My Labonews

I'm writing this not only because of the recent events on Austrian and other universities that Joel is very enthusiastically engaged in. I had this on my mind for quite some time. So let me just make it clear at this point that this is my personal opinion and not a personal attack against anybody who does not agree with me.
Being a student is frustrating. I should know it, I'm a academic student since 2003 and will probably be for couple more years. Don't get me wrong, I love it, but I can see why so many other students are so much more annoyed by "the system", "reforms", lack of money and motivation on the academic side. The current discussion in Austria among other places is whether is is legal / ethical for the universities to demand a fee from the students. While I agree wholeheartedly with the statement that knowledge should be accessible to anyone, I do not agree with the UN Charta stipulated free access to universities, at least not as is. Of course I also agree that there should be world peace and equally distributed riches. But I also know that's not how our world works, and a bunch of revolutionary students won't change that fact. Purely calculated, most governments could financially bear the load of financing free access universities (not including housing and living costs of the students though). But this would in my mind result in an abolition of academic quality in general.
Another thing I know from being a student is that we sometimes tend to be lazy and like stuff that comes for free. We need lots of motivation, and for me, finishing the university with the best possible grades in the least amount of time is quite motivating when facing the fact that I do not want any longer to be dependent financially of my parents or a student loan that I have to pay back. Bear in mind that I do not accuse any of the students demonstrating now of anything. I'm just saying that in life, most things worth having don't come for free, and people should learn to appreciate that. By now you're probably shouting that me thinking I'm an arrogant snob with too much money (which I can guarantee you I'm not). Of course everybody with the potential should have access to the university. This could be achieved with student loans guaranteed by your respective government. The amount should be adapted to your & your parents financial situation, the university you like to study at and last but not least your grades (I know this is difficult to calculate in on a personal basis). People having finished their studies should then get a personalized plan depending again on their financial situation on how to pay back the loan. Maybe this is exactly what the protesters want and I got them all wrong. Still I don't like their way of showing it, because first of all I think that any protest involving adolescents and missing courses will attract way too many people that just care about this latter matter and think it's cool to go on a strike (man, I do sound like I'm 80). Second, I personally would be really pissed to have my courses boycotted by people whose opinions I do not share.
Sure you can not just allow anything happening to you. And I'm also in favor of young people taking an interest in their own future. My university is comparatively well funded in comparison to other foreign institutions, but I still think that a university is more apt to decide its budget (e.g. by raising fees) than a government (who almost exclusively cuts down budgets to fund for more short term expenditures). Sure it sucks that every couple of years you have to pay more fees. But I much rather have this and a constant quality of education, than governmental cut downs that change with every legislation. To put it plainly: I think the universities should be (at least partially) funded but the people who take advantage of these institutions (i.e. students), who will later on (hopefully) have a better paid job, rather than the general public (by raising taxes for everybody to pay for the education of the few). Then again, what do I know.

A couple of my friends received their diploma last Saturday, and as an excuse to drink some free wine, I brought my camera. More pics here.

Good article in the past issue of Die Zeit underlining the fact that decision about the ethics of animal research should be left to experts and not politicians, culminating in the question of whether wild life itself can live up to our bio ethical standards... Next two days I'll be on a meeting about animal care regulations and issues here in Basel, this was the perfect introduction!

So I made it back from Luxembourg, almost in one piece. My talk on Monday at the University of Luxembourg went fine, I enjoyed it a lot. We had to switch the auditorium 3 times as nobody could get the beamer to work... that was hilarious. I had quite a large amount of listeners in the audience, which I liked very much, among them some faces from my educational past who wanted to keep in check. As my talk was somewhat general, there weren't too many challenging questions afterwards, however I enjoyed the interaction and people seemed to like the idea of the system I presented. Afterwards I had a very interesting dinner at the Cercle Munster with some of the Professors. We had a fantastic meal with fantastic wine, and after I got home, I had some 3-4 hours of sleep before I had to get the train back to Basel where I had to take care of my Blockkurs students, which by the way are quite fun and pretty competent (at least the groups I'm supervising, I doubt however that that's my influence...). Yesterday then I had to give a small talk to the students (they seemed very interested... not! I'm beginning to understand what it means being a teacher). Today back to some size fractionation and affinit purifications of our egg lysozyme!

