Tonight’s assigned reading for the first lecture of a class tomorrow. Awesome
This class is simultaneously taught at UC Berkeley and MIT via cameras with one professor from each campus teaching different portions of the class. They’re in the process of writing a book and Berkeley/MIT students are their e. coli experimentation subjects. (Taken with Instagram at Stanley Hall)
From technicallyhuman,
Parking at Berkeley is really competitive.
That’s certainly one way of describing it.
We live in a capitalist system, somebody has to fund this research and science. The government doesn’t have the money.
Jay Keasling, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) program, founder of the new Richmond lab, and pioneer of synthetic biology research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley, responding to concerns about the large energy and biotechnology corporations that are “funding this research and licensing the patented new technologies it produces.”
Life is hard.
Source: sfbg.com
STUDY HARD OR DIE TRYING (Taken with Instagram at Roger W. Heyns (East) Reading Room)
You may notice the name Gutenberg at the very top, well this reading room also includes the names Dante, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Galileo, Descartes, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Kant, Gibbon, Goethe, Cuvier and Darwin.
Mutational cancer theories do not explain why cancers: 1) have clonal individual karyotypes; 2) have polygenic transcriptomes and phenotypes; 3) have flexible karyotypes, which evolve progressive malignancy and drug resistance, but maintain autonomy and even immortality; and 4) Why carcinogens induce cancer only after conspicuously long latent periods of years to decades. To answer these questions, this course tests a new karyotypic theory, which postulates that cancers evolve much like new species.
The course description to MCB 118 - “The Cancer Karyotype: What it is and What it Does” by Molecular & Cell Biology professor Peter Duesberg.
If something seems off to you about the course description then you’re on to something, this “new karyotypic theory” is highly controversial because it’s most likely horseshit. However Peter is no stranger to controversy as one of the most prominent AIDS denialists in the world. He also might have won a Nobel Prize for his early work on cancer but that’s not likely to happen now because of his other work. I doubt that his “new theory” will help his cause.
The point of this post is that Peter is teaching a course again and I’m interested in taking it for the experience. I can’t think or name many biologists who are as polarizing as Peter but as a budding scientist it’s also important to “explore” or “consider” other options that aren’t orthodoxy.
It’s highly likely that I may walk away from this class knowing that I can never do anything with the information that I had to regurgitate for a letter grade but it’s also highly likely that I’ll walk away from such an experience knowing a lot more about how science functions when you’re wading into uncharted territory. I think that alone is worth giving this class a shot.
![Candidates for ASUC Executive Vice President speak at The Daily Californian candidates forum in 1988. From left: Cris Armenta, Mike Powell, Felipe Compos and Pam Brown. (Photo by David Yee) [source]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m67ke0ldoe1qzs6yjo1_500.jpg)
Candidates for ASUC Executive Vice President speak at The Daily Californian candidates forum in 1988. From left: Cris Armenta, Mike Powell, Felipe Compos and Pam Brown. (Photo by David Yee) [source]
Source: dailycal.org
