Category Archives: Boston Research

Boston Research

In Massachusetts, nine NIH-funded research projects in this year’s $10 million club

Posted on by
Reply

 

So far for 2012, the NIH has approved 3,810 grants in Massachusetts – some for new projects, others for familiar, ongoing research centers. The big money is going to genetics, HIV/AIDS and biodefense. Few topped $10 million –according to NIH, the av

erage award amount nationwide was $44,642 for 2011. Among the group – genomics superstar Eric Lander, whose name cam

Here’s a look at the projects that, so far this year, have broken the $10 million mark – and a few that come close.e up during the recent presidential search at MIT and Daniel Kuritzkes at the Brigham, who got a standing ovation at the recent AIDS conference when he annouced findings on two more AIDS patinets who became virus-free after bone marrow transplants.  Also note that Harvard Med School dean Jeffrey Flier is listed as the PI on the grant to the troubled primate research center. Continue reading →

Starting out in science: Boston researchers share lessons from their first jobs

Posted on by
Reply

Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on “Beginnings”.

Participating in this cross-network blogging festival is nature.com’s Soapbox Science blog, Scitable’s Student Voices blog and bloggers from SciLogs.com, SciLogs.de, Scitable and Scientific American’s Blog Network. Join us as we explore the diverse interpretations of beginnings – from scientific examples such as stem cells to first time experiences such as publishing your first paper. You can also follow and contribute to the conversations on social media by using the #BeginScights hashtag.   

 

Click for video of Jerry De Zutter and others

A scientist’s first job can be a thrill, a terror, a challenge, a source of inspiration or the inspiration to do something different.  So say some of the researchers whose career paths led them through Kendall Square this week. Conversations inside and outside neighborhood labs and offices explored the question – What lessons did you learn when first starting out?

Some researcher had mentors — or at least people who gave them memorable advice. Jerry De Zutter met his first boss — Gary Barsomian of Genzyme – while playing Ultimate Frisbee.  De Zutter interned at Genzyme as an undergrad, worked at the Cambridge-based pharma for a year, and got some advice from Barsomian before heading to graduate school :“The one thing you want to make sure you do when your rise to the level of a PHD science, is to become an expert in something. “

De Zutter focused on the signal transduction processes that underlie neurodegeneration. After several jobs in the pharmaceutical industry, he now runs a team of researchers working on discovery and the pre-clinical pipeline at ALS Therapy Development Institute. The company is one of a growing number of non-profit pharmaceutical development projects.

On a break at a Kendall coffee shop, Deepti Sharma also said she had a supportive boss. Working with LC-MS ( liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry] at Advion, a company in Ithaca, New York, she said her supervisor encouraged her to take on more responsibility: “That gave me a good opportunity to explore the product development platform with full enthusiasm and energy,” she said. Sharma also got the best of both worlds – academic and industry. While at the company, she was able to work with Cornell professor Jack Henion, whom she described as “the father of LC-MS…It was as if I was working as  a student but in an innovative, fast-paced environment,” she said.

Not everyone queried in the square remembered an inspiring boss. Chris, a pharma chemist who asked that his last name not be used, said he had a supervisor with “a very serious temper problem” at his first job, which was in an academic lab. But, that isn’t what drove him out of the university setting and into the world of corporate science. Without a PhD, he didn’t see any future in academia.

Kathryn Erat

 When Kathryn Erat started her career in the 1950’s, she quickly stepped into the future.  A degree in math and physics landed her a job with a combustion engineering company working on power systems for nuclear submarines. After struggling for days to solve complex math problems, she suggested to her boss that they might be able to work more efficiently with a new form of technology – the computer. Back then, that meant a mainframe and a trip to New Jersey.

Two chemical engineers lunching outside a local biotech – Tanya and Hong – both faced the same problem when finding their first jobs in the US. The two women – who asked that their last names not be used – had to convince employers that the skills they learned in Communist countries would apply to work in this country. When Tanya, who was trained in the former Soviet Union, got her first job, she was grateful for the chance to prove herself: “For those who are not born in the States and do not have an American education, to find a first job is extremely challenging because you don’t have the right experience in this country. Your experience anywhere else seems to be absolutely irrelevant.”