You're probably not aware of this if you've never been to a scientific conference or ordered material from a biotech company, but we scientists also get scientific spam... That does not make it in any sense less annoying or more informative. Sometimes it can be funny though... For example if they call you Prof. Dr. Betz and stuff like that... Today I got an invitation from Dr. N. J. Tonukari to write a review (which is sort of a digest from published scientific literature) for The African Journal of Biotechnology... Quite an honor, don't you think?

LIVE WEBCAST / WEBCHAT during this session! Email LAMTSClive@lamtreatmentalliance.org for more information.

Please join us Thursday June 5 from 5:00 - 7:00 PM EST for a working session with William Kaelin, MD, who will discuss The VHL Tumor Suppressor Protein: Cancer and Oxygen Sensing. Dr. Kaelin, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Attending Physician in the Department of Adult Oncology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, will discuss a variety of molecular and cellular approaches used to understand how this protein prevents tumor growth. The role of hypoxia in LAM is likely important but still unclear. Dr. Kaelin is also involved in the use of anti-angiogentic therapies for cancer, an area of obvious potential overlap with LAM therapy. Our discussant Leif Ellisen, MD, PhD, is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Ellisen will lead a provocative discussion about the talk's implications for treating LAM and TSC and then we will break for dinner and informal networking.
LOCATION: New Research Building, Rm. 350 - Harvard Medical School, 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur.
For more information: http://www.lamtscseminarseries.org

The pictures from Ms. Ingrid Singh were received and put online just now, so make sure to check them out here. A few highlights are shown below:

As you may or may not know, the Institute for Medical Microbiology is looking for a new director who will head our small institute staring somewhen mid 2008 as current head Prof. Christoph Moroni will be retiring. Last Thursday was a symposium presenting the 6 chosen candidates by the committee in charge of finding an apt successor. It was quite interesting, especially the fact that the audience could rate the candidates in a form (that was unluckily not anonymous). Subjecte ranged in the virology field, my favourite presentations were by Prof. Kirchhoff on HIV and Prof. Ziebuhr on Coronaviruses, which in my eyes would be a great addition in Basel's research portfolio. Anyhow I will long be gone before he arrives, still interesting though in which direction things will move.

This is a somehwat of a chronology that started yesterday at 20:05 with a mail by Dino to the skuba (the Basel student organisation): Hallo,wie kann man 3 x 2 tickets für die Studentenstartparty gewinnen?merci,Dino

Funny Thing was that the poor first year student, barely 2 days at the uni, sent the inquiry not to skuba@something.ch, but to skuba@mailinglist.something.ch. Well, you would think  now that 11'000 students just got a mail an had a good laugh, the thing was settled.

20:59: Da haben wir von der Nordistik keine Ahnung. Hättest du etwas zum dänischen, schwedischen, isländischen, färöischen oder norwegischen Film wissen wollen..... Willkommen in der Abteilung für Nordische Philologie - das kleine Fach ganz gross! Hilsen (Grüsse) Matthias

Matthias, who obviously was a great expert in Vikingology and no first years studetn (aha, so he probably knows what he's doing...) answered not to dino@something but of course TO dino, CC Mailinglist. Now that we know that we know that nordistic people are also highly skilled computer experts:

21:04: Hallo. Habe dieses Mail erhalten, es wurde auf "verschlungenen Pfaden" an mich weitergeleitet. Keine Ahnung wie es möglich ist, dass ich das Mail erhalte, wenn es doch an die Skuba gehen sollte. Irène

Irène, first year student was happy that she finally received a mail. Of yource she had written it to the mailinglist. At that point, the story started to get funny, when it suddenly stopped after the following mail (or did it?)

21:13:  So, jetzt will ich auch mal eine Email an möglichst viele Leute schicken....... Danke dass Ihr euch die Zeit genommen habt. Übrigens, wenn man info-skuba@mailinglist.ch aus Cc oder Bcc löscht, dann lesen nicht alle mit.

