A storm is upon us, clouds at 500 ft / overcast at 4000 ft and falling, visibility <3 miles, humidity at 99%, pouring rain, freezing level quit low. This sucky IFR weather should last until Monday…Damn! I was expecting having a great time this weekend with either N4624D or N4870G, but Mother Nature decided otherwise. Both 24D and 70G are old C-172 ladies but they are well maintained and still kicking. Although it is a lot of fun to fly them, it is probably better to stay on the ground and wait for the storm to pass. The good thing is that they will get a great bath and finally get clean.

A cool picture of the hexameric enzyme Quinolinate Phosphoribosyl Transferase (QAPRTase) of S. cerevisiae showing its electrostatics intimacy. Blue are +, red and – and the field-lines are displayed. The very interesting thing here is that the field-lines are rooted from each active site outside area (6 of them). I used ABPS for the electrostatic calculations and VMD 1.8.7-alpha to visualize. The substrates Quinolinate and PRPP are basically sucked-in into the active sites following the electrostatic field-lines. It is an obvious result, but those kind of analysis are cool don’t you think ? So…what about the release of the product synthesized ?

Well I have been very busy lately. I went to France for a couple of tenured-track faculty interviews at the CNRS national labs. Overall, it was an interesting experience. I had a pleasant time with the committee 16 “Chemistry for living organisms and medicinal chemistry. Design and properties of compounds of biological interest”. However, my research proposal was a little bit out of scope for this particular committee unfortunately. But overall, it was good talking with this committee.

A week after I was interviewed by the committee 21 “Molecular and structural features underlying biological functions” and the fun began. I found what I hate the most among tenured-track faculties in France: very narrow-minded person, rude for no reasons, not listening to me at all…well pathetic people for most of them. The icing on the cake was when I was explaining my current project in the US about the molecular modelling of protein (funded by the NIH). I am a crystallographer but I am currently doing protein-modeling stuffs. The committee was obviously a group of hardcore old-school experimentalists and they violently told me that it is bullshit..meaning protein modeling is bullshit…. should I laugh now and tell them they are wrong, narrow-minded and stupid or should I save that for latter…My current research in protein modelling is all about models-validation with an experimentalist (X-ray crystallography) point of view!! The committee 16 was pleased with that, so why did you guys from the 21 didn’t get that?? Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. That’s must be the reason (sarcasm). 

Some of my friends who went through this hassle before me in different committee experienced the same fun. Awesome ! In my case, I guess it was just a bad experience on that one. But, don’t get me wrong. Working in France at a CNRS or INSERM lab is cool. You don’t get much salary compared to the US, but you do get plenty of vacations, a stress-free working environment (please don’t tell me you are under stress right ?) and if you move your ass a little, you can get some grant money to do good research. But you might end-up working with some people with this typical French narrow-minded mentality where they expect you to fall into a specific old-fashion category. If you are a little bit too atypical you are over.

This being said, it leads me to think: What the heck am I applying for positions at the CNRS or INSERM anyway? right ? Do I want to work with this kind of people? I feel so much better working in the US in every possible ways. Then now, ask yourself why so many of us leave France after graduating with a PhD and never come back in the French academia system ?

Wind, rain, cold, and wet, slippery: I felt almost sorry for the guys biking at 30 mph with this bad weather. However, it is kind of cool having the start of the tour of California in Davis. So we hang out a little, outside Wheelworks downtown to see the guys warming up and racing a couple of laps around the blocks. Well, those guys are dam fast with their top-notch bikes: impressive!

My bike, Bullitt, doesn’t like having wet tires…. too bad, I’m sure she would have love racing a little with those rookies, especially with Lance A.

I’ve always wondering what is the ratio of peer-reviewed scientific publications that just bring nothing really new to the field. Also, what could be the ratio of fake data being published every year? 

Those questions have been bugging me for the last couple of weeks. Ok, I don’t pretend that my papers are among the greatest ever published, however, the data I present are genuine and I always try to have a thorough analysis of a given question.

I’m writing this, because lately I came across a lot of papers that just garbage inaccurate to me. In no specific order, it can be: recycling old data into new one, controls experiments are missing or inaccurate, data too perfect to be true, writing a whole paper with experiments that just bring nothing new to the field, among others….

There is so many journals out there that it is somewhat easy to get a paper publish. If it failed to one journal, we just have to send it to another journal with a slightly lower impact factor. Even if in general, a correlation exists between impact factor and quality however, high impact factor journals are not immune of bad papers.

Nowadays, it is so tough to get funded that it had raised the bar very high in term of publications. A PI and a lab have to produce a lot of papers. Unfortunately it tends to seriously impact the quality, enhance the tendency of over-interpreting the data or fake them. I think the whole thing is definitively not moving in the right direction and that’s made me sad/angry.

I wish you all the very best for 2009.

Things to do : Party plenty, work plenty, stay focus plenty, have fun plenty, love plenty, give plenty, enjoy life plenty, keep an open mind and don’t take things too much seriously…