This afternoon, there was an opening ceremony for the new Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing. Novartis (which moved its research headquarters to Cambridge in 2002) is funding the center to the tune of $65 million over the next 10 years, to develop new ways of manufacturing drugs. Batch processing is the norm in pharmaceutical manufacturing, but it’s slow, inefficient and expensive. The aim of the center is to develop more continuous, assembly-line-like processes.
Seven to 10 faculty members will likely be involved, along with their grad students and postdocs. The Globe says this is one of MIT’s largest industrial partnerships and describes the current expansion in manufacturing of two other drug companies in Massachusetts.
(from hacks.mit.edu)
The John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard received quite a makeover earlier this week. MIT students, in their annual hack, transformed the iconic statue into a character, Master Chief, of the Xbox Halo 3 video game, which was released on Tuesday.
From the lab of Robert Weinberg of the Whitehead Institute, a “paper”:https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature06174.html in _Nature_ this week about *microRNA and cancer*, specifically, metastasis. It turns out that one member of this recently discovered class of molecules, microRNA, is playing a key role in the spread of a primary tumor in the body. According to this “news article”:https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070924/full/070924-7.html from news@nature, it’s not clear yet whether blocking this molecule could be a therapeutic approach.
—
This “evening”:https://network.nature.com/boston/events/2007/09/28/3237 at the Museum of Science, population geneticist Spencer Wells will give a talk about the “National Geographic’s and IBM’s Genographic Project,”:https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/ that he’s working with. He and collaborators are collecting and analyzing markers along people’s DNA to trace the path humans took out of Africa 60,000 years ago. People can have their cheeks swabbed and their mitochondrial DNA (or their Y chromosome, if they have one) analyzed to, as they say, put them on the human family tree.
According to the “Globe”:https://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/09/25/a_background_check_for_human_posterity/, local figures have already donated their DNA: Ben Affleck, Mayor Menino, Keith Lockhart, the Boston Pops conductor. Maybe I should…I wonder how far removed I am from Genghis Khan?
—
Speaking of celebrities and their genomes, *James Watson* will be giving a talk about his new book _ Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science_ next Wednesday at 7pm at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. You’ll have to “buy tickets.”:https://www.harvard.com/events/press_release.php?id=1896 I will go and blog about it. I’m sure it’ll be, um, interesting.
—
And finally, the newly expanded “MIT Museum”:https://web.mit.edu/museum/about/news/open-house.html will be open and free to the public this weekend. The director of the museum had a “commentary”:https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7160/full/449283a.html
published in Nature last week, arguing that science museums, especially university affiliated ones, shouldn’t just show science of the past, but should engage the public in the science—its process and its findings—of today.
One of the new exhibits will be one about cancer research, focusing on zebrafish as a model organism for learning about cancer and developmental biology. Who would have thought that an ordinary lab animal (and not your typical rodent either) would make it into a museum, alongside cool robots and concept cars? We’ll see how well lab fish will compete with robots for the attention of the visitors.