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Let me say at the outset of this post that I have a PhD in Bacteriology and admittedly less than objective when it comes to the topic of microbiology education and improving the public understanding of science. However, in today’s New York Times Science Times section there were no fewer than five articles that required some knowledge of microbiology to understand the implications about what was written.

1. Vaccination is Steady, but Pertussis is Surging
2. Really? The Claim: More Sugar Leads to More Cavities
3. Steep Drop Seen in Circumcisions in the U.S.
4. Patterns: Medicare Coverage Drives Antibiotic Use
5. Vital Signs: Nipple Piercings Add to Risk of Abscesses

While it doesn’t require a PhD to decipher the information in this article a basic understanding of microbiology would allow readers to understand the significance and future implications of the material that was presented. For example, in the article about nipple piercings; anybody who has taken an introductory microbiology class knows that bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes can cause pus-laden infections and if left untreated can result in potentially life-threatening abscess formation. Sugar and cavities? Microbiology 101 students all know that bacteria like S. mutans (that live in everyone’s mouths) ferment sugars and produce lactic acid that degrades tooth enamel and can cause cavities. And, most entry level microbiology students understand that the overuse of conventional antibiotics is largely responsible for the emergence of multiple drug resistant bacteria like multiple drug resistant S. aureus MRSA) and vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE).

The point that I am trying to make is that bacteria are all around us; some do good things like fix nitrogen to improve crop yields and produce oxygen during photosynthesis while others cause devastating acute and chronic infections. Nevertheless, the lay public is largely ignorant about the microbes on and around them. Most of my friends, many of whom have advanced degrees in their fields, don’t know the difference between a virus and a bacterium and believe that it is okay to treat a cold with antibiotics! How can people modify their behaviors to effectuate change to improve their lives if they lack a rudimentary understanding of the factors responsible for conditions that afflict them?

Don’t get me wrong—we don’t need more PhD microbiologists. However, requiring all high school biology students and maybe biology degree students to have a firm understanding of the fundamental principles of microbiology would be a great start toward improving the lives of many Americans!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!

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Yesterday, a bill to designate Lactococcus lactis (formerly Streptococcus lactis) the official state microbe passed the Wisconsin assembly and now awaits action in the state senate. L. lactis is the bacterium used to make cheese, and as many of you know Wisconsin makes a lot of cheese.

As many of you may know, I received my PhD in Bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and it was Ken Todar, my former mentor, friend and teacher extraordinaire (now emeritus) in the department who originally lobbied the state legislature to consider selecting L. lactis as the state microbe.

The bacterium is poised to join the state’s list of 21 designated symbols, which includes an official dance (the polka), beverage (milk) and domesticated animal (the Holstein dairy cow).

To learn more about L. lactis and its possible ascendancy as the first ever state microbe designation, listen to a podcast of an interview with Elio Schaechter, PhD, former longtime Chair of the Department of Microbiology at Tufts University, past President of the American Society for Microbiology and science education advocate.

Finally, I will be back in Madison next month to attend a meeting where my mentor, Bob Deibel (now 86 or so), will receive a lifetime achievement award for his work in food microbiology. This will be my first visit back to UW since the mid 90s. I am especially looking forward to eating a brat and drinking a few steins of Leinnies on terrace! Maybe I will be lifting a few to toast L. lactis as well!

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!

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It should come as no surprise to most BioJobBlog readers that scientists are not known for their writing or literary skills. And, for the most part, graduate students in the life sciences receive little or no instruction or training in scientific writing. This wasn’t always the case. When I entered graduate school at the University Of Wisconsin way back in 1974, Joe Wilson, Chairman of the Department of Bacteriology at the time, insisted that all incoming graduate students take a semester-long course in scientific writing. Most of my peers thought it was a colossal waste of time but by the end of the semester we all knew how, in theory, to write a scientific paper, understood the peer review process and if nothing else could write something that resembled a scientific manuscript when asked to do so. I personally learned a lot during the course and thought it was extremely useful. 

