Common Sense for the Biochemist

Why Kentucky and technology don't mix, in seven paragraphs

2006-04-25T19:19:00.000-04:00

Warning - this is a rant!
Just when you thought the state of Kentucky may be coming out of the dark ages when it comes to economic development, it does something to firmly reentrench itself again. To me, this seven paragraph story says it all:
From 14WFIE.com - Fletcher Cuts $370 Million From Budget

Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher's pen got a workout Monday, when he cut $370 million in construction projects from the state budget.
That includes more than $18 million in western Kentucky projects.
One of the casualties is a $14 million appropriation for the second phase of the Tech Center in Owensboro. The funding would have allowed construction of the facility to be completed including classrooms, business incubators and an expansion of Western Kentucky University.

The story goes on to state that. . .

And on Tuesday, he'll make a stop in Muhlenberg County, where Greenville officials announced a new industry. Gourmet Express LLC will invest more than $7 million in the Commonwealth to move its manufacturing operation from Gridley, Illinois. It will mean 200 new jobs within two years.

sigh. . . I understand that Kentucky is having some budget issues, a state having budget issues is not something new. And OK, one of those cuts was $14 milliion for a technology center in Owensboro. A center with plans to have programs to educate students and workers for the technology industry. A center with plans to serve as a business incubator for startup tech companies. Hey, these are tough times, maybe we'll get that money next budget.

What sets me off is the last part of the story (and thanks to the writer, I don't know if she meant to or not but she really gave me a good set-up). The story goes on to state the the Governor will be coming to Muhlenberg county to welcome Gourmet Express LLC's manufacturing operations. For those of you not familiar with Kentucky, Muhlenberg county is a pretty poor county. Now I'm not trying to knock Gourmet Express but the last thing Western Kentucky needs is another 200 low paying jobs (somehow, I don't think a job packaging frozen vegetables is going to pay that much). For some reason, the governments (state, local, etc. . .) of Kentucky seem to think that quantity is better over quality. All communities need a couple of large employers to help drive the economy. But thousands of low paying jobs don't put you at the forefront of economic development. When moms and dads work all their lives in these low paying jobs and scrabble enough money to send their sons and daughters to college to get a better education where the heck are these kids supposed to go? Back to digging coal or welding car frames?
So I've ranted. Taken separately I could probably handle these two pieces of information. But putting them in the same story just shows how screwed up Kentucky can sometimes be. We had to cut several million in projects from the budget including some economic development projects because our economy is cold but hey! we recruited another low paying employer to the region (sorry Gourmet Express LLC, I'm sure you are a fine company to work for that will pay lots to the state in taxes, didn't mean to just single you out). If Kentucky wants to see what happens when you rely to heavily on manufacturing and jobs that don't require a professional workforce, just look at what is happening in Michigan now that the auto industry is in a funk. Oh well. . .

Wha, where am I, oh yeah. . . its my blog

2006-04-19T00:48:00.000-04:00

Man, its been awhile. Guess I've been neglecting this blog. AgMoment.com has been taking most of my computer time. The PMP section is actually building quite a nice following (for PMPs I guess). By the way, if you are thinking about starting a blog, use Wordpress, there are just so many more things you can do with it. Maybe sometime, I'll get around to moving this blog over to wordpress on some server space I have. So whats new?

Ice Fishing I had the chance a few weeks ago to do a little ice fishing for smelt. It was cold but fun. Didn't catch a darn thing, not even a bite, but oh well.

Music If you are ever in the mood for some Newfoundland folk music, check out Great Big Sea. It is definitely a different style of music. Got to say, you don't get alot of celtic whaling songs in Kentucky, much less songs about horses falling through ice.

BANJO The ole 1985 Goldstar GF-200W is out of its case, restrung and getting used to regular use again. I can't believe I've neglected my banjo for so long. I forgot how enjoyable a little pickin' and grinnin' can be.

How about something Biochem/PMP related? Neah. . . no really, I don't have anything to say right now. . .ok maybe a little. If you want some PMP news, check out the PMP site of Ag Moment. It is spring, which means PMP news should be sprouting like the corn is in Kentucky (it's still a little too cold up here in Michigan for planting corn, but the farmers are getting itchy, and the beets are in the ground). It will be an interesting year for PMPs, what with the LSBC bankruptcy and the sparkle kind of wearing off the whole plant-made pharmaceutical industry. I think we will hear more from the plant cell culture guys (Dow Agrosciece for one). Dow seems to be investing a good bit of money lately. The Duckweed (Biolex) approach seems to be doing alright. The whole plant guys (if you want to call them that) need to find their niche, the inexpensive production platform is showing quite a few holes, I think you will be hearing more about products that can be made in plants that can not be made in other systems (e.g. whole antibodies). I would say VCs will be pretty tight with their money this year, we will see.

The job front No job yet. No comment on prospects right now, but I'm working on a pretty good deal (darn PMP industry, it just keeps sucking me back in). Let's just say that there would be many more banjo pickers where I would have to relocate for this job, maybe thats why I'm brushing up on the 5 string.

Alright, enough for now. Thanks to all for stopping by every so often. I'm going to try to post at least weekly from now on.

Loading. . . .

2006-01-19T23:20:00.000-05:00

So by now, if you haven't noticed, I've done some major renovations to Ag Moment. I am now hosting the blog using a Yahoo Small Business webhosting account. I did this so I could use Wordpress to build my blog (wordpress has alot of features that blogger.com doesn't) I'm beginning to wonder, though, if I didn't make a huge mistake.

So far, building and editing my blog has been a nightmare. When I go to write a new post or do anything to edit my site, it takes forever. For instance, when I want to write a post, I click on the "write a new post" link (sorry if you are not familiar with wordpress, just bear with me), it takes a couple of minutes for the posting page to come up. After I finish writing my post and click save or publish, once again, it takes forever for the page to save, sometimes to the point that my browser times out. On average, it will take me about five minutes just to get one post up. On rare occasions, I can edit and post just fine, so it is not a constant problem. When this is occurring, I can surf other websites just fine so it is not my connection. This has not just been a one day problem. Actually, it has been like this since I started using their service about a week and a half ago.

I called up Yahoo's small business web hosting customer service and asked them WTF. They said my site was loading fine on their computers, it may be that my ISP is the problem (other pages were loading faster becuase they were cached by the ISP). Whatever. I have tried from several different ISPs (ameritech, a merit connection via MSU, comcast) and it is the same every time. This has to be a problem on the Yahoo webhosting end. The problem is, it is too hard to find someone that can get me information. I think I know what I'm doing, and I haven't messed with any of the wordpress code installed on my site so I don't think I've messed up my Wordpress code. I have installed five or so different blogs on my account and each one does the same thing. Am I making any sense to anyone out there. If by any chance you have come across this same problem and stumbled upon my blog, please leave me a comment. If anyone else has any suggestions (besides moving to another host), please drop me a line.
In addition, when I went to first create an RSS feed for my new site, I ran into troubles. After a little digging in the Wordpress forums, I found out that I had to manually remove four blank lines at the end of the "ysbcwhmast.php" file in the plugins folder. Creating an RSS feed is a pretty common thing, I would have thought that this bug would have been worked out.
Alright, I've vented, now back to posting, maybe.

PMPs are a movin' on up . . .

2006-01-18T00:05:00.000-05:00

The recent expansion of Ag Moment is going to mean a few changes for this site too. Thanks to all my visitors who have visited looking for news on plant-made pharmaceuticals. From now on, all my plant-made pharmaceutcial news can be found at pmp.agmoment.com. I'll be moving some of my older material from this site over when I get the chance. Hey, now you don't have to wade through all my thoughts on new cell phones and dumpsters to find news on things like the Large Scale Biology Bankruptcy. For those of you who have enjoyed my quips on subjects other than PMPs, well, more is to come. I'm also going to focus on a more wider range of scientific subjects here. So I encourage you to kick the tires on the new site, and don't forget to keep visiting this site. Don't worry if you don't see much yet, more is to come.

A new Ag Moment

2006-01-12T19:31:00.000-05:00

My other blog, Ag Moment, has been growing pretty rapidly in visitor counts lately even though I haven't been promoting it too much. Because of this, I decided to put a little more effort into it. The result, a brand new, expanded, Ag Moment. I have also switched hosts from Blogger.com to Yahoo Small Business and have a new web address - www.agmoment.com. I have also switched to using Wordpress. I will also be promoting the blog more as it expands. Plans also call for sub-blogs related to specific topics within the Ag industry, all I need is a little time to get them up. Take a look and tell me what you think.

Goin' back in time

2006-01-10T23:29:00.000-05:00

Due to circumstances that were within my control but I choose not to control (i.e. I didn't back up when I should have) I lost my current blog template. However, I was able to find a cached version of it using Google Desktop. Thank you Google! The template I was able to find was about two months old so I lost a few links. I think I can find a better backup to work from but its late and I'm working on something else. If I lost a link to your page, I'll try to get it back soon. 1/11/06 Update - Looks like I have the template fixed, but some of my posts are messed up. I'm kind of concentrating on something else right now, and I will get those posts fixed when I can.

Ventria could still relocate to Missouri, maybe, possibly, kindasorta. . .

2006-01-10T17:30:00.000-05:00

File this one under Missouri realllllllllly wants another plant biotech company: From STLtoday.com - Ventria drops plans for Northwest Missouri State

Ventria Bioscience, a California company in the cutting-edge field of producing pharmaceuticals in plants, has scrapped plans to relocate to Northwest Missouri State University. But it is considering other options in the state, officials said Thursday. "St. Louis is on the table. We're wide open at this point," said Mike Mills, deputy director of the Missouri Department of Economic Development. "We intend to give Ventria many options in Missouri, as far as locations as well as facilities - and they will make the decision as to what corporate operations they want to bring to Missouri."

Sigma Aldrich is mentioned as a potential partner in this story. Sigma seems to be actively getting into the PMP area with announced partnerships with LSBC (now defunct) and Chlorogen. The Sigma angle seems to be a likely story, we'll see what happens.

Fighting Bird-Flu with plants

2006-01-10T17:26:00.000-05:00

From Indystar.com via Plantpharma.org - Dow AgroSciences researches bird flu

Indianapolis-based Dow AgroSciences announced today that it will collaborate with an Australian university to develop a plant-made production systems for a bird flu vaccine. A grant from the Australian Research Council will support collaboration between the University of Melbourne and Dow AgroSciences Australia Inc. as well as researchers at the Macfarlane Burnet Institute and Monash University.

Looks like Dow Agrisciences is starting to use some of that technology they have been researching and acquiring.

More on the LSBC shutdown

2006-01-09T18:56:00.000-05:00

The New York Times recently published a piece on LSBC concerning their closing and the general funk the PMP industry is currently in. Fellow bloggers Matt Mullen and Lene Johansen had some pretty interesting comments regarding the piece and LSBC's demise. They are definitely worth the read.

Two week review of my T-Moblie RAZR

2006-01-05T18:27:00.000-05:00

So after two weeks using my new phone and calling plan, I thought I'd give an update just in case there are anymore biochemists out there who are looking for a prepaid cell-phone service. So lets begin: RAZR phone: Battery life - decent, I can get 3 or 4 days without a recharge. The camera drains the battery life quickly. Coverage - I don't know if this is the phones fault or the fault of T-Mobile but I have found that may signal reception has been poor to fair at best. I had much better coverage with Cingular. Coverage has been fair in town and around the campus, also it was acceptable along the interstates I used to travel home for Christmas. It seems that once you hit the edge of town, your reception is gone. T-Mobile service: When I changed plans, I wanted to keep my old number. No problem they said, it will take about 24 hours. If not, call this number. Of course, Cingular wanted more information before they would release my number to T-Mobile, so I had to call the number provided to see why the switchover hadn't taken place. After waiting on the line for 45, yes 45 minutes, I finally got to talk to a human. I provided the info needed and in a few hours I had my old number again. Thank goodness I wasn't using my cell phone to make that call. I guess that's one way T-Mobile can make a buck on their prepay service. My plan does not include internet access on the phone but I can get T-Mobile's T-Zones, which includes stories from CNN, ABC, ESPN, etc. If this was the only way to get your news, you would be in trouble but if you have time to kill, this is a good way to kill it. My biggest peeve is that Google SMS (if you don't know what Google SMS is I suggest you check it out, it is really nifty) is blocked. The only reason I can see for this is that T-Zones has a 411 service that charges $1.25 per use. From what I understand, you can get a lot more information from Google SMS than T-Zone's 411. I am really dissapointed that they have blocked this service. All-in-all, being a prepay customer anywhere is like being a second-class citizen. I think the cell phone companies think the only way they can retain customers and make money is by locking them in a contract. Oh well, for the price, T-Mobile is acceptable for now.

