‘Science is not the only path to knowledge. When it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.’ Jonah Lehrer’s fascination for the theoretical discoveries of artists in the nineteenth and twentieth century resulted in the book ‘Proust was a neuroscientist’.
Rumour has it that many people who work in a lab enjoy cooking. Apart from the organisational parallels that can be drawn between following a protocol and a recipe, did you realise how much the two activities can have in common?
A lot of scientists who are “scared” of statistics fall into the trap of ignoring the existence of anything beyond a t-test. But using the right method to analyse your data is essential to having confidence in your results, and there are a lot more methods out there than the t-test.
In the past decade, important advances have been made in the field of epigenetics. Obviously, unraveling epigenetic mechanisms has been greatly facilitated by technological developments. I’ll try to give you an impression of the types of experiments that have helped fuel those new and exciting insights.
In 1951, cervical tumour cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks and put into culture, to divide endlessly and be distributed across labs all over the world, perhaps to eventually find their way to your incubator: cells known as HeLa cells.