Faculty Contributor

Four “secrets” to success in science

Originally published November 9, 2012

Editor’s note: In today’s post, our anonymous faculty blogger gives some advice for young scientists on how to succeed in a research career. (For the record, while certainly distinguished, we wouldn’t consider him “old!”)

The old professor just shook his head in response to the young student’s question about the secrets of his success. “Why in the world would you consider me successful?” he exclaimed. “I’ve never made any money in this business, my lab is always on the verge of bankruptcy, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get another NIH grant.” But the student insisted, “You’ve been doing what you love for more than 40 years, you’ve published so many interesting papers, and you’re known all around the world for the discoveries you’ve made. You must be doing something right. Can’t you give me a few hints?”

The professor thought about it for a minute and relented, “Okay, I’ll tell you four things that have kept me going for such a long time. But they’re not secrets. They’re just things that everybody knows, but doesn’t want to think about because they are hard truths to face…”

Serendipity strikes again

by Faculty Contributor on December 6, 2012 at 9:41 am | 0 Comments

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Weon-Kyoo You, Ph.D., postdoctoral researcher in the Stallcup lab

Editor’s note: We’ve previously described serendipity’s important role in the scientific discovery process. Because this phenomenon is such a strong recurrent theme in science, there are almost an unlimited number of stories about scientific progress in which serendipity was a major factor. One such story occurred recently in the lab of William Stallcup, Ph.D., here at Sanford-Burnham.

Striking out

A few years ago, a collaborator in Italy gave the Stallcup lab a mouse model genetically engineered to lack the collagen VI protein. Collagen VI is part of the support scaffold surrounding fat tissue.

“Collagen VI is also one of the important binding partners for NG2, a protein we’ve long studied in our lab for its role in cancer,” relates Stallcup. “There was a report published showing that breast cancer progression is slowed in mice lacking collagen VI, which is the same phenomenon we have seen in mice lacking NG2.”

In addition, other studies reported that collagen VI loss leads to poor mammary fat cell function. That was similar to the Stallcup lab’s observations of altered fat cell behavior in the absence of NG2.

“So we thought there was a strong chance that loss of the NG2-collagen VI interaction in fat cells might provide a unified explanation for the poor fat cell function and reduced mammary tumor progression seen in both types of mice,” Stallcup says.

Yet the group could never reproduce the mammary tumor findings that were reported for the collagen VI knockout mouse, and so their theory could not be proved. They abandoned the project.

Enter serendipity

Four “secrets” to success in science

by Faculty Contributor on November 9, 2012 at 5:03 am | 0 Comments

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Mihee Kim, Ph.D., postdoctoral researcher at Sanford-Burnham

Better luck next time: 7 tips for handling research grant rejection

by Faculty Contributor on July 3, 2012 at 12:55 pm | 1 comment

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Image courtesy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health

Editor’s note: Most biomedical researchers at academic and independent research institutes depend on grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The process of applying (and re-applying) for grants and the peer review system the NIH uses to evaluate grant applications are almost becoming their own science. In this blog post, our anonymous faculty blogger gives some advice for early-career scientists on how to keep going after a research grant proposal gets rejected—and how to do it better next time.

OK, finally…the day I’ve been waiting for! My e-mail from the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review says I can check online to get the scores of my latest grant application. But hold on a second…do I really want to know the results? If the scores are bad, I’ll be depressed over the whole weekend. On the other hand, if they’re good, I can celebrate all weekend. Might as well take a look…

“Dear Principal Investigator, scores from the latest round of study section action are now available for applications ranked in the top 50 percent of the proposals reviewed. Applications in the bottom 50 percent, including your application, were not discussed at the meeting and did not receive a score.”

Oh, great! I could definitely have waited until Monday for that news. What am I supposed to do now?

Muscling up with MyoD

by Faculty Contributor on January 13, 2012 at 8:49 am | 1 comment

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Lorenzo Puri, M.D., Ph.D.