USDA needs to improve GE crop oversight

2006-01-05T18:04:00.000-05:00

According to the Office of Inspector General for the USDA, the deparment needs to improve its regulation of genetically engineered crops. Auditors found that biotechnology regulators did not always notice violations of their own rules, did not inspect planting sites when they should have and did not assure that the genetically engineered crops were destroyed when the field trial was done. Articles in the New York Times and UPI give some details to the story. What does this mean, how should I feel about this story? Well I'll tell you how you should feel - just kidding but here is my opinion: It looks like the USDA has some room to improve in their oversight of genetically engineered crops. Has a lack of oversight caused genetic pollution in the environment? No. Genetically engineered crops have been released in the environment for over 15 years and I have not seen evidence of long term genetic pollution due to these releases. Yes, in the Prodigene case, there was contamination of the following year's soybean crop due to volunteer corn, but this contamination was found and remedied. However, I know of no documented cases that provide reproducible evidence that a transgene has escaped into the wild. If I'm wrong, please let me know. I think the companies out there working with GMOs realize the potential public backlash that could be felt if they allow a transgene to escape into the wild and are very competent in regulating themselves.

I'm back from a long holiday

2006-01-02T17:29:00.000-05:00

Well, I decided to take an extended holiday this year but its back to the grindstone. Of course, the nephew inoculated me with the latest strain of funk that he was carrying. I think he should be receiving a NyQuil endorsement or something. All-in-all, it was a good trip back to Kentucky. I did get some time to do a little light reading. This time it was "The Thread That Runs So True" by Jesse Stuart. This book is a great read. Jesse Stuart grew up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and writes about his experiences as a teacher and administrator of several schools in the area (He gains respect at his first school he taught at by beating-up a 17 year- old-plus first-grader). The educational system in Kentucky during Stuart's time was terrible, unfortunately, 80 some odd years has not changed anything. The book also paints a pretty good picture of Kentucky politics during that time. Once again, not much has changed. If you get a chance, take a few hours to read this one. Also to be filed in the slack-off category. I helped a friend and fellow graduate student set up his own blog "Enough Chicken Soup", which by his own explanation is "A year inside the head of an agriculture student in Michigan. Humorous and very random contemplation regarding random observations." File this one under "Man I live in the Bible Belt". Somehow, this sign just doesn't seem right. This is a sign on a trash toter at my parents house. Yes, the first line says "Jesus Changes Things" (a quote from Second Corinthians in the Bible), followed by "Why Pay More?" Many of the residents of Sorgho use Dumpster Dan Sanitation. Apparently, Dumpster Dan is cheap and does a pretty good job.

Ventria's move to Missouri is off

2006-01-02T17:10:00.000-05:00

First off welcome back from the holidays, but more on that later. It appears I jumped the gun a little when I posted that a scaled-down deal between Ventria and Northwest Missouri State had been reached. According to AP reports, Ventria has pulled out of their move to NW Missouri State. According to the report, Ventria's demand for product had grown so fast, that the production needs had outgrown what was being offered by the Missouri center. Let's see, I think I know of a building that is available that may fit their needs. Of course, that is pure speculation on my part. In related news - Ventria applied for release permits on 12/2/05 to for rice to be grown in Missouri and North Carolina. The Ventria move to Missouri has been a roller coaster so far, somehow, I don't think it is over. Watch here for more details.

An early Christmas present for the employees at LSBC: no job

2005-12-22T17:39:00.000-05:00

LSBC announced today that it will be ceasing operations. Employees will not be paid for work performed in December. Apparently, a few attempts at a white knight rescue or selling the company failed. As you may recall, I worked about 3 years for LSBC before heading for greener pastures. To give them credit, the company lasted longer than I thought it would. There should be a few interested parties kicking the tires on the manufacturing plant in Owensboro, we will see how that pans out. Good luck to all former employees and I wish you the best. For all of you out having withdrawals from the old Yahoo finance LSBC stock board, please feel free leave comments here. As for me, I'm off to visit the family for a few days, no blogging for awhile. Merry Christmas to all.

An early Christmas present to me

2005-12-21T17:27:00.000-05:00

I ran some numbers last night and I finally convinced myself that it was time to get a new cell phone. I had been using AT&T's Go Phone service (to heck with you Cingular, you treated your AT&T customers like seconhand citizens if they didn't switch to a Cingular plan). I was buying a monthly package and it suited what I needed. However, I was using on old Nokia phone and the techie in me wanted a phone with a few more bells and whistles, like a camera and such. If I wanted to buy a new phone, Cingular was going to force me to sign on to one of "their" Go Phone packages. Basically, I would be forced to pay more for less minutes. So I got to looking around and after running some numbers, I decided that I could save about $5 a week based on my use if I used T-Mobile's pay as you go service. And if I was saving that much, I could justify really splurging on a new phone and T-Mobile offered the Motorola Razor. Needless to say, I am now talking in style with a new Razor phone. So far, T-Mobile's coverage has been decent and I am happy with the phone. Expect a few more pictures on the ole' blog too. I splurged even more and bought (yes bought, I didn't hack this one) the software so that I can download pictures from my phone to my PC. My first offering is a one of the frozen Red Cedar River I took this morning on my way in to the lab. Yes, it is as cold and as miserable as this picture makes the weather out to be.

A few constructive criticisms

2005-12-19T17:37:00.000-05:00

I think its great that interest in plant-made pharmaceuticals is growing, especially in the academic community. I try to stay on top of all things PMP, and this means reading most of the literature coming out of academia on this subject. I have to admit, though, I am kind of frustrated with the research currently being published. Industry, you've published a few dogs too, but all-in-all you guys seem to be at least a neck or two in front of academia towards understanding how to reach commercialization successfully. This is not the reaction to a single paper or presentation, but from a culmination of events. I offer my comments below. I guess you could call them my recommendations if you want to successfully commercialize your protein. Take them as they are: First and foremost (maybe because I am a biochemist) - purification. Please don't suggest that your enzyme of interest can be easily purified using only one or two purification steps. That may be the case if you harvest a couple of choice leaves, grind them in liquid nitrogen, perform an ammonium sulfate cut, and then purify using an affinity column. This method does not scale to the kilogram levels. When you start throwing in stems and bio-mass that may not have high expression levels, not to mention having to deal with all those oxidative phenolics and tons of cell-wall material clogging filters and membranes, it starts to get complicated. Ammonium sulfate is not the greatest material to deal with in large quantities, and your not going to be doing your initial grinding step using liquid nitrogen and a mortar and pestle. If you are lucky enough that your product makes it to the point of scale-up, you are dead in the water if you haven't planned ahead and developed an expression system/protein that is amenable to purification at large scale. Affinity tags - Use them to easily purify initial quantities for initial kinetics, etc, but get rid of them quick. The FDA isn't going to allow them as part of the final product (possible antigenic properties). Don't imply simple purification of your product if you use an affinity tag as part of your proposed purification scheme. Expression levels - That one plant that you babied all its life in a growth chamber gave really high expression levels. Put it out in a hot field with the sun beating down on it and watch the expression levels plummet. It is going to be extremely tough to replicate growing conditions from batch to batch no matter how you grow your crop. Even growth chambers can give produce differences. The questions that has to be answered before that initial tranformation attempt is where will this plant be grown? You then have to go back to your purification notes and factor in expression levels and their fluctuations from batch to batch. Inflating expression levels leads to problems during scale-up. Expression levels should be based on true minimum levels observed. Overall - I guess the point that I am getting too is that you can't just blindly transform a chunk of DNA into your favorite plant and expect to be shipping little vials of drugs in five years. I really think some homework has to be done before-hand. From my perspective, you have to start with that little vial full of protein and work backwards. For instance: Which enzyme/antibody do I want to make? How much protein do I need to make? Which plant am I going to use? What expression technology am I going to use (I think it is very important that several plant/expression technologies should be tested, and no affinity tags)? How is it most cost effective to grow (field, growth chamber, greenhouse)? What are my large-scale purification challenges (i.e phenolics, cell walls, etc. . .)? Is it still feasible to make this in a plant? Begin transformations Perform enzyme kinetics etc . . . Academia (and industry too sometimes), I realize that this is bench scale work and is years from being commercialized. I just don't think that work is going to be successful if you aren't thinking about how the work can be commercialized from day one. To be safe, these comments don't apply to all academia or industry. I just am trying to put forth a little constructive criticism to progress this body of work. I think these comments tie in pretty well with my comments from several months ago. Anyways, what do you think? Any comments? Am I wrong, right, leave anything out, put too much in?

Sembiosys private placement increased by 50%

2005-12-19T17:27:00.000-05:00

SemBioSys announced last Thursday that their previously announced private placement of stock had been increased by approximately 50% to $15.5 million.

SemBioSys Genetics Inc. (TSX:SBS), a biotechnology company developing a broad pipeline of protein-based pharmaceutical product candidates and non-pharmaceutical products, announced today that it has been advised by Orion Securities Inc., the lead underwriter of its previously-announced private placement, that the underwriters intend to exercise their option in full. As a result, SemBioSys will issue a total of 3,864,000 units at a price of $4.00 per unit, for total proceeds of $15,456,000. This total includes the underwriters' option of 1,288,000 additional units, which represents a 50% increase over the 2,576,000 units initially offered.

Sembiosys places $10.3 million in private deal

2005-12-15T17:42:00.000-05:00

SEMBIOSYS ANNOUNCES $10.3 MILLION PRIVATE PLACEMENT

SemBioSys Genetics Inc. (TSX:SBS), a biotechnology company developing a broad pipeline of protein-based pharmaceutical product candidates and non-pharmaceutical products, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Orion Securities Inc., as lead underwriter, for an underwritten private placement of 2,576,000 units of the Company at a price of $4.00 per unit, for gross proceeds to SemBioSys of approximately $10.3 million.

Sembiosys has been one heck of a capital campaign lately, announcing $2.5 million in debt financing back in November. What is not know to me is how much of this placement will be used to repay this debt financing. Either way, it looks like the company has a product that they want to invest in.

4 1/2 hours of meetings = 0

2005-12-15T17:23:00.000-05:00

I've just realized I only have only posted five times this month. Man, I have been slacking. In reality, some other projects have been keeping me busy. The job search is back into full swing, the Save Farmhouse campaign that I'm helping in has been getting alot of press, Ag Moment is growing organically (I'm not promoting the site too much but the visitors are coming), and oh yeah, by the way, I'm still a grad student. So I think we have finally made the planning commision realize that their vision for a new "East Village" in East Lansing is not what the community wants and that the fraternities located in the area really want to be part of the community and not outcasts. The State News had a very good article covering the East Village debate. Of course, several of us had to sit through four and a half hours of a planning commission meeting last night for, well, once again the state news covers it well.

Scaled down deal between NW Missouri State-Ventria reached

2005-12-13T18:06:00.000-05:00

Almost a month after the state of Missouri retracted its pledge of $10 million for the creation of a biopharming center at Northwest Missouri State and put Ventria's move to Missouri on hold, a compromise has been reached. According to the Kansas City Star: Northwest Missouri State announced scaled-down biopharming plan

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Northwest Missouri State University plans to reduce the size of a proposed biologics center on its campus, after the original idea ran into some resistance in the state Legislature. The university's Board of Regents on Thursday approved a plan to build a $12.35 million business incubator on campus that would serve clients specializing in biotechnology.

This new plan includes the original business incubator, but plans for an academic center has been put on hold. Ventria will be a tenet in the business incubator In my opinion, this was a good save by Northwest Missouri State. Keep your ears perked for further developments.

And on the education note - a new blog!

