Beaker is 2 years old today!

On March 24, 2010, we published the very first blog post here on Beaker. It was about the excitement surrounding the generous $50 million gift from T. Denny Sanford that resulted in our name change from Burnham Institute for Medical Research to Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute—quite a milestone in the Institute’s history.

Since then, we have published 384 posts (an average of one post every 1.9 days!) by 17 different bloggers on subjects ranging from autophagy to zebrafish that make up 29 categories, including scientific topics as well as news about our people and events. These posts have racked up an impressive 397,653 page views by 231,347 unique visitors.

Readers of Beaker often continue the conversation with us by following us on Facebook and Twitter, and in turn, those outlets lead more readers to discover Beaker. For example, our Twitter profile @SanfordBurnham has grown from 175 to 1,418 followers and @SBI_Events has skyrocketed from 69 to 1,988 followers. Beaker posts have also made appearances in the San Diego Union-Tribune, La Jolla Light, ResearchBlogging.org, Nature’s ConferenceCast blog, and Florida Biotechnology News.

Thank you to all of our readers, fans, and followers! We look forward to connecting with you for many more years to come.

In the meantime, please enjoy reading (or re-reading) the top 10 most-read Beaker blog posts of all time:

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As 2011 draws to a close, we look back on our top 11 most popular blog posts published in 2011. Here they are…enjoy!

1. How fatty diets cause diabetes
2. Witnessing the birth of a new scientific field
3. Two-faced nanoparticles and cancer
4. Fighting fat with fat
5. Crunching the proteome
6. Science careers: from postdoc to PI
7. Students find summer training opportunities close to home
8. How cells sense nutrients and fuel cancer cell growth
9. Getting to the root of Alzheimer’s disease
10. What is “Disease in a Dish?”
11. A new stem cell enters the mix

See our scientists and staff spread holiday cheer in their native languages.

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.

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