I currently work as a freelance science/medical writer and I think the course has served me well throughout my career. In fact, while a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of Miami School of Medicine, many of my colleagues would give me their RO1 applications to review for content, grammar and editing before submitting them to NIH. As the former Chairman of my department said to me after I asked him what he thought after reading my first grant application, “It is extremely well written from a literary standpoint”. Not exactly what I wanted to hear but maybe that explains why I am a science writer and no longer an academic. So it goes....!

The reason that I am rambling on about scientists and their poor writing skills is that things haven’t gotten much better over the 35 year since I took that mandatory writing course as first semester graduate student at UW. Based on my observations, graduate students are only asked to do original writing when preparing their theses and in some instances when writing manuscripts (which are usually re-written by their mentors).  What is even more troubling is that science undergraduate students do virtually no writing at all! How then do we expect graduate students and postdocs to successfully write grant application and manuscripts if they receive no formal training in science writing?

To that end, I came across an interesting, albeit humorous, post from Dr. Isis, who according to her bio is “a physiologist at a major research university working on some terribly impressive stuff. She blogs about balancing her research career with the demands of raising small children, how to succeed as a woman in academia, and anything else she finds interesting.” Like me, Dr. Isis, doesn’t think that scientists spend enough time teaching other scientists how to write. In the post she offers some ideas, tips and solution to this increasingly vexing problem! 

Basic Writing Resources for Basic Scientists

Dr. Isis does hot science. Hot, hot, caliente science. I feel like we have already established that, though.

Learning to do hot science has not been a trivial thing, but learning to write in the scientific arena was orders of magnitude harder. It's still something that does not come easy for me and that I have had to practice to improve. I learned the first time I received my first crapvalanche of papers from a group of students that I am not the only one who has had trouble translating the suckquake of writing I learned in high school and as an undergraduate into successful scientific writing.

I wonder if scientific writing is something that we don't spend enough time teaching pre-graduate school level students.  I know that in science courses I've taught that have required papers, the most formal instruction time I have been able to devote to writing is showing them this: 

Video 1: Strong Bad teaches us how to write a successful paper. Strong Bad is full of wisdom and has taught me about 90% of the awesome stuff I know. I'd encourage you to check him out here.

But, I digress. This long, overly drawn-out, unnecessary introduction had tweo purposes -- 1) to give me an excuse to use Strong Bad in a blog. I <3 Strong Bad. 2) to point the following resource out to you.

This weekend someone showed me "Ask Betty: Grammar in College Writing." Ask Betty is run by the Department of English at the University of Washington and has all sorts of great information. It has a list of common editing symbols for those of us who edits papers and a lesson on common grammatical mistakes for those of us who are writing papers. I think this site could potentially be a fantastic resource for those of use who speak English as a second language. There's a Q&A page with examples of phrases and discussion of whether they are well-written. There is also a resource page with links to external writing resources.

Addendum: While Dr. Isis offers a good self-help solution to the problem, perhaps it might be more useful if graduate students and postdocs are required to take formal science writing courses as part of their graduate training. Technology has advanced considerably since 1974 and students no longer have to take time out from their busy schedules to attend a bricks and mortar class like I did. The course could be offered online and students could complete it at their own speed. The growing number of foreign graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, whose primary language isn’t English, suggests that a course like this may be in the best interests of American science.

Until next time....

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!

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This may be one of the more notable years for Salmonella food poisoning. First, there was a modest outbreak in the eating clubs at Princeton University and now a larger outbreak in Texas and New Mexico. This is the first time that I can recall in my almost 30 years as a card-carrying food microbiologist that there has been this many highly-publicized cases of Salmonella food poisoning in one year. Although I don’t wish Salmonella gastroenteritis on anybody, it is kind of rewarding that an organism that led to my PhD is making headlines once again. Typically, Salmonella outbreaks are not noteworthy and rarely receive much notice— usually taking a backseat to potentially life-threatening outbreaks of enteropathogenic Escherichia coli.

