P.C. Shannon

Caroline and I are about halfway through our first pregnancy, and it’s been a very interesting experience. Seeing the heartbeat on the ultrasound and hearing it having both been very powerful, moving experiences. Hopefully, we’ll find out the child’s sex later this week, and that will definitely increase our connection to the baby. At last we’ll be able to narrow our constant wrangling over names.

I’m sure that I will be overwhelmed when the baby is born and that nothing will really prepare me for that. But in the meantime, my sense of duty is already growing. This really came home to me when James Kim and his family were missing in Oregon. It was a strangely personal story as I get CNet videos on my TiVo and was already familiar with James. But when I read about him and his wife fighting for their kids’ survival, it resonated in a way that it wouldn’t have before the baby.

I may have turned 31 this year, but according to an article on CNN.com today, I’m actually getting younger:

On a global scale, three out of five consumers believed the 40’s are the new 30’s.

“Our 40’s are being celebrated as the decade where we can be comfortable and confident in both personal and financial terms. The majority of global consumers really believe life starts at 40,” AC Nielsen Europe President and CEO Frank Martell said.

This should come as good news to my wife, who feels like we’re behind the curve since a lot of our friends are homeowners but we’re not. The only problem is that now matter how you view life, a woman’s biological clock keeps time in a absolute sense—past a certain age, risks for some birth defects start to skyrocket and fertility drops off.

The other interesting fact from the article is that 33% of Irish would consider cosmetic surgery to maintain their looks versus only 25% of Americans.

Forbes.com this week has a special section on corporate citizenship. I was particularly interested in the article about corporate philanthropy entitled “Can Corporations Save The World?” Considering the source, I was expecting it to be all about enlightened self-interest and up-with-capitalism, but it actually resonated with a lot of my own thoughts. I’ll avoid going on about the rise of corporate rule and instead focus on something simpler and a bit more relevant to the Forbes article: how corporations are valued.

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I had an absolute wonderful time with Caroline on Sunday (see our lovely self-portrait). We took a daytrip out to the hill country and Fredericksburg. Ostensibly it was a quest for peaches, but really it was an excuse to get out of town for an afternoon.

Nothing terribly noteworthy happened. We stopped in a handful of quaint little farm stores that each sold all manner of preserves, jams, and salsas. It turns out that you can buy peach cobbler in a jar and that peaches-and-jalapenos really is a good flavor combination. We had lunch at an herb garden where we were served glasses of water with a rosebud. Afterwards, we had ice cream and toured the shops on Main Street.

Fredericksburg is filled with German heritage. Main Street, also known as Hauptstrasse, has the oldest brewery in the state, and you can walk down the street drinking a pint.

It felt a little strange, a little bourgeois to be touring the shops. I can remember a few years back when I drove through Fredericksburg regularly on my way to hiking at Enchanted Rock. I regarded the tourists at the shops not quite contemptuously but certainly as being removed or apart from where I was. I guess I’m in a different place now.

I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I had a truly fantastic time with my wife, even though nothing really happened. It was really something we needed, too, as we creep up on our first anniversary and after all the ups and downs of the past year. It’s odd that so much nothing can mean so much, but it does. Our little daytrip strengthened our relationship and brought us closer together. Things are slowly, surely starting to look better on all fronts.

There comes a time in every grad student’s life when he must propose a dissertation topic, and that time is finally upon me. It has been astoundingly difficult for me to figure out exactly what is involved in making a proposal, and I can’t decide if that’s due to miscommunication, benign neglect, or design.

When my class had our qualifying exams last year, there was big meeting and everything was laid out for us pretty clearly. There has been no such meeting for proposals, which makes sense because it’s a much smaller deal than quals (though no less necessary for attaining the Ph.D.). My first inclination to explain my own lack of information is to think that my boss expects the department staff to tell us about it while the staff expects my boss to handle it—miscommunication. It’s equally likely that no one realizes I’m adrift—benign neglect. (I have tried a couple of times to arrange meetings with my professor to get this straightened out, but he seems oblivious to my confusion.) My sneaking, paranoid suspicion is that we students are intentionally left in the dark. The Ph.D. is supposed to teach us to be independent researchers, so why not leave it up to us to take the final steps to becoming doctoral candidates on our own?

