This month on the Node – September 2011
Posted by the Node, on 30 September 2011
What was new on the Node this month? Here are a few of the highlights from September:
EMBO meeting
Natascha Bushati attended the EMBO meeting, and wrote several posts as one of their certified bloggers, including two interviews that are definitely worth a read: one with Janet Rossant, and a joint interview with Eric Wieschaus and Marcos González-Gaitán. Below are some quotes, but there’s much more in the full interviews.
“At the end of the day, when people believe that a human embryo from the time of conception is worthy of all protection, you cannot argue against that. All I can argue is that we are in a situation where human embryos through IVF programmes are discarded, and isn’t it more ethically acceptable to use those discarded embryos to help save human lives in the future?” – Janet Rossant
“We think of proteins and genes, but there are all also lipids and sugars, and we are ignoring them completely! Maybe the future could be to measure them, find out where they are and how they influence things. Chemistry could be the future.” – Marcos González-Gaitán
“The reality is that model systems, at least in the fields we work in, exist not because it has anything to do with generality, but because experiments were easy to do in them.” – Eric Wieschaus
Japan
This past month saw several posts about (research from) Japan: Bruno Velutini summarized turtle shell development research from the Kuratani lab, Paul O’Neill featured a new study on transparent mice, also from the RIKEN institute, and Mubarak Hussain Syed wrote about the developmental neurobiology course he took this summer in Okinawa.
Careers
* Thomas Butts expressed his concern about the future of UK science careers in his contribution to the latest Science is Vital campaign.
* An article summarizing the Node’s alternative careers posts was published in Development (and on the Node) at the start of the month.
* Finally, as always, check out the job listings on the Node for the latest openings in labs around the world.
Everything else:
Still want more? Browse the full September archive of posts to see the rest of the month!