Racist Comment?

I met an old white woman on one of the streets near my hostel who told me in my face, "Get away, you cockroaches!". I was crossing the road so my usual quick wit did not allow me to come back with a biting comment. Hmph! I do not care but I certainly wish she would not do that to another yellow person.

P.S. There were no cockroaches. It's the dead of winter. No insects...

Climate Justice NOW!

Dust dust the dead blog,
Blow blow the threads of deep thought,
Meaning is what I seek.

"Random Haiku 20 Nov 2009" by Annie Ang

Attended a climate change video plus panel discussion today at William Doo Auditorium or the Doo, which is in my hostel building basement... Summoned up the courage to be a devil's advocate and ask a provocative question. Basically, got hammered but I did get some good answers...

Too tired to type more plus huge lab tomorrow...

Gairdner Foundation Talks

My last mid-term ended yesterday and I heard from a friend about the Gairdner Foundation talks. I heard of the talks before but I didn't take any proactive action to make a decision about attending them. Serendipitously, my professor cancelled class for one of my courses today as the herbs we were supposed to measure died of infection. So I had some time to attend the afternoon talks. I didn't regret my time spent there. Sydney Brenner is now my hero!

It's the first time I heard of the Gairdner Foundation and it's their 50th anniversary this year. Apparently, they give out one of the top 3 biomedical prizes in the world and 1 out of 4 Gairdner award recipients go on to win a Nobel Prize. Which is like WOW! I decided to blog about this so I wouldn't forget the interesting stuff I learnt.

First off was a lady named Nubia Muñoz, who was a Nobel Prize nominee. She was part of the team that discovered the link between HPV and cervical cancer. I didn't know that cervical cancer is more prevalent in developing countries and that it is a significant problem. I guess the issue was not covered as the disease burden is still not comparable to stuff like malaria which is more sensational. The one useful thing I learnt from this talk is that I would probably chose Gardasil over Ceravix because it protects against more types. Another cool thing I learnt is that the vaccine should be used on men as well since HPV is transmitted sexually. A problem that I never thought about is that since the vaccine only protects a few types of HPV that causes 70% of cervical cancer, the remaining HPV strains that cause cancer will now be free to dominate. Humans are messing with artificial selection again. How this will turn up, I have no idea but I am pretty sure I know in my lifetime if I live a normal lifespan.

Second up was a Japanese guy (Shinya Yamanaka) who was the person who discovered iPS cells, induced pluripotent somatic cells. I learnt about this in Molecular Biotechnology but that was a a year ago. How fast time is passing. Interject here that I saw Yijia at the talks as well, the other exchange student in my MGY432 class. He asked me whether I know about iPS and I felt so bad when I didn't know. What a lousy molecular biology student but turned out I remembered in the end. :) He gave an interesting history of how he arrived at his research interest, stem cells while starting at investigating cardiovascular disease. Pregnant male mice, LOL! Love the 3 points he learnt from Post Grad work as well.

1. Science is unpredictable, he went from finding a cardiovascular disease to realising it is an oncogene to using it as a pluripotency maintainence factor to produce "stem cells".
2. Always do immense testing on animals before use on humans, esp. Gene therapy.
3. Don't trust the boss aka principal investigator. HAHAHA!

Yijia was predicting he will get a Nobel one day if people managed to discover therapeutic uses from iPS cells. We see about that! But too bad, the iPS cells have a higher risk of causing tetratomas as well. Terrible thing to have. It's like a parasitic abomination of a baby. Alien?

Last up was Sydney Brenner! I thought he was a younger man because I only ever saw his picture and he was a much younger man in the picture. He is the Nobel Prize winner who discovered the entire cell lineage of all C. elegans cells. He is quite the charismatic elderly man. He went up with a cane and did not use any Powerpoint or even speech notes. I love people who can just talk like that. It comes with age and experience and the sad thing about humans is when people managed to gain that much wisdom, they die! Haiz... His topic was "Humanity Genes" and that title alone intrigued me. First, he talked about mice scientists and how they were going to train mice phenotypists to study recombinant mice. But he had a better thought experiment. If you go really far away into space and look at Earth as a petri dish and humans as cells, the entire human population will be enough to cover all different mutations in every base pair in the genome. And we already have trained human phenotypists, they are called DOCTORS, lol. He was such an amusing man.

He also spoke about the Human Genome Project and described with the excellent analogy of human's arrival on the moon. Going to the moon is easy but coming back is difficult. Getting the whole genome is easy now but interpreting it is getting harder and harder. I love the Bill Clinton's quote, "Today we are learning the language in which God created life." And his quote is something like I cannot remember, damn, "It is in the language human created to write about God in the bible." A hard core scientist through and through. A concession here, I think the concept of God can TOTALLY be reconciled with evolution and other biological concepts. I don't see why they have to disagree.

I like the part about the "Uncle Frank" and to be politically correct, the "Auntie Muriel" genome. Uncle Frank exists in almost every family, he started smoking at 4, drank everyday, had 4 wives and numerous girlfriends and finally died at 91 from an accident in a Ferrari. Basically, the perfect genome.

He also said how people need SHE, Security, Health and Entertainment. He joked about how people thought he is going to say education later. He actually clarified this later with education, especially how cultural evolution is now more important for humans than biological evolution. There is this mismatch between genotype and environment now due to anthropogenic modification and people need to be educated. He is really like Watson, being SO old and eminent, they can the most controversial ideas. Like his quote about how to tell people to wise up and lead a healthy lifestyle, "You are just leasing your body from the germ line."

As you can see, I'm completely mad about him now. It's moments like this when I really don't know whether I should do Molecular Biology, Microbiology or explore something in Ecology. I'm completely mad about Molecular Biology sometimes but I don't think I'm smart enough. Haiz. And if I like Molecular Biology, why am I here in Toronto pursuing a minor in environmental biology?

My new favourite word is spasm. I went into a molecular biology spasm today. I blame NUS for causing me to like 2 subjects so much it's painful to chose. They should refine their life science curriculum. Which they did but STILL... Probably, the only person who will read this and laugh later is me...

I really should blog about my field trips and my outing to Canada's Wonderland!

Frost Warning!

Dear Blog,

I started you before I came to Toronto with a ambitious goal to blog about my feelings and experiences in Toronto. Thus far, I have done nothing although I had many feelings and experiences. Sad but true.

However, frustrated by the prospect of writing an essay that I just procrastinated and procrastinated to the desperate situation now, I have decided to blog about the impending frost.

Toronto's (Canada's) weather changes REALLY fast. When I first came on 11th August, it was still summer and the weather was completely similar to Singapore except for the cool winds. I remember walking a lot and enjoying in downtown Toronto.

It got colder when I went for my field course at Joker's Hill in the night but it was still blazing hot enough in the day to give me a sunburn. That was late August.

Just a few weeks ago in September, the highest temperature was 28 degrees Celsius and I could walk around with a short sleeved T-shirt and not catch my death of cold.

NOW, all I have waiting for me is FROST. Temperatures are never rising above 10 degrees Celsius for the next few months. Oh My God! And the sun is rising later and later and setting earlier and earlier. It used to set at 8pm plus in summer, WOW!

Hopefully, I will survive this. Okay, back to staring at my essay....