I think that’s giving the faculty too much credit; they have better things to do than actively trying to make our lives difficult. And lest anyone get the wrong impression, I’m really just amused—not upset—by these circumstances, at least since I found the answers and got them confirmed by the department’s staff. It’s just par for the course for grad school. See Piled Higher and Deeper for more evidence.

I’ve taken the structure for my dissertation proposal from my grad school bible, Getting What You Came For, which suggests a three-part format. The proposal starts with a brief introduction and then lays out the research problem. This is followed by a review of all of the relevant literature and an in-depth description of the research methods and techniques that will be used. The format could just as easily have been stolen from the NIH R01 grant, which follows a similar pattern.

My great epiphany from this experience is that no research project should be undertaken without a proposal. It doesn’t have to be as grandiose as even the ten-page proposal I’m preparing for my dissertation, but it should contain all the same parts: a clear statement of the problem, the questions involved, and the goal or end result of the project; a review of the literature; and a clear description of the techniques that will be used. In a perfect world, it should also include a timeline and milestones. This proposal (perhaps without the lit review, which can be very time consuming) should be circulated and agreed to by all involved parties.

Too often I feel like I have floundered in my own endeavors because I didn’t fully understand the project that I was working on. I didn’t have a larger context to put it in. I didn’t have a clear idea of the project’s goal or expected result. Having a clear proposal for each project would have helped tremendously, and it’s something I intend to do for new projects going forward.

I was driving around on empty this week. Somehow that got me to thinking about the diesel car that Wesley had in high school, Old Smokey. Man, we had some good times in that car and its successor, Old Yeller. So then I started trying to remember what I did during my summers in high school. I have pretty clear memories of each of summers during college, but not so much high school. I didn’t work. I went to band camp a couple of times (yes, I’m that big of a geek). But the summer between my junior and senior years in particular is a big blank, which leads me to one inescapable conclusion: I did jack shit.

Here’s the thing, though: we’re all, like, grown up now. Wesley is, like, a doctor. But not just any old doctor. No, he’s a fancy MD/PhD kind of doctor. Who’s married. To a lawyer. And owns a house. And has a kid.

What the hell? When did that happen? I guess sometime in the last 14 or so years.

Speaking of 14 years ago and memorable summers in high school, the summer of 92 shall live in infamy. Not only did it have a pretty profound effect on my life for, like, 10 years, it was also the summer I stole my dad’s car. Good times.

To the best of my knowledge, Austin is the origin of the current resurgence in rollerderby. We have two leagues, TXRD and Texas Rollergirls. I’m not sure what the beef between them is, but I assume there is one, since there are two of them and they never play against each other. Even though both leagues have been around for a few years, Caroline and I have only ever been to one match, a bout in the Texas Rollergirls league.

In January, the A&E channel premiered their Rollergirls show, which followed the TXRD league. I don’t know if I would have followed the show if I didn’t live in Austin, but thanks to the magic of Tivo, we saw all the episodes. For me, part of the interest was just in supporting local, uh, culture. It was also strangely fascinating to see very familiar places on television.

It has been even stranger seeing the girls from the show around town. Most of our encounters have been at the regular 80’s dance night on Sundays at Elysium. The experience was kind of a cross between seeing a celebrity and (because the show exposed their private lives, as much as any “reality” program does) running into an old friend.

Any lingering notions I had that reality show were real, however, was shattered by witnessing the girls’ behavior. I don’t want to name names, but one girl, who came across as very mild mannered and reserved on television, turns out to be really very crazy. Another, who was one of the more colorful characters on the show, I can only describe as even skankier in person.

For Caroline’s birthday, we went to a TXRD bout, and finally got to see our televised friends in action live. It was a blast. Going to rollerderby is kind of like attending the female version of a hockey match, because you spend half the game just waiting for a fight to break out. And fight they did! One girl got her shirt torn off and was ejected from the game.

