– – – Last Thanksgiving, I needed to bring my flies home for the holidays in anticipation of the eclosion of important potential recombinant male progeny. My goal was to use my freezer, a tray of ice, a dissection pad, a paintbrush, and some hoisted fly food vials from my lab to separate the males and the females. At some point during Thanksgiving, my mother asked if they “needed to be on the countertop” and when I said “no” they were moved to this photogenic area. Remarks were made about the apt proximity of fruit to fruit flies, the galosh…
The Science Creative Quarterly
By Lena Webb
Lena is a 4th year graduate student at Brandeis University where she repeatedly asks fruit fly maggots whether it is, in fact, getting hot in here. They have yet to disrobe, but she's waiting.
GLYCEROL STOCKS: THE FUTURE IS NOW
Cryonics, the technique of freezing dead rich people and their pets, is generally disregarded as a big lame waste of money by most scientists and doctors. The goal of cryonics is to preserve all cells in the body well enough such that in the distant future, after scientists have figured out how to successfully “thaw” these high-stakes ice cubes, doctors [robots? Femto-sized germ soldiers?] could take a stab at curing your previously lethal disease. Then you would be free to marvel at the brushed stainless steel landscape, the crushing loneliness, and how everyone has a cell phone in their brain…
OF COURSE PROTEINS TALK TO EACH OTHER
My first serious molecular biology course in college was entitled “DNA and Chromatin Structure” and there were only four students enrolled. While we were expected to take our best stabs at entertaining graduate level ideas, the class size made things inherently informal. One of our most common mistakes was the casual anthropomorphizing of molecular machinery. “But the protein wouldn’t want to interact with the binding site because…” or “RNA polymerase acts like a drunken sailor during the process of transcription—halting, pausing, falling off…” We knew that these complex molecules weren’t capable of harboring a yen for anything at all, but…