2011 is coming to its end
For some reason people look very much towards the end of the year and then become very happy and wish each other happiness when the new year finally arrives :-). The end of the year is also a time to look back, trying to assess the accomplishments of the last 12 months. One could of course do this just for nostalgic reasons. Whatever the reason was, I decided to do it and then I could see what a tremendous year I have had, so much packed it was with happenings. Could this be predicted 12 months ago? Hardly, however, I had a vague plan and at least some idea on where I wanted to get. The rest started to unfold by some mechanisms driven by some, for me unknown forces. Things happen and we have to make the best use of them. That is why it is good to have a plan, which may help us and teach us to use the things which may happen and let them take us where we want to go.
Now, looking back on the most memorable of 2011, what was the most memorable?
My two visits to Moscow of course, the first to try to prepare the bioinformtatics course, and the second was actually to run the course. I was hoping that among other things, the contact with my Alma Mater would lead to some collaboration, joint grants, etc. However, I quickly learned that the almighty Russian bureaucracy was nothing to play with. Handling bureaucracy is generally not my strongest side and spending time learning how to deal with Russian bureaucracy is definitely nothing I am looking forward to. Perhaps around 10 signatures were needed to get me a room at the university guest house. I am not going more into the details, but here is the guest house house I was going to stayed at, that April 2011, as seen by my iPhone :-). There was also this nice old Volga-car, probably forgotten at this parking by its owner and standing there since the soviet time. In some way this is rather characteristic of Russia: Nobody cares.
Actually, we also visited some friends at the Institute of Protein Research in Puschino, a research centre just outside Moscow. By that time Anders Liljas joined me in Moscow and gave some lectures for the students at the course. On the left we are eating lunch together with our friends in Puschino. On the right Anders is being prepared for a TV program which we recorded while there. It was about science in general and Nobel Prices (Anders served for many years as a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry). However, this program was never translated, perhaps the Russian authorities did not like our free talks about the state of science in Russia. However, this is just a guess, nobody gave us any explanation, which is again typical for Russia. But at least we had fun recording the program:
I was back in Lund at the end of April, but soon, namely at the very beginning of May we were going to Hamburg to collect some SAXS data at the EMBL outstation at the DESY synchrotron. And here we are, late evening having dinner at a chines restaurant:
Very nice food indeed! I warmly recommend this place. Did I get back to Lund after this? No! We went directly to Strasbourg for a meeting on frataxin and Freidrich's ataxia. This was a view from my hotel window 6th of May early in the morning and next to it is Grazia from Mayo Clinic and with whom we collaborate on frataxin, standing together with Annalisa Pastore from the MRC National Inst of Medical Research in London:
Then there was Marco. Marco is from the University of Turin. He contacted me and suggested a collaboration on some kinases. And here is he sitting outside while I was preparing the dinner, talking to his family back in Turin, perhaps discussing which Lego he should get for his son Francesco, on the right is the day after when we went to a restaurant in Malmö together with Maria Prostova from Moscow, who visited us to discuss a project on some virus RNA-protein interactions:
This contact resulted in a great grant application to the EU together with some companies and other academic groups. However, that was in December, before that there was the summer and the autumn, again full of traveling and meetings. At the end of June I went to visit my sister who stayed for a while in the far North in Norway in a place called Budö. Then we went for a one day trip to Lofoten, an area with unbelievably beautiful nature far far in the North. It was +12 degrees in the end of june! Probably the warmest temperature of the year:
A lot happened during the summer, among the memorable moments was this visit to the Danish museum of modern art called Arken. Here you can see a couple of modern art creations. The one I liked most was that with the broken stairs to the administration. Taken into account the overhead we pay the university from our grants (60%), the main part of which goes to keeping the beurocrats going, you can understand that I don't have many positive associations with the word "administration". Concerning the other two "junky" pieces, you may judged the artistic quality by yourself, I am not going to comment that for obvious reasons.
Then there was the carbonic anhydrase meeting followed by the SFBM meeting in Tällberg, a very nice place with fantastic nature. Every year, since 1996, the Swedish Structural Biology Network (SBNET) has had its meeting at this place. And this year for the first time we had the meeting of the Swedish Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SFBM). The pictures below may give an idea of that place:
And finally there was Freiburg. There we had a meeting with all the members of the EU project I mentioned earlier to discuss the details of the project. I have not been to Freiburg before, but with all Christmas lights it was definitely very charming. ALthough I must say, I did not go to the Scottish dancing event you see below. And Marco was there of course.
