So tonight, after nearly 4 years living in the US, I sat down and watched “102 minutes that Changed America” and balled my eyes out. Although I have clearly understood the implications of the attacks, I had never connected emotionally or personally.  Tonight I did.

I attribute the ‘environmentalism’ in the PNW to three things: First, it seems most people here have received some sort of education. Second, they can actually see that there is a beautiful world to protect, not just a sandpit that houses fast food restaurants and gun shops.  Lastly, the proximity to Canada has had a major impact on the communal conscience. People here can point to Canada on a map, and the CBC is a local broadcast station.

I think I’ll survive. So long as no one catches me recycling food soiled paper towels.

I was surprised to see a trashy Newsweek article written by one of the worlds top cancer researchers, Robert Weinberg.  I’m so used to him writing and speaking about the esoteric mechanisms of cancer progression that it was kind of nice read a good old-fashioned get off your fat ass review article for the masses.

He claims that by avoiding a traditional Western diet, avoiding tobacco and doing an iota of exercise we may be able to prevent up to 70 percent of cancers.  He’s not the only one saying this, hell, just do a google search.

But as I’m starting to learn as the days pass in Texas, one can ignore all these warnings by simply being patriotic about the things that are killing us.  In a society where the convenience of a video store drop box has been converted to a ‘drive through’ so one does not have to lather themselves in Crisco to squeeze out of their car seat (pardon, SUV seat), it is easier to be proud and nostalgic about the fact that in ‘merica one don’t need to get out of their car to return their videos! That’s for them savages south (or north) of the border!

But no patriotic exercise is complete without a symbol to remind you that you have done the right thing. For example, the strategic placement of a Texas lone star on said video drop box reminds one of how the rules of the state have created these opportunities for them. A picture of George W. would be a little to conspicuous when in comes to covering up propaganda to brainwash the masses.

So next time you are hobbling down the Walmart parking lot with your thighs burning from the sweaty chafeage, and your mouth watering from the though of the Kraft cheese you are going to lather you on your noodles, replace those thoughts of guilt with thoughts of pride as you realize that the redness and swelling of your moist flanks symbolize the freedom to choose.

And this.
God help the US! They may soon have to import their leaders from foreign countries who at least have a formal education.  The next Sarah Palin isn’t even going to be able to speak english.

Maybe its because I grew up in a ‘liberal’ half of the continent, but it seems to me that this may be slightly discriminatory.

The 13 year old working the desk was quite uncomfortable when I asked him if they would extend their offer to people who did not share the same faith.  I backed off realizing that the poor man has probably never seen a person with such dark hair as I before.

Well, I hope they contact me when its white-people only day.

Anyway, I hope you don’t interpret this as an anti-religious post.  I just feel it may exclude people unnecessarily.

I’m not opposed to the baby being drugged.  I think its a great example of innovative ideas being put into practice.  Wailing baby syndrome is a serious issue in this country and really should be the focus of more NIH funding investment and Pharmaceutical Marketing.  In fact, I think I’ve seen more crying babies than obese ones, and you know how concerned we are about the obese ones!

P.S. For the record, I’m not a Palin hater.  I think she is quite well composed and just as capable of running the country into the ground as the rest of these clowns.  What I’m not a fan of is shear disgusting political move/sociological experiment/sell-out/warped Disney movie that she represents.  It’s quite clear why she was chosen to be JM’s running mate, and it wasn’t because she was the governer of the closest state to Russia. It was just another way of manipulating the American lemmings away from the issues that really affect their lives. And you can’t tell me after watching the democratic primaries that being a woman would not be an issue!

Check the comments on this globe and mail article and I think it will give you a good idea.  Though keep in mind that the comments are a bit biased because most people don’t even understand the G&M vocabulary.

P.S. She is still hot!  and its got to more than shear coincidence that her kids share the same names as my wife’s nicknames for my wang.  Speaking of which . . . off to polish Piper and trim the Track, put some bark on the old Willow if you know what I’m saying. . . sorry…. that was immature.

With so many happy couples on the horizon, you can’t help but wonder what they will come up with next. A law that lets women take maternity leave so they can raise their children?  How about helping parents pay the over $150 dollars a week it costs to put your child in a day care while the women haul their asses to work while still applying antiseptic on their C-section scars twice a day?  How about free spanish classes for parents so they can understand the language that their children are being brought up on from birth?  How about funding an NIH grant to develop in vitro breasts so women don’t have to sit at their office desk with their boobs hooked up to pumps so that their babies at least get day-old breast milk? 

Yup, life can be stressful.  But don’t worry, you can always cancel your health insurance to make sure the kid at least gets food, hell you wouldn’t be able to pay the co-pay anyway, right?.  At least when the shit hits the fan you can look back at the 8 hour course you took, and remember how much you love your significant other.

The conference itself had some teething problems. The acoustics in the main room rendered the speakers incomprehensible, and there was no food.  By far the worst thing was the time limit imposed on the poster sessions at night.  That didn’t deter from the quality of science however, and I shouldn’t be a whino about how money was spend, since the ISSCR budget isn’t quite that of some of the larger conferences. 

