The Day The Music Died

Yesterday, I made the sad decision not to continue taking piano lessons this semester. No, it's not as tragic as the title of the post might suggest. But it's late and I'm still working, so I'm entitled to get a little maudlin.

I really enjoyed taking those lessons last semester. I loved playing again, learning new pieces, and doing something that was completely unrelated to science. It's the "right brain, left brain" thing--science is intellectually satisfying for me, but music is emotionally satisfying. I had missed all of that during the years I didn't play, and taking lessons again was like reconnecting with an old friend.

But I barely managed to muster an hour's worth of practice a week, and the last few lessons I had were essentially exercises in sight-reading--embarrassing for me, and likely tortuous for my teacher. It's not that I had aspirations of becoming a virtuoso, but if I couldn't devote enough time to it to make a decent amount of progress, then all I was accomplishing was diverting time and energy from my work to do something half-assed. And that doesn't strike me as a good exchange.

More importantly, I've come to the realization that, tenure-track or not, I'm a competitive person and I don't like being less productive than the other senior people in lab. This is a tough one because the senior postdocs spend 100% effort on their research, whereas 30-40% of my time is taken up by lab management and administrative tasks. In order to just keep pace, I have to either work longer hours or cut out inefficiencies in time usage.

I'm also cognizant of the fact that while I've often blamed academic culture for squeezing everything non-science out of researchers' lives, this decision was entirely mine to make. Were I to continue with my lessons, I would still generate data, publish papers, and get promoted, albeit at a slightly slower pace. It's a valid and available option, but I know I won't be happy watching other people zoom past me at work.

I'm not giving up on having a life outside of lab and keeping my hobbies, but what I get out of any particular "extracurricular activity" has to be worth the amount of time I put into it. As the business people would say, it's all about the value-to-cost ratio. Playing the piano for my own enjoyment at home provides enough value to be worth the cost, but taking lessons has not provided enough added value to be worth the added cost.

I guess the left brain wins after all.

A Silver Bullet For Flu?

Viruses Are Cool #7
Click here to read the introduction to this series.

Influenza virus needs no introduction. Each year, 3-5 million people worldwide experience the misery of severe flu illness and 250,000-500,000 die from it. And this is just for a "normal" flu season--the Asian flu (1957-1958) and Hong Kong flu (1968-1969) pandemics each killed approximately 1 million, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 killed an estimated 40 million.

Currently, there are influenza vaccines which confer protection against disease by inducing an antibody response to two viral surface glycoproteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Antibody recognition of these two glycoproteins are used to classify influenza viruses into different serotypes. For example, the lethal "H5N1" avian flu strain refers to hemagglutinin serotype 5 and neuraminidase serotype 1.

But there is a problem with these vaccines: hemagglutinin and neuraminidase can undergo changes by spontaneous mutation or by gene reassortment with animal influenza strains, resulting in the frequent generation of new strains to which the human population is not immune. Thus, last year's flu shot, which protected you against last year's flu strains, will do you no good this year because the antibodies generated from last year's vaccine cannot recognize the new "versions" of hemagglutinin and neuraminidase.

The public health strategy, therefore, has been for the WHO's Global Influenza Surveillance Network to monitor circulating influenza virus strains each year, and to recommend a combination of the three most virulent strains in circulation to be used in that year's vaccine. It's a bit like trying to catch a master of disguise by putting up wanted posters featuring the three disguises one believes he is most likely to use--highly effective when one guesses correctly, but not so effective when one guesses poorly.

A recent article, however, reports that a universal vaccine which may protect against all influenza strains is in development. The vaccine involves immunization against the influenza virus M2 protein, which is largely invariant across influenza strains. This strategy is based on previously published work showing that immunization with M2 protects mice from subsequent lethal challenge with both homologous and heterologous influenza strains (Nat Med 5:1157-1163). The study also showed that passive transfer of serum from immunized mice to naive mice protects the latter from lethal challenge, indicating that the protection is mediated by anti-M2 antibodies.

In its latest news release, the company developing the universal flu vaccine reports that the vaccine is safe in human clinical trials and that 90% of subjects given the M2 vaccine plus adjuvant develop antibodies to the vaccine, although whether these antibodies are protective against infection remains to be seen. Another concern is whether M2 will remain invariant in the virus population if this vaccine were widely used. At least one study has suggested that the invariance of M2 is due to its poor immunogenicity during infection. The same study also showed that viral escape mutants with changes in M2 emerge in 65% of infected mice treated with anti-M2 antibodies, but not in mice treated with a control antibody (J Virol 79:6644-6654). This suggests that immunization of humans against M2 could create selective pressure for mutation of the protein, which would bring us right back to where we started.

Nonetheless, these data are encouraging and we can all hope that sometime in the near future, a single flu shot will last us for life.


References

• WHO Influenza Fact Sheet
• CDC Flu Vaccine Information Page
• Influenza, Wikipedia

Tangled Bank 96

Gender Or Race?

March Hare and I watched CNN's coverage of the Iowa primaries last night. As an aside, I have to say that the caucus process, particularly the Democratic one, is very strange. As a second aside, CNN's news ticker at the bottom of the screen drives me crazy. It scrolls so slowly that it's like trying to get important information from...someone...who...talks...like...this. It's just maddening!

