$$$$ Talks

The days certainly are getting away from me quite quickly.  Between a rather inordinate amount of lab work and being unable to sleep it has not been good.  But enough about me, we got stuff to discuss for a bit!  Today's topic is actually a topic for tomorrow, the infamous SEQUESTRATION!!!  Dun dun duuuuun!

For those uninitiated, tomorrow (March 1) is the deadline for our 'wonderful' Congress to come up with a budget for the fiscal year that we're *checks watch* almost halfway through.  If they do not, about $1 trillion in automatic spending cuts occurs across all walks of government: defense, education, energy, security, etc.  The most important for me, obviously, are the cuts to SCIENCE!.  Basically this is a key step in reducing the deficit.  From whitehouse.gov:

We have a lot of debt as a country, and this is one way to stave it off for a bit.

Here's the problem that I have.  Across the board cuts (obviously) include everything.  Science is part of that.  Whenever there are acts in Congress to decrease spending across the board, science is always hit.  The issue is that, since the Clinton era, science has never really been a high priority with presidents.  Clinton increased scientific funding massively, but Congress essentially said 'where are all the cures?  We spent all this money, now where are the results?'  Science takes TIME.  In some cases a great deal of time:

30 years and $2 billion to approval

30 years is a long time, even for drug discovery.  Even for a new, groundbreaking type of drug.  This is more typical:

Between basic research, drug trials, and other testing, drugs typically take 12-15 years to gain FDA approval

It's no wonder the Clinton administration didn't see any immediate results.  It's because they take time.  Congress, however, doesn't seem to realize this. It's really no surprise, though, as there is a physicist and a microbiologist working in Congress (between the House and Senate).  Plus 32 'Health Professionals' if you'd like to count them.  So 2.  2 Actual, REAL, SCIENTISTS working in Congress.  It's no wonder they don't understand the implications of cutting research funding!!!  Everyone's all business and law!  At least, the majority are.  And no, we don't count the 'Christian Scientists', people.

Accurate as of January 11, 2013

Anyway, back to the nitty gritty.  According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, publishers of the journal Science), federal R&D programs of all sorts (including defense) stand to lose about $8.7 billion, which is about 6% of the proposed $142 billion.  While it may not seem like a lot, the majority of that money is going to be coming out of research grants.  Salaried people still need their salaries, utilities must be paid, etc.  $8.7 billion is a lot of money for research as a whole.  When you're talking about labs surviving on ~$0.5 million for 5 years, $8.7 billion can do a lot of good.  Granted, once again, this is ALL R&D, including defense.  And those guys spend money like.... ummm.... a really rich rapper in a music video.  While it isn't specified how hard hit the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be, they did say that both continuing grants and new grants (new ones already having barely 10% funded) will be hit: Click here for the official NIH notice.

Rep Jim McDermott (D-WA) submitted a bill, lovingly called the Medical Research Protection Act, which would save the NIH from the sequestration, but it doesn't look good as of now.

*sigh*.... The whole thing just seems completely ludicrous to me; they set a deadline for themselves to motivate decision making and compromise, then delay the deadline, and STILL can't come up with anything.  Here's a great idea, at the top of the list for things to cut, write this:

Congressional Salaries

That'll get their butts in gear to actually do what they were elected to.  Or they'd delay some more until they could find a way to change it -.-

If you're interested, check out This White House link to see how your state specifically will be affected.  Most are similar issues of jobs, economic security, etc., but there are some nasty education cuts that are at the top of the Texas list.  Very unfortunate.

That's it for me, I hope that you enjoyed reading this and that is opened your eyes a bit to some of the sequestration's devastation.  See you next time!

Happy birthday to me.... I made another video.... Happy birthday to meeeee.... I really suck at rhyme.....

Hello again everyone from the dark, dank area known as LAB!!!  Dun dun dun!!!  My cells (i.e. the little d-bags in my previous post) are giving me all sorts of trouble and virtually no time to do my videos, but here's one now!!  The first (of what will likely be quite a few) video game reviews.  Really focusing on the characters and their development, though, not simply 'yay this!' and 'boo that!'.  Huzzah!


P.S. the game is Farcry 3; an FPS.  Just like I promised!  And you were all clearly wondering about.

P.P.S I just realized this is my sixth video.  Go me!  My YouTube 'station' has almost 150 views!..... Total..... amongst the 5 already there.... but that's beside the point!  Go me! (again)

Hope you liked it!

Science, Working, and Working Out

Hi all!  I hope that you're doing well.  But enough about you, this is my blog.  Thus, we talk about ME!  Yay me.  So I don't have my latest video ready yet (a video game review this time; pretty major FPS).  Long story short I've been working on getting the technology to record gameplay as well as upgrading my video editing software (for whatever little it may be worth).  Moving on....

