Blog of Bermanism

As many of you know, I turned the big 3-3 on November 9th this year. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, since it was, after all, my 33rd birthday, and there’s nothing big about that one, other than the fact that it is divisible by 11 (geek!). Anyway, it just so happened that my birthday coincided with this year’s showing of the latest installment of Warren Miller’s Extreme Skiing documentaries, Playground. I love these films, as do most serious and amateur skiers in the world. The films always exhibit some of the most intense skiing you’ll ever see and the skiers and the type of terrain they ski in these movies always makes you feel like you just started skiing yesterday. This year’s movie was just an absolute adrenaline rush from beginning to end. It featured such insanity as Ski Dubai and ski-parasailing at 150mph down the side of a mountain, awesome stuff!

Anyway, I can go on all day about the movie. If you like skiing, or just plain enjoy sports and amazing cinematography, you should go see this movie. Rachel, who doesn’t ski at all, always really enjoys seeing the movies. They are always a huge event at a big old theater with prizes and lots of cheering and excitement. So, I thought that it would be a great idea if I invited whoever wanted to, to come along to see the movie with me in celebration of my birthday. We ended up having about 18 people show up, which was perfect. We took up two rows of the Castro Theater in San Francisco and we all really enjoyed ourselves.

Before the movie, Rachel took me to a restaurant that we’ve both been wanting to try for a long time, the House of Prime Rib. The name of the restaurant doesn’t get much more descriptive; this place must go through at least 10 cows per night. Seriously though, they had some of the best prime rib that I’ve had in a long time. It was so much food. I got the medium-small sized steak and Rachel got the small one. My steak lasted me two days, but it was crazy good. We also saw this table full of guys that were each at least 230lbs each, each get the “King-James” steak, which had to be 5lbs of meat. It was the quintessential side of beef. They ate it all. It was quite impressive, since the steak was only a small part of the meal. they gave you potatoes, salad, corn bread, cream of corn, and, of course, dessert. It was really excellent and Rachel and I had a really good time there.

I also got some really good presents for my birthday. Rachel got me a really nice rain jacket, something that I’ve need forever, but never really took the time to go buy. It’s a good thing she pays attention when I complain about not having things. I also got way more money than I should have for a 33rd birthday, but it is great that people care enough to give me gifts on my birthday still, even though I’d be happy with a card, email, or just a phone call. Also, my friend Ken who is on my rowing team with me, gave me an entire beer brewing kit. Ken’s been brewing beer for years and really makes some good stuff. He figured that my science and chemistry background, plus my love of beer, would make me the perfect candidate to do homebrew. Anyway, it was a really thoughtful gift and we recently tried to make my first batch of beer. I made an Amber Lager. It should be ready around the second week of January, so we’ll see if it turns out.

Anyway, it was another great birthday, to close out another great year. This next year should be one of the most intense and exciting of my life with the new baby on the way. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

The latest update on the impending parenthood of Rachel and I is that we opted to undergo a series of advanced genetic testing to more accurately determine the risk of our baby having developmental defects. The testing procedures were non-invasive, except for blood drawn from Rachel’s arm (which she loves, NOT!). The tests included a high resolution ultrasound (which was shown on the first post about Rachel’s pregnancy) and a series of blood tests. The ultrasound test looked for something called nuchal translucency, or fluid collected around the back of the neck where the neural tube would have closed. A high degree of nuchal translucency increases the chances of the presence of chromosomal abnormalities like Down’s syndrome (trisomy 21), Edward’s syndrome (trisomy 18) and Patau syndrome (trisomy 13). In addition, two rounds of blood tests, called the AFP tests, were administered to determine the likelihood that our baby had a neural tube defect, such as spina bifida (failure of neural tube closure and exposure of the spinal cord to the environment) and anacephaly (the lack of brain development). The was also a test for protein markers in Rachel’s blood that would indicate Down’s syndrome.

So, now that I’ve totally lost you, the results are in and there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that our baby has these problems, which is less than a 0.01% chance. So, this is really positive news and we’re quite happy that our baby will likely come out only as messed up as Rachel and I are already. Now all we have to do is not screw up the baby after birth. That’s gonna be interesting.

