1. party location
2. gift exchange
3. lab present

The test hens responded more quickly to the tidbitting males that had the normal or stationary wattles, less quickly to the one with the extra floppy wattle (….) and slowest to the male lacking wattles. After the hen’s attention was gained, though, she reacted about the same to each of the four animated chickens. Smith suggests that the wattle helps a rooster gain a hen’s attention when he is tidbitting, rather like a human guy wearing flashy clothes while doing his best dance moves to try and pick up chicks.

“for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase”

link to Nobel prize.org

link to the press release

PEACE PRIZE

Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
REFERENCE: “Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?” Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3, April 2009, pp. 138-42.

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE

Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
REFERENCE: “Exploring Stock Managers’ Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production,” Catherine Bertenshaw [Douglas] and Peter Rowlinson, Anthrozoos, vol. 22, no. 1, March 2009, pp. 59-69.

ECONOMICS PRIZE

The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.

MEDICINE PRIZE

Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.
REFERENCE: “Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?”, Donald L. Unger, Arthritis and Rheumatism, vol. 41, no. 5, 1998, pp. 949-50.

LITERATURE PRIZE

Ireland’s police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means “Driving License”.

MATHEMATICS PRIZE

Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).
REFERENCE: Zimbabwe’s Casino Economy — Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges, Gideon Gono, ZPH Publishers, Harare, 2008, ISBN 978-079-743-679-4.

• Couzin-Frankel J. The promise of a cure: 20 years and counting. Science. 2009 Jun 19;324(5934):1504-7.
• Pearson H. One gene, twenty years. Nature. 2009 Jul 9;460(7252):164-9.

Each one of us will then pick one of the following topics, elaborate the discussion by reading an additional latest reference of your choice and present the major ideas in the lab meeting.  (Liyun, as a physician for years, should pick up a more research-based topic).

The format will be a 10-min presentation followed by 5-min discussion. If you are discussing a research paper, the breakdown should be as follows: 5-min for background+experimental design, 5-min for 1-2 major findings. For a review paper, the breakdown should be approximately 3 mins for each major idea. The presentation should have no more than 4 slides, preferably 3, you can also use the board. We will also bring a timer.

I suggest the following six topics:

1. Pathophysiology
2. Etiology and epidemiology
3. General therapeutic approaches excluding gene therapy
4. Functional characterization of CFTR
5. Animal models, challenges and prospects
6. Gene therapy, challenges and prospects

Please reply and this thread to select your topic, and upload both your presentation and the reference article to the appropriate lab meeting folder.  I look forward to discussing these ideas with you!

More information can be found here:
http://www.hkberc.org.hk/
http://biotechmobilelab.hkberc.org.hk/

Here are a few pictures of my visit…

from wired magazine.

They are the same.

Here is how your brain done this.

1. Turning the clock of a differentiated cell back to the very beginning.
2. Guiding the resulting dedifferentiated “stem cells” or any kinds of “stem cells” to develop into the appropriate cell types.
3. Incorporating these new cells into the existing organ system properly.

In one sense, the premise of 1 and 2 is that 3 would happen automatically once you can get the Stem cells. They are not only expected to become the desired cell type, but also are expected to know what to do inside the body. This can be a tall order.

There is actually a lot to learn from basic research to see how mother nature deals with the regeneration problem. Salamander is a great regeneration model. If you cut its limb off, the cells in the wound region will grow back a limb to its entirety.

It has long been thought that these cells that are responsible for the regeneration process are pluripotent, or “stem cell”-like. A very interesting research has proven it is otherwise. The original cells in the limb actually remember their identities, and they will only grow back to their own kind. In other words, muscle cells will become muscle cells, and skin cells will become skin cells.

It looks like that instead of having some very specialized stem cells that switch all the way  back to the beginning, the differentiated cells just go back a few (?) steps and maintain their identities during the process. One wonders how this process is regulated at the network level and what has been lost in us that we do not have this capability anymore. Maybe this talent is still hibernating somewhere in our genome, waiting for us to turn it back on.

References:

Sánchez Alvarado A. A cellular view of regeneration. Nature. 2009 Jul 2;460(7251):39-40. [PubMed][Nature]

Kragl M, Knapp D, Nacu E, Khattak S, Maden M, Epperlein HH, Tanaka EM. Cells keep a memory of their tissue origin during axolotl limb regeneration. Nature. 2009 Jul 2;460(7251):60-5. [PubMed][Nature]