Damn him, now the amusement will stop! Well to spare you the time, it did not, I received 50 further mails from innocent first year students who just did not get it right. I'd love to see the look on the face of our IT staff when they check their mailbox this morning. Here's a little best of:

• Ich glaube mit der Mailliste ist was nicht ganz in Ordnung
• jaja - es lebe die mailschlacht... typisch skuba
• Sowas passiert, wenn man eine Mailingliste falsch konfiguriert. Bitte schnellstens reparieren!!
• mir geht es ebenfalls so... keine ahnung wie ich auf diese liste gelangt bin
• Bekomme ständig Mails, die mich gar nichts angehen...
• Dann ist ja die Uni nicht viel anders als das Gymnasium! Gym war super, da freu ich mich auf meinen Briefkasten durch die nächsten Jahre hier.
• Grüsse an meine Leidensgenossen, die Staatsexamenskandidaten. Grosses Fach, ganz wichtigtuerisch.
• Ich würd jetzt gerne einen Nussgipfel essen.
• Chani grad mol profitiere, für e sendig über die aktuelle wahle mache mir sone art vo herzblatt wo me d jungpolitiker diend abfroge und am endi muesch du dich entscheide wele dr am beschte passt, d froge sind gä. Wenn du das gern möchtsch mache miestisch e agnehmi stimm ha und einigermasse guet usgseh. Mir sueche au no öpert mitere erotische stimm Wo am endi d antworte duet zämäfasse, so wie bi herzblatt halt! (dich gseht me nit)
• Wo Sie auch sind und was Sie auch brauchen: Bei uns finden Sie die Adressen und Öffnungszeiten von allen Fabrikverkäufen in ganz Deutschland - und alles kostenlos.

I hope the "fun" is soon over, otherwise I'll have to punish them!

After going through a few very interesting papers yesterday, including one exploiting the MARCM strategy in Drosophila that some of us may remember, I updated some of the references in my Papers application. I wirte a few sentences every now and then for my thesis, so far I have around 244 papers in my collection, although not all of them will appear in the bibliography of course. At the moment, I went thoroughly through 25 of these 244... You see it's a long winding road! At the beginning, I got around 5-10 new references with every paper read, but that number has gone down of course to 2-5. We'll see... 

Finally I can present you the pics from yesterdays Biozentrum festivities. Much thanks to Ced and Su, we had organized a little gathering of the old folks from last years block-courses, to have fun and hear what everyone was up to. Around 12-15 people answered this call and it was a wonderful evening, along with the apero and the interestin talks. Many thanks to everyone who attended!

Click on the pic to get to the gallery!

Last Saturday was a whole symposium at the University of Basel themed: God and Genes. Unluckily, I only had the time to listen to one (and probably the most interesting) lecture: The one from Dean Hamer, NCI, USA, who discovered a gene he claims to be involved in the influence on human spirituality. It really was most interesting, although the American Style title GOD GENE was a bit misleading, leading to the conclusion that this probable helps him selling his books. What the lecture was really about was not a gene that leads people believing to one god or another, but more precisely leads to a higher intrinsic spiritual feeling, in the sense that we are more or less open to supernatural experiences.

I recorded the lecture, you can download it here as long as I keep it on my server.

Although there was no real way in knowing when the results will be out, I was quite nervous for the last couple of days... It just felt like they were coming out soon... Luckily I had brought my Mobile to the Bretagne, so I was able to get a GPRS connection even in the uncivilized world... The 28., while I was checking some train schedules for Line was finally the day, and after some heavy heart beating and some deciphering the pdf containing the matriclesof the students along with the results, it turned out that I ha a 5.5... Boy I was happy, it's not that I had honestly considered the possibility of failing it, but then again it was the last one deciding over the overall results of 3 years of work... The first 2 years count 1/3, this year 2/3... So finally, I'm happy and proud to announce that I am as of now a Bachelor of Science in Biology, Major in Molecular Biology... Gues I'll have to change my business car (which don't exist...).

Click to view original size

So now it's finally over...Time to say good-bye to our Grundstudium, and to some who'll leave the University of Basel...We celebrated after the Apéro from Prof. Keller's Lab near the Tinguely museum on the Rhein shore, eating from our 20 SFR one way grill (a horror for every scout) and drinking my 2003 Chateau Lagrange which was fantastic (the whine of course, but the BBQ was also ok). Cheese had brought in a huge plastic bag 20kg ice from our lab ice machine, driving his bike from the uni to the barbeque with one hand (the other tried to keep the ice from falling off the bike). Even my freshly bought whine glasses survived the whole day...

After some 10 hours of partying, we went to the Paddy Reilly's some Irish Pub (who would have guessed) in Basel...After some time I left to get back to my Wohnheim, as I had to be fit for the driving home this moring to Luxembourg. Enjoy the pictures!