The Eagle - where DNA wasn't discovered

I went to The Eagle pub in Cambridge last night with Drs. Hull and Fisher. Despite numerous signs to the contrary this is not where Crick and Watson discovered DNA, but where it was announced over lunch that they had "discovered the secret of life" - the structure of DNA. That was in 1953. We'd known of DNA for decades by then.

How would you discover DNA in a pub? Inside a steak and kidney pie? Fortunately the blue plaque outside was more accurate.

small science: a modest approach to research

Alec Jeffreys is one of my science heroes not directly because of DNA profiling but owing to the way in which he works. You can read more about it here and here - the gist of it is that Jeffreys, according to Nobel Laureate (Phys/Med 1978) Daniel Nathans, is a 'small scientist', which sounds like an insult, but of course is not.

'(A small scientist) is someone who can deliver without an army, with modest resources and whose work is based purely upon curiosity'. Alec Jeffreys.

I believe that biology has placed too much emphasis on massive projects that consume our increasingly limited financial resources*, but with a bit more thought and planning in our experimental designs we can increase our 'bang-for-buck' and diversify the research base. Many experiments simply throw grunt at problems where more elegant (and inexpensive) solutions would be more appropriate. We will always need some big projects, but not all projects need to be big. We need more small scientists.

Convergent Evolution: Tenrecs

Tenrecs are amazing examples of convergent evolution. How can this not be a proper hedgehog?

Yet it seems that these little tenrec chaps are probably more closely related to golden moles, aardvarks, and elephant shrews, and (more distantly) to elephants and sea cows than to common hedgehogs as they belong to  the Afrotheria clade. There are also tenrecs that look like shrews (including the Dobson's Shrew Tenrec - no relation) and otters.

What a marvellous thing evolution is.

InChI Barcodes

I heard a story about a sleepy pharmacist confusing Acyclovir and Avloclor (chloroquine), leading to the patient being given megadoses of an anti-malarial to treat shingles. Hmm, could've been nasty. This sort of thing isn't surprising given the stupid brand names some drugs have. There is, in fact, quite some literature on it. I imagined that we used barcodes or something similar to prevent this.

I particularly like the idea of using a molecule's InChIKey to generate a barcode. That way you don't need a registry to assign and track barcodes - it is implicit in the combination of molecular structure and barcode-generating algorithm.

Acyclovir           Avloclor

MKUXAQIIEYXACX-NTGMBSGFCM          WHTVZRBIWZFKQO-PKSOQXRJCD

This took me about ten seconds using DrugBank and this little website for generating barcodes. They might not look too different to the human eye, but to the special barcode bipper they are like calcite and casein.

Here I've used Aztec symbology, but I'm no barcode expert - is it rich enough? I'll guess not because I bet you can't round-trip from structure to barcode to structure (#molecules >> #barcodes).