Well, as usual, I said that I would try to write a synopsis for each day that I was in San Diego at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, but that didn’t happen. So, I’ll write a brief summary here.

In a nutshell, the meeting was great. I really enjoy this meeting, though I seem to be in the minority on that opinion. Most people’s problem with the meeting is the sheer size it and the volume of information available to you during the course of the week. This year, registration reached 31,898 at its peak. As my friend Jennie said, “That’s a lot of nerds.” We pretty much take over what ever city is unfortunate enough to host the meeting every year. The down town area is suddenly over run with tons of highly intelligent, highly educated people from all over the world who have no fashion sense, very little social ability, and who have just been let out from under the oppressive rock that they’ve been under all year, which means that they let loose with reckless abandon. So, the bottom line, you have 30,000 brainiacs (literally in this case), wreaking havoc on the city because they are blitzed out of their minds. Somehow, though, everyone shows up to the meeting the next day and conducts business as usual.

So, aside from all the fashion nightmares, the people who went out to the bar wearing their Neuroscience badge (because they thought that the “Ph.D” insignia on the badge would get them laid), and the people that brought their poster tubes with them everywhere as if they contained some kind of state secret, the meeting itself (where all of this is perfectly normal) was fantastic. I’ve learned to stay away from the minisymposia for the most part. I just fall asleep half way through the talks, and you only get a 10 minute summary of the data that the presenter has accumulated in the past year followed by two people asking questions. It isn’t the best environment for fostering collaborative discussion about the research being presented. I’ve found that the poster sessions are the place to be to get the most information and interaction. So, other than going to all of the big talks, I pretty much stayed on the poster floor all day long. This year boasted a poster presentation area equal to 1/2 of the entire ground floor of the San Diego convention center. Each meeting day had two poster sessions, each of which had roughly 1,500 posters being presented for a grand total of 15,000 posters for the week. That’s a whole lot of data being presented. Poster sessions of that magnitude can be pretty hard to navigate, especially for me since I have a project on Alzheimer’s disease and a project on Parkinson’s disease, two of the largest fields of study in Neuroscience today. Most poster sessions had 4-6 sections (usually 24 posters each) devoted to these diseases. Since I study both, this meant a very large amount of posters for me to see, usually on the order of 150/day. Granted, after perusing the posters for around 45 minutes, I probably only hang out at 10 posters per session. But, I got a lot of really great information, learned new ways of doing things that I’ve been trying to do, got a lot of new ideas, found out that some of my ideas have already been done (I hate that), learned ways to fix problems that I’ve been having in the lab, and best of all, I learned that the research that I’m doing is incredibly relevant and unique in the field.

This was my first year presenting a poster at this meeting, though it was my third year attending the meeting. I finally had collected enough data from my Parkinson’s project to present it and get good feedback. Presenting a poster is like giving a four hour talk that you repeat about every 20 – 30 minutes. The difference is that you get all of the experts in the field coming up to your poster one-on-one to talk to you about your research. Very often, they give you ideas and feedback that is useful to your continued research, and hopefully you leave feeling like your project will contribute positively to your field of interest. This is what happened in my case. So many people got truly excited by my research that I formed two new collaborations to further exploit the model we’ve developed. It is really exciting, and I’m really looking forward to the future of the project. I also know exactly how to finish up the research so that we have a very strong publication, and that is exciting in its own right. The poster presentation was, overall, a fantastic experience, even if my back and feet were throbbing by the end of it.

Aside from the poster sessions, the meeting boasted some fantastic Presidential lectures on the state of various fields of study within the Neuroscience community. In addition, there were some special speakers that gave non-traditional and surprisingly good talks about how Neuroscience is affecting the world. Among the more memorable were Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot (among other impressive things that we use everyday), and former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. Both had surprisingly interesting things to say and I enjoyed the talks a lot.