Hong, who arrived from mainland China 20 years ago, said she had the same problem, but ended up landing a job with a helpful boss. Her first realization was that the U.S. drug development industry worked under a different set of rules.

“Twenty years ago in China, (regulations) were a lot looser,” she said. Here, for example “the regulations about patient safety are very strict.”

Computational biologist Kevin Galinksy spent two years at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Maryland before coming to the Broad Institute.  As a young scientist, he’s only worked in a wired world. So, the advice to publish or perish had a different meaning for him – he can post some of the code he’s developed on the web.

John Lincecum

Back at the ALS Therapy Development Institute, Director of Discovery John Lincecum, said he was interested in science and took premed course as an undergrad. But he decided to focus on the liberal arts and leave most of the science for grad school.

He fled the oil bust in his native Texas to look for work in then booming Massachusetts. Lincecum emphasized the science on his resume and was hired as a technician for a company now known as Charm Sciences, which was developing radioimmunoassays to test for penicillin levels in milk.

“I was absolutely terrified because my worry was that they would figure out I really wasn’t a scientist,” he said. “I was English major.”

His fears came true when he spent an entire week pressing the wrong button on a scintillation counter.  Instead of carefully measuring ionizing radiation, he was pushing the button for the timer.  He expected to get fired.  “But they were very patient,” he said. What he found was that the approach he had been counting on paid off:  “I felt all I had to do was — ask a lot of questions, be very, very enthusiastic and be willing to admit every mistake I made.”

 

 

 

Who’s getting grants in Boston as NIH cuts back? New research funding for May

Posted on by
Reply

Nearly $8 million in NIH funding for new projects flowed into Massaschusett in May. Here’s a sample, with links to labs and full project descriptions:

  • $936,346 for strategies to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria to Harvards Thomas Bernhard

IDENTIFYING AND VALIDATING NEW ANTIBIOTIC TARGETS IN CELL WALL SYNTHESIS PATHWAYS New strategies to treat antibiotic resistant bacterial infections are sorely needed. This project combines small molecules and genetic methods to identify and validate new antibiotic targets in the pathway for assembly of the bacterial cell wall. The proposed work may lead to new therapies against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Gram-negative ESKAPE pathogens.

 Dr, Bernhard will be giving a talk on his work on June 21 at The Forsyth Institute, Seminar Room A, 245 First Street, 17th Floor, Cambridge, at Noon, on “The ABCs of Bacterial Cell Division,” as in ABC tranporters.

  •   $356, 356 for a prospective study looking at fat consuption and and breast cancer to Heather Eliassen  at the Brigham and Women’s hospital

CIRCULATING FATTY ACIDS AND BREAST CANCER RISK: A PROSPECTIVE STUDY  Fat intake has long been hypothesized to increase breast cancer risk, but cohort studies have not shown strong associations with total fat. This proposal seeks to expand our knowledge of the role of fat in breast cancer etiology by measuring specific fatty acids in the blood, representing fats from meat and dairy, processed foods, and vegetable sources, areas where dietary evidence suggests an association, as well as a marker of the internal transformation of fats with breast cancer risk. Characterizing these associations and further exploring potential mechanisms, will provide important knowledge about breast cancer prevention.

  •  $677, 984 for a exome chip data on 1,800 ADHD probands and their parents to Benjamin Neale at the Broad Institute

QUANTIFYING THE IMPACT OF RARE MUTATIONS ON ADHD We will generate exome chip data on 1,800 ADHD probands and their parents. The exome chip provides the first look at rare variation in the coding regions of genes that is heavily enriched for potential biological function. We will comprehensively analyze this data at a single locus, gene, and biological pathway level. This experiment promises to quantify the impact of rare mutations on ADHD.

  • $304,950 for research using in vitro studies to reveal biochemical and physiological functions of ribosome specialization to Wendy Gilbert at MIT.

FUNCTIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF RIBOSOME HETEROGENEITY:Translational regulation is essential for human health and development, but only a handful of translational regulatory mechanisms are understood. The proposed work will provide the first detailed understanding of the biochemical and physiological functions of ribosome specialization, an under-studied topic in the translational control field. We anticipate that our results will have broad implications for the study of eukaryotic gene expression, and will also illuminate the etiology of disease states, including cancer, that are associated with dysregulation of ribosome function.

  •  $278,213 for research into virulence factors secreted by many different pathogenic bacteria Alejandro P. Heuck at UMass medical school in Worcester

MOLECULAR MECHANISM OF TRANSLOCON ASSEMBLY INTO CELL PLASMA MEMBRANES I have developed a set of fluorescence techniques that have been successfully used to characterize the structure and pore-formation mechanism of various homo- oligomeric cytolytic toxins. I now propose to extent the use of these techniques to multi- protein transmembrane complexes, like the T3S translocon. The fluorescence approach will be combined with other biochemical and biophysical techniques (e.g., electrophysi- ology measurements, single molecule techniques, and cryo-electron microscopy) to un- ambiguously address fundamental structural aspects of the T3S translocon structure and assembly. By selective incorporation of various probes (e.g., environment-sensitive fluorophores, crosslinkers, gold-nanoparticles, charged groups, etc.) in the P. aerugi- nosa translocators, we will experimentally identify, among other things: which segments of these proteins are essential to determine the characteristics of the translocon channel, what segments form the contact interface between the needle and the translocon, and how the translocators are arranged in the translocon complex formed in the mammalian cell membrane..

Science in the suburbs: Earthquakes, tsunamis and more at the Weston Observatory

Posted on by
Reply

The Weston Observatory sits deep in the woods of the Boston suburbs, a full 17 miles from its parent institution, Boston College.  Part of school’s Geology Department, the humble brick geophysical research lab was built in 1949 as part of the Jesuit’s Weston College.

Weston College is now closed – most of the grounds converted to a health center –and BC bought the observatory in the late 1970s.  The building has a squat, post-war feel to it, but the scientists there have a pretty impressive scientific claim to fame –- they monitor and record New England’s earthquakes.

And, while a map of nearly 40 years of seismicity in of New England looks pretty busy, serious earthquakes are rare around these parts.  When the earth does shake,  the phones start ringing and the TV trucks find their way up to the lab. Then, it quiets down again

In between tremors, the staff at the center engages in both geologic and paleobiological research. And, they run a very popular colloquium series that fills a meeting room each month. A small room, but it was crowded for Wednesday night’s talk by Emile Okal, a Northwestern University geophysicist in from Chicago for a talk on “Tsunamis: Challenges for Scientists.”

With a French accent, a sense of humor and PowerPoint slides, Okal talked to the group about how earthquakes trigger tsunamis. But, he, noted that they can also be caused by landslides (1999 in the Marquesas), volcanic eruptions at sea (1883 in Kracatoa) and, “occasionally, we can have bolides falling out of the sky. “ A bolide is meteorite – like the one that hit an area now known as the Yucatan 65 million years ago.  It left huge crater and tsunami deposits with meteor fragments have been found as far away as Texas and Brazil,  Okal said.

“There is also some talk that it affected the climate so much, that the dinosaurs became extinct, but I don’t want to get into that controversy,” he said,

Audience members laughed, but Okal noted that the theory is the subject of debate; India was the site of major volcanic eruptions at the same time, he said.

In terms of the devastating 2004 tsunami, Okal said the Pacific Tsunami Monitoring Center in Hawaii was alerted to an earthquake in Indonesia, but was not charged with or set up to monitor activity in the Indian Ocean.

“There were shortcomings from the standpoint of science,” he said “We didn’t get the true size of the event, but we did know that it was very big.”

The bigger problem was communication. There was no protocol for warning officials in the India, Thailand and Sri Lanka, he said.

Northeast Seismicity, 1975-2011

“This is not what you want in an emergency situation. You want a system that has been designed, which has been tested, which is foolproof, which is perfectly operational where everybody knows what to do. This is what failed in 2004.”

Pacific nations like Japan are more prepared for tsunamis. So, despite the huge loss of life, the response to last year’s Japan quake was a success in some ways. Although more than 20,000 people were killed, more than 200,000 were at risk, he said.

