Blog Archives

April 25th, 2015

4/25/2015

Links to three awesome papers on Neuregulin 1 signaling in heart regeneration
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v520/n7548/full/520445a.html

Now onto "not science but important anyway" stuff

For all of you trying to decide between Grad School and Med School:
Being a doctor is a career
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-much-money-doctors-actually-110000302.html
While college teaching is more of a hobby. See page 3 in the first link and page 1 in the second
http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/pdf/2015/the-high-public-cost-of-low-wages.pdf
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cuf.asp

That’s likely after you do a postdoc:
http://www.nature.com/news/the-future-of-the-postdoc-1.17253
The last sentence obviously applies to those thinking about graduate school, too.

If you are a woman competing for a tenure track job in the academia, perhaps you will not be discriminated against:
http://www.nature.com/news/leading-scientists-favour-women-in-tenure-track-hiring-test-1.17322
There has been a pro-male bias for a long time. Remember McClintock?

Positions in academia are of course few and far between. So brush up on your computer skills:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v520/n7546/full/nj7546-253a.html

Enjoy!

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April 4, 2015

4/4/2015

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This time we will zoom in on a few worthwhile technical development papers:

In vivo visualization of transcripts in zebrafish
http://dev.biologists.org/content/142/7/1368.full
Has been done in other systems, but cool nonetheless.

Tissue-specific CRISPR/Cas9:
http://www.cell.com/developmental-cell/fulltext/S1534-5807%2815%2900075-1
Same here. The race for fully conditional CRISPR/Cas9 is on…

Smaller Cas9 for packaging into AAV
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14299.html
All these sequences of semi-random genomes are good for something after all...

And here is an exercise in futility:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6230/18.full
Why would anyone care?

Now onto “career stuff".
Some pharma jobs are moving out of Philly:
http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20150403_GlaxoSmithKline_moving_Philly_vaccine_R_D_jobs_to_Maryland.html
Fortunately not too far.

As career advice goes, this is pretty good:
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2015_03_31/caredit.a1500080
I suppose one could call her a grad school dropout. But then again, she clearly had a more rewarding career than many of her fellow students who did not drop out.

I keep bringing up the tough job market for PhDs. Here the postdoc seems to have just realized that:
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2015_03_30/caredit.a1500078
But while much of the advise is spot on, there is a little too much feel-good baloney for my liking.

Enjoy.

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Weekly sciencey bits

Disclaimer: This started as a "weekend reading list" meant to encourage students in the lab to think about science and their own future in it. Do not take it seriously: I myself may no longer agree with whatever I wrote here last week.
- Darius