Last, but not least, we were approaching Christmas, we had a company Christmas party at my place and I had to give it the look which was appropriate for the occasion:
This was a quick summary of 2011. I promise (this is my New Year promise) that next year I will update the blog in a more regular fashion, to keep the december summary short.
Best wishes and Happy New Year!
Comments
Back with a new blog!
I am a bit ashamed for not writing much for this blog. I just noticed that the last time I was here was 8th of February, 9 months ago! What happened? A lot. But perhaps moving from one place to another (I am at a walking distance from my work now) was the largest disaster, which kept me out of reach. However, my energy is returning (after all the heavy stuff I had to move around) and with the energy comes the wish to have some fun! And publishing on the blog is fun! May be the recent renewal of my grant by the Research Council made a substantial contribution to the new energy flow. Or the recent paper we published I J. Mol. Biol. I don’t know.
There is one thing I have a bad feeling about, I have only made minor updates at the site during this period. I have big plans, but they need time. Although I have installed new blog software to replace the one I had before. The new blog has a better appearance and it is synchronised with with Blogspot. I want to update a lot of other stuff, but, always that “but”. I have to finish a grant application I am busy writing now, deadline 6th of December. After that I can have fun, like updating my blog, adding material to the site, etc!
Meanwhile, you may see me on the photo below, with my former supervisor from Moscow State University, Vsevolod Tverdislov at his 70th birthday party. There seems to be some resemblance between us:
There is one thing I have a bad feeling about, I have only made minor updates at the site during this period. I have big plans, but they need time. Although I have installed new blog software to replace the one I had before. The new blog has a better appearance and it is synchronised with with Blogspot. I want to update a lot of other stuff, but, always that “but”. I have to finish a grant application I am busy writing now, deadline 6th of December. After that I can have fun, like updating my blog, adding material to the site, etc!
Meanwhile, you may see me on the photo below, with my former supervisor from Moscow State University, Vsevolod Tverdislov at his 70th birthday party. There seems to be some resemblance between us:
Long, long break, sorry!
Long break, too long. It is actually the first time and I don't understand what happened. But now, NOW suddenly my writing energy is back. I wonder if this has to do with the cycles of the sun. In few days it is going to be exactly one year since I published this site and started to fill it with information! Strange, and now one year later the same energy is back, and I am prepared again to work here! I should admit that the best pages were created at the end of February, while I was on vacation in Thailand with my sister, her kids and my daughter. It was fantastic to get away from the winter and the snow and suddenly be able to drink cocktails with fresh tropical fruits!
Anyway, much has happened since the year started, perhaps the most exciting was my visit to Moscow. I am going to give a course at Lomonosov University later this spring, and I went there for some preparations. I met a lot of old good friends, this was very nice, I enjoyed that very much. The most exciting part of the visit was my program on the Russian channel russia.ru. I talked about structural biology at the first program and about how the system in Sweden stimulates the transfer of university research to industry, also called innovation system. You may watch the first program here. The second is still not published; I assume it will come in a couple of weeks. It is in Russian of course!
Another interesting thing, which happened recently, is that one of my students is back from his halve year paternity leave, things like this exist in Sweden! Now we can continue our work on few manuscripts, which are almost ready. Publications, publications, publications. That is the academic life, publications and grant applications.
I promise to come more often now, I like this and I don't know why I don't use this more often.
Me on russia.ru
Anyway, much has happened since the year started, perhaps the most exciting was my visit to Moscow. I am going to give a course at Lomonosov University later this spring, and I went there for some preparations. I met a lot of old good friends, this was very nice, I enjoyed that very much. The most exciting part of the visit was my program on the Russian channel russia.ru. I talked about structural biology at the first program and about how the system in Sweden stimulates the transfer of university research to industry, also called innovation system. You may watch the first program here. The second is still not published; I assume it will come in a couple of weeks. It is in Russian of course!
Another interesting thing, which happened recently, is that one of my students is back from his halve year paternity leave, things like this exist in Sweden! Now we can continue our work on few manuscripts, which are almost ready. Publications, publications, publications. That is the academic life, publications and grant applications.
I promise to come more often now, I like this and I don't know why I don't use this more often.