While many of the coastal citizens knew how to protect themselves, from the waves – they sought higher ground — the designers of the Fukushima nuclear plant did not, Okal said.  Tsunamis have been know to generate 20 meter (65-foot) waves in Japan, but the walls around the plant and much of the coast are only 6 meters (20 feet) high.

“You don’t design a nuclear plant by putting the most the most vulnerable part” –the power source — “behind a 6 meter wall,”  he said. “ The fact that the plant was designed in such a completely negligent way – it becomes criminal.”

Aware that we wasn’t addressing other scientists, Okal touched on some technical points – and quickly veered away from them. He said two things help him when he has to speak to an audience of lay people. He comes from a family of teachers so “its in my genes,” he said. And he teaches a class on “disasters” to undergrads. So, he has to keep it simple.

“If you put an equation on the board, they drop the class,” he said.

Okal’s  talk was the last of the Observatory’s Spring Colloquium series. The series also included talks on  “Exploring The Potential Of Mineral Biosignatures Of Precambrian Sedimentary Rocks For Exobiology…Geothermal Heating And Cooling For Homes And Businesses In New England…Tracking Hurricanes And Nor’Easters Off The U.S. and East Coast Using Land-Based Seismometers and OffShore Buoys.” Visitors can also schedule tours or check out the upcoming open house on June 13.

 

 

 

 

 

Multi-platform “omics” and nanoparticles among 20 new Massachusetts NIH grants funded in April

Posted on by
Reply

The National Institutes of Health funded 208 grants  in Massachusetts April, for a total of $91 million. That includes 20 new research grants, including these three:

 CHEMICAL INHIBITORS TO DEFINE AN ESSENTIAL M. TUBERCULOSIS SIGNALING NETWORK

 Veteran TB researcher Robert Husson of Children’s Hospital in Boston is the PI for a $1.3 million collbaorative project using small molecule chemical inhibitors to characterize enzymes that regulate tuberculosis. These protein kinases,  PknA and Pkn, are potential drug targets  — and the key to possible drugs – as they regulate downstream proteins and pathways. The grant promises that the investigators will bring “together state of the art expertise in transcriptomics, phosphoproteomics, lipidomics, metabolomics and computational biology…” described as a “multi-platform “omics” approach.

POPULATION-BASED REFERENCE RANGES FOR ESTRADIOL AND ESTRONE IN MEN

The Framingham Heart Study (FHS) is one of four men’s health cohorts that will use a $536,000 grant from The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases  from to look at the role of  estradiol (E2) and estrone (E1)  in men’s health and disease remains poorly understood. The researchers will identify reference limits and examine how deviations associated with health outcomes. The other cohorts are the European Male Aging Study (EMAS), the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), the Concord Health and Ageing in Men Project (CHAMP).

DEVELOPMENT OF FCRN-TARGETED NANOPARTICLES FOR EFFICIENT ORAL DELIVERY OF INSULIN

The Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials  $764 NIBIB at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital won $764,000 from the National Institure of Biomedical Imaagin and Bioengineering to develop a nanoparticle delivery system that will allow the creation of oral versions of boilogics and other injectable drugs.The grant notes that “ key challenge in the oral administration of biologics such as hormones, antibodies, growth factors, enzymes, and vaccines is overcoming the physiological barriers presented by the gastrointestinal tract. These include extreme pH environments, enzymatic degradation, and poor permeability across the intestinal epithelium.”  PI Omid Farokhzad, M.D., has already launched a start- up called BIND Biosciences to commercialize similar drug deliver approaches.  The Cambridge company made the news recently. Scientific American reports that that the company’s  new tumor-targeting, nanoparticle-based compound is now in clinical trials   after showing promise in both mice and monkeys. “Although this first trial is small, with only 17 patients, and still ongoing, researchers are reporting some positive results, and no obvious major safety setbacks, according to a paper published online April 4 in Science Translational Medicine.” More on this group and their efforts here.