Like the Princeton outbreak, the exact source of the Salmonella infection is unclear. That said, public health and CDC officials are leaning towards large, raw tomatoes. In 2006, the Food and Drug Administration discovered that consumption of tomatoes in restaurants had caused a salmonella outbreak that affected 21 states. , “until the source of the outbreak is identified federal and local health officials in both states have recommended that infants, the elderly and anyone with an impaired immune system avoid eating Roma and red round tomatoes that are not grown at home or sold attached to the vine.” So far, 40 confirmed cases, with patients ranging in age from 3 to 82, have been reported in New Mexico and Texas since April. To date, 17 people have been hospitalized, but no deaths have been reported.

Molecular analyses indicated that all of the cases in New Mexico and Texas were caused by the same strain, a relatively rare serovar called Saint Paul (6^th most common serovar infecting humans). Federal health officials at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA fear that this may be the beginning of a large national outbreak of Salmonella gastroenteritis. This is because about 30 cases caused by the Saint Paul strain, have also been reported this year in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas and Utah. Like the New Jersey, Texas and New Mexico outbreaks, the cause of those other outbreaks is under investigation.

Salmonella gastroenteritis generally last between four and seven days, and most people are able to recover without medical (antibiotic) treatment. But, it can sometimes lead to death in immunocompromised adults or young children. Symptoms include headache, nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea and sometimes vomiting.  Although textbook descriptions of the pathogenesis of Salmonella gastroenteritis generally portray it as a mild illness, I can tell you that people I know (lab mates of mine) who came down with the disease (gee, how did that happen?) suggest otherwise!

I suspect that fecally-contaminated water may be source of the infection. But, then again, it has been almost 30 years since I thought about Salmonella gastroenteritis. That said, I don’t think that you ever forget the essence or minutiae of your thesis work!

For those of you who are interested, the electron micrograph of Salmonella typhimurium shown with this post is from my PhD dissertation. As I recall, the electron micrograph was taken in 1980 and the bacterium shown in the micrograph was grown for 48 hours on nutrient agar . Althought I would like to take credit for the shot (nice pose eh?),  it was taken by Phil Hegge in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my alma mater. if you look closely you may be able to see fimbriae along with the flagella.

Until next time

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting (and remember to wash your tomatoes)!!!!!

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Yes, even the Ivy League isn’t immune to food poisoning outbreaks from time-to-time. There are currently 10 confirmed cases of Salmonella food poisoning at Princeton U. Another 50 people or so have also fallen ill with gastrointestinal symptoms consistent with Salmonella food poisoning.  As a precaution, university officials have temporarily discontinued doing business with their produce suppliers. For those of you who don’t know, Princeton is famous (infamous?) for its so-called dining clubs. These clubs take the place of sororities and fraternities which are not allowed at this august institution of higher education. Obviously, there is more than eating that goes on at these “dining clubs.”

The reason I am blogging about the outbreak is two-fold. First, I live about seven miles from Princeton and it has been all over the local news. Second, I did my PhD work on the pathogenesis of Salmonella gastroenteritis. So, Salmonella food poisoning is dear to my heart (thankfully, not my gastrointestinal tract). Many infectious disease experts tend to dismiss the seriousness of Salmonella gastroenteritis. This is likely because it is usually not as devastating as shigellosis or infections caused by enteroinvasive strains of Escherichia coli (which is actually Shigella masquerading as E. coli). As my major professor once put it “You know when you have Salmonella gastroenteritis—if you can’t decide than it is not salmonellosis.”

I am happy to report that I never came down with gastroenteritis while working for over three years with enteroinvasive Salmonella strains (even though I was routinely mouth pipetting and eating lunch in the lab; practices which aren’t acceptable by today’s standards). I like to think that “the bugs” were afraid of me. Alternatively I had either a great immune system or extremely good aseptic techniques. Whatever the reason, it is always embarrassing when card-carrying microbiologists come down with the disease(s) that they are studying. Luckily, I never came down with the disease caused by the bacterium that I was studying during my first postdoctoral fellowship—Neisseria gonorrhoeae. That would have been extremely difficult to explain!

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting (remember to wash your hands)!!!!!!!!

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