2005-12-12T16:37:00.000-05:00

And what a great segway from the last post to this post. I just received an e-mail from Dr. David Tribe from University of Melbourne alerting me to his newly created blog, the GMO Pundit. Dr. Tribe has put together a really well written (I wish I could write as well) blog that, even though in its infancy, contains a wealth of information pertaining to genetically modified organisms. Welcome to our little community of online advocates for GMOs!

Apparently, it is OK in France to destroy GM crops

2005-12-12T16:17:00.000-05:00

I can't really say that I agree with this one: From Yahoo News - Activists' destruction of GM crops was justified: French court

ORLEANS, France (AFP) - In a judgement expected to send a chill through companies growing genetically modified (GM) crops in Europe and embolden their opponents, a French court acquitted 49 activists who destroyed GM plants after ruling their actions were justified. The court in the central city of Orleans dismissed the criminal charges of organised vandalism against the 49, who had uprooted GM maize in the region planted by the US biotechnology group Monsanto in two incidents, one last year and the other in 2005.

To catch you up, here is a little background to this story. According to the courts, the activists were in the right to use vandalism to stop the unbridled distribution of modified genes that constitutes a clear and present danger for the well-being of others, in the sense that it could be the source of contamination and unwanted pollution. You know, I sure would like to see the courts evidence that these crops presented a "clear and present danger" for the well-being of others. Where is the evidence that these crops have contaminated the natural gene pool? Where is the evidence of this genetic "pollution"? Once again, more education of the public (and governments) is needed. . .and soon.

The saddle fell off

2005-12-07T17:29:00.000-05:00

First, I was back in the saddle, then I wasn't quite. Well, the saddle has officially fallen off. I received notification today that the job that I had accepted had officially been taken off the table. Its not the companies fault and I have no hard feelings for them. Its those darned venture capitalists that keep fouling things up. Oh well, on to the next step. If anyone out there needs someone who can take green-juice and turn it into drugs, get in touch with me. You know, now would be the perfect time for a career change. Maybe I will move to Reno and become a blackjack dealer or maybe I'll just brush up on my banjo playing and join a bluegrass band. By the way, I think I back to feeling human again after about a week and a half of being under the weather. Maybe I can get a few things done now. So, how many of you out there can say you were laid off from a job before you ever actually started?

No words of wisdom today: well . . .

2005-12-01T17:30:00.000-05:00

I've been fighting some sort of cold or funk most of this week. Thanks to my little germ-factory of a nephew for the inoculum. Usually, a good dose of NyQuil, some Aleve, and plenty of rest is enough to pull me through. However, it looks like NyQuil just may not be the cure it used to be. Rob Stevens over at the Fortress of Solitude has the full story on this. Seems like NyQuil is now being made without pseudoephedrine, a common ingredient used in the making of methamphetamine. After discovering this I looked at my little green bottle of restful sleep and sure enough, it proclaimed "now pseudoephedrine free!" as if this was some great revelation in funk fighting. Of course, I probably wouldn't be writing about this unless I had a problem with this and I do so here we go: #1) NyQuil (a drug) was reformulated. There was no change in the name to signal this, there was a small message in one corner of the bottle proclaiming it to be pseudophedrine-free, but I didn't notice this until it was pointed out in a blog. Does this mean that Aleve could reformulate itself to be "naproxen-free", slap a small banner on their bottle to proclaim this, and start selling sugar pills? #2) From what I understand this reformulation was performed because pseudoephedrine is used in the manufacturing of illegal methamphetamines. So you are telling me that I can't get my cold relief because some slime-ball wants to blow up his house trailer and kill himself making homemade poison? This just seems asinine to me. Alright, enough ranting, time for some medications and rest.

Coffee is good for you?

2005-11-30T17:54:00.000-05:00

Maybe so. According to this story found on Biospace.com, caffeine (found in coffee, cokes, etc . . .) may actually improve short term memory. Now where did I put my coffee mug . . .I forgot.

Junk faxes be-damned!

2005-11-29T18:14:00.000-05:00

Once again in an attempt to keep this blog from getting bogged down in too much science I bring you this article: Talking Back To the Junk Fax If you are tired of receiving junk faxes, then I suggest you try some of the tips suggested. I especially like this idea:

When Tyler receives a junk fax, she takes a piece of black paper, puts it in her fax machine and dials the "fax replies to" number or the transmission fax number on the junk fax. Before transmitting, she tapes the ends of the paper together to make a loop. "Your very dark fax will be sent on an endless loop until someone at the other end realizes what's happening and interrupts the transmission," she says. "This may not get you removed from the list but it sure makes you feel a lot better! And I've never had a repeat junk fax after I've used this trick."

Of course, you don't necessarily have to reserve these tactics for junk faxers. I imagine the above tactic could be used very nicely for a very expensive practical joke.

Sembiosys plant derived insulin bio-equivalent to human insulin

2005-11-29T15:58:00.000-05:00

Sembiosys will publish positive results from their research into the bioequivalance of their recombinant, plant-derived insulin product compared to the equivalent recombinant product produced using traditional techniques. The plant-derived insulin was expressed in arabidopsis seed. The next step for Sembiosys will be the expression of this product in their commercial expression system, safflower using their Stratosome(TM) Biologics System. The abstract for the published results is here

Swiss say no to GMOs

2005-11-28T19:55:00.000-05:00

The Swiss have voted to ban the use of GM plants and animals for five years. If the referendum is passed by the legislature, this will be the toughest set of regulations put forth in Europe. Polls show that 55% of the population support such a ban. Particular support is coming from parts of the farming community intersted in organic farming. There is still a long road ahead to gain public approval of GMOs. An anti-GMO measure was recently voted down in Sonoma County, California. The debate rages on . . .

Save FarmHouse

2005-11-28T16:39:00.000-05:00

As if being a graduate student wasn't enough, I also am an advisor to the Michigan State Farmhouse chapter. Yeah, I don't know what the fun of trying to keep 40 college guys in line is but I enjoy it. However, my main troubles right now is not trying to keep the guys in line, but it is putting up with the East Lansing city government. So here is the background story: Michigan State Farmhouse is located at 151 Bogue St., which is located in what is commonly known as Cedar Village. Unfortunately, Cedar Village has gotten a pretty bad rap in the past few years because of mainly non-MSU students congregating in the area and starting riots after big basketball games. Well, the city's solution to this problem is to bulldoze the entire area, rebranding it as the "East Village", building 4-8 story "multi-use" buildings, and increasing the population by 4,000. Basically, they want to recruit 4,000 "young-professionals" and "empty-nesters" to co-exist with 2,000 students. Although the city has said that Farmhouse does not have to redevelop, their master plan calls for a road to run right through our property, meaning they will have to use eminent domain to take our property from us. Unlike a regular home-owner, a fraternity can not just up and move to a different house. We need an institutional-style building (think college dorm) and these can't be found everywhere and are very expensive to build. Now for the cool part: The property owners in this area have rallied behind Farmhouse and have started SaveFarmhouse.com. I encourage you to visit the site and learn more about this pipe-dream that the critters in East Lansing City Government have dreamed up. By the way, our chapter was just recently named the outstanding fraternity of the year on MSU's campus and has been named the best maintained fraternity on campus for the past two years.

Welcome back from turkey day

2005-11-28T16:26:00.000-05:00

Welcome back everyone. Hope everyone had a good turkey day. Made the 8 hour trip back to Owensboro, KY for the weekend. Had a little trouble with some snowy weather but nothing too bad. I basically just relaxed this weekend, not any major reading or researching, just alot of T.V. and turkey (and hence, no posts). I did have several adventures this weekend. For the first time in about 2 1/2 years I made it over to Casino Aztar in Evansville, IN and made a donation to the company. I can also cross off the "Yellow Rose" in Owensboro as a bar I have never visited. Lets put it this way, just imagine the bar from Roadhouse and you have the Yellow Rose. Well, back to the grind.

Sembiosys uses debt financing for capital expansion

2005-11-22T15:17:00.000-05:00

Sembiosys has secured 2.5 million in debt financing from Oxford Finance Corporation of Virginia for capital asset purchases. According to the press release, these capital asset purchases will triple their plant growth capacity. This expansion is needed as Sembiosys moves its insulin and Apo AI drugs from research into a commercialization phase.

Growers Research Group and LSBC ink licensing deal

2005-11-22T14:30:00.000-05:00

Growers Research Group has:

entered into a research license and option agreement centered on LSBC's proprietary GENEWARE® plant gene expression technology. The license provides GRG with access to a key technology, developed internally and extensively patented by LSBC, to accelerate development of new products for use in agriculture.

My interpretation: LSBC has passed the development of their lysozyme project over to GRC in an attempt to further focus their business model (production of therapeutic recombinant enzymes). I suspect that they don't want to commit what resources they have left to the progression of this project. This is pretty much backed up by a quote from Greg Pogue, Vice President, Research and Development:

"By licensing a technology asset in a field of use which is no longer part of our core portfolio, we generate value for LSBC while focusing our efforts in our core business, namely, the development of novel and follow-on plant-made biopharmaceuticals,"

Surely you must be joking! A book recommendation?

2005-11-21T18:03:00.000-05:00

If you haven't heard of Richard Feynman, check him out. Dr. Feynman(now deaceased) was, according to his website a:

scientist, teacher, raconteur, and musician. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb, expanded the understanding of quantum electrodynamics, translated Mayan hieroglyphics, and cut to the heart of the Challenger disaster. But beyond all of that, Richard Feynman was a unique and multi-faceted individual.

Feynman is one of my favorite intellectuals. I have read two of his books, both autobiographies, and would highly recommend them. You are probably thinking, this guy was a physicist, and his life was interesting enough for two books? Well, yeah, basically it was. In "What Do You Care What Other People Think", Feynman basically recounts his younger days growing up and how he first got interested in physics through fixing radios. The book goes on to explore his days working in Los Alamos on the atomic bomb and how he learned to pick the locks (for fun) of safes that contained top-secret information. Dr. Feynman also explored some very interesting techniques for picking up women. To make a long story short, this is not the story of your average college professor, I would almost dare to say he had a quite interesting life outside of science (sorry if I have offended any average college professors reading along). In the sequel to "What Do You Care . . ." entitled "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!" Dr. Feynman recounts parts of his latter career while sprinkling in a few more stories from his earlier days. Dr. Feynman is the person that is most credited with the discovery of the O-ring failures that lead to the Challenger destruction, but he will tell you in his book that this was not necessarily the whole story . . . I'll let you read more about that on your own. So with Thanksgiving coming up, I would suggest picking up one of these two books for a post feast reading.

I'll take potpourri for $500 Alex (2)

2005-11-21T17:35:00.000-05:00

I took the weekend off from posting. Didn't do too much, kind of a relaxing weekend. Anyways, back to the grind. Today's post falls under the "potpourri" category, with a little bit of everything included. First up: Trends in Plant Science has a few interesting articles in press regarding the plant biotech industry, in particular, Julian Ma and the European Union Framework 6 Pharma-Planta Consortium crew have a good review of issues facing the PMP (or PDP) industry. I took in my second ever hockey game Friday night. I've got to admit, I'm kind of getting hooked on hockey (yeah, I've got to get back closer to home before I really turn into a northerner). Unfortunately, the Michigan State Hockey team remained in a funk and fought Western Michigan to a 3-3 tie. Now for some blog housekeeping: I was lucky enough to sign up for Google Analytics before they cut off their free signups. It's really neat to see some of the data that I can collect from my visitors. I'll be using that data to work on improving this site. For example, Google is doing a nice job of referring visitors to my company reference entries. Therefore, I need to work on getting those entries a little more updated and polished up. It's also nice to see friends, family, and former co-workers are keeping an eye on me. Keep it up and drop me a line sometime. Now for a totally useless site: I present elgooG. Basically its a mirror of Google backwards, try it out, and here's a hint if you try to use the search function, everything there is backwards.

Cornell Opens Plant Biotech Center

2005-11-17T17:58:00.000-05:00

From Newsday.com - Cornell opens research park devoted to farming

GENEVA, N.Y. -- Cornell University on Wednesday opened a new 72-acre research park dedicated to agriculture and food technology. "Cornell University is committed to technology transfer as a potential engine for economic development," said Susan Henry, dean of Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Science.

Looks like New York wants to get into the plant biotech game.