Me on russia.ru
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! I often ask myself, why do we get so excited about the new year, why are we so happy about it? It seems to be a good occasion to forget all our problems, concerns, etc, and just celebrate. I think this is the only holyday on earth, which unites so many people and makes so many people happy, independently of religion, nationality, and all other million things, which have we invented to keep ourselves away from each other on this planet.
I had a wonderful Christmas and New Year celebration with my family, sisters, their kinds, old friends and their families. I need such occasions to remind myself that what really maters in life are the people we surround us with, all the friends we acquire during our life, and of course our loved ones, our families.
Now when we have reached 2011 I can see that almost the whole year is already scheduled with coming meetings, courses, trips to various countries, and much more. I recently got an invitation from Vietnam to go there in February and give some lectures (and they would pay the whole trip). Unfortunately I had to decline, I have already filled February with three different meetings and I also need time for my students, for writing and publishing papers, writing new grant applications, hopefully solving new structures, taking care of our company, and of course adding new pages to this site. Otherwise it would have been nice to get some sun and see some green. Here we are getting more and more snow, all efforts to keep the way to the house free from snow seems to be futile, new snow comes quicker that I can handle it.
Next will be Moscow! I am going for a few days to prepare a course on structural bioinformatics, which will be given in April at my Alma Metter, the Lomonosov Moscow State University! I am really feel excited about going to Moscow, teaching students at my old university after so many years! You will get the report of course!
I had a wonderful Christmas and New Year celebration with my family, sisters, their kinds, old friends and their families. I need such occasions to remind myself that what really maters in life are the people we surround us with, all the friends we acquire during our life, and of course our loved ones, our families.
Now when we have reached 2011 I can see that almost the whole year is already scheduled with coming meetings, courses, trips to various countries, and much more. I recently got an invitation from Vietnam to go there in February and give some lectures (and they would pay the whole trip). Unfortunately I had to decline, I have already filled February with three different meetings and I also need time for my students, for writing and publishing papers, writing new grant applications, hopefully solving new structures, taking care of our company, and of course adding new pages to this site. Otherwise it would have been nice to get some sun and see some green. Here we are getting more and more snow, all efforts to keep the way to the house free from snow seems to be futile, new snow comes quicker that I can handle it.
Next will be Moscow! I am going for a few days to prepare a course on structural bioinformatics, which will be given in April at my Alma Metter, the Lomonosov Moscow State University! I am really feel excited about going to Moscow, teaching students at my old university after so many years! You will get the report of course!
December letter
A month since I wrote anything on this wall. It has been quite hectic time. I find that writing letters, or a blog, which is more or less the same thing, needs some accumulated positive energy. I think during hectic times this energy is mostly used to keep me optimistic, no matter what, and the little, which remains, is needed for the most essential communication. And the result is no blog posts. Sorry for this. Now when courses are almost over, no major grant applications ahead, the days will soon start becoming longer, etc. I am looking forward for spending more time writing on this wall.
Much happened during the past month. Victor Lamzin from EMBL-Hamburg (where the DESY synchrotron is located) visited us, gave a nice seminar which was followed by a tutorial on the Arp/Warp program package, used for automatic protein model building into electron density maps. You may read about the details of Victors work here. And here you see Victor in the computer room talking about his program:
Much happened during the past month. Victor Lamzin from EMBL-Hamburg (where the DESY synchrotron is located) visited us, gave a nice seminar which was followed by a tutorial on the Arp/Warp program package, used for automatic protein model building into electron density maps. You may read about the details of Victors work here. And here you see Victor in the computer room talking about his program:
And here before the diner at an Indian restaurant in the evening with Victors colleague Tim:
Other big events of the period include the structure determination by our company SARomics Biostructures of the Inimex Pharmaceuticals Innate Defense Regulator (IDR) IMX942 in complex with its target, the ZZ domain of human p62 (sequestosome-1). You can read more about this here.
That was a big news which went with a press release by the two companies.
A week ago I also went to Stockholm to collect some data at the SGC (structural genomics consortium), since Max lab is closed due to some technical problems and our in-house equipment needs some reparation. It was not much fun to drive 600 km on roads covered by snow, by somehow I managed to come back home safe. I even took a couple of picture on the way. Here is how it looked like at the stop I had for a coup of coffee at a place called Brahe Hus.
I actually put some extra light on the second photo, otherwise it was as dark as the first one.
