Laboratory website culture and Pimm in Nature: the real digital windows

Paul Smaglik, Naturejobs editor wrote a Prospects piece in the current Nature (yeah, the big one) in his column on laboratory website culture apropos of the highly unofficial lab website competition of Pimm. Read it, think it over and build better and more professional lab websites. Oh yes, and don’t forget to allocate the resources (see the comment of Anonymous Prof).

Nature 447, 347 (May 2007) Paul Smaglik: Creating better lab websites gives potential collaborators and recruiters a clearer window into your world.

Maybe it’s the proper time to ask once again the question: Who wants to host the best laboratory website competition?

Stem Cell Lab Monitor: post series on excellent stem cell labs

Research in life sciences is more a team effort than ever. If you take a look on an average peer review article, in most cases there are as many as 6 authors and usually from more than 1 lab. But the basic unit and currency of any valuable research contribution is a LAB. Not the principal investigator (although the PI is the most representative voice of a lab) in itself, not a lonely grad or postgrad student, or an assistant, but a working functional and whole LAB, which can consist of 3 people or 10 or 25 people. The same arithmetics applies to the equipment: what makes a lab is not one particular tool (an incredible confocal, a smart PCR machine, a cool laser MicroDissector) but the whole set of the lab tools (picture: my Macbook shot on the Cambridge lab I worked last year).

So here I am happy to inform you on my coming blog post series (column), called Stem Cell Lab Monitor which will introduce the outstanding stem cell labs all over the world through their homepages, projects, interests, members etc., and through interviews (forgot almost: blogterviews) with the PIs and other lab members if possible. I hope you can get a picture on the lab cultures this way. If the focus is not on a definite stem cell lab, rather on a tissue engineering or a mitochondria or any life sciences lab, it’ll be a Tissue Engineering or Mitochondria Lab Monitor, respectively.

These will be my short questions to the PIs in the first round, and they can be modified and specified depending on the lab under investigation.

1. What is your scientific background and how did you get immersed into stem cell research? What was the motivation behind that?