Biolex adds three to management team

2005-11-17T11:11:00.000-05:00

Biolex continues on its media blitz with this following announcement. Biolex announced Wednesday the addition of three new personnel in their management ranks. Included in the additions is Glen Williams, former vice president of manufacturing and general manager of Biogen Idec's Research Triangle Park facilities. Also included are two former Bayer Healthcare LLC employees, Ms. Dee Parson Grange and Dr. John Elliott Humphries. Williams will serve as senior vice president of operations, Ms. Dee Parson Grange will serve as vice president of business development and Dr. Humphries will serve as vice president of development.

You mean there are only 24 hours in one day?

2005-11-16T17:41:00.000-05:00

Once again, I have been neglecting this blog. But I haven't been slacking on the blogging front in general. I was thinking the other day, if one blog takes this much time to maintain properly, why not maintain two? So, I decided to start another blog, this one being called the Ag Moment. Basically, this blog is geared more towards the farmer and agriculture retailers out there and is a roundup of daily general agriculture news. I haven't forgot about CSFTB, though, and I'll try to split my time between the two as equally as possible. I've got a few ideas for content and design up my sleeve, hopefully you will see some of these soon. Now, for some news on the plant biotech front: Matt Mullen's Ag Bio Biz Blog is doing a great job covering the recent story in the Wall Street Journal regarding GMO plants. This latest entry is focused on the response garnered by the article. Apparently, the writer should have done a little more research (I pointed that out here).

Ventria's move to Missouri is on the ropes

2005-11-16T16:07:00.000-05:00

It looks like Ventria's planned lock, stock, and barrel move to Missouri may not be happening after all. The Missouri Development Finance Board has decided NOT to pledge $10 million needed for the construction of the Missouri Center of Excellence for Plant Biologics on campus at Northwest Missouri State University. In the article linked above from the Maryville Daily, Scott Deeter, CEO of Ventria had this comment:

“We regret that after several attempts, the financing did not materialize, leading to delays that require Ventria to consider other options for fulfilling its business objectives,"

This is a definite opportunity for other communities out there looking to develop their own plant biotech community. It will be interesting to see where they land.

A victory in California for GMOs, small biotechs still fighting for government cheese

2005-11-10T15:42:00.000-05:00

Its a special 2 for 1 post today: First up, (and again gleaned from Matt Mullen's blog here and here), residents of Sonoma county, California voted down Measure M, which would effectively ban the cultivation of any organism that was genetically altered using state-of-the-art techniques. I would call the margin of victory pretty sizeable, being 55-44%. I think this victory will give the plant biotechs some "political capital" for spending in the never ending process of gaining government and public acceptance. And this "political capital" could be really be used by some small biotechs right about now. Several companies (also accessed through Plantpharma.org) and industry organizations lined up yesterday to put pressure on Congress to reverse the Small Business Administration's changes in who may qualify for SBIR loans (more about this change here). These changes have affected PMP companies such as Chlorogen. David Duncan, president and CEO of Chlorogen had this to say in a statement to PR newswire yesterday:

"It's ironic that when the news is filled with stories of the flu and pandemics, our firm has had to shelve its bio-defense vaccine program which could potentially deliver massive quantities of vaccines against anthrax, cholera and other afflictions. Why? Because under the current rules of SBA, our firm of only 12 employees is no longer a 'small' business,"

GMOs take the front page

2005-11-08T17:23:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Matt Mullen's ag bio biz blog for the head's up on this one (more on his blog below). The battle between farmers growing GMO crops vs. non-GMO crops takes a front page spot on the Wall-Street Journal today. One possible flaw in the story I want to point out. Under the heading Contaminated Seed, the story states:

The debate over GM contamination has surfaced most passionately in Mexico. Four years ago, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, discovered that GM corn had mingled with native varieties in the southern state of Oaxaca. The report, later supported by Mexican government research, staggered local farmers. Mexican peasants depend on corn for as much as 40% of their diet, using it in everything from tortillas to a hot drink called "atole."

However, a recent article in Science (and blogged here), reported that this contamination had disappeared when a follow up study was performed. Reasons for this disappearance could not be explained. Now, for Matt Mullen's ag bio biz blog. I just stumbled upon this blog today and it is another good one based on the agriculture biotech industry. Mr. Mullen is "a magazine editor of publications providing growers of row crops with production and business information" and his writings show it. This is one to put on regular rotation. For those of you with interests in Tobacco, and some of my readers are, he also authors the Tobacco Farm Blog. Enjoy!

Sometimes science and the church can get along

2005-11-07T21:52:00.000-05:00

File this under "why isn't there more of this going on in schools today?". At a genome sequencing conference held in Hilton Head, South Carolina last month, a group of students from the Sacred Heart Academy, an all Catholic girls school, in Hamden Connecticut presented their results from sequencing osteoporosis-related genes in bovine. The sequence data was good enough to even be included in Genbank. We really need more of this kind of thing happening in our high schools. The way this program is set up is very impressive. After hearing a presentation by this school at the conference in 1998, Agilent decided to donate a sequencer to the school. Coupled with a $20,000 dollar grant (okay, so raising this kind of money would be a little hard for most schools) and you have one heck of a high-school research program! And talk about a research program:

The DNA sequencing project was part of Sacred Heart's campuswide, multidisciplinary effort focusing on the examination and understanding of osteoporosis, and involving every student in the school.

How many high-schools do you know with a research focus?

Get your Nature Erratum - on

2005-11-07T16:35:00.000-05:00

Just got an e-mail referring me to yet another science-related blog. This one is called nature erratum. This blog is being maintained by a newly minted Ph.D. and it focuses on "the life and opinions of young medical scientists (pre-faculty)." I recommend checking it out (and thanks for the link!).

Get your "freak on - omics"

2005-11-02T21:49:00.000-05:00

Note: This should have been posted last Thursday, sorry for the delay. Michigan State University brings in several speakers a year for a lecture series called the "Worldview Lecture Series". I think they usually have one or two a semester and they are free to all students and staff. Several weeks ago, I attended a very intriguing lecture by the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns (of PBS fame for documentaries on Baseball and the Civil War to name a few). But that's not what I want to talk about tonight. Tonight I had the priveldge of hearing a lecture by Stephen Dubner, of Freaknomics fame. If you haven't heard of the book Freaknomics (or have but haven't picked up a copy of it)I would highly encourage you to check it out. The book was co-written by Stephen Dubner and Stephen Levitt. Who are these guys? Well, Mr. Dubner is a journalist who as a few books to his credit (I won't list them here, you can check out his website) and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Steven Levitt is one of the more highly regarded younger economist in the United States (if not the world) and is currently a professor at the Univesity of Chicago. The collaboration between the two authors is working very well as Dubner is able to understand the data and proposals being put forth by Levitt and is able to communicate them in a way that is understanbable to common folk like us biochemists. In summary Freakonomics is: well, I don't know how to really explain it. The authors proclaim that their is no unifying theme behind the book, but rather a series of stories that look at the economics of certain topics. The book looks at such issues as the economics of drug dealing and explains why drug dealers still live with their mothers. The book also uses statistical approaches to study cheating amongst teachers and sumo wrestlers. The book even looks at what makes a good parent. The authors have stirred some controversy with this book as it has brought into the mainstream Dr. Levitt's theory that the legalization of abortion caused drops in crime rates during the 80s and 90s. I won't go into details about the book, but I want to present my thoughts after reading it: The more I chew on the stories presented in this book, the more I look at economics in a new light. Some people have focused on the individual stories presented and the authors take on the controversies surrounding them but that is not what I really focused on. The point brought home to me is that economics is really the study of incentives. Their are incentives to being a drug dealer making less than minimum wage. There are incentives to being a teacher that cheats. The basis for everything we do is based on incentives. I guess I never really looked at the world that way. Overall the lecture was very enjoyable. Most of the topics covered were already visited in the book although there was some that wasn't, including the the first documented case of monkey prostitution (that story would probably be incentive enough for me to recommend his lecture to someone). Perhaps the most humorous (maybe thought provoking) part of the night came during the question and answer session. The question was asked, what is the reasoning behind people wanting to gamble when they know that they are going to lose their money? The answer is the same reason why people vote. Before I explain, let me say that Mr. Dubner and Dr. Levitt have a column coming out in the New York Times this Sunday concerning why people vote. The answer to both of these questions is that we are paying for the rights to fantasize. By putting a quarter in a slot machine or buying lottery ticket, we are buying the right to fantasize about what we would do with all those millions we are about to win. In the same way, by voting, we are buying the right to believe that we are single-handedly changing world policies. In a utilitarian view, the chances of coming up a millionaire or casting the deciding vote that puts a Democrat in the White House to stop the war and stop world hunger are slim. If you don't rush out and buy the book, at least check out their website, it has several hours worth of reading material on it. I have read the book and will say that it is a very enjoyable read.

Keeping the serious:humorous ratio equal

2005-10-30T22:36:00.000-05:00

Time for the humor/lighthearted quotient to be filled for the blog. Today, I suggest you head over to a blog I just discovered (and that is because they added me to their blogroll - Thanks), the Ratlab. This blog is run by a graduate student, who like me, should be doing other things. My favorite entry so far is how to extract DNA in your own home.

LSBC firms up funding

2005-10-30T22:22:00.000-05:00

Back in early October LSBC pulled a registration with the SEC for a financing deal with Brittany Capital. Turns out, all is well, there were a few details about the deal that the SEC did not like (LSBC can not place a "put" to Brittany if their stock drops more than 30% in a day for instance). The deal is back on. LSBC also announced the completion of what looks to be a bridge loan with Agility Capital to float the company until the bigger financing from Brittany can be put in place.

Biolex marches on

2005-10-30T21:52:00.000-05:00

Biolex announced on Friday that they had entered into an agreement with the Japanese pharmaceutical company Kringle Pharma. In this agreement, Biolex would produce a leading anti-cancer compound, NK4, using their LEX system. NK4 has been shown to prevent metastasis and angiogenesis of cancerous cells in animal models. NK4 was designed as an atagonist to hepatocyte growth factor. According to the article in the Pharmaceutical Business Review:

Biolex has now formed commercial line creation collaborations with six pharmaceutical and biotech companies encompassing a total of 16 proteins targeting multiple indications. This agreement with Kringle represents Biolex's first collaboration with a Japanese company.

In another press release, Biolex, announced the successful completion of a phase 1 study for first Lex System ™ produced therapeutic protein. The protein being produced is a form of interferon alpha. I know from several quarterly conference calls that I have listened to from LSBC that they were interested in developing their own versin of this but I believe that they have since backed maybe backed away from this protein. Added 11/02/05 - Octoplus has announced a Phase 1 study using Biolex's, alpha interferon product. And here is one from a while ago that slipped through my fingers: Biolex Therapeutics Doubles Manufacturing Capacity, Realizing Significant Economic and Time Efficiencies Capabilities in Place for Partners and Biolex Proteins This brings their total cGMP manufacturing space to 13,000 sq. feet. Looks like they are putting the $36 million that they raised in venture funding this summer to good use.

I'm not back in the saddle again, yet . . . maybe

2005-10-30T21:05:00.000-05:00

What a week, that's all I can say. The finances for the position I was going to take hasn't come through yet so the big move back to the biotech industry is off, at least for now. We are still shooting for a start date a couple of months from now. All this came about four days before the big move so it was kind of suprising, but not really, it is the biotech industry after all. Luckily, I was able to assimilate back into the lab I had been working in with no problems and it is back to cranking away at maize microarrays. I am really lucky to work in the lab I do. I get alot of traffic from search engine queries wanting to know about what a biochemist does or just about the life of a biochemist. If you are one of them, then let me say, you better have tough skin and a love for roller coaster rides, especially if you are interested in getting involved with a small biotech company. As for me, I guess my skin is pretty tough and I enjoy being thrown a few loops every now and then. I'll keep hanging in there and keep you updated.

Would you like to take a survey?

2005-10-23T23:04:00.000-04:00

As the number of visits to my site increases, I am kind of interested in knowing if I am actually drawing repeat customers. You will find a new survey right under my Google Ads on the left-hand column of the page. Please take a second to tell me how many times you have visited, and thanks for stopping by! NOTE: You will have to use your browser's "back arrow" to navigate back to my site after voting.