And what now? You may guess from the following photo taking just outside my house in Lund:
Its Christmas time!
Two weeks later
Two weeks of lectures and practicals, organising visits, trials to get the students understand some basic ideas, work with company questions, answering e-mails, etc., etc. Here you see Derek and Chris from iThemba Pharmaceuticals at Max Lab:
iThemba is a South African company focus on the development of drugs against tropical diseases, and HIV, which unfortunately has become pretty much a tropical disease. We discuss some collaboration in relation to my malaria projects.
My friends on Facebook complain that I have abandoned them, I have not been to the gym for ages (yesterday went for the first time after 3 weeks), and we got the first snow! Poor students from the very South at the course! I have got some student from Egypt, Southern Europe (France and Spain), India, China, and some other countries, I don't actually know exactly. It must be a real shock for them, snow laying on the ground everywhere! That was how it loked like from my office window Friday morning:
I even managed to get a puncture in the middle of the night on my way home back från Malmö, where I went to bring my daughter after a Haloween party! Thanks to Toyota's road assistance the problem was quickly fixed, and I could get a nice night sleep that night.
One of the most memorable events was probably the attempt to get the PhD students at the crystallography course to start using Linux. My Goodness! What a suffering that was for some of these poor people, they needed to remember about 10-15 Linux commands and use them to organise their directories, download some files, unzip them, edit some other files and try to use a program for processing X-ray data. That was really dramatic. People often think that crystallography is like MS Office. You open the program and start solving the structure. I think at least these fellows have now changed their minds and probably will try to keep away from crystallography for the rest of their lives. We all work so hard to put our brains to sleep and awakening is of course very painful. And the longer our brains existed asleep, the more painful the awakening is.
We are supposed to enjoy our lives, not to exert our brains. That is what happens when there is no external or interna stimuli and motivation. Animals usually have two things on their mind: Food and sex, the last one being the only way for them to get pleasure. Still, they have to work hard even for this! Since most of us are well fed and don´t need to go around hungry, what remains then? And the pleasure often is accessible in various easy forms, so what we do? Put our brains to sleep, that is what animals do when they are satisfied with their life. But some of us are more inventive of course, look at politicians and administrators (for example, university administrators). How much trouble and how many problems they cause for others? The way I understand it is that they work hard trying to keep us awake! What would we do without them?
Anyway, today we are going to watch the new Harry Potter movie. This is something I am really looking forward to!
How I started on the web
I promised to tell the story of how I became interested in using the Internet for teaching and marketing. It all started when I got e-mail from Shaun Fawcett, a person specialised in helping people with their English writing (writing help central). More than 10 years ago I purchased from him a collection of recommendation letter templates. Being at university one has to write such letters several times per year. From time to time I kept getting e-mails from him on various subjects related to English writing, and sometimes I actually red these e-mails and still find them very useful. Anyway, about a year ago he started to market a new pdf book on how to create a website and start marketing your own stuff. I purchased his book, that was the second time I ever purchased anything from him, I red it over the Christmas holyday last year and I actually started creating my own site! That book made everything so easy and accessible, that I was difficult to resist starting the work with own website. And the first result? It is proteinstructures.com! saromics.com was my second site, by then I was pretty sure of what I was doing. I share this story because I know people like stories and because I think Shaun is really doing great job, helping people. Just to make it clear, I don't get paid for saying all this and i have actually never had any contact with him. Perhaps some day I will write to him. I can tell you what was my latest purchase from Shaun, it is a book on writing a pdf book, or e-books, as they are called on the internet. And why do I need that? I need that because I am writing en e-book related to the content of this site. Probably I will call it something like Practical Guide on Structural Bioinformatics. When it is coming? I cannot promise you now, but I am doing my best.
Me as internet marketer
It feels it was a long time ago I wrote anything here. I probably mentioned earlier that I was going to have a week full of teaching PhD students some basics of X-ray crystallography. I also decided to update all my lectures on this subject, which is always time consuming. The moment one changes one or two slides, suddenly everything else starts to feel terribly misplaced, you probably know the feeling. Last Friday we have fun collecting data on the synchrotron from lysozyme crystals, which were grown by the students from the course. They all got the opportunity to flash-freeze and mount one crystal and then take one shot to see that it actually diffracted. It is always a fantastic feeling to see the first diffraction from a crystal, even if it is lysozyme!