Every cell in your body contains the same DNA, with genes coding for many thousands of proteins. Yet a muscle cell makes a very different set of proteins from say, a bone cell, enabling it to perform its muscle-specific job. Lorenzo Puri, M.D., Ph.D. and his lab members study what makes stem cells (precursor cells) choose to produce the proteins that turn them into muscle cells. In doing so, they hope their research will one day help improve strategies for muscle regeneration in patients with muscle wasting diseases, such as muscular dystrophy. While a cure for muscular dystrophy is not yet in sight, the ability to stimulate muscle stem cells to generate mature muscle cells could make a big difference in the lives of patients. By repairing muscles damaged by the disease, muscle regeneration therapy would extend the lives of patients and allow them to function effectively in a whole range of activities that are currently unthinkable for victims of the disease.

Sanford-Burnham’s “Two Cultures”

by Faculty Contributor on December 8, 2011 at 4:06 pm | 1 comment

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Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980), English author, physicist, and diplomat (Image by ©Bettmann/CORBIS)

A member of Sanford-Burnham’s faculty reflects on history, philosophy, society, and what it takes to get science done.

In 1959 the British physicist C.P. Snow delivered a lecture, and subsequently published a monograph, entitled “The Two Cultures,” describing what he saw as a growing divide between science and the humanities. Snow was afraid that science, spurred by the success of Sputnik, the resulting space race, the growth of nuclear technologies, and the very beginnings of the revolution in molecular genetics, would produce a culture that was impenetrable to non-scientists and in which scientists would be so specialized that they lacked the ability to connect with the rest of society. The publication was assigned reading for many university students at that time, and triggered many discussions about the balance between science and other aspects of society. Partly as a result of such discussions, a number of institutions of higher education were motivated to realign their curricula to make sure that science majors still learned about the roots of western civilization, including literature, art, and philosophy (with notable lack of foresight, nobody was thinking much about Asia in those days!). Oddly, in many cases this adjustment was not balanced by corresponding requirements that humanities students enroll in introductory science courses. These questions of academic focus have continued to be a source of debate, as universities continually struggle to balance their arts versus science programs.

Metabolomics fuels cancer drug discovery

by Faculty Contributor on November 29, 2011 at 2:37 pm | 0 Comments

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Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Stefano Tiziani (left) and Dr. Giovanni Paternostro, adjunct assistant professor at Sanford-Burnham, in the NMR facility

Genomics is a global look at all the DNA or genes in a cell or organism and proteomics refers to all the proteins. But these don’t necessarily tell the whole story about what’s going on inside a cell at a given moment. Metabolomics adds another layer of complexity, describing all the chemical reactions a cell uses to process nutrients and produce both energy and the chemical building blocks required for maintenance and growth.

Since cellular metabolism relies on an intricate and finely-tuned network of interconnected pathways involving many proteins and enzymes, it follows that many human diseases, including cancer, can throw metabolism off, changing the relative abundance of different metabolites (the chemicals involved in metabolism). Thus, the ability to detect and quantify such metabolic changes would make a very useful tool for evaluating the status of a disease and judging the effectiveness of a therapy.

Meet Sanford-Burnham’s graduate students

by Faculty Contributor on November 16, 2011 at 11:34 am | 0 Comments

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Stacy Devlin, program coordinator, and Dr. Guy Salvesen, dean, (center) with students in Sanford-Burnham’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (Photo by Nadia Borowski Scott)

Even though a large portion of the research work at Sanford-Burnham historically has been carried out by postdoctoral trainees, graduate students have always had a presence at the Institute. In the past, these individuals were officially enrolled at UC San Diego or other universities and carried out their research in a lab at Sanford-Burnham because of its particular expertise. Although this type of arrangement still continues, the situation changed in 2006 when the Institute founded its own graduate training program designed to confer Ph.D. degrees. The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Sanford-Burnham was recently recognized by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) as a Candidate for Accreditation.*

According to the Dean of the program, Dr. Guy Salvesen, “Our eventual goal of full accreditation will serve as proof of what we already know; namely, that a Ph.D. degree from the Institute is a rigorous one of high quality that stacks up well against a degree from any of the other outstanding institutions that students might choose.”

