High Productivity - an Aging Phenomenon?

The soccer field is so frustrating. With age I have learned exactly what to do on the field but physically am no longer capable of actually doing it. Meanwhile the young punks mindlessly whizz by and crash out of bounds. Is it the same with science?

The conventional wisdom has been that scientific productivity dwindles with age - brilliant young scientists making outstanding conceptual leaps. However, recent work suggests that this is not the case, and that prime productivity is maybe around 50 years old.

Well, I'm beginning to come round to the idea that older folks maybe aren't as clapped out as we all used to think. For example, members of our center had the pleasure this last month of lecturing on "The Molecules of Life" to ORICL - the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning. The class was mostly retired scientists and engineers and, let me tell you, they were the liveliest bunch of students I have lectured to in quite a while. This begs the question as to whether they were always that engaged or have perked up with the advancing decades. I know the latter is true of myself - the reason I interminably interrupt and yap about in seminars others give is experience - whereas 30 years ago I could understand hardly anything scientists were talking about, these days it comes much more easily, and I think the same may have been true of our ORICL audience. And some scientists I know keep working for ever and ever, it seems. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a 102-year-old Nobel winning scientist (pictured above) said: 'Above all, don't fear the difficult moments - the best comes from them."

So maybe instead of prematurely fretting about retirement planning, 51-year-olds like myself should realise that the best years of our lives are still ahead? This maybe true in science, but it doesn't alter the fact that I'd still like to punt those mindless young punks off the soccer field - if only I could catch them!

Who needs supercomputers? - Just use your cell phone.

OR



?.

As a specialist editor of Computer Physics Communications I regularly get issues in the mail, and was amused to read in the latest edition an article entitled "Mobile Phone as a Platform for Numerical Simulation" by Filip Sala of Warsaw University. Today's cellphones have about the CPU power of PCs of the late 1990s, and there are 5 billion of the pesky little things. Sala managed to use one to simulate light propagation in linear and nonlinear media based on the one-dimensional Schrödinger equation and molecular reorientation in nematic liquid crystals. So who needs supercomputers? - just get your daughters off the phone. Well, maybe supercomputers are easier after all......

Imagine your computer working 18,000 times faster. This guy doesn't have to....

On the Volunteer TV web page. Well, I DO have to, in fact, because I don't actually sit down in front of Jaguar myself and use it - my co-workers, such as Roland and Benjamin, do. But the spirit of the article is what counts......

Book recommendation

Not often that you get a book recommendation from Club Mod, but this one - A Renegade History of the United States - was raucously entertaining. Thaddeus Russell shows how the dregs of American society - the slaves, drunks, prostitutes, Irish (!) etc - shaped many of the freedoms that we take for granted today - in direct disobeyance of the authorities, such as being able to go to a dance, wear what we like, play rock music etc. It also provides evidence against some of the conventional wisdom we have all internalized, showing, for example, that ex-slaves wanted to go back to being slaves, the deep unpopularity among the populace of going to war in World War II, and so on.

I loved it.

Decoupling.....

..and the Honorary Doctorate.

I'm back in Heidelberg and gave a talk at a Chemistry Symposium here today (as, by the way, did Stefan Fischer, Petra Imhof and Tomasz Berezniak of our group). Tonight, at the symposium an Honorary Doctorate was awarded to Carl Djerassi, known for his 1950s work on the synthesis of norethindrone, the first effective oral contraceptive.

This invention effectively divorced sex from reproduction - a truly world-shattering effect of science on society - and contributed more to women's liberation than has any political act, allowing millions of women to pursue a career without sacrificing a sexual relationship.

Now the decoupling of sex and reproduction is so highly unnatural that society never has learned how to deal with it. When sex was robbed of its primeval physiological potency, millions of years of evolution, that have hard-wired instincts and associated morals into us arising from sex causing babies, were, in an instant, rendered obsolete. This hard-wiring meant that society could not change as quickly, and, anyway, the sustained association of sex with disease persists. But what will happen should scientists eventually take the next step, eradicating the sexually-transmitted diseases, thus removing all physiological 'danger' whatsoever? Society challenges scientists, and then vice versa.

Peer Review, Again

Peer review can be exasperating, but also fun. A while ago I reposted some amusing reviewer comments from the journal "Environmental Microbiology". Well, just after that we submitted a paper for which one reviewer was raving about the work and the other thought it boring - chalk and cheese it was.

Of course I can't repost the above anonymous reviews here. But I thought it would be fun to compose two reviews myself, the first scathing and the other glowing.  Although fictitious, they are composed of actual reviewer comments about our manuscripts submitted over the last year or so. (And, yes, one of the reviewers, who presumably has a Ph.D., does spell the word "know" as "no".)

Reviewer I.

 Essentially, the paper either tells us what we already know, or makes novel assertions which are uncheckable and based on needless ad-hoc-erie. The authors should change the tone of their paper to be constructive rather than "criticizing" the work of other people - by comparing to such works (sic), the authors are doing themselves a disservice, as they should no (sic) that is really no longer acceptable. This submission will not help the reputations of any of the coauthors as it is really not at the level one would expect for three of the main authors. They should all provide a bit more guidance, mentorship and advise (sic)  to the apparently junior author, in the opinion of the review (sic) who is very familiar with the very nice high quality publications of Smith. The impression left on this reviewer is one of being cheated, as if only the first half of a fine review article was provided. Poorly designed and provides only trivial results, if any. The ball-and-spring model is too simplistic and I do not think that any of the conclusions can be reliable.

Reviewer II.

An important and sorely-needed contribution to the field and will have an impact, or should have, not only on practical strain development, but also in basic research into microbial physiology. The approach stimulates new ideas, is interesting and very promising judging from the results exposed in this manuscript.  The paper is clearly written, well executed, and richly supported by an abundance of supplemental materials. The work is thorough, complete and well written. This interesting paper provides new insights and suggests a scheme which has many interesting elements and should make an important contribution to the field. In summary, this manuscript is an important physical contribution to our understanding of conformational transitions in proteins.This is an outstanding piece of work: an exciting and unexpected discovery that may also be of importance to other biocatalysts. It is an important step towards interpreting neutron scattering data and obtaining quantitative agreement between MD results and neutron data. The simulations are carried out competently, the mathematical analysis is thorough, the results appear to be of very high quality and the presentation is clear. The work should be of general interest for all kinds of organisms. It provides a good example of this type of approach and has been carefully performed –

Hmm...accept or reject, I wonder?

UT Supercomputer Predicts Revolution

Well, I knew the UT supercomputers were good. After all, we have peered into the origin of life, probed biofuel barriers, helped design drugs  and done myriad other things with them. But I didn't know they were capable of predicting revolutions. Apparently so, according to this BBC report on data mining with the UT SGI Altix "Nautilus" machine. 

"S'ils n'ont pas d'ordinateur, qu'ils mangent de la brioche!":