All summer in a day

It has been a while since I have had a day off.  I am working at the Palo Alto Research Center for a while (possibly until mid-August) and we (Michael Recht and I) are scrambling to gather lots of data in a little time.  Consequently, we have been working long days in a cold, loud, windy room doing lots of trouble shooting. We have been fairly successful.  Our troubles are not lying dead in the street, but they seem somewhat subdued for now.  

We have some real data in which we are confident.  Real data are like the drugs that keep scientists hooked to relentless schedules like the one we are working on now.  We sleep, eat, and collect data. I am dead tired, but running off the buzz of really cool data.  However, I have a glorious half hour to sit and do whatever I want because we took some time out this morning to think, which put us off schedule.  If we were to start our experiments right now, we would miss lunch in the cafeteria.  I brought my lunch, but Michael didn't and it's Mexican food day which is pretty good.  Though it would be nice to skip the eating part of our lives right now, that really isn't practical.  I am glad to have a half hour to simple sit.

I realized that I will not be doing anything this next Saturday besides getting ready for the Gordon Research Conference on Microbial Population Genetics which is in New Hampshire next week.  My time prior to this Saturday is completely scheduled, and from the moment my plane touches down in San Francisco upon returning from the conference, my time is scheduled.  (Yes, I will be in the lab at the end of a traveling day which includes taking a shuttle to Boston, a flight from Boston to SFO, and a 2.5 hr car drive back to Merced).  

I am not sure what I will do this Saturday.  My sewer line should be completely replaced by the end of today and I am not sure what my backyard will look like when I return, so maybe I'll put it back together.  I am sure I'll do a couple loads of laundry.  Maybe I will take a nap or read or go for a walk or watch Hmong guys play volleyball with their feet.  All of those sound great right now.

I did forego some sleep last night and went dancing in Palo Alto.  The music was Latin and I taught a couple of guys to Merengue.  It was fun. I noticed that all of the women in this area have long hair that is really shiny with at least a few curls in it.  I showed up with my short (though stylish) hair, blue fingernail polish and a cute shirt depicting a small child about to be eaten by a sea serpent.  I felt like the entire counter culture population present and had a good time regardless.  

You have got to read this article!

This article "Unsung heroes work hard to cut hospital acquired infections" documents great advances in the fight against antibiotic resistance!  My brother Tom, a doctor, just sent it to me.  Very important stuff as antibiotic resistant nosocomial infections kill more people in the US each year than HIV does.  

Hot Stuff!!!!

I just got a cool post on my Facebook Wall from Marnee Chua, the development genius who raises funds for the School of Natural Sciences at UC Merced. She informed me that her homework assignment from her online course through Montana State was to read the article "What Antimicrobial Resistance Has Taught Us About Horizontal Gene Transfer" by Miriam Barlow.  It is a chapter in the book Horizontal Gene Transfer:Genomes in Flux. That is the first time a friend has told me that someone I have never heard  of referred them to my work.  It feels so good to know that someone out there reads and appreciates my work.

New Directions

I have been working on antibiotic resistance for nearly ten years now, and I definitely still love it. It is a great system for studying evolutionary biology and it feeds my morbid sense of humor. However, I find that after a decade, my attention wanders a little and I am venturing out into some new directions.

I am starting to study math a little with a brilliant woman, Kristina Crona. She thinks that antibiotic resistance can teach her something about math. So I explain biology to her to help her with her math problems and then I get her to explain math to me and it turns out that some of my problems are interesting to her. She is so good at explaining math that it seems easy and fun while she is around and it still makes sense after she has left. That's a good mathematician.

I have also started working on a coral reef project with Monica Medina. We are trying to push the evolution the symbionts of coral species to find out whether they can adapt to changing ocean conditions. This is fun science. I am more excited about this project than anything that I have done in the lab for the past year.

I am also starting to work on biofuels. This line of research may be the most challenging because it requires a knowledge of chemistry. I have taken more chemistry classes than biology classes because chemistry is so challenging to me and I am always trying to overcome that deficit. It is good to have a challenge and I think I can work this project out. It may just take a lot of planning before it becomes anything approaching brilliant.

The journey of motherhood

My sister Marie is due to deliver a new baby very soon, which means that my caring and protective feelings for her are amplified by a factor of at least ten.  I am perfectly content to massage feet, trim toenails, carry luggage, set up the nursery, and watch Youtube videos of Criss Angel as a show of support to my sister.  These protective feelings extend beyond her however.  Last weekend, my show of support for a friend's expectant wife came in the forms of baklava, galatabouriko, dolmas, spanakopita, olives, cheese, salad, and bread because she wanted Greek appetizers at her baby shower and I am experienced in Greek cooking.  Beyond that, I have recently been recruited as the on-call doula for two mothers whose husbands may be out of town when they go into labor.  I have not been a doula since I was 19 and helped with the delivery of my cousin/best friend's baby, but those moms seem to sense my protective nature and say that they would trust me perfectly to care for them while they are in labor.  

As I try to reason through my compulsion to care for pregnant women, I find reason is perhaps lacking.  All I have is an idea that pregnant women go on a painful and dangerous journey that lasts 40 weeks.  The destination seems to be the border between spirits and the living where there exists a passageway for life to come into or exit the world.  A woman, it seems, must brush against death as the final step in collecting a new life at that point of passage.  

While the journey in takes 40 weeks, the journey back takes much longer as nearly every facet of health and life is delivered from mother to child.  Food, warmth, support, love and learning are all provided by mothers who care for their new child with such strong compulsions that reasonable needs like sleep, privacy and personal interests are set aside.

