systems biology
oracknows | October 26, 2016Although I did not coin it, I frequently use the term “quackademic medicine” because, unfortunately, there’s a lot of quackademic medicine around. Although regular readers know what the term means, i always feel obligated to briefly explain what quackademic medicine is, for the benefit of any newbie who might happen upon this blog. Basically, it is a term used to describe an increasingly common and alarming phenomenon, the infiltration of rank quackery and pseudoscience into medical academia. You might think it impossible or unbelievable, but it’s anything but. Beginning around a quarter of a…
oracknows | October 14, 2016It’s no secret that I’m not exactly a fan of Dr. Mark Hyman he of the “Ultrawellness” medical empire and arguably the foremost promoter of the “subspecialty” (if you will) of “integrative medicine” known as functional medicine. Integrative medicine, as I’ve told you time and time again, is a specialty dedicated to “integrating” alternative medicine into conventional science-based medicine; i.e., integrating quackery into medicine. One very prominent, very common strain of integrative medicine is known as functional medicine, and Mark Hyman is, although not its originator, its current main…
cagapakis | April 25, 2011Two videos that Patrick Boyle and I made were selected for the Bio:Fiction Film Festival! One of the prizes is an online audience award, and you can watch and rate all of the films! It's such an honor to be part of this festival and to be showing our work next to that of so many amazing artists, scientists, and filmmakers, and we would be super thrilled if you voted for us!
Here are our videos! First, the world premiere of Compound 74, a fictional documentary about a possible future of synthetic drug design through synthetic biology:
And second, the commercial we made for Ginkgo BioWorks--…
cagapakis | September 11, 2010My good friend and labmate just published an awesome paper: "Emergent cooperation in microbial metabolism." His experiment started with 46 strains of E. coli that had mutations in their metabolic pathways that prevented them from being able to grow without supplementing the media with extra metabolites. Alone they died, but grown together in the same tube, many pairs of mutants were able to feed each other the missing metabolite. Metabolic cooperation was the key to survival.
Measuring and understanding metabolic cooperation can be used to build stronger, more predictive models of…
cagapakis | September 10, 2010
Noise obscures meaningful information. Noise is what ruins your carefully designed synthetic biology gene circuit. But noise is part of life and life, it turns out, needs noise. There's a terrific review article in this week's Nature discussing recent theoretical and experimental work on biological noise showing functional roles for molecular, genetic, and evolutionary noise.
From the abstract:
The genetic circuits that regulate cellular functions are subject to stochastic fluctuations, or 'noise', in the levels of their components. Noise, far from just a nuisance, has begun to be…
