As a relatively early-stage researcher, the low paylines at NIH are a concern for me. In order to have a career in my field, I will need to successfully compete for NIH funding. As I have progressed through my training, I have watched the funding landscape deteriorate. I remember in grad school-I may have touched on this in an ancient blog post-hearing a senior faculty member tell us things were bad (circa 2004), but that by the time we were on the tenure-track job market things would be better. Well, I am on the job market (kinda) and things are worse. Much worse.

These findings bring to light another important issue. As medical research advances, many new interventions, whether drugs, genetic alterations, or physical implants, will become available. Unintended consequences (“side effects”) must at least be considered because they will be there.

This is an intriguing way to combat the bare pipelines that a lot of Big Pharma companies are facing now. It remains to be seen what this type of internal competition and short time frame will mean for progress within the company. The article is also lacking specifics on the rationale underlying the decision making by GSK executives. For example, what type of progress is required for expansion/contraction? How much? Is part of this based on what is promised in the grant applications? Programs like this, which have been launched by other companies as well, will be watched to see if it is a better model than the current funding structure.

The study generally deals with a relatively new field of study known as epigenetics. Epigenetics deals with changes in gene expression, some potentially heritable, that do not include changes to the underlying DNA sequence. This particular article is concerned with DNA methylation. Long story short, DNA methylation leads to the silencing genes and subsequently less mRNA and protein produced by the silenced gene. More genes are silenced as we age. This makes since as development and growth, both physical and mental, should require the products of a greater number of genes. Interestingly, genes that become silenced as we age consist of many many integral players in what we consider “aging.” These include tumor suppressors and DNA repair genes.

We know that environmental experience can lead to epigenetic alterations that affect gene expression. For example, we know that maternal attention (licking, grooming, etc.) leads to epigenetic changes that facilitate anxiolytic responses in the offspring. This finding gets me to the title of this post: How much of what we now call environmental factors actually exert their effect through changes in gene expression. Potentially long-lasting changes in gene expression. I wonder how many experiences that we think are in our past, both positive and negative, that are still with us epigenetically?

Generally, I do not agree with absolutes (see what I did there), and this one is no exception. I think valuable research-that is discovery of something new- can be accomplished without a clear hypothesis at the outset. It is difficult, and regularly operating without a hypothesis can lead to ambiguous results, but I think real hypothesis-lacking research is possible.

Autophagy is a critical function for cells. Not only is it an efficient mechanism for clearing debris, but it also facilitates the dynamic regulation of cellular activity. Cells use autophagy to allocate resources toward critical activities at times when these resources are scarce. Additionally, autophagy, through mechanisms that are not entirely clear, is thought to be involved in the pathology of many diseases from cancer to neurodegeneration.

This paper gives us some insight into why exercise is appears to help prevent many seemingly disparate diseases.

The science tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in 2009 assessed close to 308,000 fourth- and eighth and over 11,000 twelfth graders questions on the physical, life and Earth sciences.

For fourth graders, questions varied in level of difficulty from identifying the benefit of adaptation for an organism to designing an experiment that would allow them to compare types of bird food. Questions geared toward students in grade twelve ranged from being able to compare weather data to tell which city has warmer temperatures to whether they could recognize a nuclear fission reaction.

Just thirty-four percent of fourth-graders, 30 percent of eighth-graders, and 21 percent of twelfth-graders reached the “proficient level” in science in 2009, according to the assessment. Twenty-eight percent of fourth-graders, 37 percent of eighth-graders and 47 percent of twelfth-graders failed to meet the basic achievement level for the exam, compared to a mere one to two percent of students at all grade levels demonstrated advanced understanding of science.