The Science Family is Doing Well

-
One of the unintended joys of my job is that over time I have developed an international club of collaborators, former postdocs and students. It is hard to travel anywhere and not have someone to meet for coffee or dinner, and this situation only amplifies when I visit a major college town. 

 This week I spoke at the North Carolina Commodities Conference in Raleigh NC.  Turns out that two of the undergrads that worked in my lab used that experience to find great positions in Research Triangle Park.  Both are doing very well and I'm super proud of them.  I had a chance to grab a beer(s) and catch up with them. 
Visiting with two former students, now in great careers.  Those are the papers we co-authored while they were in my program.

As strange coincidence would have it, Dr. Qinghua Gao was also at NC State.  Qinghua is one of my best friends in the world.  We had such a wonderful time working together for a year back in 2007, and I've visited his lab in Shanghai several times since.  His wife is  a scientist and is working on a project at NC State.  He's here for a month or so, and it was great to get together.  His son has gone from a baby to a second grader in a very short time. 


With my friends from Shanghai. 

When I signed up to work as a university professor I never realized the lives that would accidentally change, especially my own.  The relationships we build in the laboratory are durable and deep, stemming from a common intense pursuit of answers to a common question.  There's a great respect and admiration that grows from revisiting the lives of the people that stopped under our lab's tree a bit before pushing on to the next (more exciting) steps of their journey. 

Popular posts from this blog

Film Review: The Need to Grow

-
Image
The recurring ads on Facebook pulled at me to watch The Need to Grow , a documentary film about food and farming.  As someone connected with these areas professionally and personally, I thought it would be worth a watch.  Here is a review. First the good things.  The film is nicely shot and well written.  The majority of the work builds on themes such as nutritious diets healthy soils, and efficient energy. Those are the central underlying values of the film, and ones that I wholly endorse.  However, where the film falls apart is in its approaches to achieve those end points.  Two of the "experts" recruited for the film are none other than Jeffrey Smith and Vandana Shiva, two people with little training in science or farming (and no, Vandana Shiva is not a physicist as the film claims).  The narrator is actress Rosario Dawson, who early in the film makes the proclamation, "Agriculture is the most destructive human activity on the planet." It is...
Read more

Food Babe Visits My University

-
Image
It was 6:30 pm in the lab and I was just thinking about the last things I'd need to get done before I could go home.  Typical night.  Usually I'm riding home about 7 pm, but an email popped up asking me if I was going to go watch the Food Babe.  A click on a link would take me to the note on a UF Dean for Students Good Food Revolution Events website.  Vani Hari would be spreading her corrupt message of bogus science and abject food terrorism here at the University of Florida. Oh joy. There's something that dies inside when you are a faculty member that works hard to teach about food, farming and science, and your own university brings in a crackpot to unravel all of the information you have brought to students. She might have started from honest roots.  Her story says she was duped by an organic yogurt stand (join the club) into buying taro toppings that were filled with artificial, non-organic colors.  She realized that she could use social m...
Read more

Shame on Pediatrics. Rejecting Scientist's Comments

-
 A lot has been said about the journal Pediatrics December 2023 Clinical Report on "Using GMOs on Children". The poor scholarship and citation bias are alarming, and the bias against safe technology is clear.  When I wrote to editor-in-chief Dr. Lewis First, he indicated that I was invited to submit a response to the article that would be posted below the article on its website. I submitted my response, and it was not published on the site. My guess is that it illuminated the bankruptcies of the article in a manner that ran counter to the authors', editor's and journal's narrative.  So I'll publish my comment here.  Dear Pediatrics Readership,  The article by Abrams et al. represents a stunning example of how misinformation spreads- even through a credible conduit. Pediatrics is a respected journal, so when a paper implies a technology is dangerous, physicians and the general public take note. That’s good. But if the message runs counter to the scientific con...
Read more