The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century

Peter Pringle

Over at the Quackometer blog, a report that a quack's legal action against the Guardian over an article by Ben Goldacre has failed.  Goldacre himself writes about it in the Bad Science blog (and presumably in today's Guardian).

This libel action has cost the quack, Matthias Rath, £500k for the Guardian's legal bills, and probably the same again for his own costs.  Whether it will silence him and his business, I don't know.

Visually Mediated Motor Planning in the Escape Response of Drosophila

Gwyneth Card and Michael H. Dickinson

Current Biology 10.1016/j.cub.2008.07.094
[Summary] [Full Text] [PDF] [Supplemental Data]

 

Here's a smashing paper - a deeply detailed analysis of the Drosophila escape response.  What's more, it's hard to see the usual justifications we need to use in grant applications.   And a paper about "looming threats...

Ben Goldacre will be familiar to Guardian readers and those (like me) who regularly check up his Bad Science blog.  This book shares much of the subject matter Goldacre covers in his blog: bad science journalism, dodgy medical research, quack medicine and the like.  Goldacre really considers bad science as it applies to medicine and medical research.

Since I've not finished this book yet, this is not so much a review as a heads-up that it's out, available from Amazon (click the image), and that from the chapters I've read, it's a very readable counterblast to dodgy science.  Chapters cover topics such as dodgy health "experts" such as Gillian McKeith and Patrick Holford; media and MMR (and other health scares); CAM "treatments", and much more.

It seems like it was only yesterday that I started a new season, and here we are with the last time trial of the North Bucks club event season (we have a couple of hill climbs, and the Norlond '25' on 7th September is the nominated event for the club '25' championship still to come).  In actual fact I have one remaining season goal - the Duo Normand on the 21st September (see my preview blog article).  This event was the eighth counting event in the 2008 NBRC League - the final table is available at the North Bucks Road Club website (pdf file).

I got a bit wet in some relatively light rain (in comparison to the overnight rain that we'd had), and another bout of rain caused some to wonder whether the event would go ahead.  But go ahead it did. I had a distinct lack of energy, probably due to a mild tummy upset over the previous 36 hours.  I was also a bit cross about the JCB parked across the road just before the climb to North Crawle, and the slow moving traffic through North Crawley.

This was the second time trial this weekend, and the overnight weather really did not augur well for a fun time out there on the F1/25 (which for those who don't know, is on the A1 between Sandy and Buckden).  In fact I was woken at 5am by the stonkingly heavy rain.  However, by the time Richard came to pick me up, shortly after 7am, the rain had stopped, and it stayed off for the duration of the race.  Otherwise, the weather was a little disruptive, with a stiff breeze that was mostly a crosswind. 

I still felt a bit weak from the tummy upset, and I found it very hard to get my heart rate up to the sort of level I would expect for a 25 mile time trial.  In fact I spent most of the event in level 2.  It was a bit of a lonely event for me - there were only a handful of riders starting behind me, and I only caught one rider.  I was caught by Ken Platts for 4 minutes near the St Neots (A428) exit on the southbound leg, which bucked my ideas up a bit - my concentration had been wavering quite a bit up to that point.  Traffic was fine this morning, thought here had been a two-car crash northbound to Buckden that had the road reduced to one lane when I passed through (some riders encountered a complete carriageway closure and had to zoom up the hard shoulder).

A. Bhutkar, S. W. Schaeffer, S. M. Russo, M. Xu, T. F. Smith, W. M. Gelbart (2008). Chromosomal Rearrangement Inferred From Comparisons of 12 Drosophila Genomes Genetics, 179 (3), 1657-1680 DOI: 10.1534/genetics.107.086108

Calvin Bridges is, with Alfred Sturtevant, one of my heroes of Drosophila genetics.  Among his achievements were the demonstration and confirmation of the chromsome theory of inheritance, and the establishment of the polytene chromosome maps (for more about polytene chromosomes, see this article).  Bridges was one of the early members of the Morgan fly lab, and stayed there for his entire (though unfortunately short) career.  Kohler, in his excellent history of Drosophila genetics, characterises Bridges as the "blue collar" member of the lab, the worker who would invest huge energy in the technical development of Drosophila genetics.

A. Bhutkar, S. W. Schaeffer, S. M. Russo, M. Xu, T. F. Smith, W. M. Gelbart (2008). Chromosomal Rearrangement Inferred From Comparisons of 12 Drosophila Genomes Genetics, 179 (3), 1657-1680 DOI: 10.1534/genetics.107.086108

Back when I was a carefree postdoc, one of the projects I worked on was the assembly of a molecular physical map of the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Of course, Drosophila researchers had for years been using a physical map, the polytene chromosome map, and indeed we used this as the framework on which we assembled our molecular map using cosmid clones. These papers take the genome sequences of 11 Drosophila species (plus the sequence of Drosophila melanogaster, determined back in 2000), fit them to the polytene chromosome maps, and examine chromosome rearrangments seen in inter-species comparisons.  It seems to me there isn't anything hugely sexy in this work, but there is a huge amount of work that sets the evolutionary relationships between these Drosopholids in context.  It's also an opportunity to expound on chromosomes in Drosophila!

