Science: Stephenson Cancer Center annual symposium 2019 (upcoming 2/1)

This Friday (2/1/2019) we'll have the Stephenson Cancer Center annual cancer research symposium at the Samis Education Center in the Children's hospital.

There are three tracks of sessions; Cancer biology, Prevention and control, and Experimental medicine and developmental therapeutics.

This year I'm not giving a talk, but may check out some sessions and presentations by colleagues. 

Otherwise, there are a few results I want to see soon in the lab. We are looking at injured brains of mice, and optimizing experimental conditions to observe these injury's biomarkers. Collaborating with neuroscientists certainly provide interesting opportunities.


Symposium Link:
https://stephensoncancercenter.org/Research/Research-Events/Cancer-Research-Symposium

Past 2-3 days were cold, down to lower 20F (-5~-6C) at night in OKC. But the temp was nowhere near the arctic cold Chicago and other midwest cities were having.

Science: Science is show and tell

This week I have been working on revising a manuscript.

The manuscript went out and received a harsh review. A part of the reasons is that the reviewer was not convinced by a previous work, which is the basis of current work.


When we test hypotheses, we test them. Yet, some of the hypotheses will be determined as "untrue" after experiments/tests, even with best rationales.  In many cases, nature holds something beyond our reasoning.

One way to get over with it and to endure perceived "failures" is, to know such is the nature of the game of medical science, to know a "failure" is not really a failure but another trial to get closer to truth, and to get used to it. 

Hypothesis-driven science is not unlike baseball. No one hits all the time. We swing. We miss. But sometimes we hit.

In the lab, we can do trials and errors. It is a good thing for cell biology and other lab science.


Once we find something that may be "true", we further test them. Here we need to be cautious, especially when we feel like we are onto something.


We test many possibilities internally in the lab, so we become confident in the positive result.

But reviewers outside do not know how much of confirmatory experiments we have done here. Nor the amount of inputs from colleagues, pathologists, and others. All these backstage work are not considered if not shown.


In the manuscript, we did not show some data. The said reviewer assumed we did not do due diligence, and thought we knew very little about what we were showing.


Well, at first I was bummed by the review. But there is something constructive. It is a feedback by a peer after all. We need to show what we did internally but did not show. That, adding the data we did not show, is what I have been doing this week.


I need to remind myself, 'Science is "show and tell". ' When they are saying we did not show enough to convince them, we got to show some more.

Science: Government shutdown

The US government shutdown is dragging on.

My workplace is a state university, so I am not one of 800,000 people who are in federal agencies and directly affected. Yet, the US government is the biggest sponsor for medical research through a number of research grants. That shutdown certainly affects many things we do.

For example, during the government shutdown, all the responses to inquiries to upcoming grant by the government officials are delayed or suspended.

This pending of response slows our planning and preparation process.


There are many other things I can work on, so my everyday work does not seem to change much. Yet, in a broader sense, this shutdown is surely destabilizing environment for medical research in the US.

I do not welcome nor support this government shutdown.