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Biology

Every Man an Island, Pt. 1

No man is an island, entire of itself — John Donne, Meditation XVII Scanning electron microscope images of B. thetaiotaomicron, a prominent human gut bacterium, and the intestine. From: Human Gut Hosts a Dynamically Evolving Microbial Ecosystem Gross L PLoS Biology Vol. 5, No. 7, e199 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050199 Only one out of ten cells in our […]

Blog for Darwin

I just went to Shirley Wu’s blog and found this. Apparently February 12-15, 2009 there will be a Blog for Darwin blogswarm, in honor of his 200th birthday and 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (First time I hear this term, blogswarm; not sure if I like it). I wrote […]

More on Microbial Sequencing

(Continued from “On Microbial Sequencing“). Well, it’s really been a great meeting. The biology of pathogens, parasites and symbionts is amazing. Historically, the microbes that chiefly interested us were one of those three: those that causes disease in humans, animals (focus on domesticated animals), plants (again, mostly domesticated). However, as we are (alas, too slowly) […]

Tardy Reading and Scientific Breakthroughs

A friend of mine who is also a scientist once told me: “the only time I read, is when I write”. What he meant was, that the only time he reads scientific literature, is when he writes his own papers, and needs to do the proper research to place his research in the context of […]