MIT fights to keep its defunded fusion program

Posted on by
Reply

MIT houses a lot of futuristic-looking devices, and some actually focus on technology that – at this point — we can only imagine.  One would be the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, a warehouse-sized, magnetized  device that  scientists are using to do research on fusion energy.   This tokamak, one of three in the U.S., looks like a 20-foot high water tank overrun by pipes, vents, pumps and monitoring devices.

But, if the proposed federal budget passes, there will only be two  — one in California and another at Princeton in New Jersey. Instead of the funding for the MIT device, as it has for more than 30 years, DOE will shift the fusion dollars to a similar international project in France.

So, MIT scientists are fighting to save it. One of them is Geoff  Olynyk, a tall, thin, clean-cut graduate student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. He was studying fuel cells at Queen’s University  in Ontario, Canada, when a scientist from the MIT fusion program came to speak.

“If you talk to fusion people, they inevitably have that moment when they caught the fusion bug,” he said during an interview in the tokamak control room.  The visit from the MIT’s prof was when he caught it.  He thought:  “This is really cool and important and I want to work on it.”

MIT grad student Geoff Olynyk

He’s one of about 160 technicians, scientists and engineers who , under the 2013 budget, won’t be able to work in it- at least at MIT. So, Olynyk and others have launched a campaign —  Facebook, Wikipedia page and a website called “Fusion Future” – to save the MIT program. They’ve brought Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Michael Capuano on board to tour the device.  They’ve collected more than 1,800 signatures on a petition.  Last week,  eight university presidents  — including MIT’s Susan Hockfield  who sent letters to Obama’s  Science Advisor Dr. John Holdren and Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu asking for level funding for the domestic fusion program. One major concern – fusion researchers and students would leave the field, they wrote.

Olynyk  agrees. He said the MIT program stands out from the other two in that it emphasizes training and education.  If the unit is closed, he said, grad students who have enough data will be able to finish their research, but others will have to go elsewhere.

Nuclear science professor Dennis Whyte was on his way to a thesis defense after finishing up a class in the control room. He thinks the other two domestic programs will eventually be cut in favor to the ITER program in France. He’s not sure why they picked MIT this year.

“We have — as much as possible – looked at what we’ve done and what we’ve accomplished,” he said. “I don’t want this to sound arrogant, but we can’t figure out what we are doing wrong.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that the defunding of the MIT project was a “tough decision.” DOE  spokesperson Keri Fulton supplied the following comment via email.

“The research projects supported through the Department’s Fusion Energy Sciences program mark the culmination of decades of effort by the international science community to demonstrate the transformative potential of fusion as an energy resource… In light of the current budget climate, the Department was required to make a number of tough choices in the FY 13 budget request, including an overall reduction to the Department’s Fusion Energy Science research program.”

Sense About Science: Boston area researchers get media training

Posted on by
Reply

After attending a media training session organized by the MIT student group, Luke E. Stoeckel, PhD, Director of Clinical Neuroscience and Staff Training at MGH-Harvard Center for Addiction Medicine, decided to look at ways to publicize his work.

According to Dr. Stoeckel:

“The Standing Up for Science media workshop, organized by Sense About Science as part of the Cambridge Science Festival, inspired me to think creatively about how to take advantage of social networking tools, such as this Nature blog, to help push science forward by sharing my enthusiasm for science with a wider audience, inspiring the next generation of young scientists to take risks in their work, and advocating for the responsible communication of scientific information.”

The workshop promises to offer “practical guidance for early career researchers to get their voices heard in debates about science; how to respond to bad science when you see it; and top tips for if you come face-to-face with a journalist.”

The next Standing up for Science media workshop takes place on April 24th at the Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA. Apply now to Leonor Sierra  and see the flyer (pdf). for details.

The program joins Harvard’s “Science in the News”   in the effort to explain current scientific topics to non-scientists.

Dr. Stoeckel offers this guest post on his efforts after attending a Standing up for Science Media workshop :

This past week, research groups funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse were brought together via a web conference to exchange ideas centered on an emerging brain imaging technology known as real time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a promising new tool helping scientists understand brain function in order to develop novel, personalized treatment approaches for disorders involving the brain and behavior, such as addiction.