Science careers: from postdoc to PI

by Faculty Contributor on August 10, 2011 at 10:43 am | 1 comment

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Dr. Malene Hansen (right), pictured here with graduate student Philip McQuary, emphasizes the importance of mentoring during the postdoctoral training years. (Photo by Nadia Borowski Scott)

In theory, our system of advanced science education is designed to move students through graduate school and then postdoctoral training en route to taking their places as principal investigators (PIs) heading their own research laboratories. In reality, even in past years there were clearly more scientists being trained than there were openings for lab heads and faculty positions. To some extent this bottleneck was alleviated over the past two decades by the boom in the biotechnology industry, which has offered an outside-of-academia source of jobs for trained scientists. However, the slumping economy has hit the biotech industry just as hard as everyone else, with downsizing taking a large bite out of available industrial jobs. And now, with competition for grant funding more intense than ever and academic job opportunities increasingly scarce, postdoctoral researchers often feel that they are in a holding pattern waiting for the occasional faculty or industrial position to open up. How can postdocs deal most effectively with this situation in terms of preparing themselves to compete for rare openings?

On July 28, the Sanford-Burnham Science Network (SBSN), an organization of postdocs and graduate students, sponsored a discussion of the tricky transition from postdoc to PI. The session was chaired by SBSN leaders Dr. Caroline Kumsta and Dr. Rachel Wilkie, both postdocs at the Institute. Dr. Malene Hansen and Dr. Stefan Riedl, two young Sanford-Burnham faculty members, led the discussion by sharing their own steps leading from postdoctoral researcher to assistant professor.

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Shared resources, shared successes

by Faculty Contributor on August 8, 2011 at 1:27 pm | 0 Comments

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Microscope available in Sanford-Burnham's Cell Imaging facility

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of posts highlighting Shared Resources available at Sanford-Burnham. Future posts will further explore some of the individual capabilities found in these core facilities.

Suppose you’re a new assistant professor just starting your career at Sanford-Burnham, and you need to perform some high-resolution fluorescence microscopy to finish your first big paper as a principal investigator. How do you afford that $400,000 confocal microscope for the key experiments? For that matter, how does anyone afford a $400,000 microscope? Here’s where Shared Resources saves the day. Just down the stairway sits the Zeiss Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope that Sanford-Burnham’s Cell Imaging facility has thoughtfully provided for you. How did you get so lucky?

First impressions

by Faculty Contributor on August 3, 2011 at 9:02 am | 6 Comments

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Dr. Mihee Kim, new postdoc in Dr. Robert Oshima's lab

Editor’s note: We often hear how important it is to make a good first impression. We thought it would be interesting to learn about newcomers’ first impressions of Sanford-Burnham, so we interviewed some new employees who each play a different role at the Institute’s La Jolla campus.

One of our most recent employees, Dr. Mihee Kim, has been a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Robert Oshima’s lab since June of this year. From previous positions at Harvard and NIH, Mihee had experience both with stem cells and with proteins that bind to nucleic acids (such as DNA). She is combining those disciplines in the Oshima lab’s attempt to understand the role of the Ets2 transcription factor (a protein that controls the expression of other genes) in the behavior of cancer stem cells. Mihee had heard of Sanford-Burnham because a former Harvard colleague, Dr. Dieter Wolf, took a position as professor here in 2007. She had no preconceived impressions of the Institute, but has been pleased to learn that our claims of having a collaborative culture are not overstated. Being somewhat new to working with animal models, Mihee has already established interactions with postdocs in several Institute labs to develop a robust system for identifying intestinal stem cells. She has also found the imaging and flow cytometry shared services to be very effective resources for interaction and for providing both training and expert analysis.

Most amazing, she says, is the fact that, “people actually respond in a helpful way to e-mail requests for advice and reagents. I never had that experience before!”

Mihee is excited about the freedom she has been given by Dr. Oshima to explore multiple aspects of Ets2/cancer stem cell function according to her own curiosity and intuition.

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Serendipity in science

by Faculty Contributor on July 28, 2011 at 12:46 pm | 0 Comments

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Stephen Hawking, famous English physicist, lives with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), a debilitating disese that affects motor neurons.

Many people are familiar with the story of Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin produced by mold growing in a bacterial culture. These same people would probably be surprised at how often carefully planned scientific experiments yield unexpected (and even unwanted!) results, usually leading to repetition of the experiment to discover where things went wrong. However, one mark of a really good investigator (like Fleming) is the ability to recognize when the “error” may actually be a truth that provides a key new insight. The phenomenon of looking for one thing and serendipitously finding another plays a surprisingly frequent role in the process of scientific discovery.

