Sushi and jujubees...my tasty day

So my love of jujubees and my excitement for sushi tonight has caused this investigation...into CANDY SUSHI!
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Jelly beans ftw!!


Lemonheads also - FTW!


MANY MORE PHOTOS!!!

Recipes:
Food Network
Very similar to the Food Network recipe with bonus sushi type and pictures

You didn't learn this in school...

With gems such as "Hunger is fat leaving the body," "Most women aren't sexually stimulated by spanking," "How to break off a fight with a hobo before he stabs you," and my personal favorite "Foreign Objects You're Going to Try to Put in the Microwave at Some Point so Let's Just Get it Out of Your System Now."

The 10 Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You In School
This is a must read

Neil Patrick Harris, yay

I'm not big on Glee...but wee.

Tears of joy...

Oscar now has new feet. After an accident with farm equipment, they built him prosthetics that his skin will graft to. This gives me tears of joy. source

Boo Science!

So the other flip of the coin. The New York Times recently published an article complaining about the lack of progress. See my last post for some "Yay science!"

Be prepared. I'm about to jump on my soap box.

My responses to parts of the article...

"But the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome Project — to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments — remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease."

Ummm...back to square 1 huh? We can map genes to the 'reference genome'. Let's just start with Francis Collins since I discussed him in my last entry and his story is fresh on my brain. He found a single nucleotide difference in 1 gene that causes Progeria. The human genome has thousands of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms and other changes in our DNA. If our DNA was the same, we wouldn't all have so many differences. THAT shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. But no, linking a single base pair change to a disease...that's not progress at all. Oh, and btw, they discovered what that single base pair chain causes and a potential treatment to alleviate the problem. It's in a Phase II trial. Yep, back to square 1.

"In announcing on June 26, 2000, that the first draft of the human genome had been achieved, Mr. Clinton said it would 'revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.' "

Yes, because turning in your first draft for your final paper will always yield the best results...We didn't have a draft of the genome that we felt confident in until 2003. The 'reference genome' is made of sequences from several different people so it can be a better reference because we are all different.

"It was far too expensive at that time to think of sequencing patients’ whole genomes. So the National Institutes of Health embraced the idea for a clever shortcut, that of looking just at sites on the genome where many people have a variant DNA unit. But that shortcut appears to have been less than successful." [the 'clever' shortcut involves looking at common variants in different human populations] "But with most diseases, the common variants have turned out to explain just a fraction of the genetic risk."

Clearly, because it didn't answer the riddle, we have failed as scientists. Oh, and btw, the reason we did that was because of how ridiculously expensive it was to sequence a genome. Currently, we're down to $30,000/complete genome sequence. It's estimated to be down to $1,000/genome in the next 2 years. Filtering through the info contained in billions of base pairs will be easier when we can take out the noise that is common differences between you and me.

"But most of the sites linked with diseases are not in genes — the stretches of DNA that tell the cell to make proteins — and have no known biological function, leading some geneticists to suspect that the associations are spurious."

Ummm...who is your source calling this spurious? Between genes are thousands of binding sites for things like transcription factors that regulate the expression of proteins coded by genes. Some are certainly spurious but we don't know all the interactions between proteins and DNA. I doubt they are all spurious just because we haven't figured it out yet...

"The only way to find rare genetic variations is to sequence a person’s whole genome, or at least all of its gene-coding regions. That approach is now becoming feasible because the cost of sequencing has plummeted, from about $500 million for the first human genome completed in 2003 to costs of $5,000 to $10,000 that are expected next year. "

Several points I already mentioned but they didn't seem to care about earlier...

"But while 10 years of the genome may have produced little for medicine, the story for basic science has been quite different. Research on the genome has transformed biology, producing a steady string of surprises. First was the discovery that the number of human genes is astonishingly small compared with those of lower animals like the laboratory roundworm and fruit fly." ... "Little, if any, of this research could have been done without having the human genome sequence available. Every gene and control element can now be mapped to its correct site on the genome, enabling all the working parts of the system to be related to one another."

So, they are telling us that having the 'reference sequence' has been really helpful. Ok, so we haven't solved cancer yet. Just because we haven't done what some president predicted in the time he allotted, doesn't mean we failed. Eventually this writer kind of ish came around. But they sure as hell tried to make it as much like a failure by their wording.

Ugh. I'm off my soapbox. For now.

Yay Science!!

Francis Collins, Director of the National Institute of Health brought up some interesting points at a recent talk at my school.

Recovery Act:
- Funding health care research
- Funding whole genome sequencing of cancers and projects such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) http://cancergenome.nih.gov/

"...the scope of the TCGA Research Network has expanded to include more than 20 tumor types and thousands of samples over the next five years. Each cancer will undergo comprehensive genomic characterization that incorporates powerful bioinformatic and data analysis components. The expansion of TCGA is expected to lead to the most comprehensive understanding of cancer genomes and will enable researchers to further mine the data generated by TCGA to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer."

50 Acute Myeloid Leukemia genomes have been sequenced (leukemic cells and the same patient's 'normal' cells). 10-20 Myelodysplastic Syndrome genomes are currently in the works. Numerous breast cancer and prostate cancer genomes have been completed with more in the works. We're already learning awesome things about these genomes. Check out this AWESOME study that was published in Nature. I got to speak to the author of this paper and have colleagues that work directly with him. http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/20568.aspx

So there, yay science! And yay the recovery act.

How to get better at being ironman

Maybe I should be Iron Man for Halloween. The pieces just keep coming together...

First, my previous post and now this shirt.

I thought the commercial was a joke...

wtf...just wtf

OMG CUTE

source

I knight thee...

A friend emailed me, the source is unknown.

I want this for my bar....Cocktail phylogeny

Purchase here.

From Must Have Cute

More info/pictures

PhD time vortex

Source

On another note - it's a good habit but I've become OCD about appropriately citing things...

Best. Printer. Ever.

Dude. People have too much time on their hands, but this is cool.