Addiction has been called the No.1 public health problem in the U.S. One of the defining features of addiction is the loss of control of drug use despite serious consequences. Addictive substances ruin lives by hijacking brain circuits that have evolved to help us meet our survival goals – the needs for food, companionship, and shelter. In addition, these potent substances change these same brain circuits until the pursuit of healthy goals like spending time with family are replaced by compulsions to use addictive substances.

Neurofeedback is a training method in which people are given information about their own brain activity to assist them to learn conscious control of this activity. Our team of clinicians, neuroscientists, computer programmers, and engineers led by Dr. Eden Evins from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and Dr. John Gabrieli from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one group using real time fMRI-based neurofeedback to determine whether we can help people learn to improve control over their own brain in order to empower these individuals to take back control of the compulsive urges to use drugs that are ruining their lives.

We are in the beginning stages of this research, but the exciting ideas and early findings shared at last week’s NIDA-sponsored web conference are cause for optimism that this area of research will improve our understanding of brain mechanisms underlying addiction and, potentially, will lead to novel therapies for effectively treating this brain disease. This past week’s web conference was also an example of how advances in social networking technologies are revolutionizing how scientific information is exchanged. This has the potential for accelerating scientific advancement, which will be critical for tackling the most complex scientific challenges facing us today.

A couple additional examples of how I was inspired by the Standing up for Science Media workshop include (1) participating in a conference called ‘Hacking Medicine’. This event brought together a group of entrepreneurs and clinicians to tackle large problems in medicine. It was important to advocate for the responsible translation and application of science as the conference centered on a competition to create a product to solve a big problem in the healthcare system by bringing together individuals from diverse backgrounds in science, engineering, healthcare, and business. (2) After the Standing up for Science workshop, a group of members from the conference had our first meeting to put together an article focusing on the challenges we see in translating functional neuroimaging findings from the fields of cognitive neuroscience to application in the typical clinic. We are using social networking tools such as Google docs, Mendeley, etc. to share and grow ideas.

MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito on science, social networking and “the shape of ideas”

Posted on by
Reply

On Monday evening, Joi Ito, Internet pioneer and head of the MIT Media Lab, talked to Nature Boston as part of our coverage of Social Media Week. On Thursday, tune into the live stream of “Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media.” The panel, hosted by American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), is the latest in the monthly series organized by Science Online NYC, aka SoNYC.  

Science, by its nature, is built on a web of traditional social networks. Look at any citation map, C.V. or literature search for a sense of the interactions that drive scientific inquiry. Much of what we know stems from who studied with whom, who worked serendipitouMIT photo by Andy Ryansly in a particular lab and who moved their ideas from one company to another.

“With the so-called social networks we have today, we’ve exploded that,’ says Joi Ito, the Internet pioneer and, now, the director of MIT’s Media Lab.

The burst in electronic interaction is about much more than collaborating over the Internet. Scientists can learn a great deal from social networking about how to generate data, how to test ideas and how think beyond disciplines, Ito said.

In a conversation earlier this week, he offered a hypothetical example of how emerging tools are creating new ways to analyze information generated by online networks. Take data from the history of books, together with trends from search queries and Twitter and connect it all to scientific references, he said.

“Then we get these really rich data sets with which we can understand… the shape of ideas within the context of society.”

He also offered a very concrete example. This spring’s Research Update session – usually open only to the Media Lab’s corporate and philanthropic sponsors — will become a Tweet-up. For the first time, most of the previously private sessions will be live streamed and the lab will solicit input through Twitter.

“The more you get your ideas out there, the more likely you’ll find people to collaborate with,” Ito said.

Ito likes to talk about the Internet as a philosophy of decentralized innovation. In that sense, it is driving a shift in the way scientists collaborate.

“You can see peer review in science and peer review on the Internet converging,” he said.

Traditionally, a researcher will seek confirmation of findings from peers –top experts in a field. The basic ethos of the Internet, Ito said, is that, if you put something online and it survives, it must to be true. Instead of a handful of  experts, “millions of people are going to read it and if you’re wrong,they point it out.”

For researchers accustomed to working with carefully collected data within a clearly defined discipline, that approach may seem chaotic. That’s the point.

