The Blog Swan

I doubt there’s a biologist alive that hasn’t realised that 2009 marks a significant bicentennial – the birth of Charles Darwin, a man whose legacy is one of the most profound of any scientist who has ever lived.   Conveniently it is also the 150th anniversary of the book that is he is most famous for, “On the Origin of Species”.

A good hub for information on the celebrations would be the Natural History Museum’s Darwin200 site.

I was glad leafing through Chris Miller’s blog today to find out that I’m not the only scientist who has actually never read this book.   I actually downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg some years ago and stuck it on my iPod (in the days before I carried a smartphone) with the intention of reading it.   It was too long for the iPod reader, so I never got around to it.

In the absence of any formalised New Years Resolutions I promise to go out and find a nice hardbound copy to grace my bookshelf.  And read it too.

However, it’s not the only scientific anniversary being celebrated.  For those people who are more interested in staring at the sky than staring at living organisms 2009 is also the International Year of Astronomy.

Again, there’s a fantastic dropping off point from the IAU and UNESCO at astronomy2009.  But why is this being celebrated?  In this case it is the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope by Galileo Galilei, whose legacy is at least as awe inspiring as that of Darwin’s.

With an amateur telescope setup with a CCD camera/webcam capable of producing pictures rivalling that of a 200″ telescope in the 1950′s I always feel it’s a shame that more people don’t stare in awe at the sky.  I particularly liked this story on the Physics World site, about how a group of people are going to build a replica of Gallileo’s telescope and image through it, to show what the man himself might have been capable of resolving.

I find it interesting that these are both thinkers who proposed theories that were against the prevailing religious orthodoxy, and in Darwin’s case some even now failing  to be accepted by some people of a more closed minded religious persuasion.   Maybe all Darwin needs is another 250 years?

Whilst I’m making ad hoc resolutions – I will also use this year to  interact more with my local astronomical society, a group of people who I am in frequent email contact with, but have yet to pitch up to the society meetings to join.

I’m proud to be a scientist, and I’m proud of the wonderful achievements science has made, so it will be nice to use these two excellent celebrations to push my own knowledge forward a little more.  And not just focused around the computerised science I spend my time on.

After the bitter disappointment of the various parties allowing MPs a free vote on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill amendments/updates it was genuinely gratifying yesterday to see all the handwringing, religious polemic and general misunderstanding about the ‘hybrid embryos’ parts of the bill put to rest with a resounding defeat of the attempt to ban their creation by 336 to 176.

Whilst I’m slightly more ambiguous about the ‘saviour siblings’ (a ban on creating them also heavily defeated) I see no real reason to deny people IVF for these kind of medical reasons if you’re going to allow IVF and embryo screening for other people.  I’m just largely against IVF as a means of conception because I am not convinced that couples have any ‘right’ to have children in the first place.

These 2 results however give me great hope that the attempt to lower the abortion time limit from 24 to 20 weeks will also fail.  This particular piece of attempted legislative stupidity (and actually the above 2 as well) flies in the face of all scientific thought, evidence and advice that has been offered.

It still disturbs me greatly that gut feelings, moral panic and general ignorance are allowed to stand against rigorous medical advice and evidence.  I suspect those people who find these things unethical, unacceptable or morally repugnant still consider themselves to be ‘the moral majority’.  I wonder how they feel on days like this when the people they elected to represent them vote in these kind of numbers, and clearly demonstrate that, for now, the moral majority is in favour of allowing science, research and medical breakthroughs to continue.

First of all this gem of a quote from the mostly useless (s/n ratio of about 1/10 postwise) zenhabits.net, a site that stays in my RSS feed because I’m simply too Zen (or lazy) to remove it:

“Drink lots of water. During the course of our sleep, we lose a lot of oxygen during our breathing and so its important that when you get up, you have a big glass of water. The energy our cells gets from water is very important and useful and will keep our body working in correct order.”

First of all I’ve obviously been blissfully unaware of my poor body hemorrhaging oxygen during the night.  It’s just lucky that I haven’t lost so much during one of those extended weekends where I did nothing but sleep that I died!

Also, delighted to hear now that I’m fueled by water, when I could pretty much have been convinced that I’m functioning mainly as a sort of carbohydrate economy.  But I’m a biologist, so what would I know!  I wonder how many calories there are in water?  I’d better start counting them seeing as I am on a diet.

Secondly we have something from the esteemed morning journal ‘The Metro’.  From their science soundbite section Minicosm we have another great quote:

 ”You heard it here first – Charles Darwin was wrong about evolution.  Well in chickens anyway.  A study of the birds legs has revealed that they are not descended from one species as the biologist thought. Yellow skinned chickens have yellow legs because they lack a gene which breaks down pigment in cornfeed.  Their white skinned cousins do have the DNA meaning the two do not share the same ancestor.”

I mean this is truly a startling revalation – 2 creatures, that apparently LOOK like chickens, act like chickens and presumably taste like chickens don’t have a common ancestor.  This can only mean that one of them is in fact an entirely new branch of life!  Does this mean because humans  lack KRTHAP1, or MYH16 which the primates have that we also do not share a common ancestor?  I think someone needs to tell the evolutionary biologists, because this is going to change their world view quite a bit.

Such a shame really, I sat in front of “Life in Cold Blood” and  the Stephen Hawking program last night thinking that it was great that there was finally a bit of decent science related TV on (apart from The Big Bang Theory of course!).  These two quotes have depressed me beyond belief at the general ignorance of the authors they have just exposed.

Urgh

Yuck

“The ionome is defined as the mineral nutrient and trace element composition of an organism and represents the inorganic component of cellular and organismal systems. Ionomics, the study of the ionome, involves the quantitative and simultaneous measurement of the elemental composition of living organisms and changes in this composition in response to physiological stimuli, developmental state, and genetic modifications.”

from this paper.

When oh when will it become deeply unfashionable to create new ‘omics at will?  I for one can’t wait.   I even had a moan about this in a recent seminar I gave.  Genomics I could understand, even proteomics (I intensely dislike ‘transcriptomics’ even though I have to use the term daily), but every time a new ‘ome pops up it seems even more desparately implausible than the last one.

What I’d love to do is track citation levels of various ‘omics, see how many of them survive outside of their first use, or subsequent publications by the same lab. I even went so far as to create some overarching ‘omes.  I quite like the idea of a planetome (biome just doesn’t cut it for me really), solar systome.. maybe galaxyomics, universomics?  Need some seriously high throughput technology for that..