our embassy in Iraq) US soil yet? I got a magic rock to sell you. Ever since I started carrying it I haven't been attacked by tigers. Low cost, only $140,000--about the same cost of one minute of the Iraq war.
Simple and complex is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. I'm a biochemist and have primarily worked on protein structure and enzymology. To me, anything under 1,000 Da is small (and I suppose it follows, simple). My brother however has an extensive background in physical chemistry and modeling compounds in excruciating detail like how a "big" (complex) molecule like say ethanol (46 Da) interacts with a catalytic substrate. His concept of big and my concept of small as far as chemistry goes don't even overlap!
Another thing that you might find interesting is that DNA and RNA are arguably really simple molecules. A sugar group, some phosphates, and four different bases that just repeat. It was actually a major debate into the 1950's as to whether protein or DNA was the true genetic material. The point against DNA at the time was it's simplicity! However two experiments put that idea to rest: the Avery, MacLeod and McCarty experiment put forth good evidence in favor of DNA, but it wasn't until 1952 that just about all the "DNA's too simple" skeptics conceded with the Hershey-Chase experiment.
I have to disagree with you as well. I've worked in a number of labs at three different universities over the years and only one professor fits your description. I quit that lab as soon as I had another job lined up. The low end for the profs I've been around with that one exception would be not less than 50 hours of real work a week, and that's when they're not teaching a class (add another 20+ hours a week). The other reason they're not around is all the committees they're on. One professor I knew was out of town not less than twice a month, every month, due to all the committees he sat on.
"the monklike state of existence of many scientists, to investigate and research in silence, and then the looking down disdainfully upon the common man and his mispercetions: this is part of the problem. this anti-populist attitude of many scientists is part of the problem. an arrogance, a classism, an us-versus-them way of looking at the world. it is the lack of communication efforts of scientists themselves that leads to the dangerous and stupid ideas many common people swallow in the first place"
That's quite the caricature. I've been employed as a scientist for going on a decade now, and your depiction of John/Jane Q. Scientist works for only a tiny minority of the people I've worked with. I've worked with a hippies, hipsters, single moms, Norman Rockwell-esque family types, religious people, nonreligious people, sports fanatics, geeks, barflies, rednecks, people of all different races, colors, creeds, nationalities, and in general a wide, wide slice of humanity. Maybe you ought to not paint a group of people with a wide brush until you've at least met one or two of them first.
Yeah it's ageism. Regardless of that fact, it's also targeting the wrong age group. There are awards in science for "young investigators" to recognize achievement (ie provide funding) and also to recognize that a scientist who's been in the field for 20-40 years has a name and a better chance at getting the increasingly scarce funding. So I guess in limited forms ageism might not necessarily be a bad thing. However, those "young investigator" awards are for people who are typically 10 years older than what this prize is for. That's what I really don't get. A scientist in their mid 20's is a junior to mid-level Ph.D. student. One in their late 20's might have just got their Ph.D. You only have some control over your career at this very early stage. You decide broadly what area of research you want to work in and what lab to join (if you're extremely good it'll be entirely up to you). After that, you might have the pick of a small number of projects. Very few grad students are advanced enough to introduce a project of their own to a lab and a negligible number of them will actually get permission from their advisor. Someone who has a Ph.D. already but wants to broaden their range of expertise will join another scientist's lab in a related field and will usually introduce new techniques and projects to that lab. Without being able to read the/.'d article it seems like they should be targeting the late 20's to mid-30's scientists. Even then, a more appropriate award might be at most low six figures. Managing a seven-figure grant is a major chore and it would be expected to run a whole lab for several years.
Well today I'm making radioactive mosquitoes in the lab. Muhahahaha!
I'm investigating a certain aspect of insect metabolism and use a tritium-labeled compound to do it. Why? Because dengue hemorrhagic fever is a bitch and the mosquito I work on transmits the pathogen (and a couple others) to humans. We'd like to know new and better ways of making this not happen, and better understanding of the mosquito's metabolism certainly will help. So hurrah for my radioactive mosquitoes! May they soon be killed and analyzed, the rotten little bastards!
"4. New Marine units composed of the Islamic extremists worst nightmare: superbutch lesbians locked into eternal PMS synchronization. Name? The Crimson Tide."
A friend of mine comes pretty close to that. She's a rather butch lesbian who used to be in the 101st Airborne. One Thanksgiving at her place she brought out a photo album with a picture she took in basic...I think it was basic. It was a "family" picture, as in all the women in the unit who were lesbian and willing to be in the picture. It was around about a third of the women.