A little something to remind me about what I'll be missing this winter

2005-10-23T22:41:00.000-04:00

As a make plans to move further south and out of Michigan, I know I'm really going to miss all that snow this winter (yeah right!). Anyways, in preparation for the coming winter, I present to you The Calvin and Hobbes Snow Art Gallery. This is a nice little collection of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons related to Calvin's artistic side when it comes to snowmen. Enjoy!

read more | digg story

Some required reading

2005-10-23T22:04:00.000-04:00

The packing is starting to roll along. No involved posts tonight, just some required reading - I think I'm going to be concentrating a few posts on the lactoferrin protein, several companies seem to be developing their own version of it. I'll start off tonight with this story from Checkbiotech.org - Pharming presents Human Lactoferrin results at international conference. Pharming Group is a Dutch company who is specializing in the production of recombinant proteins in transgenic animals. This company announced in June a collaboration with AgResearch of New Zealand to develop the product mentioned above. This protein is also being developed for several plant expression systems, including Ventria's and Meristem Therapeutics'. I'll have more on them later.

Whats better than gambling in Vegas? The stock market!

2005-10-20T19:52:00.000-04:00

Last one for the night. . . Got a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket and want to do a little gambling. Well, you can try your luck with this stock: BioCryst Pharmaceuticals Inc. (BCRX) If you take a look at the chart for the last three months this stock has doubled in value and the volume has skyrocketed. Why all the activity: Avian flu. Seems that Biocryst has a drug on the shelf that could be used against avian flu should it cross into humans. Derek Lowe does a better job of covering the story than I could ever achieve so I encourage you to check out his post. My opinion, if you didn't get into this one ahead of the curve, say two months ago, you are out of the loop and will probably get burned on this stock. This is a stock play based on market hype. Avian flu is a major concern to society but the press has done a great job of over-hyping this story. Unfortunately, unless there is a pandemic starting tomorrow, the press will drop this story when the next Hollywood superstar is murdered. When this happens, Joe stockbroker is going to sellout for the next big thing and you are stuck with a stock worth 50% of what it was. Of course, if you were thinking ahead of the curve and have already doubled your money - sell - I think we have seen the top of this ride.

Why have something for free when you can pay for it!

2005-10-20T19:38:00.000-04:00

Alright, one more and I am out of here, maybe two. . . Don't Let Fear Kill Muni Wi-Fi This is a story about how the big internet provider services (i.e. Comcast and SBC) are trying to block local communities from serving up free Wi-Fi access to their entire community. I'm sorry, you can argue that free access like this would make it easier for internet frauds and the evil portions of society to operate but that just isn't going to cut it with me. If these people want to operate anonymously on the internet (as a free Wi-Fi service would allow them to be), they are going to find a way. Heck any 13 year old can already do that. This is just a plain case of greed on the part of several poorly run companies. These guys can not figure out any imaginative ways to make a profit so they rely on greasing the palms of legislatures to impeed what I view as progress in our society. Enough venting, and yes, I can probably be called a hypocrite because more than likely I'll be signing up for broadband through one of these companies when I move, that is until I can get free Wi-fi. Even then, the Wi-Fi speed probably won't be blazing fast and I may shell out a few bucks for a cable modem or DSL if I want to do some heavy downloading, say a few CD or DVD Knoppix disk images (I'm finding that Knoppix is really really cool, but more on that later).

Just as long as you are washing your hands.

2005-10-20T19:25:00.000-04:00

A quick post for you to let you know that I am still alive. Things are getting pretty hectic. Got a house to pack and I have to spill as much of my brains onto paper for my colleages that I am leaving behind. Here's one that I am sure will be made into some sort of 20/20 or Primetime live special. I can see it now: Is there a killer lurking in your handsoap? Is washing your hands actually making you sick? Find out right after this commercial! The story goes like this: FDA to Hear Concerns on Anti-Germ Soaps It looks like there are some concerns starting to mount as to whether the excessive use of these anti-microbial soaps will cause bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. Accordingingly:

A recent study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in which scientists observed the development of bacteria in 224 households for a year, showed no significant increase in resistant bacteria in houses using anti-bacterial instead of regular soap. Nor did it show that anti-bacterial soap led to healthier homes than regular soap.

Of course

It called for further studies, saying the effect could take place over a longer term.

Yes, what good is a study if it doesn't call for more studies. The jury is still out on this one for me. I appears that these soaps don't really help that much. Of course, right now, I'm more worried about getting out of Michigan than about what type of soap I'm using.

Kids these days . . .

2005-10-13T21:45:00.000-04:00

The last post for the night and it is a light-hearted one, my samples should be dry. Youth feeds zoo rabbit to 'gator. This is crude, but I wonder if the alligator thought it tasted like chicken?

A few current PMP articles

2005-10-13T20:47:00.000-04:00

Just a quick rundown of some recent news in the PMP industry: First up by way of Plantpharma.org;
Dow AgroSciences, Sangamo BioSciences Announce Research and Commercial License Agreement in Plant Agriculture Basically, Dow is licensing technology involving specially designed transcription factors that recognize specific DNA sequences. Transcription factors, for the layperson, are proteins which regulate the transcription and eventual production (translation) of proteins from targeted genes. These TF's will be used to control expression of recombinant protein products. This is an interesting article because it again mentions Dow using technology for " use in plants and plant cell cultures. If you are an adamant reader now full of "common sense" from this blog, you will know that Dow signed a collaboration deal with Chlorogen in September in which the two companies would work to produce recombinant proteins in plant cell cultures. It really looks to me like Dow is making a major investment in plant cell culture technology. Here's another one concerning Dow Agrisciences that came out today(I use Dow and Dow Agrisciences interchangably): SEMBIOSYS COMPLETES ANIMAL VACCINE FEASIBILITY PROGRAM FOR DOW AGROSCIENCES Once again, Dow looks to be really investing in plant pharma and plant made pharmacueticals. To be honest though, I don't know how much research is going on in side the company. And for those of you who are new around here, and even for those who are regulars, here is another good review article concerning plant-made pharmaceuticals. Well, that will about wrap up the serious portion for tonight, hopefully my samples will be done speedvaccing soon (yes I am still in the lab) and I can go home.

I'm back in the saddle again!

2005-10-13T19:14:00.000-04:00

Posts have been a little sparse this past week. Well, there is a reason for that. I received an offer letter for a job in the mail today! I've been working on this job prospect for about two months now and things have finally come together. I'm planning on signing it and sending it back tomorrow. With that I'll officially be back in the industrial work force! Don't want to say who I'll be working for yet, but I am very happy with the prospects of this company, and I'll be doing something I know a little about. I'll be shooting to start November 1. That means I have alot to work on in the next two weeks, research to wrap up, a house to pack and get on the market, finding a new place to live (by the way, I will be moving a somewhat significant distance from Michigan). I'll try to keep you up to date with everything that is going on. I've got a pretty good lead on a Condo to rent close to where I'll be working. Unfortunately, I think my research is not going to be wrapped up as tightly as I would have liked but things happen. Oh well, its going to be a pretty exciting two weeks, stay tuned!!!

LSBC backs out of Equity deal?

2005-10-09T23:40:00.000-04:00

Back in August, LSBC announced a deal with Brittany Capital for $15 million in financing to keep the company afloat. The company then filed a registration with the SEC for the shares to be issued to Brittany capital and other interested parties. However, the company filed this form RW last Friday, October 7, requesting to withdraw the registration. I really haven't done enough research yet to figure out what all this means. Hopefully some news will come from the company soon, regarding this.

I am the cause of airline bankruptcies

2005-10-09T22:48:00.000-04:00

A little background: Back in December of last year I took a trip to the University of Arizona Microarray Workshop. I flew on Northwest and was supposed to go from Lansing to Detroit to Tuscon. However, I ended up going from Lansing to Detroit to Minneapolis, was supposed to go to Denver but missed that connection so I went to Pheonix and then to Tucson, 10 hours late and without my luggage. I won't go into all the details but lets just say that from my interactions with Northwest that day I can understand why the company is bankrupt. It is not because of high oil prices, it is because of rampant inefficiences within the system. So fast forward to this last Friday. I had to conduct some business in St. Louis and the plan was for me to fly in, be in meetings from 9:30a.m. - 2:30 p.m. and fly back to good ole' Lansing that night. It would be tight but doable as long as the United Airlines could keep their act in line. Hey, United just secured $3 billion in financing to get them out of bankruptcy so they must be doing something right? Anyway, the first leg of my journey starts at 6:00 in the morning and I make it from Lansing to Chicago no problem. I check and my flight to St. Louis is on time. Since I have a little time, I find a corner to relax and take in the latest TWIT podcast on my MP3 player. About an hour before I'm supposed to depart, I check my flight status again and my flight has been canceled - OH *$%#!. The lady at the gate says that I can't get confirmed on another flight to STL until 11:30, mind you, I have a return flight scheduled for 3:45 and I need more time than that for what I am doing. Luckily, I was able to get standby on an American flight that left about 10 minutes later and I got to STL only 10 minutes late, phew. My meetings went very well (don't want to tell you what I was doing, maybe later)but I was on my game for four and a half hours. Then it was back to the airport in time for my 3:45 flight back to Chicago. We boarded the plane a few minutes late and were ready to go when we were told we had mechanical problems. Apparently, the inbound flight was full and a passenger who had a small child just held them in their lap. However, federal regulations state that all passengers must have a floatation device, i.e. your seat cushion, so the parent was provided with a hand-held, sealed floatation device. During the flight, the kid tore open the device which made it unusable. FAA regulations mandate that every plane have one of these devices in operable order whether it is needed or not so we had to wait at the gate for 20 minutes or so while maintenance rounded one up. Mind you, this was a flight from St. Louis to Chicago, the biggest body of water we flew over was the Mississippi river. Well, we get to Chicago late, fortunately, my flight back to Lansing was late boarding so I didn't have any troubles catching it. All the passengers boarded, the door was shut, the cabin "was prepared for takeoff", and we sat there, and waited, and waited, and waited . . . There was only one ramp crew working that side of the terminal and we couldn't get a push back from the gate. It took AN HOUR to get a crew to push our plane back from the gate. Even the pilots were expressing their anger at this inefficiency to us. The flight attendant, who in my book deserves a promotion or a big raise, basically opened up the pantry and was handing out drinks, snacks, and alcohol for free. All-in-all, I was back in Lansing only an hour later than planned but man, what a day. The last two times I have flown has been nothing but pure chaos. United Airlines may be out of bankuptcy but I see nothing that shows that they will be profitable again. Cutting out those ten cent bag of pretzels is not going to save you any money when passengers are waiting for an hour to be pushed from the gate. In my opinion, the best thing to do to these bankrupt airlines is to sell them off for parts. Sometimes, you just have to start all over again and I think that is the case for the entire airline system.

Water on Mars!

2005-10-09T19:13:00.000-04:00

Seriously, NASA has spent how many billions trying to figure this out?

Picture taken outright from IamAPirate.com

Stewardship Conference for Plant-Made Biologics:

2005-10-04T17:28:00.000-04:00

Just noticed an advertisement for this conference: Stewardship Conference for Plant-Made Biologics: USDA Protocols for Research and Production November 7-9, 2005 This conference is being hosted by the USDA and Northwest Missouri State Univeristy. I'll let you visit the conference website for more information but it seems like most of the PMP players will be in attendance. For all of you farmers out there, registration for you is $100, and I would say you would get your money's worth. I probably won't be making it but who knows.

CiteULike + Feed Digest = Cool

2005-10-03T20:05:00.000-04:00

I have been trying to find a good way to show the research articles that are of interest to me on my blog. Luckily, I think I have found such a way. CiteULike.org (which I reviewed here) allows you to create an RSS feed from your list of citations that you have collected. I then took this feed over to Feed Digest to create a javascript code that could be inserted into my blog template and there you have it! In the left hand column of this page right under the Plant Pharma links and above my Link Blog (which was created in a similar fashion) you will find my list of recent articles of interest. By the way, if you just want the feed for this list, it is: http://www.citeulike.org/rss/user/barneb I have also used Feed Digest to create the "Common Sense Wire". Over the next few days, I will be work on combining several RSS feeds from science sites of interest into one feed. Right now, it is just a combination of the Nature News and Science News feeds but I have a few others I want to add. The raw feed for the "Common Sense Wire" is: http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/RURASTMZKB.rss Enjoy! By the way, I will still probably be putting together a more static page with citations of interest separated into categories, etc. . . and I have started working on that review I promised.