Probably the best thing about going to these meetings, however, is that you get a chance to catch up with friends that you don’t get to see all the time, or to have fun with people that you do see a lot in the lab. In my case, I was able to reconnect with several people that were a big part of my graduate school life, Steve and Igor, and a newer friend who was an undergraduate research assistant when I was there, Jennie. We went out, had a great time as usual, caught up on each other’s lives and progress on our respective careers. And, we got drunk and stupid, fitting nicely into the cliche that is the drunk Neuroscience Nerd running unobstructed around downtown San Diego. At least, I suppose, we didn’t have our name tags on and we didn’t have our poster tubes with us. But, we fit the rest of the stereotype (though each of our wives dresses us, so we actually looked pretty decent).

So, that was the meeting in a nutshell. I’ve returned from it with a renewed sense of validation and purpose and a healthy dose of pride in my research. I’m going to try to carry this energy and work hard to finish up this project so that I can publish this paper and finally have my first publication.

Oh, for those of you who are wondering, we didn’t have any signs of smoke from the San Diego fires while we were there. I believe that they were largely under control and extinguished before we arrived, and the fires were way too far outside of the downtown area to affect us.

Next year’s meeting will be in Washington, DC, so that will be exciting and I’m looking forward to having more great data to present.

As usual, the past few weeks have found me lying naked on the beach with an empty bottle of whiskey in my hands wondering what happened to the future I envisioned for myself….

Yeah right!

Boy have I been busy. Everything sort of came down in the last three weeks. We’ve been racing our hearts out at some great regattas all over the nation and I’ve wanted to write about those experiences in detail here, and I will very soon. For now, just know that The Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston, MA was a truly wonderful experience and I hope that I have the opportunity to do it over and over again. The Head of the American Regatta in Sacramento, CA was also an awesome experience, which I’ll write about as well.

In addition to all of the racing, I’ve moved our website to a new hosting provider. I was wish Powweb for years and years, probably as long as this website has existed. But, their service became horribly slow and impossible to deal with, so I left them for GoDaddy.com. So far, I’m really impressed with their service. Not only is the website access INFINITELY faster, but the service is cheaper, their interface more intuitive, and their tech support (the little I’ve needed) has been great! Maybe I’m alone in this, but I’m pretty happy with the move so far. I just like that my website responds like I want it to, and that my blog doesn’t take 10 years to load a single page. My mom’s website, and the Austin Rowing Club’s website are also hosted on powweb and I’m in the process of moving them all over to GoDaddy as well. It is a big job to migrate a website, especially one that operates all of your email and that people check regularly. In the case of ARC’s and my mom’s websites, their commerce and business depend on the website’s proper operation. Anyway, it is a big job and takes a lot of time, but I think it will be a good thing in the long run for everyone.

So, with the migration of my website, I have renewed interest in posting blog entries. I’m going to try to catch up on the regattas post by the end of tomorrow, and then I’d like to start writing about the conference that I’m attending right now in San Diego, CA, the Society for Neuroscience, 2007. As of this morning, the attendance at the meeting is 30,192. That’s pretty amazing, and a whole lot of nerds in one place.

A number of my friends from graduate school are here, which is good considering the people in my lab generally don’t go out of their way to spend time with me. So, I’ve got a lot of social potential this week, which, along with the science potential, is one of the greatest things about coming to these meetings.  I’m looking forward to a productive week of catching up on the field of neuroscience and catching up with old friends while my liver catches up to months of not drinking much at all. It should be fun, and I’ll hopefully keep you posted.

I’m actually presenting a poster at this year’s meeting, because, finally, after two years, I have enough data to show something here. You can check out my poster on the Swanson Lab website, if you’re so inclined.

Well, check back here often. I’m hoping to have enough downtime to finally catch up on blogging to the point where I can do it more often. I think one of the reasons I don’t blog more, even short posts, is that I feel like I need post things in chronological order and that I’m so far behind that I just act like a deer in headlights and don’t do anything about it. Maybe if I catch up, that will change.

Oh, and Rachel and the baby are currently doing great. Rachel is less uncomfortable than she was during the first trimester, but she still doesn’t feel right. We’ve decided that the sterotype for pregnant women and how they should feel throughout the pregnancy is set by people who aren’t athletic and aren’t keenly aware of the state of their bodies, like Rachel. I don’t think she’ll feel right until she’s back to the way she was before the pregnancy.

More later folks.