Sunday, September 28, 2008

"The 'scilence' is deafening"

An editorial in the September 19 issue of Science titled Scilence on page 1605 noted ...there are five times as many people in the United States with a degree in science or engineering currently working in those fields than there are either practicing lawyers or doctors. The "scilence" is deafening. [This line was in the context of the refusal of the recent presidential candidates to engage in a "conversation" on science policy.]
HOWEVER elsewhere in the issue is an article with a subheading A decade after 26 members of the entering class of 1991 earned their Ph.D.s from Yale's elite molecular biophysics and biochemistry program, only one holds a tenured faculty position. Page 1625 gives a listing of "where they ended up," which includes Tori Willliams Reid, now of Right at Home (home care for seniors), Jennifer Holmes, a patent lawyer at Ropes & Gray, G. Koji Sonoda, library manager at Amgen, Albert Crescenzo, a consultant to Symyx (Iselin, NJ), and Michael Reifler, of Whole Foods.
[321 Science 1622]

The 19 Sept 08 issue of Science also has a "Perspectives" piece titled: Illuminating the Modern Dance of Climate and CO2 which notes "Currently, the amount of CO2 emitted as a result of human activities is about double the amount required to explain the rate of increase of atmospheric CO2." [Did Al Gore mention this?] Noting a historical correlation of 40 ppm CO2(volume)/K, the authors state: However, given the discrepancies between different temperature reconstructions, and the uncertainties associated with interpreting Northern Hemisphere climate proxies in terms of mean global temperature, we estimate a gradient of 20 to 60ppmv per kelvin of global warming.
[321 Science 1642-1643]

One has a short mention of nanoparticle shape shifting. p. 1601

Appreciating fluorine chemistry, LBE notes the article Fluorous tags unstick messy chemical biology problems which includes the text: "Recent innovations suggest a range of potential applications of fluorous tages could be realized in chemical biology..." One has the line: Fluorous tags behave more like molecular "Post-it notes. The article mentions benefits in mass spectrometry (but curiously not NMR): [in fluorous proteomics] the fluorous tags are not prone to fragmentation, so the spectra [sic: patterns] are less complicated.

In passing, note the article "Apoptosis [cell death] Turbocharges Epithelial Morphogenesis." p. 1641.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home