• Who needs it: We don't have a medical school, but the University of Kansas (KU) does, and we have the stronger computer science and overall engineering research programs here. Electrical, Computer, Mechanical, Industrial, Civil, and Chemical Engineering could all benefit from contact with BME. That's just our college; then there's Anatomy and Physiology in Vet Med, Physics, Biology, Statistics (for the OR, optimization, and control theory), Math, Biochem, Chemistry, in roughly that order. Business Administration, MIS, even Architecture and Design for the visualization aspects. Maybe the Genetics program in Plant Path. Plus, you don't have to have a medical school to have a medical library.


• Why we need it: To have research in telemedicine, applied sensor networks, and embedded systems - all very fundable areas; to expand into applied biophysics, microbiology, diagnostic medicine; to build on our core competencies in robotics, control systems, and optimization.


• When we need it (and how long we've needed it): Many engineering faculty, staff, and students would doubtless disagree with my assertion that we've been ready for a BME department for the last 10-20 years at least, but I'm speaking from what I saw at Hopkins, which has a top BME department and pretty good EE and CS departments. Also, UIUC didn't have BME when I was a grad student there, and now it does. And if that doesn't convince you, well... look! Vitruvian Man icon! Sparkly!


• How bad we need it: As a function of opportunity cost from unmet needs and unclaimed available funding, I would say we need it more than anything else. In terms of sheer intellectual benefit I put Linguistics first, but that's more an osmosis and head count thing.


• Where it should live (i.e., to what college it should belong): Engineering would be best equipped for BME, though I could see Vet Med housing a biomedicine program with certain telemedical and prosthetic components. I don't know enough about CVM to say, but from my experience: they are surprisingly well-funded by NIH, but in terms of untapped potential and staying power in bioinformatics, it's going to take major input from Engineering, Arts and Sciences, and Agriculture. Plant sciences gets short shrift in the BME arena, but if one of you has the perfect Bionic Ent idea, now's your chance to post a comment about it without looking like a kook.

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Banazir

Today, martin_samuel and I attended a K-State EcoGen tutorial on GeneMarker, a software package for fluorescent molecular marker analysis.

( About the workshop )

All in all, it was useful and informative workshop to Martin and me, if only to give us a hands-on experience with AFLP analysis and a high-level overview of SNP data and the data flow pipeline.

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Banazir

Today was the kickoff meeting of our Arthropod Genomics Center. The introductions were made by Sue Brown, our lead PI, and some of the other principals:

• Rollie Clem for the grants committee


• Roman Ganta for the curriculum committee


• Mike Smith for the seminar committee


• Rob Denell for the symposium committee

Our venue was the Purple Pride Room of the K-State Alumni Center, one that evokes the (lower four) Tower Rooms of the Beckman Institute. Let me just say that the Alumni Center does seem an excellent investment, and will see useful life far beyond its pure fundraising purposes - especially when people start to realize what a nice resource we have for meetings.

This brings me to five Targeted Excellence projects on which I have varying degrees of involvement: Bioinformatics (2004), Global Research on Water-based Economies (2004), Ecological Genomics (2005), Sensor Networks (2005), and Arthropod Genomics (2006). It's a lot to have one one's plate, but of course the bioinformatics ones are intervoven.

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Banazir

Here's my new biology icon, cross-posted from _scientists_ and animatedgifs. Feel free to take and share it!

Comments and credit are appreciated.

( Image credits )

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Banazir

(Cross-posted to infojunkies and _scientists_.)
Edit, 13:40 CST Sat 24 Dec 2005 - I added the BBC article on British stem cell researchers' reactions and the New York Times article on Dr. Hwang.


Surrounded by reporters outside his office after tendering his resignation from Seoul National University, Dr. Hwang Woo Suk apologizes to South Korea on December 23, 2005.
Photo from The Telegraph (UK).

( South Korean professor Hwang Woo Suk resigns after university investigators say he fabricated stem cell research )

Source: [ Red Herring ]
Other articles: [ Chosun Ilbo (South Korea) | BBC (UK) | New York Times (USA) | Telegraph (UK) | Voice of America (USA) | ABC News (USA) | MSNBC (USA) | Detroit Free Press (USA) ]
Reference: [ Wikipedia articles: ( Hwang Woo Suk * stem cells * cloning ) | New Scientist piece on sex and cloning ]

( My thoughts: judge not, etc. )
( Some additional comments on fame and personal glory versus privacy and the right to an ordinary life )

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Banazir