I also spent a lot of time updating the web site of our company, SARomics Biostructures. I take care of this site, I rebuilt it in June this year and since then I have been optimising its content for search engines, adding more and more keywords and phrases. The aim is, as always, to be visible on the first page of Google, and preferably together with your competitor. This means that one needs to find out which keywords or phrases the competitor uses and try to optimise some text on your own site for these. Actually, I feel very proud of myself, I learned how to do that, and now I have several keywords on the first page of Google. Among those, for example, are:
contract crystallography services
Custom crystallography services
protein crystallization services
And some others, I just don't want to give away all our important keywords, the competitors, if they ever would find this blog, probably can also find our keywords by themselves. It is actually an interesting story, how I started my web master "carrier".
I will tell that later, probably tomorrow.
I also spent a lot of time updating the web site of our company, SARomics Biostructures. I take care of this site, I rebuilt it in June this year and since then I have been optimising its content for search engines, adding more and more keywords and phrases. The aim is, as always, to be visible on the first page of Google, and preferably together with your competitor. This means that one needs to find out which keywords or phrases the competitor uses and try to optimise some text on your own site for these. Actually, I feel very proud of myself, I learned how to do that, and now I have several keywords on the first page of Google. Among those, for example, are:
contract crystallography services
Custom crystallography services
protein crystallization services
And some others, I just don't want to give away all our important keywords, the competitors, if they ever would find this blog, probably can also find our keywords by themselves. It is actually an interesting story, how I started my web master "carrier".
I will tell that later, probably tomorrow.
A week later
About one week have gone since I wrote the first entry to the blog and today I was surprised that people actually found it! Great, that is quite inspiring. That was a busy week, anyway. We went to Stockholm last Friday to celebrate my sisters birthday, came home on Sunday. I spent the time on the train to Lund preparing a lecture on protein crystallisation; I am running a course for PhD students now. We meet mostly once/week, but next week we will have 3 meetings, I will go through X-ray diffraction basics (Monday), data collection (Wednesday) and actual data collection at Max Lab on Friday! The people at the course had the opportunity to set up their own crystallisation drops and we have got nice crystals there. We will use them on Friday for X-ray data collection Great fun! Many of them have never been to a synchrotron, although it is only 10 minutes from the lab.
I have also planed some new pages for this site. There will be some more theoretical stuff on interactions, a computer tutorial on protein-ligand interactions; I will also finish the homology tutorial (we run it at another PhD student course I had about a month ago and it worked well). There will also be some material and a tutorial on superposition of structures. And I will put on the web an old tutorial that used to be at the Swiss Modeller server, but for some reason was removed. I like it because it describes a problematic modelling case.
I hope I can start with this the coming weekend. We have another course approaching, this time for students on the Masters program on protein science..
I also need to install some program to give you people the opportunity to leave comments here.
Perhaps next week.
P.S. Our company (SARomics Biostructures) published a press release on a publication in which our structures were used. You are welcome to view it here.
I have also planed some new pages for this site. There will be some more theoretical stuff on interactions, a computer tutorial on protein-ligand interactions; I will also finish the homology tutorial (we run it at another PhD student course I had about a month ago and it worked well). There will also be some material and a tutorial on superposition of structures. And I will put on the web an old tutorial that used to be at the Swiss Modeller server, but for some reason was removed. I like it because it describes a problematic modelling case.
I hope I can start with this the coming weekend. We have another course approaching, this time for students on the Masters program on protein science..
I also need to install some program to give you people the opportunity to leave comments here.
Perhaps next week.
P.S. Our company (SARomics Biostructures) published a press release on a publication in which our structures were used. You are welcome to view it here.
Decided to open my blog
I have been thinking for a while that I should find some means for communicating with all the people coming to my site. At least to be able to say thank you folks for stepping by. I finally decided to start with this blog and leave other great ideas for later use. I am new to this and will need some time to read all the instructions on how to set up a blog and also add some functionality, for example enable commenting.
The main purpose of this blog is to inform people on new additions or changes at the site. But also to tell stories of new stuff I find in papers I read, on the internet, etc. Just like what people do when they met.
Everything has its beginning, and this is the beginning of my blog. I actually feel quite excited. Interestingly, the actual blog application has always been here. All I needed to do was just to click "enable". Now it is enabled! WIsh me good luck!