One of my favorite talks was Peter Lansdorp’s discussion about whether there may be functional differences between sister chromatin that could result in asymmetric cell division.  To visualize individual sister chromatin, he utilized a clever strategy called ‘chromosome orientation FISH’ or CO-FISH.   This technique involved labeling the telomere repeats to visualize the 5′ and 3′ ends of the chromosomes, while simultaneously labeling the A rich and T rich sequences that are present near the centromere.  One strand would therefore look like this:   5′Asequence-3′, and the other one 3′tsequence-5′. He calls of  them the ‘Watson strand’ and the other the ‘Crick strand’ .  By labeling the cells with BrDU, he was then able to use Hoescht dye, UV light and endonuclease, in a way that I didn’t quite catch, to kill the newly replicated strands.  By counting the distribution of leftover Watson and Crick strands he was then able to deduce whether an asymmetric cell division had occurred.  He studied what must have been hundreds of sections from mouse intestinal epithelium of mice that were fed BrdU.  He was able to demonstrate individual examples of non-random template segregation of individual chromosome in vivo using the CO-FISH technique. Interestingly, he observed this phenomena in later replicating cells outside of the defined stem cell niche of the epithelial crypt, leading him to believe that the asymmetry may not be specific to stem cells per se.  At the moment, it seems that technical limitations are holding back the work, although tremendous progress is being made.  It would be great to see some of the stuff done in vivo to get more clear pictures. 

The question period got a bit heated when the moderator called up his scientific ‘Skeletor‘ Thomas Rando, to discuss the ‘immortal strand hypothesis’.  For those who didn’t witness, the two had back to back commentaries in Cell regarding the possible reasons for retaining a parent strand of DNA as discussed previously on this site. 

Speaking of Thomas Rando, he gave a pretty captivating talk about muscle stem cell function.  He’s shown in the past that muscle regeneration capacity decreases with age, but this doesn’t correlate with the function of the muscle satellite stem cell.  Instead, it seems to be the satellite cell microenvironment that makes the difference. He has discussed some of these factors in a recent review as well as a recent paper in Cell Stem Cell and Science.  In general, the development of the muscle satellite cells is directed towards myoblasts via transit amplifying cells.  In aged animals, however, the satellite cells tend to proliferate and become more fibroblastic. The take home message was that that extrinsic and systemic signals led to the regenerative failure of satellite cells.  Heterochronic parabiosis (the grossest of gross surgeries) was used to study the contribution of the Wnt signalling pathway to the abberant differentiation of the satellite cells.  Inhibition of the Wnt signalling using DKK-1 and SFRPs reversed the phenotype. 

To move on, Sally Temple, got people excited about the identification of a new population of adult stem cells that share similar properties with embryonic stem cells. The cells reside within the back of the retina in a place called the Retinal Pigment Epithelium. The RPE forms early on, about day 32 in human embryos, and day 9.5 in mice, and apparently sits quite dormant and minimally used during the life of the organism.  The cells were isolated from retinal epithelium from Cadavers, but she has also been able to isolate them from live patients undergoing some horrible eye surgery or something along those lines.  Interestingly, these cells had limited passages that they could undergo, but there was no correlation with age, as she checked from cells isolated from patients from 22-99 years of age.  Of course she was able to show that they expressed the regular panel of stem cell associated markers, but only by PCR, and she was able to direct them along differentiation pathways as with ES cells.   I don’t remember if she did teratoma studies, but she did do Chorioallantoic Membrane (CAM) transplants to see if masses developed that contained cells of different origins.  The masses were smaller than those of ES cells but did display a heterogenous population of cells. 

Questions arose about whether she has been able to isolate cells from patient with such diseases as retinal neuropathy. 

There were some strange things about these cells that I couldn’t wrap my mind around.  They could be isolated as adherent, and then be taken back into canonical ES spheres repeatedly, despite the massive changes that must be occurring to the cells as they are passaged in culture. 

Sean Morrison was quite prolific at the conference. He gave a motivational speech at the Junior Investigator meeting, was treasurer for the ISSCR, and hosted one of the breakfasts.  His talk was kind cool. In the first half of his talk he discussed the difference between the traditional model of cancer growth and the cancer stem cell (CSC) model of cancer growth. He was quick to remind everyone (to my liking) that the CSC paradigm does not explain all cancers, so what he did was isolate metastatic melanoma cells, created single cells suspensions, and was able to get those single cells to form tumours between 15-20% of the time. He concluded that the CSC model did not apply to these cells, and thus could not be over-stretched to include all cancer.  My only criticism is that he did the study using already metastatic melanomas that likely have a higher proportion of cells that have undergone the necessary changes toward a population of tumour initiating cells. 

During the second half of his talk he discussed the inverse relationship between self renewal and age. He did microarray analyses of cells to determine genes that were stem cells specific and associated  with age.  He identified only a single gene that followed a the pattern with age, HMGA2.   He showed, in a nutshell, that this gene was required for NSC self renewal, but not for the proliferation of normal cells. He studied it in the background of different knock out mice, that I didn’t write all the names down for, and showed that its involved, but is not likely the only factor.