“If you have the ability to collect a lot of data and inputs and do an analysis to filter out the noise, then you actually get a really interesting set of answers that has the benefit of having diversity mixed into it,” Ito said. He pointed to Wikipedia as an example.

You also end up with data that tends to be more robust – in the same way the human body is robust. Like the immune system, robust systems tend to be open and a bit messier but they are more adaptable, he said.

“When you have chaotic and fast changing environment, that we do, fitness and robustness are actually important…efficiency and cleanliness less so…But, I’m an Internet guy, so that’s the way I think.”

For more, see the Media Lab’s Social Computing project: The Social Computing group works on models for information processing that work from both angles. We build sociotechnical tools that aim to create substantive human connections as part of the process of data analysis. Our current focus is on developing programming languages for social computation.

Who’s getting grants in Boston as NIH cuts research funding?

Posted on by
Reply

When Barbara Alving, the former head of National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), spoke at Harvard last spring, an audience member complained that even Harvard’s superstar scientists couldn’t get NIH grants. Alving, whose NIH agency was about to be shuttered suggested scientists get used to it – NIH funding would be tight for a while.

A search on the NIH data base proves her right. While the agency funded 403 new projects in Massachusetts in 2010, that number dropped to 335 in 2011.

Does that make the grant winners super superstars? Or was the research in the labs at the right place at the right time? So many variables go into NIH funding, it can be hard to tell. Still it’s worth looking at where the money is going.

The 11 new winners so far for 2012 are looking into influenza, herpes, DNA replication timing, structural vaccinology for malaria and the search for biologically active antitumor and anti-infective agents in natural products. Our data is current as of this morning, but the numbers change constantly as NIH adds new grants to the database.  Grants went to Boston University, UMass med school and Brandeis University. But, Harvard-linked researchers – and infectious disease — dominate the list.

At $530,282, the biggest new grant so far this year went to Harvard chemist Suzanne L. Walker for research into the “structure, function and inhibition of human o-glcnac transferase.”

From the application: “O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT) is an essential mammalian enzyme that catalyzes a unique post-translational modification, O-GlcNAcylation. This modification mediates critical cellular processes involved in nutrient signaling, stress responses, and cell division. Aberrant O-GlcNAcylation has been linked to many diseases, and the work proposed here will lead to the development of small molecule inhibitors to probe OGT’s biological roles and potential as a therapeutic target.”

More on Walker’s work here and at her lab’s web page.

Harvard is also offering dibs on her finding to drug developers through the school’s tech transfer program.

Walker’s group is currently investigating the target specificity of one class of inhibitor.These compounds will be useful as cellular probes of OGT biology. In parallel with these efforts, the group is optimizing another class of OGT inhibitors. Through a combination of analog synthesis and structure-based design, this class of OGT inhibitor has sub-micromolar IC50, is non-toxic to mammalian cells, and inhibits OGT activity in HEK cells. More on that here.

Coming in second for January 2012 is another Harvard project,  Samuel Behar’s work on TB immunity, which won a $528,749 grant.

From the application : Apoptosis and efferocytosis: Regulators of immunity to tuberculosis.  Pulmonary tuberculosis, a disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is a threat to global health. The disease tuberculosis occurs when the immune system is no longer able to contain the infection. This research proposal seeks to understand how the immune system controls the infection. In addition we seek to determine whether the mechanisms that generate T cell immunity can be enhanced to improve the response to vaccines. Since T cell immunity is important for the control of tuberculosis, it is hoped that by understanding features of host resistance, new strategies can be developed for the treatment and prevention of tuberculosis.

And at third, David Knipe’s microbiology lab at Harvard med school almost made the half-million mark with a $492,229 grant for research into “chromatin and herpes simplex virus latency.”

Herpes simplex viruses cause considerable genital, ocular and nervous system disease, and genital herpes increases the risk of HIV infection. There are drugs that target the active growth of herpes simplex virus but none that target the latent infection. This research will define basic mechanisms of herpes simplex virus latent infection and new targets for potential drugs to treat the latent infection of these viruses.