He'd be better than any candidate that's a serious contender. The fact that he's dead isn't a problem either. The Republicans nominated a dead guy for president in 1996 (Dole), and a microencephalic chimp in 2000 and again in 2004. The Dems for their part nominated a block of wood in 2000, and in an attempt to catch the Republicans off guard, an ever-so-slightly different block of wood in 2004.
Me, I'll probably flip a coin and vote Green, Libertarian, or Socialist. I just gotta find me a three-sided coin.
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I happen to be on the other end of this. The lab I work in participates in a youth apprenticeship program with the local school district, and one of the options for the gifted and talented students that get into the program is biotechnology. For the last year and a half I've had a high school student assisting me (16 hours a week, full time in summer) on some of the research projects I'm working on (I'm a postdoctoral research associate in entomology). Through his lab work and a weekly 4 hour lab course he's learned quite a few skills. Cloning techniques, site-directed mutagenesis, how to do SDS-PAGE and acrylamide gel electrophoresis (non-bio people: put gene of interest into vector and then into bacteria, make specific mutation in gene, separate out proteins and DNA fragments by size), how to make up solutions, sterile technique, a bit of raising insects, and other basic molecular biology techniques. That and of course fill tip boxes and wash and autoclave labware, which is just as fun as it sounds. I try to keep it non-repetitive and introduce new things when he's mastered old, and his doing of more grunt work gives me time to do other things once I'm sure he's okay on his own for a given technique. Not many high school students are capable of operating at the level he's at. However the lab's been doing this for quite a few years now and all of the students leave with at least a good introduction to basic molecular biology techniques and what science is really like: if you only had to do it once it'd be search, not REsearch. I don't think they've ended up as authors on papers as of yet, but they do help keep the lab running. Some have been given mini-projects that have been of backburner project interest level, some of which now are being pursued by graduate students. So yes in the right environment high school students can make a contribution to real research.
"I'd think there's going to be significant push-back getting used to the idea of drugs coming from a bunch of guys in their garages."
How about from a bunch of guys working in a warehouse in one of the bad parts of town? I ask in all seriousness because a friend of mine is doing exactly this in a biotech startup and apparently attracting venture capital hasn't been too rough. Sure I kid him about being in the drug business on the bad side of town but nobody will ever really know if something looks promising enough to partner with a big company to push through clinical trials. In any report you'd probably just see the startup corporate name and logo (I hope my friend didn't draw it because then it'd be a cartoon chicken humping a moose or something) and "in partnership with MegaBuck$ biotech giant NASDAQ symbol ASDFAS."
I've been doing research in the biological sciences for 12 years now, including some work that was at least tangentially related to human health. I am not in it for the paycheck--if that's all I wanted, my friends and I joke that we'd go to KFC School of Business Management and be assistant managers at fast food restaurants making more than we do in science. I, and the majority of the people I know, don't want to be professors either. It's extremely rare for a professor to actually do any lab work themselves, but if you ask they'll tell you they miss it. Besides there are 300 people applying for each professorship at a decent university. Then if you are unlucky enough to get the job, you have to successfully fight in a viciously competitive funding environment to get tenure and not lose your mind or your liver in the process. It's actually hard enough to keep a job in academic science, period. My boss and I are applying for grants. Hers are in part to keep my position funded, she's got one out and is writing a second. I've got one out, and am applying for two or possibly three more. Contrary to what you wrote, my grants are largely my ideas and my writing, and should I get funded is my money, not the boss's. However science funding is so obscenely bad (most grants have ~5% success rate, the best one I'm applying for has ~25%) that I'm also going to look for a new job, with the boss's full knowledge and support, even though we'd both very much like me to stick around for another couple years and get our proposed butt kicking science done.
So why do it if there's nothing but nonstop stress, Burger King assistant manager pay, and institutionalized job insecurity? I get to solve problems. I get to figure things out. I get to do things (sometimes, not often, but sometimes) that nobody has ever done before, see things nobody else has ever seen before. Work in a small way on projects that could impact millions of people's lives. I'll never be famous, which is fine with me. I'll never be rich, which, well, I can tolerate. I might not ever have job security...which okay, I'll admit is seriously grinding down my enthusiasm and idealism. But the things I've gotten to do--even paid a pittance to do--I wouldn't trade. Catching jellyfish off the docks in Oregon. Turned loose on a billion dollar synchrotron, unsupervised at 3 am to understand how an enzyme known to be a virulence factor in several diseases functions at an atomic level. Making radioactively labeled mosquitoes to understand lipid trafficking, working with cell culture (It's a cell from an insect's midgut...that under laboratory conditions can endlessly propagate itself. How cool! And here's my what I'm going to do with it...), genetically engineering fluorescent organisms, using high-throughput screening to find new drug lead compounds. A lot of hard work, but sometimes that's damn good fun. Plus along the way you get to understand phenomena on a level that most people don't even know exists. I'm of course not claiming god-king knowledge here, but I could spend a long time talking about the terrible beauty of host:pathogen and vector:pathogen relationships for example, or protein structure, or anything else I've studied a while, just like any other scientist. That's fun too, although not cool in most of society. But my mom still thinks I'm cool. Ok, no, she doesn't.
