Personal Scientist Women Blogs
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Not sure what to do with this space anymore. I know what I'd like to do in the blogosphere, but I don't have time. And when I do things half-assed , it I need a place to rant, but ranting over real people does not seem right when I can hide behind a pseud. Moreover, far to many people know My Real Self, so ranting about everyday work and personal stuff is out of the question too.
hgg
YoungFemaleScientist
I had an interesting experience about a week ago while hanging out with a new friend. We were buying beer and pooling our pocket money to give as a present for the host of a going-away party, and didn't have anything to wrap it in. We wanted to be classy and get an envelope. (If this happens in science, you go home and drink whiskey and come back the next day and try it 8 more times and take careful notes and try to figure out why you got one answer 5 times and the opposite answer 3 times, and then you modify your protocol and do it another 8 times and if you get the same answer 7 times, you publish it and say +/- 1.
On the Nobel Prize front, 2009 is turning into a banner year for both nucleic acid chemistry and women scientists. As I posted earlier this week , two of the three winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine ("for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase") are women. And today it was announced that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Ada E. Yonath along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A.
Women in Science
DoctorMama
As I mentioned before, one of my best friends , Christina Shea, just published her second novel , a work that you – my readers – helped bring to fruition. And as promised, here is my interview with the author. I came to blogging via the infertility community ; Christina is a fellow IVF veteran as well as an adoptive mother (she has a balanced translocation, the same problem that Julia faced).
I ran across a reference to aqua fortis in one of the commentaries in Chemical News (1891). The conversation is about a suit in court where a chemist was injured when an inappropriately packaged bottle of aqua fortis spilled. (It had a cork, and according to the rather snarky commentator, the judge — and the chemist in question — should have known that aqua fortis should not be capped with a cork.) Aqua fortis , literally strong water, was once the common name for nitric acid. Concentrated nitric acid is a strong oxidizing agent (I can still see the small scar on my mother's hand from a spill in her undergraduate days), and I imagine would rather quickly eat away any organic matter, such as a cork.
The Culture of Chemistry
A little while ago, another mom (A) joined our playgroup. We average in our thirties; A is closer to forty, and has a two-year-old. My pregnant friend, holding my Tater, asked if we were planning to have another baby; I said, maybe in a few years. And, I added, we are very lucky; we can plan such a thing with reasonable certainty, and it's not always so easy.
A Natural Scientist
I don’t even know where to begin. An apology for not posting for so long? A thank you to ScientistMother for making me feel less lame for posting after such a long hiatus?
Mother of All Scientists
Biochem Belle has articulated this better than I, but I will share here my thoughts on the Miller-McCune article about how the "real science gap" appears to mean a reduction in the white male demographic in the workforce. It describes exactly what I've seen a lot of people talking more informally about: the system is currently constructed as a pyramid scheme, and it leads many productive, smart people (who don't have the luck factor that helps land a TT position) to go elsewhere and/or leave science because the model is unsustainable. It suggests that we need to figure out how to revamp the postdoctoral experience to be more like a medical residency that trains PhD level scientists for some specific area (and not just uses them as bench monkeys to do our work for us), so they can be retained in a productive capacity and contribute to the growth of innovation.
ChemicalBiLOLogy
Aetiology
I mentioned last month that we are planning an Emerging Diseases conference here in April. Things are moving quickly and registration is now open ( here ). Abstract submission is also up and running here .When the vaginal microbiome gets out of whack, it causes an uncomfortable, often chronic condition known as bacterial vaginosis, which is associated with pregnancy complications such as premature birth as well as a heightened risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases. But finding ways to return the disrupted vaginal microbiome to its normal, healthy state has proven difficult because nobody knows what ‘normal’ really means. As Nature Medicine reported in a July 2011 news feature , a team of scientists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore had found that there are many naturally occurring versions of the microbiome, in part because the bacteria present in a woman’s vagina may vary according to her ethnicity.
Spoonful of Medicine
Aspiring Mommy-Scientist
I was reminded yesterday that it has been a ridiculously long time since I posted, again. I'm in my 8th month of pregnancy and still doing well...starting to get a bit more uncomfortable, from the baby riding up against my ribs and causing reflux, to the weight of this big baby causing pain in my pubic bone and the summer heat causing swollen feet and ankles. But overall, the pregnancy has really been treating me well.When I began to blog almost 5 years ago, I wanted to share stories of my graduate school experience with other women scientists in the hopes that we could form a virtual support network for each other. Back then it took me weeks to find even one other woman doing the same thing with a blog. Today, there is a whole community of women blogging about their experiences in science and engineering, from undergraduates to tenured faculty. A google search of "woman science blog" or similar will point to some prominent blogs and from there a newbie blog reader can use blog rolls and comment threads to find the panopoly of bloggers having more intimate conversations about life, work, and the precarious juggling act of "having it all." You might have guessed this was coming.