Anti-GMO activists destroy French fields

2005-10-03T19:01:00.000-04:00

According to this story at Plantpharma.org (a reprint of this report), activists calling themselves "the volunteer reapers" destroyed three fields containing transgenic organisms this summer in France. According to this website, one field belonged to Monsanto, one to Limagrain, and the last to Meristem Therapeutics. The destruction of the Meristem field has the organization Defeating Cystic Fibrosis upset as these plants contained a potential enzymes meant to relieve secondary effects of the disease. Unfortunately, progress for plant-made pharmaceutical companies in Europe is still being hindered and will probably continue to stymie investments in Europe. Fortunately, this type of resistance has not been seen on this level in the United States. Lets hope that our efforts to educate the American public about the risks and benefits of plant-made pharmaceuticals and GMOs in general continues in a logical and scientific manner.

Your quest is over Monty Python, the holy grail has been found? (part 2)

2005-10-01T20:25:00.000-04:00

About a month ago, scientists reported in Science magazine that the FT transcript may be "Florigen". This report has been followed up by some very elegant experiments reported in the September 9, 2005 issue of Science. In a nutshell, researchers linked the FT gene to a heat shock inducible promoter. They were then able to heat shock a leaf of an arabidopsis plant and show that this caused flowering, presumably because the FT transcript had been made in the leaf and transported to the shoot apex. The authors go on to surmise that the FT gene can autoregulate itself and the presence of its transcript causes expression of the FT gene in the shoot apex. Note: Once again, the link contained on this page goes to an abstract which is only viewable by subscribers to Science magazine, I'll work on getting some better links. Added 10/03/05 - Here is the pubmed abstract for this article which is accesible to the public.

How 'bout them Hilltoppers

2005-10-01T20:03:00.000-04:00

I may be pretending to be a Spartan, but I still bleed Red and White. The Western Kentucky Univeristy Hilltopper football team is looking pretty good this year, having been ranked as high as #1 in NCAA Div 1-AA. They dropped to number three this week after taking a loss from Auburn. But they bounced back this weekend with a win over Indiana State. OK, so its not Big 10 football or anything but I miss the days of watching the football team in the friendly confines of L.T. Smith stadium. I've been to one MSU football game and it is not the same. Smith stadium has a capacity of about 20,000 and is usually not sold out whereas the Spartan stadium holds over 70,000 and always sells out. It is nice being able practicaly on the field watching the game instead of from a half mile up in the nosebleed section. Anyways, just wanted to stand up and be counted as a Hilltopper. On a side note, I was on campus today during the big UM-MSU game (unfortunately, MSU lost). Football Saturdays on a big ten campus are something to see at least once.

Was Greenpeace misquoted? You decide

2005-09-29T22:27:00.000-04:00

I recently found a pretty interesting article on GMWatch.org dealing with a claim made that Greenpeace supported GM Pharming. Upon further review, this claim deals with a statement made by Eric Murphy, Agragen's chief scientist in a recent article regarding Agragen.

Greenpeace, which normally opposes GMOs, was quoted in a recent news report saying it favors PMP production of a recombinant form of omega-3, Murphy says.

So what is this news report supposedly claiming Greenpeace's support of GM Pharming? Well, I did a little research trying to find this article and about the closest I could find was this. This article focuses on Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace and former president of the organization. Dr. Moore recently split with Greenpeace, stating in part that "by the mid-1980s, the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism," and has formed his own movement called Greenspirit. In this article, Dr. Moore had this to say about genetically enhanced plants:

Genetic enhancement: Activists persist in their zero-tolerance campaign against genetically enhanced food crops. There is no evidence of harm to human health or the environment, and benefits are measurable and significant. Genetically enhanced (GE) food crops reduce chemical pesticides, boost yield and reduce soil erosion. Enriched with Vitamin A, Golden Rice could prevent blindness in 500,000 children per year in Asia and Africa if activists would stop blocking its introduction. Other food crops contain iron, Vitamin E, enhanced protein and better oils. The anti-GE campaign seeks to deny these environmental and nutritional advances by using ''Frankenfood'' scare tactics and misinformation campaigns.

So, did Greenpeace really endorse GM Pharming, well I'll let you decide that one. By the way, if you can find any other article regarding Greenpeace's reported endorsement of GM Pharming, please pass it along.

Wouldn't it be great?

2005-09-27T17:59:00.000-04:00

Wouldn't it be great if there was a computer operating system that was small enough to fit on a CD, including all the essential programs like Word, excel, outlook, and a web browser like Firefox. And what the heck, lets make all that available for free. With any computer that has a bootable CD-ROM drive you could drop this CD in it and have your own personal operating system up and running on that computer. Oh wait, you can do that. You know, I try to keep up with technology but looking at what is available these days, I have definitely slipped a little. So what is this great little CD I am talking about, it is Knoppix. Knoppix is what is known as a live CD and contains a version of the linux operating system along with several open source programs such as the MS office clone, Open Office and that great web browser, Firefox. So I now have the option of booting to a linux operating system without having to worry about partitioning my hard drive, which is not for the faint of heart. The only real tricky part of this whole experience has been burning the CD-image that I downloaded correctly onto a CD, which involved a little bit of special software. After that, I had to contact the "computer guru" of our department to set my CD-Rom drive as the first drive the BIOS looks at when booting because the previous "guru" had password-protected changes to the BIOS system. After that, I was in business. Knoppix, or any linux OS does not like to share hard drive space with Windows XP, so in order to save anything the easiest option is saving to a USB drive (I am currently working on that). Because Knoppix is open source, there are several customized versions available, including Gnoppix which uses a different GUI, and a version I am looking forward to sniffing around in - BioKnoppix, a version that comes loaded with Bioinformatics software. Hopefully I will never have to use this disk for this reason but Knoppix can be used as a recovery disk to recover information from a hard drive when your Windows OS crashes. And did I mention it is free!!!! By the way, this post is the first (maybe of many) written using the firefox browser running on a Knoppix/Linux operating system. Alright, back to learning this new OS.

Agragen wants to work with North Dakota communities

2005-09-26T21:23:00.000-04:00

The second of two quick posts for tonight. Agragen's top executives published a commentary in the Grand Forks Herald on 9/14/05. In this commentary, the executives take their case straight to the public for why they wish to set up shop in North Dakota. Agragen has been catching some flak over their plans from Ameriflax. The commentary goes on to point out similar disputes that arose with Ventria and Budweiser and how these disputes where resolved and how hopefully, their similar disputes can too. To my (biased) eye, this is a very good move and I hope that Agragen's dealings in North Dakota will move forward. As I said in the other post for today, I feel a big state of the industry review brewing and I'll have more to say then.

Ventria breaks ground on their Missouri center

2005-09-26T21:17:00.000-04:00

The first of two quick posts tonight: Ventria has broken ground on their new headquarters being built on the campus of Northwest Missouri State University. They also reported that their field research testing whether varieties of rice can be grown in northern Missouri also went well. About $10 million of the construction costs for the $23 million dollar facility will come from state funds. Hopefully, I will have more to add to this towards the end of the week in a planned review.

Nothing new under the sun

2005-09-25T22:40:00.000-04:00

A quick post tonight. Nothing to new to report, just a few random thoughts and links. Hopefully, I can get this posted tonight. I am working on the MSU campus tonight and the internet has been incredibly slow. It has been this way since the fall semester started. Our campus is hooked up to the Merit or "internet2" or whatever it is called backbone but tonight I think I would get better service from a 56K modem. The web-based e-mail has also been slower than Hotmail on a bad day lately. I guess the IT guys here just can't comprehend the fact that adding 40,000 or so people to a network when the fall semester starts can be a significant event. Oh well, geeze, with these last few posts you would think I have been in a bad mood lately but I am not really. Actually, these last few days have been really good. Anyway, time for the weekend link of interest and it is: The Million Dollar Homepage A student is attempting (an doing a dang good job of it) to pay his way through his undergraduate studies buy selling advertising space on his site at $1/pixel. Apparently it is working out pretty well. There is a pretty interesting gimish of adverts ranging from personal blogs and homepages to the normal casino and home mortgage spam. But hey, this may be one of the only cases where spammers are doing a good thing by paying for this guys college. You will also notice that I've made a few touch-ups to the ole' blog. I've added a random quote generator at the top of the page, hopefully I'll get it filled with some pretty good quotes. I'll be adding a few more links and blogs o' interest so be on the lookout for some news ones, and doing some general house(blog)keeping too. One last thought - I was reading an artcle over at BiotechNik's site about intrinsic stock valuations when he mentioned he was still using an old HP15C. What is it about these things that make them stick around? I guess I am from a younger generation who have never used this type of calculator. For those of you who don't know, these old HP calculators work in a "reverse polish" fashion. I can't even begin to explain how to operate this thing much less ever try to calculate something on them. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that you will see one of these in just about every lab you visit. One good thing about these calculators is that they hardly ever get "borrowed", because who would want to use the thing. Here's to a great week!

You heard it first at CSFTB

2005-09-23T23:47:00.000-04:00

I only admit to being a partial expert in the plant-made pharmaceutical industry. However, apparently I called one right in the search engine industry. After Interactive Corp aquired AskJeeves.com, they announced on Wednesday that Jeeves would be sacked. Followers of CSFTB would remember that I reported in August that Jeeve's was interviewing for other jobs. Although I did report later that maybe the development of some new products would save his job, this was not enough. The last straw came when Jeeves showed up Monday dressed like a pirate for "Talk like a pirate day". Alright enough kidding aside. I am by no means an expert in marketing or in search engine technology but what the heck are these guys doing? AskJeeves.com is a respectable search engine, although it probably isn't the leader in this field. Taking away Jeeve's is like Google deciding that their name isn't professional enough and changing it to something like "Worldsearch" or something. Hey I agree that the old days of three years ago when a flashy name for a website bagged you a couple million in an IPO are over but please. The internet has become a very powerful research tool, but that doesn't mean you can't have some fun while using it, so what if that fun comes from pretending that you are asking a fictional character for the information. I am hereby invoking an exception from my rule 3 of common sense for a biochemist here. What the heck do these stuffed suits think they are doing? Do they even know how to surf the internet using anything better than AOL's web browser from version 3.0? Thank you for taking what little fun I could have out of performing relevant searches on the internet. I will go home now and eat my one serving of gruel and be happy with that, not asking for another serving. Alright, I am done venting now, I mean it, really. Hey Jeeve's, now that you have been "negatively retained", how about getting in contact with me? I could probably struggle to pay you minimum wage to promote my site but we could work in some bonuses or something for attracting attention to my site. Just think it over. I can put you in a lab coat, show you a few pipetting techniques, let you run a few protein gels, and you would be set. Hey, science is more fulfilling than being a butler right? Insn't it? Oh come on, being a scientist isn't all that bad? Right?

A bit of common sense for the Biochemist pt. 8

2005-09-23T20:00:00.000-04:00

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it." - Albert Einstein

The never ending quest to keep your web self organized, pt 8.

2005-09-22T20:28:00.000-04:00

So now I'm an expert on this subject huh? At least that is according to Mike at Mindvalley. Here is a recent comment he left for a recent entry

I have enjoyed reading all of your comments about web-based social bookmarking and thought you might like to check out www.blinklist.com. If you get a chance to check it out, would love to hear your thoughts since you are an expert user in this space and very familiar with all the offerings out there. Cheers and keep up the blogging! Mike

Alright, so maybe he was pandering a little bit for some attention but what the heck I appreciate the comments. So I went over to Blinklist to check it out. Log-in and registration is simple. I had my Del.icio.us links imported in under a minute. From there, it was a quick drag and drop of a "blink this site" button onto my firefox browser and I was underway. The user interface is a little more fancy than del.icio.us and you know I like simple but I can handle it. The extra bells and whistles are pretty handy. There is a starring option by each link which adds that link to a list of favorites. There is also a list of recently visited tags and a pretty neat "cloud" representation for your tags. The blinklist toolbar gives you quick access to manually add a link. The server response for adding links, etc. . . was pretty fast. The only improvement I can suggest at this time is to list all of my tags (like del.icio.us does) when I am adding a new link and be able to click on a tag to add it to a link. All-in-all, I would say this site gives del.icio.us (my gold standard) a run for its money. It is definitely worth giving this site an extended trial period. Definitely worth checking out! If you are coming in late to this thread, here is (a by no means complete) list of social bookmarking sites: Blinklist.com CiteUlike.org Connotea.org Del.icio.us MyJeeves Simpy - Added 9/25/05 If there are any (and there are) sites I have left out, please drop me a comment, I think I'll keep updating this list and if I come across something worth writing about, I will.