Working out.  Backwards from the title?  Yes.  Do I care?  No.  Anyway, Christine and I have been doing the Insanity program for two weeks now and it's pretty rough.  We're both doing better, though, getting stronger, losing some fat, and I'm fairly certain I have an ab.  It's pretty awesome, if I say so myself.  Which I do.  If you've wondered about it or heard and don't know much, it is pretty worthwhile.  We like it, anyway.

Science and work!  Work and science.  Hmmm.... A thought occurred to me that most people I know aren't aware of what I'm studying.  If you're curious, read on.  If not, well..... watch the videos.  They're pretty cool.  And subscribe on YouTube.  Now let's see... right!  My science!  I'm doing work with mouse Embryonic Stem (ES) cells.  These were popularized around 2000 with their massive potential for therapeutics, etc., but underlying ethical issues of destroying fetuses to harvest the cells.  Enter line restrictions  protests, vandalism, etc.  Regardless, they do have substantial potential for therapies with diseases causing cell loss (Alzheimer's, Leukemia, Parkinson's, etc.) as they have the ability to turn into any cell type in the body, from the brain to the toe.  Though I can't think of a toe degeneration disease off hand.....  Hahahaha!  Can't think of a TOE off HAND.  I crack myself up.  Anyway, these so-called pluripotent ('many powers' in latin; in this case can turn to many adult cell types) cells are taken from the inner cell mass (see below) of a developing embryo and can be kept in culture indefinitely.

Establishment of pluripotent Embryonic Stem (ES) cell lines

Again, there is a great deal of controversy with this, namely amongst religious groups (see science education and evolution vs ID videos for some more controversies).  In 2006, it was discovered that you could take an adult cell (liver, skin, brain, blood, etc.) and, by forcing it to express specific transcription factors, change it back to the state of pluripotency, thus birthing the induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell.  This was a major breakthrough in the technology, just recently indicated by a Nobel Prize win.  Instead of trying to get these dissident groups to go along with using ES, we found a way to get around the controversy entirely.  Not necessarily easy, but it certainly worked.

Examples of Reprogramming (bringing cells back to pluripotency) and some of the methods used.

Before we start randomly injecting these, or other, stem cells randomly, though, we need a few things.  Namely, we don't know a great deal about how stem cells work or the processes that change them to new cell types.  Don't get me wrong, we know plenty about it, but not enough to start with therapies.  My project is based around a specific aspect of this: how the cells deal with mutations.

Mutations are permanent changes in the DNA sequence of cells.  Frankly, ES cells don't mutate very much.  Data has shown that they mutate at about half as frequently as adult cells and about a quarter as much as cells made in the lab using ES (for example, making a brain cell from ES in a culture dish).  My project is focused on trying to understand why this happens and, perhaps, eventually be able to maintain this level of genetic integrity (as it's called in the field) when the cells are becoming whatever they need to be for the therapy.  I'm specifically looking at the major pluripotency genes; the ones that keep a pluripotent cell pluripotent, and seeing if they have some relationship to genetic integrity genes.  There are two major ways mutations are fixed: DNA repair and Cell Death.  DNA repair fixes smaller issues (single or a few bases missing, mismatched, etc.) while cells trigger apoptosis (a major death pathway) is there is major damage such as too few/many chromosomes, large scale damage, etc.  What I've found by looking at gene expression and control data is that there is a great deal of interaction between pluripotency and these integrity genes.

Cell death genes (right) under direct control of the three major pluripotency genes (left)

If we add in additional transcription factors, the number of controlled genes increases significantly.

I'm also going to be validating this data in our own ES cell lines, ensuring that the binding is occurring and the expression levels are the same as this data shows.  In addition, I'll eventually be getting rid of the plutipotency factors from our cells and seeing how both the integrity gene expression and mutation frequency are affected.  To make a long story short, we use a transgenic mouse that gives us the frequency of mutation by a special reporter gene.  It's pretty awesome.  As a quick note for you, as well, here's a special picture from a couple of days ago:

This is an image of my cells in culture.  The larger white circles/ovals are the cell colonies while the longer, individual cells are a cell type we use to grow the ES on, known commonly as feeders (appropriately, as they take in the media we give and spit out the media the ES cells use).  Some of the smaller bunches of cells are the differentiating ES (those turing to adult cell types), particularly the ones with distinct nuclei (a lot of white space and a small dot).  And if you're curious, this picture is of the cells at 40X actual size.

I hope you liked my little overview of my project.  If you're feeling extra nerdy, feel free to ask about it.  If there's one thing I enjoy it's talking about science, and more specifically my work.  Either way, I'll see you next time!