A sign of a new day, or is it the sign that it’s Friday. The bench is clean, media is made: YPD, Cornmeal, and Serum! I love the site of a clean bench in the afternoon. Organization is in the eye of the beholder. Plates are where they need to be! The equipment is there, solutions waiting, with research to be completed on Monday. Some where, I’m sure there’s a poem to be written about all of this.

With a tightening economy, grants fewer and far between, a faster pace, and the ever increasing need for PI’s to publish, I’m extremely excited to be here.  With a constant strain on the world of soft money, any research has to know how valuable it is to have an opportunity to contribute.  If you’re a researcher, we’d love to hear about what you do.  The DC area has a great community out there.  I know it’s waiting to be found.  Drop us a line.  Shoot us a link to a picture of your  bench.  We just might publish it!

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.  The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.
NYtimes Link

My goal is to stay in scientific research as long as possible.  I’m approaching a 10 year career here, and I’d love to think about alternatives to the traditional pathway while building on what I’ve done.  Mixing science and business seem extremely exciting.  Maybe an MBA is the next goal.

What do you do in science?  What’s been your plan?  Have you progressed in a non-traditional scientific career? Please do comment here or drop us an email.

Check out the desk connected to my bench.  Work has begun with the first entry in a lab notebook, and time reading journals related to the lab’s previous research.

I hear artists discus the impact of their studio environment on their creativity and inspiration, I’m curious to know how many scientists out there actually draw from their lab environment.  How many people grow from the visual, and functional aspects of the lab?  I think it does.  The environment including the lay out of the equipment to it’s impact on the interaction between the other scientists all play a role in the functionality of the lab.