September 2005 Nature Biotech is a good 'un

2005-09-22T18:38:00.000-04:00

The September 2005 issue of Nature Biotech is a very good read. The focus of this issue is on antibody engineering and manufacture, something that I take a particular interest in. The issue does a good job bringing the reader up to speed on the history of antibody therapuetics, the current crop of therapeutics (both commercially available and under development), methods of production, and where this subject is going. Of particular interest of for methods of production as is relates to the "pharming industry" is the Production of human monoclonal antibody in eggs of chimeric chickens. The authors of this research where able to create chimeric (partially transgenic) chickens that expressed significant quantities of recombinant human monoclonal antibodies only in the egg (3mg/egg). The levels of successful chicken chimeras formed seemed to be pretty high, however, no transgenic offspring were produced from the chimeras (so far). Here is a link to a review of this research in the same NBT issue. One more note, this issue also contains the research article that I talked about here regarding a plant-derived antibiotic resistant marker gene.

LSBC and Icon Genetics announce the completion of something

2005-09-22T18:24:00.000-04:00

The world of biotech is full of vague press releases, but this one could almost take the cake. Large Scale Biology Corporation and Icon Genetics AG Announce Successful Completion of Research Phase of Product Development Collaboration. Of course with all vague press releases, there is lots of room to spectulate so lets make some speculations. From following both of these companies, I would say that the enzyme under development as an enzyme replacement therapy is Icon's Phenylalanine ammonia lyase (an enzyme replacement candidate for phenylketonuria). Icon tested this product in field trials in conjunction with KTRDC this summer. I would speculate that the success of these field trials has something to do with this press release. As far as the "initiation of the commercial phase of the collaboration." I would speculate that this means that the two companies will start looking for a big pharma partner for funding of further development. Without anymore information I would not want make anymore inferences.

Keeping your web-self organized pt.6

2005-09-19T20:13:00.000-04:00

Since I have devoted several entries to web-based social bookmarking subjects (pt. 5, pt. 4, pt. 3), I thought I would keep the thread going. Keat's telecsope has weighed in on the subject and brings up some good points about whether your bookmarking habits may give away a research competitive edge. Head over there and check out his thoughts. Personally, I think this could be a possibility, but the advantages of such systems far outweigh the possible negatives.

I see you have bought a shirt, need to refinance your home loan?

2005-09-19T19:41:00.000-04:00

Doesn't make sense does it? Well, I guess not to me it doesn't but apparently Mervyn's department stores thinks it is very logical. The story goes like this: Several months ago I went to Mervyn's and bought a some new shirts and jeans. When I went to pay, they offered me at 15% discount if I would sign up for their Mervyn's card. That was my first mistake. Anyways, I signed up, paid and went on my way. Fast forward a couple of months and I start seeing missed calls from (513) 619-2683 on my cell phone. Of course, whoever called (a computer) left no voice mail. I called the number back and got a recording stating "RDI Marketing Services has called me for research or sales purposes". This went on for a period of about a week where I would get about one or two of these phone calls a day (which I ignored because they left no voicemail and when I called back I got a recording). Finally, I was able to catch them when they called. The lady calling stated that she was with GE Money bank who handled the Mervyn's card accounts and since I was a Mervyn's customer and since I owned my home and since they were a bank, she would like to give me a quote to refinance my home loan! WTF!!!!! The lengths that these companies go to nowadays to get around the telemarketing rules. You know, Mervyn's has good quality cheap clothes that a grad student can afford but this really peeved me and I really don't know if I want to give them my business anymore. I can not wait to start getting calls asking me if I need to purchase funeral services just because I bought a steak knife at the grocery store (I'll never sign up for a Kroger card simply because of that reason). Mervyn's has recently announced that they will be closing about a quarter of their stores that were not making any money. You know maybe if they would focus on customer satisfaction instead of making money by selling customer information, they could turn a buck or two. Another similar case (albeit a little less annoying) happened to me just today. As I was perusing one of the premier research journals whose name will remain anonymous, I kept getting pop-under ads telling me that "I had won a new laptop" (and yes, it was just when I was browsing this one site and no, I don't have any spyware on my computer). If this was the Drudgereport I could understand, but this was a respectable publisher. I guess making a quick buck is easier than profiting by making your customers satisfied. Ok, I am done venting now, back to your regularly scheduled blog.

Who knew left-handed DNA was so abundant

2005-09-18T22:27:00.000-04:00

So if you know anything about DNA, then you know that in it's native form, it exits as a helix with a right-handed twist. If you don't know anything about DNA, then it still exists in a helical form with a right-handed twist. In very rare circumstances, you will find DNA forming a left handed helix, but this is very uncommon. That is, unless you believe what the mass media tells you. The left-handed DNA hall of fame has cataloged those instances where the "artist" in charge of creating a pretty picture of a DNA helix has not consulted with his local molecular biologist for accuracy (or the local molecular biologist got his degree from the internet). Check it out.

Dow Agrisciences signs collaborations with Chlorogen

2005-09-18T21:49:00.000-04:00

Dow Agrisciences and Chlorogen announced two collaborations last Friday. Under the first, the two companies will work to develop technologies for the production of recombinant proteins in plant cell cultures. The second agreement focuses on the development of Chlorogen's chloroplast transformation technology for the introduction of proprietary traits in crop plants. This is not the first time Dow Agrisciences has dabbled in this type of technology. Dow ended a multi-year collaboration with Large Scale Biology in 2001. Revenues from this collaboration was $52 million for LSBC. It is good to see Dow investing in this type of technology again. Added 9/19/05 - Another note of interest is that the first collaboration involves the use of plant cell cultures, and not whole plants???

Our numbers are growing

2005-09-11T17:45:00.000-04:00

I would like to give a belated welcome to another blogger whose interests lay in biotech. The Medicine Vault is written by "a mid-level biopharmaceutical worker desperately trying to keep a job and earn a living, raise a family, and stay awake all without opening a vein." As my career plans are currently under major revision, an entry of his is particulary relevant. It is especially true in the pharmaceutical/biotech industry that you are basically a contract worker. Although it is not the best position to be in, from my experience in the "real world" you just have to get used to it. You also have to be very careful with you financial planning, making sure that you have a little put away just in case the company tradewinds start blowing a different direction and you find yourself being "negatively retained"

Pandering to my main audience

2005-09-11T15:15:00.000-04:00

I know most of my "audience" out there probably has a different political viewpoint than I. So in what can only be called blatant pandering to my audience I serve forth the following pictures. Above picture from Jeremy Zawodny's Flikr Stream And I must say that this last story even gets a WTF from me: Bush lifts wage rules for Katrina

Whats the matter, bug got your tongue?

2005-09-11T15:02:00.000-04:00

I don't know whether to file this under funny or scientifically important but according to the BBC, a bug has been found that eats the tongue of a fish and replaces it with its own body.

But don't be too freaked out - scientists say the creature does not pose any threat to humans and only attaches itself to fish tongues.

New "linkblog" in place

2005-09-11T14:45:00.000-04:00

Doing a little "blog improvement" over here at Common Sense for the Biochemist. I figured out a neat little way to have my latest links saved at Del.icio.us to be posted on this blog. I am using Feeddigest.com to read my RSS feed from my del.icio.us account and create a chunk of Javascript. That javascript chunk can then be put in my blog template code and viola, a linkblog tied to my del.icio.us account. The linkblog is found in the left-hand column just below the Plant Pharma links. I also removed the Link2blogs tower as this was not bringing many visitors to my site. More improvements and updates are on the way.

Neat Periodic Table of the Elements

2005-09-08T21:12:00.000-04:00

Here is a neat little periodic table made using AJAX coding. Try it out!

Keeping your non-web self organized, pt 1

2005-09-08T17:38:00.000-04:00

So I have been on a bender lately evaluating software and apps designed for keeping web bookmarks and references and other items organized (I am currently sniffing around OnFolio). Well, here is a non-computer application (if you want to call it that) to further keep yourself organized, PocketMod. PocketMod is designed to be a replacement for those bulky PDAs and organizers that we tote around. OK, so it is a single piece of paper that can be customized in your browser before printing that can be folded to make a small 8 page notebook. To tell the truth, I think its a pretty neat little organizer, although I have had a little trouble getting it folded right, hey, it was late in the day, after fooling around for about 3 minutes, I finally got it right. Another net little web app is this Notepaper Generator

Biolex raises $36 million in venture capital

2005-09-07T19:00:00.000-04:00

Biolex announced September 1 the completion of another round of venture capital funding. According to the press release, this funding round will be used among other things, to expand their cGMP manufacturing capabilities. Biolex has been on a roll recently, announcing their acquisition of Lemnagene in July and a partnership with Centocor in March.

The world is my oyster!

2005-09-06T20:24:00.000-04:00

Sorry that I have been quite on this blog for so long. As I have stated, life for me has been pretty busy lately and I have made some pretty big life decisions. I am officially announcing that I am wrapping up my research and will at some point disconinuing my pursuit of a doctorate degree. I have decided to get back into the plant-made pharmaceutical industry if I can. I don't have a job lined up yet but I am actively following up on several leads. I went ahead and made this decision before so I could concentrate more on my job search. I believe I could successfully complete my degree and I have enjoyed my research and the lab I am in, but in the end, the Ph.D. is not for me. To be honest, I enjoy working at the bench and the real technical aspects of research, such as process and assay development and that is what I want to continue doing. So all of you readers out there, I am available. For now, this blog will continue on as usual, keeping you informed forces me to keep up-to-date in the PMP field. I'll keep you all up to date on where things are going for me.

Google Desktop version 2 (or keeping your web self organized pt. 5)

2005-09-06T19:32:00.000-04:00

Google released version 2 of their desktop search engine last week. This version has a ton of new features in it. I have downloaded it and have to say it is pretty neat. The new version contains a sidebar that displays information based on what sites you have surfed. For instance, there is a stock ticker display that will display the latest price for any stock that you have recently looked up. The sidebar also pulls RSS information from the sites you have visited and continually displays new clips from these sites in the "web clips" section. The program is collecting and recording alot of information about the sites you surf, but I am okay with that. I have found that the search feature is very useful for finding that protocol that you wrote a year ago and buried in your computer filing system. Try it out.

Support for the plant pharma industry

2005-09-06T19:05:00.000-04:00

It is great to see an ever growing presence for the plant pharma community on the web. Hopefully we can educate the public about the true risks involved with the production of plant-made pharmaceuticals along with the benefits. Their are many activists out there who are spending alot of money to spread thier version of the truth. In defense of the industry, the folks over at Plantpharma.org have started an online petition addressed to USDA Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns and FDA Commissioner Les Crawford. In recent years, both the USDA and FDA have been working with industry stakeholders and the public to create a set of regulations that are fair to both parties. This petition is in support of continuing this open dialogue and reads in part:

Plant-made pharmaceuticals (PMPs) have the potential to address therapeutic discovery and production issues for real people with real illnesses. Government regulators, academics, health care professionals and independent scientific standards should be the determining factors for how best to take advantage of the important, life-saving opportunities plant-made-pharmaceuticals have to offer – not special-interest groups or activists.

I encourage you to read over this petition and give your support for continued regulation of this industry based on scientific fact and not lobbyist pressure.

Plant derived antibiotic resistance gene

2005-08-29T19:45:00.000-04:00

In an upcoming Nature Biotechnology issue, Mentewab Ayalew and C. Neal Stewart, Jr. from the Univeristy of Tennessee will report on the use of an ABC transporter gene from Arabidopsis to confer Kanamycin resistance in tobacco. Kanamycin resistance is used as a selectable marker in plant transformation. Usually, a resistance gene is linked to the gene of interest. Plants that are then shown to be resistant to an antibiotic, the selectable marker, will also contain the gene of interest. Usually, this antibiotic resistance gene has come from bacteria, which raises concerns that the gene could be horizontally transfered to native bacteria or other plants. Because this new gene is an ABC transporter normally found in plants, this concern is muted. A copy of the paper can be found here.

