Community Voices

Guest post by Christine Queitsch. Last week when the scientific community lost one of its brightest and most innovative minds, I lost my long-time mentor and the closest thing to a mother since I lost mine. Susan Lindquist had found me in a basement laboratory in the former East Germany, in 1992, shortly after the…

GSA-Art features the creative works of scientists. Read more in GSA President Stan Fields’ call for submissions. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email to GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line. Biswapriya Misra is a postdoc in the Department of Genetics at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. He loves cooking and…

I’m a total sucker for new methods. I couldn’t wait to try out Trans-Helical Illumination (THI), in which low intensity lasers prime conversion of helical proteins. The potential of Synthetically Integrative Sensor Neurons (SISN) to probe brain subregion function is inspiring. Closer to my own heart, we have high hopes that Optical Wavelength Assembly of…

Guest post by Joanne Topol. GSA-Art features the creative works of scientists. Read more in GSA President Stan Fields’ call for submissions. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email to GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line. My art reflects inner feelings that cannot be accessed through analytic thought. These feelings are…

GSA-Art features the creative works of scientists. Read more in GSA President Stan Fields’ call for submissions. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email to GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line. Bianca Ruiz is a graduate student rotating in the Fields lab at the University of Washington, Genome Sciences, who…

According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, 33% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years and another 24% believe that God guided evolution over millions of years to create humans as they exist today. While scientists should respect people’s deeply held religious beliefs, it…

GSA-Art features the creative works of scientists. Read more in GSA President Stan Fields’ call for submissions. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email to GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line. To me, science is not about being in the lab; it is about solving puzzles. I have been working…

GSA-Art features the creative works of scientists. Read more in GSA President Stan Fields’ call for submissions. If you would like to submit your own work or nominate someone else’s, please send an email to GenesToGenomes@genetics-gsa.org with “GSA-Art” in the subject line. Our first GSA-Art post is by Matthew S. Sachs, a Professor in the Department of Biology at Texas A&M University…

Guest post by Teresa Bonello It was 1984 and the first cloning of the homeobox sequence in Drosophila had just been reported. Newly-minted postdoc Denis Duboule was called into the office of his mentor, Pierre Chambon, and asked if he wanted to lead his own investigation looking for Hox clusters in mice. What followed was…

I’m fond of saying that while scientists often have a hankering to draw sketches, pen novels, compose songs, or carry out other acts of artistic creation in what available free time they have, you don’t find many creative artists hankering to borrow a bit of lab space for a few nighttime experiments. If you’re a…

Perhaps no topic has had more ink spilled by biobloggers – especially if you include electrons dripping out of laptops – than the tyranny of the Journal Impact Factor. A metric designed by Eugene Garfield to help librarians select journals, the IF has been routinely abused for purposes never intended. How can we reverse this…