Academic conferences are strange beasts. The basic premise is to bring together a bunch of people working in related areas and to get them to exchange ideas. Hopefully, as the ideas flow between attendees, the resulting swirls and storms will inspire new ideas. Some people contribute to the flow by giving talks, others by presenting posters, but, after the formal sessions are done, everybody gets involved there's plenty of chatter.
That's on the face of it. If you look below the surface, you see slightly more. Most attendees combine this exchange with a skillful level of political cunning. People will cosy up to potential reviewers, if they are about to submit a manuscript, or try to establish reputations, if they're thinking of changing their position. In fact, many would say that the need for political manoeuvring is really what drives most conferences.
Needless to say, you gain the most insight into this at the bar. In fact, the more conferences I go to, the more I see the bar as providing the most important sessions to attend, particularly on the night of the conference dinner. When people are relaxing, are less inhibited and arguably have their guard down, you can learn a great deal. Far more than any amount of chit-chat over tea and biscuits will ever tell you.
I've learned a lot in the bar at my last few conferences, but it's a dangerous game to play. A few too many drinks and you end up loosing more than you gain. And for nothing, you'll have to navigate your way through the rest of the conference with a hangover.
This is a lesson I'm slowly learning.
Wednesday, 28 November 2007
Tuesday, 20 November 2007
FAQ: Why Navier-Stalks?
Navier-Stalks is a play on words. In the early 19th Century, Messrs Navier and Stokes devised equations for studying the flow of fluids. Since then, the Navier-Stokes equations have baffled and frustrated many a mathematician because they have non-linear properties which make them very hard to solve.
I was in Japan attending a conference, at which an eminent Professor gave a talk outlining his vision of how he saw the field progresing. It was the sort of passionate talk that had a high tally of buzzwords, but that lacked bankable details. Among the many ethereal ideas was one about how introducing maths into biology will position us to calculate quantities describing the human body and its behaviour. But he warned us that the body would be highly non-linear and as he said this, Navier-Stokes appeared in big letters on the screen behind him. Only it didn't say Navier-Stokes; it said Navier-Stalks.
This is an understandable mistake if you'd never read about the work, but I can't think of a nicer way to sum up the mismatch of knowledge between maths and biology.
I was in Japan attending a conference, at which an eminent Professor gave a talk outlining his vision of how he saw the field progresing. It was the sort of passionate talk that had a high tally of buzzwords, but that lacked bankable details. Among the many ethereal ideas was one about how introducing maths into biology will position us to calculate quantities describing the human body and its behaviour. But he warned us that the body would be highly non-linear and as he said this, Navier-Stokes appeared in big letters on the screen behind him. Only it didn't say Navier-Stokes; it said Navier-Stalks.
This is an understandable mistake if you'd never read about the work, but I can't think of a nicer way to sum up the mismatch of knowledge between maths and biology.
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
FAQ: What's the purpose of this blog?
Scientists enjoy a strange existance. We spend our time investigating the unknown, learning new ideas and fashioning new tools with which to unpick big knots of problems. Some of it is also spent politicking; finding out who are the movers and shakers, what research is in demand and who is pulling the strings. I'm learning all this afresh, having just moved jobs from theoretical physics to biology, and I thought it would be fun to document the experience.
The transition from physics to biology has been fascinating. It has also been bewildering. Biologists and physicists are completely different. They talk a different language and take a completely different approach to scientific discovery. Basically this comes down to the difference in subjects. The human body is a vast, unknown, highly complex machine and it's very difficult to study aspects of it in isolation. Physicists, on the other hand, have done a good job at pairing down matter to its basic building blocks and now they are struggling to refine those theories and to use the blocks to explain what they see in particle detectors. Working with the basic building blocks allows the physicists a level of rigour and certainty in their thinking of which biologists can only dream.
There's been a recent realisation in biology that there's a lot to be gained by introducing some of this rigour, so there's been a push to bring computer scientists, mathematicians and physicists into biology. This has lead to the advent of fields such as computational biology, mathematical biology and systems biology and it's there that I now earn my bread and butter.
The transition from physics to biology has been fascinating. It has also been bewildering. Biologists and physicists are completely different. They talk a different language and take a completely different approach to scientific discovery. Basically this comes down to the difference in subjects. The human body is a vast, unknown, highly complex machine and it's very difficult to study aspects of it in isolation. Physicists, on the other hand, have done a good job at pairing down matter to its basic building blocks and now they are struggling to refine those theories and to use the blocks to explain what they see in particle detectors. Working with the basic building blocks allows the physicists a level of rigour and certainty in their thinking of which biologists can only dream.
There's been a recent realisation in biology that there's a lot to be gained by introducing some of this rigour, so there's been a push to bring computer scientists, mathematicians and physicists into biology. This has lead to the advent of fields such as computational biology, mathematical biology and systems biology and it's there that I now earn my bread and butter.
