I had lunch with one of my colleagues at a well-known coffee hangout here in Arlington today. The university building that houses both of our faculty offices was no more than a block away. But after the pandemic, its the home office that serves as the categorical work place. I’m not sure that our building will be repopulated as such.

We both agreed, campus offices are out and Zoom is here to stay. It’s just more efficient and it gets rid of the whole commute thing. And of course work travel. That’s in spite of the ubiquitous Zoom fatigue. Has the nature of work really changed permanently?

And on that note, off to a Zoom call….

Today’s NYT report on the Havana Syndrome, here. Interestingly (and probably not related), clinical neuroscience researchers are exploring the use of focused ultrasound for enhancing drug delivery produced by opening of the blood brain barrier. In the former case, the suspicion is on microwaves (radio frequency). The clinical work is using sound waves that, name not withstanding, are much lower in frequency.

I’ve thought for sometime that it might be possible to use resonant radiation to modulate the firing frequency of specific sets of neurons from outside the brain since this type of physiology is inherently both electric and chemical.

If we assume that the physics of this universe holds everywhere and that there is a lot of life spread across the billions of galaxies, then does that life hold to the same carbon-based biochemistry as a generalizable principle? Or, alternatively, if we could play “the tape” back over from the formation of our planet, would we end up with a recognizable biosphere?

So, when our probes test for life–say on Mars–will they recognize the signatures of life?

I read the other day somewhere that the science peer review system has its origins in the jury system of English Common Law. Two thoughts come to mind: first that the jury system makes mistakes and second that not a lot of folks look eagerly towards their jury duty. The same is true of scientific peer review of course.

The problem is what might work better? While the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and other elite entities pride themselves on funding individuals instead of projects (ideas), it’s not at all clear to me that having a few powerful scientists or tech billionaires make the choices would be immune to making mistakes. Consequential scientific discoveries are tricky things: they emerge often where least expected. I remember one story where the Institution had to hurriedly award tenure after a Nobel Prize was announced.

Some folks look towards the X-prize model or even towards predictive markets. Once again, the former involves a choice of what is an important challenge, the latter has notoriously imperfect predictive powers.

When I was asked about this problem at any one of the many NSF panels that I visited to do Q&A, I would point out that one alternative to these not so good methods, would be to simply divide the NSF budget equally among all US PI’s–roughly $5K. A typical minimum value for a science grant is $1M/3 years. A small number of the panelists let me know that the 5K would be just fine–which surprised me.

We have a similar problem with journal articles that we have with grants. Today, I heard it suggested that we simply dispense with peer review of manuscripts and allow the bad ones in– figuring that eventually, only the good ones would be cited and the rest would wither away in the cybersphere.

Drop me a line, if you have a way to solve this problem.

I’ve submitted my grades for this academic semester and am now on sabbatical until Fall of 2022. And I’ve been back at my university long enough to have a bit of perspective on my time at NSF. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the big scientific opportunities for new biologists who stand on the threshold of becoming independent investigators. Per my own experience, I focus on basic life sciences although the biomedical implications are often obvious. Here is my list:

• Origin of the ribosome and translation
• Evolution of molecular signal transduction
• Brains embedded in bodies as unified systems
• Environmental microbiomes as sentinels for ecosystem dynamics
• Deep ocean adaptations in eukaryotes
• Biosphere/Lithosphere self-organization principles
• Viruses/animal toxins and their co-evolution with their attack surfaces
• Mnemonic storage in genomic sequences (as distinct from the DNA dogma)
• The biology of the high atmosphere ecosystem
• Evolution of excitable cells
• Beyond signal sequences in protein targeting.

If you are a trainee looking at one of these areas for your own research, please go ahead and drop me a line for my further thoughts.

It’s making the rounds in my world. You can read it here. He is an extremely credible science reporter. The details on the Spike protein furin binding site are compelling. And of course the bit about NIH funding. Well recommended. Hat tip to TC.

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One thing about science in general and biology specifically: progress is dependent on previously published results. Loose confidence in those and the whole thing is a house of cards. What’s remarkable to me is that for the life sciences, in general, the whole edifice is remarkably sturdy. The reason I have confidence in my mRNA-based vaccine is because ultimately, I accept the DNA-dogma and the constellation of results over the past 60-70 years that have supported it. In other words, the theory of how the vaccine works makes sense within the larger theoretical framework.

While to a large part, this is also true of physics, it’s also clear that there is a basic fundamental issue between the macro-physics of General Relativity and the micro-physics of Quantum Mechanics. This theoretical problem has been around for such a long time, that those of us on the outside of that discipline don’t waste time worrying about it. But….if that inconsistent dogma was directly connected to something deeply practical (like a life-giving vaccine), I would be worried. There’s a very deep-end of the pool quality to the theoretical frameworks of physics that removes us from mostly having to worry about their practical effect on us here in the shallow end of our blue planet’s neighborhood. But let’s stay far away from any event horizons.

Eric Lander is having his confirmation hearing today, coverage from Politico here. I applaud the President’s raising the profile of the OSTP director to cabinet-level.

More interesting are the two competing versions of a huge NSF plus-up that are making their ways through Congress. Here’s a nice analysis from National Journal’s Brendon Bordelon. My view is that the NSF’s proper wheel house is basic science. Full stop. The caveat is that my world view is already contradicted by the existence of the Engineering Directorate. So I suppose both of these bills aim to recreate an extramural version of Bell Labs inside the NSF as well.

If that’s the case, then I will say, that model has been sorely missed by the US. But I’m not sure a federal agency is the right place to start over. Instead, I’d take a look at the National Labs–both Sandia and Argonne same obvious candidates.

Is here. This is the theoretical under-pinning of the work that Nadine Kabbani and I began a year ago. Our experimental work is about to be submitted in the next day or so. It’s a nice story I think….

Camille Nous, is a fictitious French addition to quite a few high profile articles designed to “protest” current authorship conventions in science. She has published across quite the waterfront of disciplines–easily explained by her non-existence. But the larger question raised by the addition of Nous to the list is whether our authorship conventions serve the function for which they were designed–namely to allocate intellectual responsibility for the publication as a product. My own view is that this question is quite valid. The whole reason that I support ORCID is the notion of allocating credit for the production of scientific work in a manner that is more functional than the current status quo. Although it goes beyond ORCID. Many journals require a section that essentially states who did what with regards to the project. Now if you could attach that to ORCID, then we’d be in a better place.