Bad Blood: The Secret Life of the Tour De France

Jeremy Whittle

I was intrigued by a brief news piece in the latest issue of Science to fall onto my desk (the 22nd August issue).  This concerns the recently published genome sequence of Trichoplax adhaerens, a peculiar animal in a phylum I'd never heard of.  That in itself was interesting, particularly as placozoans have a really odd body plan that involves a mere four cell types.  Wikipedia has a nice description of Placozoa, from which the image below comes.

On browsing the web a bit further, I found this movie (Quicktime format) of a placozoan moving.  I presume this would be Trichoplax adhaerens, as this is the only known species in the phylum - a second described species, T. reptans, was apparently described at the end of the 19th century but hasn't ben seen again and it's existence is doubtful.

This event was held on a new course (I understand that it had been used before as the basis for a 25 mile event), and uses the new A428 dual carriageway section from Hardwick to turn at the Caxton Gibbet roundabout where it crosses the A1198.  The event HQ was in the excellent Comberton village hall, about 5 miles from the start.  For this event, the weather was perhaps the warmest i've had all season for a time trial: cloudy skies in the morning had cleared away to brilliant sunshine, and we were experiencing temperatures of around 28 degrees!  There is of course a serious downside for every positive - the wind had beens trengthening all day, and by the time we started it was pretty strong.  Being a new dual carriageway, the course is very exposed, since the trees planted alongside hadn't grown yet.  I whizzed out to the turn doing 32mph a lot of the time, but on turning, had a real struggle to the finish.  The return leg is also the longer leg.

Th course has a lot of potential - the road is new, so the surface is pristine, there wasn't actually too much traffic and the turn seemed straightforward when I reached it.  On a day with rather more moderate wind (or ideally no wind!), this should be really fast.

Here are photos from various time trials. 

For copyright attribution, see notes below the thumbnails.

{gallery}timetrials{/gallery}

Drosophila RNAi screen identifies host genes important for influenza virus replication.

Linhui Hao, Akira Sakurai, Tokiko Watanabe, Ericka Sorensen, Chairul A. Nidom, Michael A. Newton, Paul Ahlquist & Yoshihiro Kawaoka 

Here's an cool page showing academic pedigrees of Drosophila workers: FlyTree.

 It's interesting to see how few steps it takes to get back as far as T. H. Morgan!  For example, here's where I fit in the grand scheme: Robert in FlyTree.

I can recall "O Superman" being something of a novelty hit in the UK charts.  I had heard it via John Peel's show, and always reckoned it was far more than merely a summer novelty hit.  One of my greatest regrets is that I did not go and see Laurie Anderson in Edinburgh on the eve of my final examinations for my degree.

Subsequently I bought a 5xLP recording of United States I-IV, from which her then stage show was abstracted, but that's no compenation!

The header images are all related to Drosophila:

Above: These are the giant polytene chromosomes found in a variety of tissues in Drosophila - these are from the salivary gland cells of the third instar larva.  Calvin Bridges (see picture of the fly lab below) devised maps based on the banding patterns of these chromosomes - maps still in use today.

This evening's event was the final event in the club's series of evening time trials.  A reduced turnout probably reflected the dodgy weather - it was quite breezy and rained quite heavily before we started. 

Despite turning up well before the start, I was the last to sign on, riding at number 15.  I didn't think it was a particularly quick evening, and as my computer was mostly on the blink I was riding without knowing my speed.  I took most of the corners pretty carefully, as they were a bit damp (particularly early on) due to drizzly rain, and got a bit stalled by a slow Landrover driver in Beachampton.  I felt like I was grovelling up the hill, but that's not unusual!  I had Kevin Stokes in my sights from the turn, and finally caught him at about Nash on the return leg.

Here are the current standings in the 2008 Beijing Olympics doping league.

Before the Games, Russia withdrew two walkers and a cyclist over positive test or suspicion of doping.   Bulgaria withdrew its entire weightlifting team due to positive tests for steroids.  The Greek weightlifting team also had numerous steroid positives.

The utilization during mitotic cell division of loci controlling meiotic recombination and disjunction in Drosophila melanogaster.

Bruce S. Baker, Adelaide T. C. Carpenter, and P. Ripoll 

Genetics 1978 90: 531-578. [Abstract] [PDF]

As a postdoc, I worked for several years on the cell cycle in Drosophila.  At that time, the field was just beginning to take off, not least because of the efforts of my then group leader.  Nowadays, I study the ageing process, still using Drosophila, and including modelling the function of WRN, the gene responsible for the progeroid condition Werner's syndrome (WS). WRN encodes a RecQ DNA helicase (unwinds the DNA double helix), but unusually has a second activity, a DNA exonuclease (removes nucleotide bases from the end of a DNA strand). We are currently studing the Drosophila homologue of the WRN exonuclease (which we have named DmWRNexo, and which is encoded by the CG7670 locus).

When trying to demonstrate that a mutant of CG76700 indeed displayed characteristic comparable with defects seen in cell lines derived from WS patients, I recalled reading this paper at the beginning of my postdoc position.