Not sure of your options after graduation? Then you should check out What Can You Be With a PhD? this Friday and Saturday at NYU. There will be symposia covering a variety of career paths including academia, pharma, biotech, government jobs, publishing and more. See event website for more details.

Last night I had the opportunity to attend another Meet the Author event sponsored by Bioentrepreneur. As discussed in a previous post, Bioentrepreneur is a site sponsored by Nature Biotechnology, designed as a educational resource for scientists interested in commercializing their research. The speaker was Thomas Gunning, vice president and general counsel at EMD Serono.

Gunning offered some advice for building a successful startup. As outlined in his article, published in Nature Biotechnology last year, Gunning discussed five key elements to developing a successful business. First off, bioentrepreneurs should pay close attention to detail. You never know when you will have the opportunity to close a deal, and that chance may come and go all too quickly. By being organized and prepared to discuss your business venture at anytime, you can avoid missed opportunities. Second, make sure your product is unique. Otherwise, there won’t be a market for it. Even if you have improved an existing product, it is key that you are able to market your product as either the best-in-class or novel.

Gunning also discussed freedom to operate and exclusivity. Patent and legal issues like these are something that we, as scientists, must pay close attention to. After all, this is not what we are trained in, so it is particularly important you don’t limit your market and financial possibilities with patent issues. So how are we supposed to prevent issues like these? That is where Gunning’s next piece of advice comes in. Surround yourself with the best and brightest advisors you can find. That includes lawyers, investors, management teams and scientists. By building the strongest team possible, your company will be more likely to succeed. Finally, Gunning discussed the importance of due diligence in avoiding liability issues. We have all seen the huge legal fines for pharmaceutical cases in the papers. In order to avoid a potentially disastrous legal situation, it is critically important to uncover any contingent liabilities.

So take Gunning’s advice. With a good product, good people, good planning and a bit of hard work, your startup can succeed.

If you are interested in checking out past or attending future Meet the Author events, be sure to visit the Bioentrepreneur forum on the Nature Network for more information. And of course, you can check out many more articles like Gunning’s at the Bioentrepreneur website.

It was a late night at the lab today. Sadly, I missed my opportunity to see Documentary Shorts at the Imagine Science Film Festival (ISFF). But you don’t have to miss it! There are still 2 days left of the ISFF (last day October 24th). So check out the schedule to catch the remaining events. Happy viewing!

As scientists, we are taught to communicate in a very specific language at very specific times, mainly during a lectures or conferences. Building communication skills outside of these defined communication periods proves to be difficult. Luckily, other outlets for scientific communication do exist, the Nature Network being one of them. But what really makes one a good communicator and what are they ways in which we, as scientists, can improve our communication skills (in science and outside of the lab alike)?

Last night I went to a talk sponsored by the Columbia University Biotechnology Association where the speaker, Nick Colucci, sought to answer these questions. Colucci is a scientist-turned-healthcare communications CEO at Publicis Healthcare here in New York. He offered some valuable advice on how was can effectively communicate with both scientists and others. He stressed the importance of body gestures such as eye contact and the appropriate stance one should have when communicating with more than one person at a time. He even suggested that one can practice their communication skills by joining the Toastmasters International. However, his most important piece of advice was to be self-aware. In essence, knowing both your strengths and weaknesses will help to make your more confident and give others a better idea of your skill set. This will help to make you more successful, both in an out of science.

In the end, I walked out of the talk with the knowledge that succeeding in science goes beyond laboratory skills… and, hopefully, a better idea of how to gain those skills.

You may have seen from my previous post that there was a SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN event in New York this past week. I had the opportunity to attend this event and it was really quite fun. The talk given by the editor-in-chief, Mariette DiChristina, gave an insiders look to the recent SCI AM special issue called Origins. Origins of what? Well, pretty much anything you can think of from paper clips to life on earth.

To be quite honest, I really didn’t know what to expect from this talk. I had never seen an editor-in-chief talk about science, let alone discuss scientific articles designed to be enjoyable to both a scientific audience and the general public. What I got from the talk was a combination of interesting facets of scientific history presented in a succinct, enjoyable format. Some fun facts include:

• The origins of scotch tape date back to 1930, with the development of cellophane. Scotch tape actually contains four individual layers. There is adhesive layer and a clear cellophane layer. However, there is also a layer of primer that helps the adhesive stick to the cellophane and an additional “release agent” which allows one to unravel the tape from the role. Scotch tape also is also triboluminescent and releases X-rays when unraveled quickly in a vacuum.

• Chocolate dates back to 3,100 years ago. However, the addition of milk to chocolate, effectively creating milk chocolate is accredited to an Irish physician and naturalist named Hans Slone in the 1680s.

• The origin of cooking our food dates back to 1.9 million years ago. Harvard anthropologist, Richard Wrangham, believes that cooking is an essential development in formation of characteristics we consider to be distinctly human. After all, evidence suggests that Homo erectus, hominids with larger brains and smaller pelvises than their predecessors, appeared around the same time as the advent of fire. Anthropologists believe that cooking allowed for less chewing time, leaving more time and energy for social relationships, thus, stimulating brain growth. Now that’s food for thought.

For more scintillating stories of origins, I encourage you to check out this free podcast interview with Mariette DiChristina and, of course, check out the Origins issue.

Come see the Acting Editor-in-Chief of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Mariette DiChristina, talk about the beginning of… everything! The event takes place at the 92YTribeca on Thursday, October 1st at 6:30 PM. Tickets are $12 and include a one year subscription to SCI AM. For more information check out the website and read the event description (as given on the site) below:

From paper money to paper clips to the pill, humans have long wondered about the mysteries of our origins. How did the universe begin? When did the human mind arise? How about the electronic “mind,” the computer? What about the beginning of life? Scientific American Acting Editor-in-Chief Mariette DiChristina discusses the surprising and fascinating stories behind these beginnings, shedding light on the origins of the world around us.