Being familiar with girls on both teams, we couldn’t decided which one to cheer for. I ended up taking my father’s route and cheering for a good game. I was not disappointed. The bout was close throughout and undecided until the very end.

Rollerderby leagues are springing up all over the country, from New York City to Phoenix, Kansas City, and even Caroline’s hometown of Richmond. I like to think that it started right here. Now that I’ve had a taste of the all-girl rollerderby, I’m hooked and ready for more.

Go Clinton! The former President and the current governor of Arkansas have persuaded the nation’s soft drink makers to remove high-calorie beverages from public schools. The New York Times has the full story.

This is really impressive, as I didn’t expect the likes of Coca-Cola and Pepsico to really give a rat’s ass about slowly killing a generation as long as it brought in money. I guess they had to bend to the general public’s growing realization of what’s going on. There’s really no reason for anyone to drink soda. Giving it up is an easy, easy way to cut calories, and when you have some for the first time in a long while, you’ll realize how sickly sweet it is.

Now if we can just get Big Soda to stop selling poison water.

On Wednesday night, both Caroline and I had our cars broken into. This has happened to me before, but this time was much more unsettling. Previously, some crackhead smashed the window on my pickup truck and nabbed my portable CD player, which I paid $20 for at Best Buy. The real pain there was having to replace the window.

In the current circumstance, our cars were sitting in front of our house, and there was no “breaking in” per se as both cars were unlocked. The theives—who we figure were just some kids from the neighborhood—took some CDs from my car, nothing from hers. The unsettling part is that this happened in our tranquil little subdivision miles from downtown and other sketchy areas.

I keep thinking about the part in Fahrenheit 9/11 where Michael Moore goes to Canada and starts walking into people’s homes to see if they lock the doors or not (the film makes it seem as though there are no locked homes in Canada). He starts a conversation with one guy, asking the man has ever experienced a break-in. Just some liquor, probably taken by local teenagers.

I guess that’s my conundrum. I’m not really upset about the actual theft—although it is annoying to have to repurchase like 8 CD—my mind is filled with images of home invasions and Elizabeth Smart and so on. (And for all the worried parents out there, we do lock the doors at night.) But I don’t want to have to lock my car at night. I want to believe that we live in an area where such precautions are unnecessary.

But clearly that’s not the case. I guess the solution is to only keep burned copies of my CDs in the car.

Last time, I said that I had clear vision of my future. I want to lay that out now, as much for my benefit as anyone else’s. I want to work in systems biology. I’m really interested in the range of interactions within a cell, and I want to contribute to applying results from high-throughput studies, such as microarray analysis, to real biological problems, primarily cancer and other diseases.

Wow, this has really turned into a personal mission statement. I’ve also realized that while I’m not currently working on anything that could even loosely be termed “systems biology,” I am studying cellular interactions, so at least I’m kinda on course.

Wikipedia is telling me there’s something called “computational systems biology,” which nominally sounds like it’s right up my alley. But when it comes down to it, I’m much more interested in applications than in pure research. So if I need to develop new algorithms, then that’s great, but if I just need to process data, then so be that’s great, too, so long as my efforts are contributing meaningfully to the research.

I’m also interested in synthetic biology, but there are two problems with pursuing this area immediately. One is that it’s still a very bench-oriented enterprise. I don’t think we’ll ever get away from that as there are just too many random factors to handle computationally. Second and more significant, it’s still a very academic discipline, and I don’t want to be an academic. I think that systems biology now will pave the way for me to enter synthetic biology later, when it becomes a field in which biotech and pharmaceutical companies are interested.

I’m very interested in working at Genentech. The biotech company was just named as the best place to work by Fortune and as one of the top twenty smartest companies by Baseline. The Fortune article sacred me off a little bit, just because I wasn’t sure if I had the passion. But after writing this little “personal mission statement”—as touchy-feely as that sounds—I’ve found that I do.