 

MIT students collect 10,000 names on petition calling for more government funding for science

Posted on by
Reply

 Stand with Science, a campaign launched by MIT students, has gathered more than 10,000 signature on a web petition calling on Congress not to cut science funding in the name of deficit reduction.   Below find a sampling of  comments from the petition.

They are also planning a“ Science Policy Bootcamp” …a  4-day short course, offered during MIT’ idependent Activities Period in January, designed to introduce graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to the ‘nuts and bolts’ of science policy making. The course provides an opportunity for young scientists and engineers interested in science policy issues to increase their understanding about and practical involvement with science policy. The bootcamp serves to both expose participants to the fundamental structure and dynamics of science policy and inform them of routes into a policy experience or career.

At the same time, the Columbia Journalism Review has a piece that suggests reporters look a little more closely at claims that there is a shortage of scientists.

Simply put, a desire for cheap, skilled labor, within the business world and academia, has fueled assertions—based on flimsy and distorted evidence—that American students lack the interest and ability to pursue careers in science and engineering, and has spurred policies that have flooded the market with foreign STEM workers. This has created a grim reality for the scientific and technical labor force: glutted job markets; few career jobs; low pay, long hours, and dismal job prospects for postdoctoral researchers in university labs; near indentured servitude for holders of temporary work visas.

Not enough money or too many scientists? Either way,  government funding harder to get. Some say even the stars are losing their long-time NIH grant. So here’s a sampling  of comments from the petition, with our subheads.

NO FUTURE

I have taught Biology at the graduate and undergraduate level and run a University Research laboratory level for 35 years. I have never seen the stature of, and funds for science as low as it is now. If I were just entering the field I would choose an alternate career. The US has is in danger its potential for economic development for the next several generation ..if the country survives that long.

Cutting funding to science and technology is a reactionary response to current fears about deficits. Such cuts would sacrifice our children’s future without making significant progress to bolstering the nation’s financial security.

I am currently a Junior Biochemistry major and at the rate we’re going now, I’ll probably end up serving people dinner to make money after school, when I could be working on new antibiotics to combat the rapidly increasing numbers of resistant infectious pathogens. Without research in that field, it won’t matter what our economy is because we’ll all have been wiped out by superbugs that can’t be killed

There are so many things that are vital to our future, but research, education, and technology development seem like no-brainers. Well I guess they ARE brainers, which is the point? Either way they are clearly important so please don’t cut funding for them

As a former Alzheimer’s Disease researcher and current high school biology teacher, I support continued funding for science research. Many people don’t go into research as a career simply because there is not enough money. This is an injustice to society.

I am an Experimental Psychologist and I stand by this letter. I teach my students to question evidence, to test their predictions, to analyze data, to refine and replicate. I am a scientist, and I teach my students to be scientists in their every day lives. Science makes my students think, decided for themselves, and act. Is science important? Yes- in every discipline and in life!

As an NSF-funded grad student, I could never have gotten my PhD without public funding; the student loan debt would have been too high. My state university also takes around 40% of our grant in overhead fees, so the grant that funds me also brings money to my state. My PhD research has also supported fourteen undergraduate lab employees, who have gotten vital career skills (and gone on to jobs or graduate work in science, too). None of this would have been possible without public funding.

FROM THE LEFT

Less foreign occupations, more graduate education!

This is my livelihood. Not everything is market driven, such as science

FROM THE RIGHT

I am a tax payer. This is a wise investment in the future.

U.S. pharmaceutical companies are curtailing drug-development efforts due to their difficulty and expense. They are difficult and expensive because of our limited understanding of fundamental biological processes. This understanding is advanced mostly by academic and medical researchers, who rely on Federal grants. Each fundamental advance lowers the time and cost for private industry to develop pharmaceutical and biotechnological applications

SHORT

I am for science.

SCIENCE!!

 yay science!

 MOM

As a Mom to a very intelligent Grad student I support this

TWEET INFLUENCE

Science is vital to our country. Why U no see that?!

ICLICHE

Those who bit the hand that feeds them are bound to starve.

.. penny-wise and pound-foolish….

To paraphrase Obama: “If the plane’s too heavy, don’t throw out the engines.”