A case in point can be found in studies of motor neuron degeneration being carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Dongxian Zhang, associate professor at Sanford-Burnham. The death of motor neurons in the spinal cord is responsible for lethal diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy and amyotropic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), neither of which is treatable or curable. Dr. Zhang’s group hypothesized that motor neuron death might be caused by the absence or malfunction of a specific type of membrane receptor called MNR. To test their theory more directly, they paid a commercial company to create a mouse in which MNR was genetically deleted. Sure enough, motor neurons in these mice degenerated a few days after birth. To further prove their point, the group attempted to rescue the lethal defect by genetically adding back the MNR gene. To their consternation, these transgenic rescue mice still died shortly after birth.

“At that point we were completely stumped and discouraged,” confesses Dr. Zhang.

Science…under the Tuscan sun

by Faculty Contributor on July 21, 2011 at 2:24 pm | 0 Comments

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Harrison Ford plays a glycobiologist in the movie Extraordinary Measures.

In the movie Extraordinary Measures, Harrison Ford plays a glycobiologist.

If brides and grooms can have destination weddings, then scientists should be able to have destination research conferences. These types of conferences are increasingly popular as opportunities for scientists to experience fun locales while also interacting and exchanging ideas with a relatively intimate group of expert colleagues. The Gordon Research Conferences have been trendsetters with this format since the 1930s, sponsoring scientific meetings on a variety of topics at sites within the U.S. Starting in 1990, Gordon Conferences have been held in more exotic foreign locations, including Italy, Switzerland, Japan, England, Hong Kong… and even Texas.

Earlier this summer, Dr. Hudson Freeze, program director in Sanford-Burnham’s Sanford Children’s Health Research Center, chaired the Gordon Conference on Glycobiology in Lucca, Italy. 170 glycobiologists from around the world gathered to hear about exciting new developments in the science of carbohydrates (sugar molecules) and the complex molecules like proteins and lipids whose properties are influenced by incorporation of carbohydrates. Once a rather understudied area of biology, glycobiology has been transformed by the realization that carbohydrates mediate many of the key molecular interactions that govern cellular function. Meeting topics included the effects of sugar modifications during development, the role of carbohydrates in normal adult physiology and the involvement of carbohydrates in tissue engineering and repair, including their importance in stem cell biology.

The San Diego Foundation supports science

by Faculty Contributor on July 20, 2011 at 1:45 pm | 1 comment

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iRGD peptides can specifically target cancer drugs (red) to the blood vessels that feed tumors (green). (Image courtesy of Dr. Kazuki Sugahara)iRGD peptides can specifically target cancer drugs (red) to the blood vessels that feed tumors (green). (Image courtesy of Dr. Kazuki Sugahara)

iRGD peptides can specifically target cancer drugs (red) to the blood vessels that feed tumors (green). (Image courtesy of Kazuki

At a time when scientists are having increasing difficulty acquiring financial support from federal sources, alternative sources of funding are becoming more important for maintaining the momentum of critical research at universities, research institutes and even industrial laboratories. At Sanford-Burnham, research assistant professor Dr. Kazuki N. Sugahara was recently awarded a one-year, $75,000 grant from The San Diego Foundation, via the The Blasker-Rose-Miah Fund. This marks one of the few times that a Sanford-Burnham investigator has received funding from this source, underscoring the novelty and importance of the project. This key piece of local funding will allow Dr. Sugahara to continue his research on the use of tissue-penetrating peptides that can detect developing tumors and enhance the delivery of cancer therapeutic drugs.

Top 10 most-read blog posts of 2012: #6

Four “secrets” to success in science

Serendipity strikes again

Four “secrets” to success in science

Better luck next time: 7 tips for handling research grant rejection

Muscling up with MyoD

Sanford-Burnham’s “Two Cultures”

Metabolomics fuels cancer drug discovery

Meet Sanford-Burnham’s graduate students

Science careers: from postdoc to PI

Shared resources, shared successes

First impressions

Serendipity in science

Science…under the Tuscan sun

The San Diego Foundation supports science

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