If you expect to get rich and famous doing science, no wonder your post seems bitter. It isn't going to happen and isn't a right reason to do science in the first place. Those pie-in-the-sky ideals are.
"Unlike the House rules, however, the senate requires 60 votes to get anything substantial done."
No. The senate requires exactly 50 votes plus the Vice President to get anything substantial done. The Democrats need to grow a spine and tell the Republicans to go ahead and filibuster. Sure it would delay passage of anything for about a month, but after that spectacular Republican self-destruction the Democrats would have the necessary political clout to over-ride any further obstruction.
"Many universities sit on huge sums of money and still get government help so I'm not losing sleep over that one either."
According to this page, The top public university system in terms of endowment is (surprisingly) the University of Texas system (that's all the UofT campuses) with $10 billion. I imagine post-crash it's closer to half that. My own system (University of Wisconsin) had as of 2004 just under a billion. Sounds like we ought to be sitting pretty, uncorking the champagne, eating caviar, and lighting our cigars with $100 dollar bills, eh? Not so. That's the value of the endowment--the principle of which can't ever be touched. You have a global recession so any university that had plans for income from the endowment has to put those plans on hold. Plans like deferred maintenance, a critical problem at every university in the country. Or replacing obsolete buildings. After World War 2, there was a huge surge in construction, that picked up again in the 60's and 70's. There's now a glut of cheap and hastily constructed buildings from the 50's to the 70's that are in dire need of replacing. Or simply running the university: state governments have been slashing funding of their university systems for years. Chronic underfunding of universities also has the inevitable result of skyrocketing tuition which means that a university education is becoming unaffordable even to the middle class. This at a time when American businesses complain about lack of qualified job applicants. All this makes it sound like funding of education and the universities ought to be a high priority in any stimulus package. Unfortunately, it got cut by a handful of short-sighted Senators.
The electron storage ring at APS has a circumference of 1104 meters. The Experiment Hall wraps around it and is where all the beam lines where most of the work is done are at. Even though I've been a site user there several times I couldn't tell you what sort of lights are used, other than they seemed to be large lights like what a warehouse would use, and were harsh. APS has a picture. Yes brilliant scientists could have put in nice soft full spectrum lights that didn't hum. But they cost money which is in very short supply and high demand. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost for replacing the lights (initial bulb/tube cost, labor, plus any rewiring) in a building that big would be greater than the cost of a brand new detector at a beamline ($million plus). The detector is a major component in what allows us to do work. Lights on the other hand, as long as you don't need a flashlight, suck it up.
I remember visiting SSRL about five years back as a site user. Protocol at the time was that you pretty much ate, slept, and worked at the beamline you were assigned to in 16-N hour shifts until your time ran out. Consequently there was food trash all over...and a huge ant infestation. Near the end of the time I joked that we ought to put one of the ants in the beam. About a year later, a study came out in Science investigating tracheal respiration in insects using synchrotron radiation.
"Not sure how it works in most fields, but in the one I'm in, it's your boss that gets the funding, not you."
In academia, that depends on what level you're at too. Undergrads very rarely have their own money, if they do it won't exceed at most a couple thousand dollars. Masters students in sciences sometimes pay their own tuition, other times are paid by the prof, and occasionally will have their own money. Ph.D. students usually are supported by the prof but sometimes in cash-strapped departments must have their own support for salary (and many are encouraged to apply for small grants of their own at least). Post-docs sometimes as a condition of being "hired" by a professor must come with their own grant covering 100% of salary, a bit of travel money for conferences, and cover a portion of lab supplies. Since post-docing is still viewed as training for becoming a professor, it makes sense that if you can't get a grant to support yourself you'll never survive the tenure process.
I don't care what "dangerous" chemicals terrorists or any other boogeyman can get their hands on in general. Thats because context matters: that's what compound(s), time, location, amount, etc. We can be reasonable about which chemicals are banned for the home hobbyist, which are restricted (by amount, or maybe a background check) without practically banning dihydrogen monoxide like we are now. Besides everyday household products can contain large amounts of dangerous chemicals anyway. If I want to make home-brew napalm without using any illegal chemicals, it'd be pretty easy to do (dangerous, but easy). Freedom is 100% dead long before you can get 100% security...which doesn't exist anyway.