Welcome to Navier-Stalks
Hi there. Allow me to warmly welcome you to this new and shiny blog.
I've set this blog up for a bunch of reasons. At the top of the list was my need to describe the weird and wonderful world in which I work. Until recently, I was a theoretical physicist, studying the more mathematical aspects of quantum field theory. But, having completed my PhD and finding myself unemployed (and unemployable), I thought I'd try my hand at biology; specifically bioinformatics.
At the boundary between biology, mathematics and computer science, bioinformatics concerns itself with developing algorithms to study the huge volumes of genetic information that exist in the DNA of each specie of organism.
Having aimed for Bioinformatics, I managed to miss the mark and was offered a position doing something slightly different. Instead of analysing the genetic information as it is encoded in the DNA, I was offered the chance to try to model how the DNA is used in the cell to allow the cell to respond to its environment.
For example, in the body, the microbes that are responsible for disease can emit molecules which bind to proteins on the surface of certain cells. The binding can affect the behaviour of the proteins, allowing them to modify other proteins inside the cell, which themselves might affect other proteins. This process can continue like a chain of falling dominos. Eventually, a modified protein reaches the nucleus, triggering a new protein to be manufactured using the DNA and the new protein is shuttled to the cell surface where it can be secreted in order to fight the microbe. It's my job to simulate all this.
Being offered this job was definately a good thing. Modelling a dynamical system is essentially physics and so is much closer to home, but it places me in a world between worlds. I don't know enough biology to consider myself a biologist (although I'm learning fast) and I'm rapidly moving away from the sort of maths that a physicist would use. The closest label I can find to fit this world is Mathematical Biology, although many people are pushing the far sexier (but more vague) label of "Systems Biology". Either way, that's what I do.
The purpose of this blog is to document and derive humour from, the culture clash that exists between the physical and life sciences. Physics and maths pride themselves on their rigour and exactitude and, in those fields, you can go far with a well constructed theory, irrespective of how well it compares to experiment. Biology and Medicine, on the other hand, are driven by the need to make use of the knowledge and rigour frequently goes out the window. As such, the life sciences are more akin to engineering. Of course, this is not unreasonable. The human body is an enormous machine of unknown mechanisms and unearthing how it all works is a colossal task.
Hopefully, as the weeks glide by, we will see many examples of how this process of discovery pans out and I, no doubt, will spend much of that time banging my head against my desk. But, for now, let's embrace the naive delusion that all will go smoothly.
Either way, it will be a fascinating trip.
I've set this blog up for a bunch of reasons. At the top of the list was my need to describe the weird and wonderful world in which I work. Until recently, I was a theoretical physicist, studying the more mathematical aspects of quantum field theory. But, having completed my PhD and finding myself unemployed (and unemployable), I thought I'd try my hand at biology; specifically bioinformatics.
At the boundary between biology, mathematics and computer science, bioinformatics concerns itself with developing algorithms to study the huge volumes of genetic information that exist in the DNA of each specie of organism.
Having aimed for Bioinformatics, I managed to miss the mark and was offered a position doing something slightly different. Instead of analysing the genetic information as it is encoded in the DNA, I was offered the chance to try to model how the DNA is used in the cell to allow the cell to respond to its environment.
For example, in the body, the microbes that are responsible for disease can emit molecules which bind to proteins on the surface of certain cells. The binding can affect the behaviour of the proteins, allowing them to modify other proteins inside the cell, which themselves might affect other proteins. This process can continue like a chain of falling dominos. Eventually, a modified protein reaches the nucleus, triggering a new protein to be manufactured using the DNA and the new protein is shuttled to the cell surface where it can be secreted in order to fight the microbe. It's my job to simulate all this.
Being offered this job was definately a good thing. Modelling a dynamical system is essentially physics and so is much closer to home, but it places me in a world between worlds. I don't know enough biology to consider myself a biologist (although I'm learning fast) and I'm rapidly moving away from the sort of maths that a physicist would use. The closest label I can find to fit this world is Mathematical Biology, although many people are pushing the far sexier (but more vague) label of "Systems Biology". Either way, that's what I do.
The purpose of this blog is to document and derive humour from, the culture clash that exists between the physical and life sciences. Physics and maths pride themselves on their rigour and exactitude and, in those fields, you can go far with a well constructed theory, irrespective of how well it compares to experiment. Biology and Medicine, on the other hand, are driven by the need to make use of the knowledge and rigour frequently goes out the window. As such, the life sciences are more akin to engineering. Of course, this is not unreasonable. The human body is an enormous machine of unknown mechanisms and unearthing how it all works is a colossal task.
Hopefully, as the weeks glide by, we will see many examples of how this process of discovery pans out and I, no doubt, will spend much of that time banging my head against my desk. But, for now, let's embrace the naive delusion that all will go smoothly.
Either way, it will be a fascinating trip.
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