My department had its retreat this week and it really cemented in my views about its biases. We had a rather forced event where we interacted with other researchers and tried to come up with impromptu collaborations. I wasn't exactly enthused with the idea to begin with, but I felt it devolved into churching out more and more non-sensical combinations of hype-y technologies without any attempt to carefully think about a biological question. I've spent the few days since trying to reflect and think about what other biases or viewpoints I might encounter at other universities and how they contrast with my own tech-obsessed environment. That said, here's this week's set of instrument pictures: First time I've seen a TEM before, it looked like it was built in the 80s
When you have a very expensive hammer... My favorite studies are those that aren't technologically fancy, but test a big idea. This is the study that I am most proud of to date. b_b and I just used luciferase assays for miRNA activity to demonstrate functional exchange of miRNAs between cells. The trick was that we expressed C. elegans miRNA in one population, and had a luciferase reporter for it in another. Super short and sweet, and nothing fancy involved.
It's hard for me too be too critical, given that my current project is somewhat of a hammer targeted at what I hope is a well-chosen nail. But I now have my sights focused on learning what other big-picture research views are out there. My undergrad institution had a lot of emphasis on structure. Some days I wondered why anyone would even care about that topic, but others it all clicked and I saw exactly how a particular system could be understood through the precise physical interactions of its part. But what other worlds exist within biology outside the current trends of massive sequencing, -omics, and advanced imaging?