We don't have 5-fold symmetry. We're bilaterally symmetric; we have a top, bottom, left, and right. A starfish has a top and bottom, but no left or right. For what it's worth, not even a five-armed starfish has exactly 5-fold symmetry. They are considered radially symmetric, but are thought to have evolved from bilaterally symmetric organisms and have some structures that show this.
I guess you've never heard of the Clergy Letter Project then. It's specific to evolution but a requirement for the theory of evolution is an ancient earth. The text also explicitly supports modern science in general, which would include geology anyway.
"A member of the armed forces (a GENERAL!), a policeman, a firefighter, the owner of a barbershop, a barman, a sailor, just-from-frisco-but-not-gay, capitan of the school's wrestling team."
But what about the construction worker, indian chief, cowboy, and biker?
YYYYYYY M C A!
51% isn't enough. 100% isn't enough either (heh--Lieberman?). It has to be at least 51% freedom-loving Constitution-supporting senators, regardless of political party. Unfortunately you seldom get a senator who supports all of the Bill of Rights. Democrats have a bizarre hatred of the second amendment, Republicans aren't particularly fond of the 1st and 4th amendments. This FISA bill shits all over the 4th amendment, so every single Republican senator reliably goose-stepped up to vote for it (McCain and Sessions didn't vote, but were expected to vote for it. 22 Dems likewise betrayed their country including Obama). Every patriotic Nay vote came from Democrats plus Bernie Sanders who caucuses with them. So a point to Dems for being slightly less treasonous. Huzzah.
IIRC the first chemical synthesis of a gene was by Khoran in 1970. What these guys have done is replace the four bases of DNA with different ones, and with a different attachment to the ribose group (having a carbon-carbon triple bond instead of normal DNA's carbon-nitrogen single bond), and have demonstrated double-stranded helix formation. The phosphate deoxyribose backbone is still present in it's usual way. Other groups have modified the backbone of DNA; probably the most famous is peptide-nucleic acid where the backbone is like that of a protein backbone. Also non-standard bases have been introduced by many groups and have been used for years. The paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society also references these modifications plus some others, notably work simultaneously replacing bases and modifying the sugar groups in the backbone. Still replacing all four bases, changing the base-ribose linkage, and having the resulting product form right-handed duplexes, all of that at the same time, that's pretty cool.
"The Bush docterine has in fact, been highly successful. We have not been attacked at home again since 911. There is no getting around that fact. "
In the 9/11 attacks 2,998 people died and over 6,000 were injured. The world responded with a huge outpouring of support and quickly became allies in ousting the Taliban. In the Iraq war, there have been 4,102 American military deaths, and another 313 military deaths from other countries. 29,978 Americans have been injured by tally from iCasualties. Over 900 contractors have been killed and 12,000 wounded by May 2007. Iraq Body Count, which probably has the most stringent standards (ie certainly will under-report) in reporting Iraqi deaths has an estimated 85,060 to 92,787 fatalities. The in/famous Lancet studies estimated 654,965 Iraqi fatalities through the end of June 2006. In addition to the carnage, we've got a military in a shambles that will take a decade or more and hundreds of billions of dollars to refit and rebuild. Our deficit has swelled. Our economy is staggering around punch-drunk. We've pissed off the world in a way that has never been done before. We've taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and the Taliban are regaining strength both there and in nuclear-armed Pakistan. It is indisputable that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, indeed Saddam was an enemy of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Iraq is now a terrorist breeding ground.
And the evidence that this is protecting us, rather than killing, maiming, bankrupting, and making us less safe is that there hasn't been another attack on (excluding the frequent mortar and rocket attacks on our embassy in Iraq) US soil yet? I got a magic rock to sell you. Ever since I started carrying it I haven't been attacked by tigers. Low cost, only $140,000--about the same cost of one minute of the Iraq war.
Simple and complex is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. I'm a biochemist and have primarily worked on protein structure and enzymology. To me, anything under 1,000 Da is small (and I suppose it follows, simple). My brother however has an extensive background in physical chemistry and modeling compounds in excruciating detail like how a "big" (complex) molecule like say ethanol (46 Da) interacts with a catalytic substrate. His concept of big and my concept of small as far as chemistry goes don't even overlap!
