Eye Herpes...

This could start as... the horror, the pain, the cruel reality...

It actually started with this acute pain on my left eye on Saturday morning and some light sensitivity that got worse during the next day... The weird thing is that there was nothing of unusual with the eye: it looked exactly the same as the right one! But... my vision became blurred and then it wasn't fun anymore (as if it was until now...)

I could describe how painful a cornea infection by the Herpes Virus Simplex can be, but let's imagine you're sleeping and suddenly someone hits you with a fine but rough needle right in the middle of your eye and then starts to push it back and forward... now imagine, you're screaming in front of a mirror trying to figure out what the hell got into your eye and you see nothing, you just feel the pain... you can't stand the light anymore (photofobia), you start to think you became a vampire! On the next day I started to see some redness on the conjunctive tissue around the iris... Do not confound these symptoms with the one's of a conjunctivitis, if you notice loss of vision you have to see your ophthalmologist immediately !!
The treatment can last between 10 days or 1 month. It consists of eye drops to diminish the inflammatory response and eye ointment (acyclovir) to be applied between 3 to 5 times a day.

So, on your behalf, whenever you have labial never touch your eyes. If you think scratching your hands on a towel or tissue is enough to get rid of the virus, you're wrong. HVS can survive up to 3 days in dry surfaces, but it will enter its lytic cycle in moist surfaces like our mucosa.
Be careful, I also thought it wouldn't happen to me...

Loose thoughts

2009 is the year of Darwin

200 years since his birth
150 years since the publication of the "On the Origin of the Species"

Until recently I was quite reticent regarding the impact of evolution on current research. Training in biochemistry seeks immediate understanding of direct relations between genotype and phenotype, gene and protein, between structure and function... specially in crystallography where everything is static, though quite beautiful... I still remember my first protein crystal, lysozyme :)

The most important thing I've learn during the past year was the crucial role of time, that sweet independent variable which allows the Human brain to perceive the dynamics underlying biological systems.
Macroscopic but rather subtle differences between mammals, birds, plants, fishes... that's what Darwin could observe back in his time and what an extraordinary observation and impartial description he made! Guided by his insatiable curiosity, persistence and sense of opportunity, he began the most important conceptual revolution in Humanity since Christianity.

"Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution" (Theodosius Dobzhansky)

Though... I wonder... how could natural selection allow the survival of such a self destructive specie as we, humans, are?
Against all the odds we proliferate... we beat natural selection, we overcame the limiting step: cheating mother nature.
And here we are better than ever, the more advanced society Earth has ever seen, addicted to material satisfaction ("I can get NO satisfaction..." is now out of date)...
Everything has a cost:
so that some can be well fed others must experience daily starvation,
so that some can smile others must cry,
so that some can control others must obey,
so that some can yell others must be kept quiet,
so that some can live others must die...

Drift ?
No... organized and powered drift...

First conference on my own

Second week of the new year and here I go to London, first time in the city apart from the airports, sponsored by Virgin trains! Quite fast I must say, 1h30!
Time to rencounter Rodrigo, meet Sílvia and on the next day rencounter an old friend that I haven't seen for a couple of years... Great dinner (Wagamama sponsor) great people... what can I say more? It was really nice :) Thank you*

But I was there in "work", to spy on Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance! hehe
Can you guess who I encountered there? People from Gulbenkian! And another guy doing his PhD in Edimbra, from the Gabba program. The world is really a small place! :)

On my last day I decided to spend a couple of hours at the National History Museum. There I was looking at the fossils when suddenly I hear "Please find your nearest exit. This is an emergency evacuation" ... everyone starts to look for the exit and when we finaly got there, the security guys were letting people entering the building !?!?! "There's an emergency call? Ok, Stop right there! Do not try to come in!" Whatever!
Let's keep moving and come back to the peaceful Birmingham :)
See you next time London! ;)

Work after holidays

Why do we always have the feeling that holidays are short?

After two weeks of pure entertainment and pleasure (you dirty minds!!) I had to come back to Birmingham, sponsored by Ryanair as usual. The "self-contained flat" where I live was freezing and on the next day I woke up with a beautiful snowfall :) This scenario kept repeating for a few days giving me enough time to develop a nice strategy to not fall in the side walk: walking on the grass is much less dangerous! ;)
I had this thing (they call it compulsory exam) on Wednesday, something about statistics for post-graduates and I had only 3 (long) days to study for what turn out to be an exam impossible to fail: we could consult the handouts, which actually helped me to answer a whole group of theoretical questions by looking (for the first time) into the corresponding slides; many of the exercises had an working example counterpart in the notes; 55 questions for 1h45m and of course the pass mark was (I wonder if this is the only place in the world where this is so...!) of 40% !!!
Ok, no, I didn't scored 100% (not even after passing the tight evaluation of Professor Dinis Pestana, that great Statistician!), I couldn't do better than 74% :(
(what you're looking at? I'm in the "First" range! ahah lol...)

In this same week I had to finish my 3 month report... where I learned how to do a gantt chart and realize how empty and meaningless it can be...Nevertheless, is was worth to see the long time and work I still have to... to do what? let's make a list:
- travel to exotic places
- meet extravagant people
- discuss the state of the world with creative/optimistic minds
- visit all my friends around the world (I know I owe you that ;) )
- spend time doing nothing
- learn how to not stress
- laugh every day
- develop the multiscale model, write the thesis and go to somewhere sunny! :))

Totally doable :D

Happy New Year

JAMES - NIA - 13/12/08

Alive
Amazing
Extraordinary

What a rush!

We all know that the correct way of doing things is allocating time for specific activities, planing ahead. Still, I find myself many times working under stressful conditions where suddenly everything starts to make sense! Though, at the same time these exciting findings are so messy that I can't speak about them in the correct order.
Tomorrow I have this important meeting...I will present and explain my PhD project to a specialized audience that is suppose to give me some feedback and practical advice!
One and a half month has passed and I still feel I know too little...This scarcely distributed information spread all over my brain without priority signals nor links between them. Yet, I see the light! I have these flashes claiming for more attention, but they're still short-lived!
When will I know everything about plasmids and their hosts and ways of transmission and regulation and dependence on host's physiological state and environmental interactions? When? When will I know the most important experimental observations by heart?
So many things to read... so many exciting observations to be rediscovered in my personal and exclusive way of perceiving the reality...
The ultimate question.. when will I recognize all the available models and understand how they work...when will I be able to implement all these exciting theoretical testing hypothesis...
And of course the results... Well, let's not think about them for now!!

What a rush!!!
Take a deep breath and slow down...