Alright, alright...I'll get to my point now. March Hare and I were wondering which would be more socially significant: having a woman president or a black president? Which would be a bigger step toward a non-discriminatory and egalitarian society?

Arduous has written about her hopes for a female president. As a woman, I'd definitely like to see a female president. After all, as Arduous points out, other countries, including a few that Americans would generally consider to be less socially progressive, have had female heads-of-state.

But as an ethnic minority, both here and in my country of origin, I think having a minority president would also be tremendous progress. Especially for an ethnic group for which there is so much water under the bridge--slavery, the Civil War, segregation, the KKK, etc.--as well as continuing discrimination.

Elizabeth Edwards has been quoted saying, "We can't make John black, we can't make him a woman. Those things get you a certain amount of fundraising dollars (CNN Politics)." So in theory, a black female candidate should be the perfect choice. But if Condoleeza Rice were running for president, I wouldn't vote for her. Gender and race aren't enough in my book. And if it came down to Clinton versus Obama, the deciding factor for me would have to do with policy, not with the gender versus race issue.

In any case, I'd be curious to know what the rest of you think about this. Would Clinton or Obama, if elected, represent the biggest step forward for our society? And would the election of a woman or black president effect any real change in the lots of women or blacks in this country?

A Step In The Right Direction

New Hampshire has joined Vermont, Connecticut and New Jersey in allowing civil unions for same-sex couples. Honestly, I'm not sure whether to be encouraged that one more state now provides rights and benefits to same-sex couples, or to be disgusted that real equality for same-sex couples still cannot be won.

Let's not kid ourselves--if heterosexual couples can be married, but homosexual couples can only have civil unions, then clearly some relationships are more equal than others in the eyes of the law. The problem with this, obviously, is that the government should provide equal rights and protection to all its citizens, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, etc.

Equal.

Not similar, not approximate, not sorta kinda.

Whatever "union" the government provides should be applied equally to all couples. If religious institutions want to have their own discriminatory versions of matrimony, that is their prerogative so long as they receive no funding from tax dollars. Bottom line: bigotry is bigotry regardless of whether people try to gift-wrap it in religious text.

There was a time when interracial marriages, like mine, were banned. In fact, laws against interracial marriage, called anti-miscegenation laws, were in effect in some US states until 1967. That was bigotry, and so is the banning of same-sex marriage.

In declaring anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, the US Supreme Court said:

Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State (Loving v. Virginia, Wikipedia).

Aside from the part about marriage being "fundamental to our very existence and survival", one can substitute "homophobia" for "racial discrimination" in the ruling, and the words would be as applicable today as they were forty years ago.

I think it's about time the rest of the country followed Massachussetts' example and extended to gay and lesbian couples the same "basic civil rights" that heterosexual couples enjoy.

Mid-Academic Year Review

The past year has been an experiment in work-life balance for me. One of the things that has always bothered me about academic research is the culture of single-minded dedication to work and science, and the lack of tolerance for one's life and interests outside of lab.

In mid-August last year, I lamented the strictures placed on my life by my career. In late August, at the start of the fall semester, I made some academic year resolutions to address some of these issues. Let's see how I'm doing so far:

Spend more time with March Hare and Dormouse. This has been going well. I've cut back on my work hours and have managed to take at least one day off on most weekends. March Hare and I have had dinner together almost everyday, although this is, admittedly, in large part because he waits patiently for me to come home to have dinner. Still, it's a significant improvement over my postdoc lifestyle.

Stay in touch with friends and family. This has been patchy. I've kept in touch better with some people, and worse with others. On average, I guess there's been no significant change from before. I'll have to work on this.

Keep up with my hobbies and not get sucked into doing nothing but work again. I've definitely done this--I've been blogging pretty regularly, cooking a lot, taking piano lessons, and making progress through some books. Ironically, in my zeal to prove I can be an academic scientist and still have a life, I may actually have taken on too many things. I'm now thinking about cutting back on some of the extracurriculars. More on this later.

Not let the house deteriorate into a full-fledged disaster area. I'm all over this one! My success in this was primarily due to my parents' visit last year. For some reason, the thought of my mother being in my house always inspires me to clean like a madwoman. I'll have to ponder that some more.... We've also cheated a bit by hiring a service for the basic "maintenance" cleaning.

Read the pile of papers on my desk. Um...not so much. But with my grant deadline looming, I'll be forced to read some of that stack pretty soon.

Not start another book before I finish the ones I've already started. Sigh...I just can't resist peeking into new books. I blame my friends who keep buying them for me! :-)

Update my notebook regularly instead of hoarding Post-It notes and paper towels covered in chicken-scratch. I seem to have hit a bad stretch of these resolutions. My deficiencies in this arena have already been documented here.

Use the treadmill to exercise instead of as a coat-rack. We're no longer using the treadmill as a coat-rack. Yay, progress! Next step will be to actually use it to exercise....

Overall, I think I've kept a respectable number of these resolutions and have definitely improved my work-life balance. I might've gone a bit overboard with the hobbies, which is great for variety but bad for my stress levels. Perhaps the pendulum has to swing from side-to-side a few times before a good balance is found.

Regardless, I've been happy this past year...happier than I've been in a long time. I feel I've finally found a workable solution to the life-versus-career dilemma. It might need a little tweaking here and there, but now I am confident I can have both.

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