Saturday, April 01, 2006

Down from the Mountaintop



Greetings from Seattle!
I've come down from the mountain and present you with another photo from the top of Mount Whistler.

Here is my latest scientific observation: When you cram 600 international scientists, shoulder-to-shoulder, in an auditorium for a week and let them cough/sneeze all over one another and share buffet utensils, they will catch each others' colds. And to prove the point, I write this post in the midst of a sneezing fit.

The good news is that the conference went very well. Here are a couple of more tidbits:

1. We learned how efficiently tadpoles can regenerate their tails.

2. We learned that in Italy, gene therapy is being used to treat a blistering skin disease (epidermitis bullosa) by replacing the patient's faulty gene. The patient's own skin cells are harvested and expanded in a petri dish with the corrected gene added and used as skin grafts over blistered areas. Since the cells originate from the patient, there is no sign of immune rejection. A clean, healthy layer of skin replaces the tissue that had been completely blistered.
http://www.expertopin.com/doi/abs/10.1517/14712598.6.4.367

That's all from Seattle for now. I'll be home tomorrow!






4 comments:

Snerd Gronk said...

OK, I've got a juicy tidbit from the Lay Monks' Cloister Cell conference and it's more about human nature than about Lay Monks' Cloister Cells themselves. This morning, I received an e-mail from a lay monk, completely unknown to me. He said that he had read an article of mine from 2002 and pointed me to another website that he thought would be of interest. When I visited the website, I was floored! It turns out that a lay monks' group in Indiana has plagiarized my entire article of 2002. They copied it word-for-word (along with my illustrations) slapped their own names on the manuscript (in place of mine) and got it published in the Indiana Journal of Ophtha-Cloister! This has to be the worst case of plagiarism that I have ever seen in my lay career.

Snerd

eyedoc333 said...

Why, I never!

not_over_it said...

Surrrre!

KEvron said...

snerd, you need to get layed.....

MEtoo