Chlorogen eyes possible expansion

2005-08-29T18:55:00.000-04:00

Chlorogen announced friday a collaboration with Missouri State Univeristy that could lead to the building of a manufacturing plant on their campus. Chlorogen would receive tax incentives in return for purchasing equipment to fill new lab space and manufacturing equipment that will be leased back to them. As released earlier, Chlorogen is also close to closing on another $6 million in venture capital funding.

Common Sense for the Biochemist, pt 7

2005-08-29T15:46:00.000-04:00

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Michael Crichton (1942 - ), Caltech Michelin Lecture, January 17, 2003

Common Sense for Symposiums

2005-08-26T15:35:00.000-04:00

I just learned that my old school, WKU will be holding the first ever symposium dedicated to Bluegrass Music. The deadline to register has already passed but I may try and make it. Talks such as "Smokin’ Grass without Prejudice: Kentucky’s Bluegrass Connection to Nashville’s MusikMafia" to be given by David Pruett will sure be a change from the presentations I've been sitting in on. And on the subject of meetings and symposiums, I ran across a very humorous article (count this as the weekend funny) at Respectful Insolence catagorizing the creatures that attend surgical meetings.

I am still alive

2005-08-26T15:14:00.000-04:00

Thanks to all of you out there for visiting, it seems like I am getting more and more unique visitors everyday. Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but I've been really busy lately. I promise I should be back up to full steam in a day or two.

New York times article regarding Ventria

2005-08-16T20:27:00.000-04:00

This is the second of two stories found on Plantpharma.org This New York Times article in today's edition does a good job covering the ongoing move of Ventria from Sacramento, CA to Marysville, MO. If nothing else, the NY Times article has a good picture of a rice being grown in a field for those of you who have never seen it. I was wondering if rice could be grown in northern Missouri, I guess I was not the only one.

Chlorogen firms up its chloroplast expression platform

2005-08-16T20:09:00.000-04:00

This is the first of two stories today taken from Plantpharma.org. Chlorogen today firmed up its expression platform utilizing expression of recombinant proteins in the plant chloroplast. In this story found on Plantpharma.org, the company stated that it has acquired a license to CTT (Chloroplast transformation technology) patents held by Rutgers university. Not much to this story, but it looks like I could do a little research to find out how these patents match up with what Chlorogen already has. From the sounds of the press release, it looks like this will prevent Chlorogen from having to dance around some potential patent issues with CTT and will probably give them some more room to develop their technology. Clearing up patent issues without the use of vultures - I mean - lawyers is always a good thing in my book. Chlorogen is also in the middle of raising about $6 million in capital which should be closing in October. Looks like it may be a busy winter for these guys.

How to keep your web-self organized pt. 4

2005-08-16T10:40:00.000-04:00

Keep those e-mails coming! The discussion over social bookmarking seems to be a hot topic right now. Solving the world's (and internet's) problems through blogging is the way to go, well, outside of actually doing something about the world's problems. Thanks to Ben Lund the project manager for Connotea for dropping an e-mail regarding the ongoing discussion over social bookmarking - Part 3, Part 2. I post parts of it (in no particular order) and give my response.

I'm the project manager for Connotea at Nature Publishing Group. I'm always looking for feedback (both good and bad) from users and visitors, so I was interested to read your post about Connotea and CiteULike.

Once again, thanks for the e-mail.

I was also puzzled by your comparison of us to Google. The primary aim of Connotea is for it to be a useful service that enables users to organise their own resources -- the idea of finding or discovering new articles is a secondary, albeit very important, one.

With this remark, I was thinking down the road business-wise. I'll probably ruffle a few feathers here, but I think del.icio.us and CiteULike will eventually get bought out by the likes of Google or Yahoo or another big time web player. This discussion started with my review of MyJeeves, which combines a search function with a bookmarking function. I think this would probably be advantageous for both del.icio.us and CiteULike, as it would give them access to virtually unlimited server power and storage space, not to mention virtually unlimited brain power for improvements. I may be mistaken since I don't know the full business plan for Connotea, but I just don't see it being sold off or eventually having the resources that these other two sites potentially may have access to.

We're still in the stage of constant development on Connotea, and have already altered out plans to take account of user feedback and developments on the wider web, so if you have any ideas about how to make it more useful, feel free to let me know. You mentioned a couple of things in your post: * Difficulty of manually adding a bookmark: 'Add a bookmark' is the first option in the toolbox on the right hand side after you log in. Does the toolbox blend in too much in with the background? Any suggestions for how to make it more prominent? Also, the idea is for users to mostly use the bookmarklets, so they can add links as they're reading them. Do we need to make that more prominent too? * General difficulty in navigation: Is there any chance you can give me a couple of examples of what you were trying to do? Then I can look at the navigation we have right now and work out how best to make it more usable. Again, if you have any suggestions, please let me know.

As soon as you log in you are directed to your homepage, you then have to go to "My library" to view your toolbox options. In the other two cases, you have the option to start adding links or references as soon as you log in (OK that is kind of getting nit-picky but it made an impression on me).

I was intrigued that you contrasted Connotea with CiteULike, since the underlying functionality and concepts of the two are virtually identical. It's true that we emphasise different aspects of the services, but in essence both Connotea and CiteULike are about saving and sharing links online.

A science based social bookmarking site is a good idea and I am sure there will be quite a few people out there who will find your site useful. However in the grand scheme of things, you can not forget del.icio.us in these comparisons, which beats both CiteULike and Connotea hands down because of its simplicity. I don't know how to describe it, but del.icio.us has a very clean, user-friendly interface. The CiteULike interface is just as "busy" as Connotea's (more on that comparison further down). Let's talk speed issues. While I have been writing this post, I have been adding links to both del.icio.us and Connotea. Maybe it is because I am "across the pond", but I have been able to add 2-3 links in del.icio.us to every one in Connotea, and this is simply because I have been waiting for pages to load in Connotea. As stated in a previous post, this is not the first time I have had speed issues with a NPG site. CiteULike is loading maybe a little slower than del.icio.us but not by much. To me, its those little things that can give one site an edge over the other. So I have declared the winner to be del.icio.us, however, there's a catch. With CiteULike, I can store my copy of a PDF version of a reference article on their server and attach that to a bookmarked reference. Therefore no matter where I am I can get access not only to a reference, but to my copy of the actual paper. This is the only reason why I would use CiteULike and its a very good reason. Thanks again for your e-mail, and I hope that I have answered some of your questions. Now about those rising journal subsciption costs. . . As a side note: This string of posts has made me realize how important blogging is regarded by the professional world. It is easy to see what has been said in the blogosphere about a particular subject or thing through a simple search on Technorati or Bloglines. I am impressed by the attention that CSFTB has been garnering lately. Note added in proof: Sorry for the format of the quotes. I am working on that issue.

How to keep your web-self organized pt. 3

2005-08-15T11:22:00.000-04:00

I just received an e-mail from Richard Cameron from CiteULike regarding a recent post on social bookmarking that reads in part:

Hi Brian, I just noticed your blog post about CiteUlike. I didn't want to post this as a comment to avoid any attempts at blatant self-publicity, but did you know you can actually upload the yours PDFs to CiteULike? I can keep them on the server for you, so you can access them from anywhere regardless of whether you've got your computer at home set up to proxy through your university's network? There no quota at the moment, but there's obviously a limit to the proportion of the world's information I can keep on my servers, so that that may change at some point. However, hard drive space is cheap and I'm keen to keep the content because it means I can ultimately do full-text searches on it.

Thanks Richard for the heads up (and by the way, you deserve some blatant self-publicity just for visiting my site). I definitely missed a huge feature of your site that changed my entire opinion about it. I have tested this feature out and it works great! I have also noticed that you can import your references from BibTex although I haven't tried that feature out. I am currently using EndNote but I am sure there is a way to save my EndNote references as a BibTex file and import them that way. To be honest, I will still probably keep my full PDF library on my hard drive space simply because a good library can be very time consuming and expensive to collect and I don't want it to be managed by anyone else but me. However, this is a great way to keep a small collection of articles to read while you are travelling or away from your home base or have on hand when traveling to conferences to share with your peers. For those of you who are still fastidiously filing away paper copies of interesting articles and keeping an index with index cards, this could be a great way to start experimenting with an electronic library. I haven't been able to test any of the other features of this site, such as tagging documents or searching them since I haven't built my own library yet but I imagine you could develop some pretty neat ways of organizing your documents with with the tag feature. I think the guy(s) at CiteULike are on to something and you should try it out. But don't blame me when you spend a full day reorganizing your references!

1 badger + 1 linux box = The Weekend

2005-08-14T21:24:00.000-04:00

So it is time again for a (belated) weekend odd story and this week's pick is Installing linux on a dead badger. Other notable notes: I posted my 100th post this week, the honor went to the Mexican corn invasion. I hosted my 1000th visitor this week - If you were reading from Washington, D.C. using a firefox browser and you came from In The Pipeline at 3:15 this last Thursday, then you are the lucky reader! Posts are still going to be kind of spotty this week. Got a few things going on, more later.

Your quest is over Monty Python, the holy grail has been found?

2005-08-14T21:03:00.000-04:00

The holy grail of flowering that is. This article gives a good introduction to "Florigen" and its history. I guess I am supposed to be interested in this subject by default as several researchers in the department I work in have been chasing this molecule all of their lives. Florigen is proposed to be a hormone that tells a flower that it is time to make a flower. Classic experiments have shown that florigen is a signalling compound that can be transmitted through a plant. Florigen is produced in leaves in response to being exposed to a certain time period of light. Leaves that are producing florigen can be grafted onto plants that are not flowering and cause them to flower. Furthermore, once this plant has started to flower, leaves from this plant can be grafted onto another plant and cause it to flower, even though both plants have not "seen" the correct amount of light to stimulate natural flowering. The trouble with all of these experiments is that no one has been able to nail down what that signalling compound is and so this mythical florigen compound has become a "holy grail" of some sorts to the plant biology community. However, a group of Swedish researchers have reported in Science that they have identified the gene responsible for the production of florigen. I'll be honest with you though, I have not had time to read the article so I can not comment on it myself. Plant flowering is a big concern in the PMP industry. Of course, transgenic plants that don't flower don't shed pollen that could contaminate the native flora. Added 8/26/05 - After reading the article, the authors imply that an RNA transcript is the actual signal. These transcripts are being produced in the leaf and then transported to the meristem where they are translated into a protein that promotes the expression of flowering genes. Note added in proof: The link to the Science abstract can only be viewed if you have a subscription. I'll try to work on getting another link for this article.

How to keep your web-self organized pt. 2

2005-08-14T20:19:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Matthew Wygant for a few suggestions of other social bookmarks that I should check out from a previous post. Per his suggestion, I did check out Connotea and CiteULike and here are my thoughts: Connotea: Nature Magazine still doesn't have this website stuff down. Granted, in the last year or so they have made their website a little easier to navigate, before that, reading Nature online was atrocious. The site is still a little hard to navigate. The same can be said for Connotea. The user interface is pretty clean, which is a plus, but it is really hard to manually add a bookmark (is the add form even accesible from your login homepage?). Nature's servers are also slow, probably because of them being located 1/3 of the world away (I assume). I did run into some problems with slow loading pages with Connotea also. Of course, del.icio.us has some server slowdowns also. All-in-all, I would say don't even try it, well, try it, but I'll bet you won't like it after you have tried del.icio.us. I am willing to bet that at some point, Nature will lose interest in this project (they are magazine publisher, not Google), and this project will eventually wither out. CiteULike Actually, this is a pretty neat little site. However, in order to access a paper from this site, you must have a subscription to the journal that it is located in. OK for me, I just have to work through MSUs network (I can proxy from home too). Personally, if I have a paper that I want to keep as a reference, I get a PDF copy of it on my hard drive. When coupled with a reference manager program like EndNote, you can make yourself a pretty nice little reference library. I don't want to suddenly not have access to a paper simply because the new institution I am at does not have a subscription to that journal. CiteULike is a good idea and may work for some people, but it doesn't help me.