All are invited to the happy hour at Rockefeller University tomorrow night (9/24/09) at 7:30. There will be food and drinks, as well as a discussion on the future of scientific publishing.

For more information and to RSVP to the event, see the forum post here.

Come see blogger Eva Amsen speak at a blogging panel on September 21st.

See her blog post here.

Check out the forum post on the New York hub here.

Blurb from the event website:

Join a roundtable discussion, “A Blog of Her Own: Scholarly Women on the Web,” on Monday, September 21, 2009, at 12:30 pm in Alfred Lerner Hall Room 555 at Columbia University’s Morningside Campus. The event is sponsored by Columbia University’s Scholarly Communication Program, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and Women in Science at Columbia and will be moderated by Columbia professor and blogger Jenny Davidson.

Hear from the women behind the popular blogs Bitch Ph.D., Tenured Radical, Oh! Industry, Easternblot.net, and Expression Patterns. Bitch Ph.D. author Tedra Osell is a writer, former English professor, mother, and sometime public intellectual. Claire Potter blogs as Tenured Radical and is a professor of history and American Studies at Wesleyan University. Alexandra T. Vazquez, one of three contributors to the blog Oh! Industry, is an assistant professor at the Center for African American Studies and in the Department of English at Princeton University. Eva Amsen blogs at Easternblot.net and recently completed her Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Toronto.

The speakers will discuss the interplay between their blogging and scholarship, attitudes towards blogging among their colleagues, how blogging should be valued in the academy, and blogging as a feminist act. The Columbia community is encouraged to send questions for the bloggers in advance to kp2002@columbia.edu.

This event is free and open to the public. It is the first of six events this academic year in the speaker series on today’s pivotal issues in scholarly communication organized by the Scholarly Communication Program. The second panel, The Future of Learned Societies, will take place on October 22, 2009. Subsequent events will focus on open data, open-access business models, and other topics. Follow the series remotely via Twitter at https://twitter.com/ScholarlyComm. Video will be distributed through the Program’s website and Columbia University’s iTunesU and YouTube pages. Previous events in the series are available online now. For information on the series, Research without Borders: The Changing World of Scholarly Communication, please email Kathryn Pope at kp2002@columbia.edu, or visit https://scholcomm.columbia.edu/events.

The new academic year began this week ¹. To start the semester off with a bang, CUMC invited Eric Olson, Ph.D of UT Southwestern to come and speak at the annual Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Professor Lectures. Olson spoke about his work on microRNAs (miRs) and their therapeutic possibilities, particularly as heart disease therapies.

Olson reasoned that because miRs have been shown to regulate muscle development and function, perhaps they play a role in regulating our most important muscle, the heart. More specifically, he wondered if disrupting the function of specific miRs could change the response to cardiac assault. In order to determine what miRs may play a role in cardiac function after assault, Olson performed microarray studies. Described in several bodies of work (reviewed here), miR gain- and loss-of-function models appear normal under basal conditions, but are involved in stress-dependent responses. In essence, these miRs play a role in pathological cardiac remodeling only after myocardial injury, and they exhibit differential effects. For example, miR-195 is upregulated in hypertrophic hearts and increased expression of miR-195 is sufficient to drive hypertrophic growth and myocyte disarray, contributing to heart failure. Another miR, miR-126, plays an important role in cardiac repair. Myocardial vascularization is essential following a heart attack, and miR-126 is involved in neoangiogenesis. Without miR-126, proper neovascularization doesn’t occur and vascular rupture ensues.

The possibilities in targeting specific miRs for therapies are virtually endless. Olson described the collaborative development of anti-miRs, which are linked to cholesterol or a long-chain fatty acid to facilitate uptake. If one is able to regulate the expression of a specific miR, it could greatly improve prognosis after cardiac injury. However, these therapies are not without their difficulties. MiRs often regulate more than one target and the pleiotropic effects could outweigh the benefits. Additionally, miRs are rapidly degraded and, although chemical modifications can improve stability, there is not yet consensus in the field on which modification is best.

Nonetheless, I think we will continue to see more development of miR-targeted therapies for cardiovascular disease and other pathologies as this field progresses.

¹ Now that the semester has started, the hub calendar should have more events and seminars in the New York area. All Nature Network members are free to post an event or seminar. If you think something is of interest to the New York science community, go ahead and post it!

What could be better than a Nature Network happy hour? How about a Nature Network happy hour where you not only get to mingle with fellow scientists but have the opportunity to develop your skill set outside of the lab. Thanks to collaboration between Naturejobs and the Center for Biotechnology at Stony Brook University, local scientists had the opportunity to hear about an exciting program available to them. Currently in its sixth year, the Fundamentals of the Bioscience Industry Program is catered to graduate students and postdocs seeking to transition into non-academic industry careers. This program is broken into modules focusing on the product development process and regulatory affairs, the business of bioscience and corporate culture and career development strategies. In essence, if you are wishing to transition out of academia, this program is an excellent opportunity to gain the knowledge necessary to do so. Described as a “comprehensive introduction to the complexities of the bioscience business environment” this program will better prepare you for the bioscience industry market and help you to develop a network of potential employers. The program is one semester long, with classes in the evenings two times per week (training available on the Manhattan or Sony Brook campuses). For more information, see the program website (above).

One more thing… Special thanks to Noah, Shelley and the rest of the team at Nature/Naturejobs for organizing the event. Without their hard work, events like this would not be possible. There are likely to be more events like this in the future, so keep an eye out on the New York hub.