This part of the journey is where my sister Marie has found her passion.  During the first two days of her first child's life, she tried unsuccessfully to breast-feed her daughter after a C-section delivery.  Through the help of a lactation consultant she was able to figure out the problems preventing successful feeding and to then find ways of solving them.  In short, she fought very hard to be able to breast-feed her daughter and was ultimately successful.  Her success ignited her with a desire to help others do the same. She has become a lactation specialist for WIC and energetically calls mothers encouraging them to do the same.  There is no judgement or criticism if they don't do as she has done.  She just tries to share with others something she believes in and that she has fought hard to obtain.

It is great fun to sit around the dinner table and hear her oldest daughter (now 5) discuss the technicalities of breast-feeding with unerring accuracy.   It's even more fun to see the forms my sister's passion takes as she prepares informational packets for new moms and cupcakes decorated like breasts for doctors to increase their awareness of breastfeeding.  She always emphasizes to me that WIC promotes breast-feeding because it supplies babies with natural antibiotics and that breastfed babies are healthier than those fed with formula.  She finds a way of relating breast-feeding to everyone.  As I watch the intensity of her efforts and the joy that she finds in them, I am in awe of her.  Though I feel so protective of her, she is clearly one of the strongest and most fearless people I know.

This I believe

About a year ago after having three grant applications declined in a week and a half, I started thinking about what things I believed in. I was inspired to do so by the NPR "This I believe" program and it seemed like it should be simple enough to define my beliefs, but it turned out to be enormously challenging. This essay was the best I could come up with, and for many reasons, I wasn't ready to share it. I pulled it out last night, cleaned up the writing a little and I think that it is something I can share now.

This I Believe
I believe in accomplishing the most important thing each day. I learned this while I was in graduate school from Kay Whitmore who was an ex-CEO of Kodak. I knew him socially outside of school and at some point, maybe a year after meeting him, I realized what an amazing opportunity it would be to have this man mentoring me. So I went to him with all of the questions I didn’t have answers for and he had answers for each one of them. When I was frustrated with school and ready to quit it was “Toughen up”. When I needed to go to a conference about evolution and didn’t have any money, he helped me find a sofa that I could sleep on in a comfortable home near the conference. And when my heart was broken, the answer he gave me was two tickets for the best seats at the symphony so that I could move on. The best answer he ever gave me though was when I asked him how to do well in life. He told me to accomplish the most important thing each day. He said that this was how he had become successful. 

I took those words to heart and they did wonders for me. I got a Ph.D. in three years and published seven papers in that time. I raced through my postdoctoral studies in a year and a half and got a job as a founding faculty member at the newest campus in the University of California system about three years ago. With that position, I have helped to set up a genomics core as well as my own lab, published several more manuscripts and devised a way, at least on paper, of controlling antibiotic resistance and keeping antibiotics useful for an infinite amount of time.

Those words “accomplish the most important thing every day” would seem flawless to me if it weren’t for the fact that I seem utterly incapable of getting a grant. To a scientist, grants are life-lines. In essence, they are arteries carrying oxygen, water, and nutrients (literally) into the lab. Like blood to the body, money keeps research in a lab moving...progressing. I’ve been trying to get a grant for three years and most of my applications don’t even get scored which means they are in the bottom half. I have worked on becoming a better writer, generated data that make my proposals seem likely, and I have had scientists with grants read my proposals and edit them until they like what I have written. I don’t know what else to do.

The main source pumping money into research is the federal government, and since the war in Iraq started, there hasn’t been as much money for science as there used to be. But this may not be the only reason I can’t get a grant…I know people who get grants...Maybe I am too young, maybe I haven’t published enough, maybe I don’t know the right people, maybe antibiotic resistance isn’t as popular as H.I.V. or A.D.D. though it kills more people, and maybe it’s that I am trying to solve the problem by manipulating evolution instead of just making more and more drugs that are less and less effective.

With all of these unknowns, I want to call Kay Whitmore, or better yet, go visit him and tell him that I can’t get a grant and ask him what I should do, but I can’t because he is dead. He died of leukemia nearly five years ago. I found out about it from a newspaper article on the day of his funeral. I was in the lab and the most important task of the day ended up seeming meaningless as I sat there and cried.

I remember an address he gave a few days after the September 11th attacks in which he said ” There is no sense in death. Some people will try to say that God needs the dead more than we do, but try telling that to a widow with three children.”  

I don’t know that my need really compares with that widow either, but as the money in my lab slowly runs dry, I feel like I need to talk to Kay Whitmore pretty badly and since I can’t, I just hang on and keep believing in the best answer he ever gave me.

I still believe in that advice my friend gave me.  I am not yet funded, but seem to be getting a lot closer.  My real reason for posting this though is that I went to a business school named for Kay Whitmore and looked at the display about his life and career that was set up inside of a glass case.  It was all impressive, but there was nothing there about how involved he had been in helping college students.  I was not the only one he cared for.  He spent most of his time post-retirement working with students and he attended many recitals and graduations.  He gave out much dating advice that always started with the line "Men are like microwaves and women are like crockpots".  He was a guide and friend to so many.  I felt like I needed to pay tribute to him even if it was only in this very small way.

 

new antimicrobials!

This isn't much of a blog entry especially after taking off from blogging for a month but this is worth blogging about.  A DNA binding molecule can kill bacteria in 2 minutes.  This seems like a good idea except that I wonder what it does to human cell.  I mean the same is true of heat, bleach, and peroxide, but those are all lethal to human cells too.  Anyway, this is a cool idea.