The Darwin Beat and science themed tattoos

This evening there was a lecture given at Rockefeller University as a part of the "Science in Media" and "NYC Skeptics" series. Rockefeller attracts a lot of interesting people since it's the leading research university in the Biological Sciences in the world, with the most Nobel laureates in the field as faculty. Since Cornell is literally across the street, we get announcements of events taking place there. Tonight the speaker was a science writer named Carl Zimmer, who often writes in the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times and other magazines such as Discover and the Scientific American.

Being a journalist, he was extremely well spoken and a very good presenter, so his lecture was a ton of fun to listen to. His talk was titled "The Darwin Beat: Reporting from the Frontiers of Evolution". He talked about many examples of how amazing nature is and how scientists have learned so much incredible information by studying the evolution of species. For instance, much of what we know about the migration of the continents to their present locations comes from evidence from evolutionary biology. People studying a small immoblie species of spiders found that genetically related groups of them were living in the southern tips of South America, Africa, as well as in Sri Lanka and Australia. The only way this is possible - since these animals don't move more than a few inches in their lifetimes - is if these continents were once all part of a huge ancient supercontinent, which of course is a well-known scientific fact today.

Zimmer also talked a lot about snake venoms - apparently there is a scientist in Australia who has dedicated his life to studying venoms and he travels around the world collecting them from different snakes. He figured out that many venomes are compounds that exist in other species at different locations - one very poisonous venom is a pancreatic enzyme that must have mutated during the course of evolution to be made in venom glands of snakes instead of the pancreas, conferring an advantage to the snake that could kill its prey by injecting a digestive enzyme into the prey's circulation, which one can imagine, would be a pretty dangerous. These are just a few example that stayed with me after the lecture because they beautifully illustrate the elegance of nature and the fact that everything is the world is interconnected and indeed, we have a lot more in common with snakes and spiders than we like to admit.

Inevitably, when there is any talk of evolution, the issues of creationism and intelligent design also come up. Towards the end of the lecture I almost felt like I was listening to Richard Dawkins. After having lived in the US for 8 years and having read and listened to Dawkins' work, I wasn't surprised to hear the statistics of people's beliefs about evolution and creationism in this country. While the situation is a lot better in Europe, it still amazes me that there are plenty of educated people around the world who deny the validity of evolution and would rather believe that humans were created as they are now 10,000 years ago by a supernatural being.

Again I have realized how much I love science or the ideas behind science. The complexity and beauty of nature never seize to amaze me and that's why I have been studying it for many years and why I am in graduate school now. I have been discovering, however, that doing the actual science - as in doing the experimental work itself - is not nearly as beautiful and glorious as the big picture is. In experimental science, everything lies in the smallest of details and a lot of what we do in the lab is troubleshooting the experimental designs. While this is absolutely necessary for the advancement of science, I am not always sure that I have the kind of personality ad patience to do it for the rest of my life. But for now, I have no reason to complain. I am working in a field that is truly my passion and that I have a huge admiration for, and even if research turns out not to be the exact part of it that I also enjoy doing, it's never too late to try something new.

Last but not least, Carl Zimmer writes a pretty interesting blog that I would like to recommend: The Loom. A section of the blog deals with science themed tattoos. He did mention today that he had once met a scientist who had something related to his field of research tattooed on his body somewhere and how this gave Zimmer the idea to look for other people with similar ink. On his blog, you can find many of such tattoos, some of which I think are super cool. Also, this is further evidence that scientists are a little nuts, and that grad school makes people do silly things - like quite spontaneously getting a nose piercing after a long day in the lab. (I have absolutely no regrets about it.)


One of my favorites, a DNA double helix, on the ankle of an immunologist, and I love that she even says in the description that "The two double-stranded breaks don’t bother me; adaptive immune cells have those as part of normal development." (Sorry, for non-immunologists, normally, breaks in DNA are bad, that's how a lot of mutations arise, but in the case of some cells in the immune system, it's a really good thing, because that is how they acquire a huge repertoire of recognition molecules through which our immune systems are able to recognize such a wide variety of pathogens.)