Another thing that you might find interesting is that DNA and RNA are arguably really simple molecules. A sugar group, some phosphates, and four different bases that just repeat. It was actually a major debate into the 1950's as to whether protein or DNA was the true genetic material. The point against DNA at the time was it's simplicity! However two experiments put that idea to rest: the Avery, MacLeod and McCarty experiment put forth good evidence in favor of DNA, but it wasn't until 1952 that just about all the "DNA's too simple" skeptics conceded with the Hershey-Chase experiment.
"Science, even bullshit science, is big money."
...
*looks at paycheck*
*looks at dented, rusted '96 Dodge Intrepid in parking lot*
*looks at bank account*
*looks at paycheck*
*looks at the lab's 95% ethanol stock*
...so instead of cotton candy they'll have lutefisk on a stick. Okay, more like a glop in a bowl since it'd just slither off the stick.
I have to disagree with you as well. I've worked in a number of labs at three different universities over the years and only one professor fits your description. I quit that lab as soon as I had another job lined up. The low end for the profs I've been around with that one exception would be not less than 50 hours of real work a week, and that's when they're not teaching a class (add another 20+ hours a week). The other reason they're not around is all the committees they're on. One professor I knew was out of town not less than twice a month, every month, due to all the committees he sat on.
"the monklike state of existence of many scientists, to investigate and research in silence, and then the looking down disdainfully upon the common man and his mispercetions: this is part of the problem. this anti-populist attitude of many scientists is part of the problem. an arrogance, a classism, an us-versus-them way of looking at the world. it is the lack of communication efforts of scientists themselves that leads to the dangerous and stupid ideas many common people swallow in the first place"
That's quite the caricature. I've been employed as a scientist for going on a decade now, and your depiction of John/Jane Q. Scientist works for only a tiny minority of the people I've worked with. I've worked with a hippies, hipsters, single moms, Norman Rockwell-esque family types, religious people, nonreligious people, sports fanatics, geeks, barflies, rednecks, people of all different races, colors, creeds, nationalities, and in general a wide, wide slice of humanity. Maybe you ought to not paint a group of people with a wide brush until you've at least met one or two of them first.
Yeah it's ageism. Regardless of that fact, it's also targeting the wrong age group. There are awards in science for "young investigators" to recognize achievement (ie provide funding) and also to recognize that a scientist who's been in the field for 20-40 years has a name and a better chance at getting the increasingly scarce funding. So I guess in limited forms ageism might not necessarily be a bad thing. However, those "young investigator" awards are for people who are typically 10 years older than what this prize is for. That's what I really don't get. A scientist in their mid 20's is a junior to mid-level Ph.D. student. One in their late 20's might have just got their Ph.D. You only have some control over your career at this very early stage. You decide broadly what area of research you want to work in and what lab to join (if you're extremely good it'll be entirely up to you). After that, you might have the pick of a small number of projects. Very few grad students are advanced enough to introduce a project of their own to a lab and a negligible number of them will actually get permission from their advisor. Someone who has a Ph.D. already but wants to broaden their range of expertise will join another scientist's lab in a related field and will usually introduce new techniques and projects to that lab. Without being able to read the /.'d article it seems like they should be targeting the late 20's to mid-30's scientists. Even then, a more appropriate award might be at most low six figures. Managing a seven-figure grant is a major chore and it would be expected to run a whole lab for several years.
Well today I'm making radioactive mosquitoes in the lab. Muhahahaha!
I'm investigating a certain aspect of insect metabolism and use a tritium-labeled compound to do it. Why? Because dengue hemorrhagic fever is a bitch and the mosquito I work on transmits the pathogen (and a couple others) to humans. We'd like to know new and better ways of making this not happen, and better understanding of the mosquito's metabolism certainly will help. So hurrah for my radioactive mosquitoes! May they soon be killed and analyzed, the rotten little bastards!
"4. New Marine units composed of the Islamic extremists worst nightmare: superbutch lesbians locked into eternal PMS synchronization. Name? The Crimson Tide."
A friend of mine comes pretty close to that. She's a rather butch lesbian who used to be in the 101st Airborne. One Thanksgiving at her place she brought out a photo album with a picture she took in basic...I think it was basic. It was a "family" picture, as in all the women in the unit who were lesbian and willing to be in the picture. It was around about a third of the women.
Yeah if the submitter wanted evil publishers, the worst of the worst has long been Elsevier.
He'd be better than any candidate that's a serious contender. The fact that he's dead isn't a problem either. The Republicans nominated a dead guy for president in 1996 (Dole), and a microencephalic chimp in 2000 and again in 2004. The Dems for their part nominated a block of wood in 2000, and in an attempt to catch the Republicans off guard, an ever-so-slightly different block of wood in 2004.
Me, I'll probably flip a coin and vote Green, Libertarian, or Socialist. I just gotta find me a three-sided coin.