Following the Columbia disaster, I joined the anti-manned-space-flight school of thought. The basic premise is that space travel is too expensive and too dangerous to send human beings aloft, especially when all of their work can be done by robotic craft. In addition, NASA should focus on scientific research and exploration, which is almost universally done by machines.
I recently read a publication by Popular Science magazine that detailed possibilities for space travel in the year 2100. It changed my thinking. I still think there’s no reason to send astronauts into orbit to do routine tasks that can be safely and effectively executed by robots. For instance, there’s no need to risk the lives of 7 people to launch a new weather satellite or conduct microgravity experiments. However, I realized that to have humans exploring the solar system in a century, then we need to have manned space flight now.
In other words, we need to go to Mars, just as the President has requested. I understand that there are a lot of pressing problems here on Earth that need to be dealt with — I tend to think that this administration is generally making things worse. Nonetheless, $1 billion is not a lot of money in terms of the national budget. It’s less than the cost of a B-2 bomber. Farm subsidies (forget the myth of the family farmer, these are really just corporate payouts to ADM and other agricorps) are $332 billion annually. More to the point, every dollar spent on space technology translates into about $6 in the terrestrial economy from new technologies and products.
NASA is pursuing the President’s directive with the usual bureaucratic shortsightedness. The agency has cancelled all missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope, focusing instead on the International Space Station. The Hubble is one of the most important and expensive scientific instruments of the 20th Century, and by refusing to maintain it, NASA has relegated the space telescope to so much orbital debris. While it is imperative that the human race set foot on the red planet, we cannot loose sight of the basic science that also must be conducted in space.
I read a lot of Wired. This month’s issue has a cover story about the exportation of tech jobs to India. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but this topic has been in the news a lot lately. It got me thinking about whether biotech jobs would ever be sent overseas to cheaper labor markets. I worry about this because since I decided to go back to school, I have fully expected and planned to get a job in the private sector rather than trying for an academic position.
Moving tech support or programmers to another location is a fairly straightforward proposition. All you need is a desk, a computer, a telephone, and then just route the calls. Moving a lab is a very different beast. In addition to the physical space, there’s a lot of specialized equipment, stocks, samples, chemicals, and chemical waste. Not to mention that the scientific community in this country is much stronger and more respected. The brain-drain historically is from India to the U.S.
However, the research climate in this country is changing. Politico-religious pressures are dampening stem cell research. The intellectual property laws are stifling innovation. We’ve already seen this situation drive prominent researchers to other countries. It seems likely that, without a major reversal in policy, this American brain-drain will continue. The United States will not be a leader in biotech.
It’s a conclusion that seems preposterous to us. The U.S. has been number one for so long that we can’t imagine being anything else. The Russians couldn’t either and certainly now are having hard a time not being a superpower. But the historical fact is that all empires fall. Maybe biotech is the beginning of the end for the U.S.
I’ve started work on my second rotation in Andy Ellington’s lab. It’s a bioinformatics problem, so I’ve had a crash course in Perl before I started writing any programs. But so far it’s progressing very nicely, and Andy is excited about it. I hope that before too long, I’ll be able to put the keyboard down and start doing some bench work to verify the computational work.
Previous people in the lab — mainly an undergrad who is now at Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship — developed a database of amino acid-nucleotide interactions called “AANT”. I’ll spare you the details on how this was done, but there is a Nucleic Acids Research paper on it. Now I’m going back through the data looking for nucleotide-amino acid interactions that are at approximately the same distance and orientation as other interactions. I think ultimately Andy would like to be able to intelligently design aptamers (RNA molecules that bind other molecules) to bind proteins rather than having to screen for them, which can take months.
I taught my first two classes of the new semester today, and it went pretty well. The big thing I learned today is that you have to set the mood from the first time you walk in the door — or at least the first time you open your mouth. So I greeted everyone and asked them all their names. I made a sincere effort to learn the students names and call on them by name. They seemed to respond very well to that. They were a little bashful about coming up to the board to work problems, but they did it and seemed to take to it well.
Setting this kind of friendly, jovial classroom environment is a big step for me. I’m usually kind of quiet and reserved. I’m certainly in the habit of waiting for others to set the mood and then fitting myself into that. Of course as the instructor, it’s up to me to set the mood.
I really enjoy teaching, at least in a smaller classroom where you can interact with the students. I don’t envy the professor, having to stand before 115 blank faces and drone on for an hour about Mendel’s experiments. The part of teaching I hate the most is the grading, which the prof — lucky bastard — doesn’t have to do. I suppose there isn’t a way to have your cake and eat it, too.
Anyway, the course website is here, and you can see the website for Dr. Iyer’s lab here. He does very cool stuff with microarrays, a.k.a. gene chips. He got his PhD from Harvard and did his post-doc in the Brown Lab at Stanford, which played a big role in developing microarray technology.
A while back, I let our friend Marjorie run wild at Emo’s with the camera-phone. I have finally collected together the pictures she took and made them available for all to see. Enjoy!
Marjorie’s Mini-Blog
