Tanentzapf Lab

1. One of formative experience of grad school for me was when our lab moved across the hallway to a bigger space & I realised my research didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of science & that this actually made me love science even more. So here is a thread about that.

According to my Garmin watch Watching Canada play in the World Cup is hazardous to your health

The 3 most important ingredients for good science are solid experimental design, proper controls, & well executed statistical analysis. Other stuff, cool new techniques, fancy pricey machinery, nifty AI tools? Those are nice to have but won't matter if the basics are done badly.

In the last 15 years we had: first image of a black hole, The LIGO experiment, proof of the Higgs Boson, mRNA Vaccines, CRISPR, AI revolution (especially alpha fold). I could go on. Pushing the narrative that discovery is slowing down is an embarrassment for @TheEconomist

This week we will submit a paper that concludes a project, & answers a question, that I started 25yrs ago. This is very satisfying, not because its the most important scientific question, it wont cure a disease or alter textbooks, but because the Journey was so fascinating & hard

There are 2 main narratives about AI in science & academia, Either AI is a miracle that will have us cure everything in 5yrs OR it's a distaster that will ruin science/academia if not humanity. The reality is neither, AI is an amazing tool that helps A LOT but has limitations

2. But then they say "Yet this remains an inspiring time to be a scientist in Canada."

1. Our main biomedical funding body is telling Canadian PIs its review system is collapsing. 50% increase in applications (attributed to AI but really due to PIs dealing w/ is essentially a lottery). PIs declining to review due to fatigue from turning down so much awesome science

Maybe my favourite thing about science is that the scientific literature is full of these small incredibly interesting tidbits just waiting for an explanation. Like this: almost a third of viable mutations in mice exhibit low body weight for some reason.....Mystery to be solved!

The new SDB Merch Store is now open! Model organism t-shirts, sweatshirts, caps, & mugs. Funds help support SDB programs. @RogersLabUCD bit.ly/4tByh9W

Qualities I believe make a paper good: caution, avoiding strong language ("suggest" instead of "prove"), understatement, refusal to speculate beyond the data. Things reviewers ask for in papers: certainty, data that "proves" something is true, claims of "Novelty", speculation.

For academics how much time is spent & how many emails are sent just to get documents signed? If we eliminated tomorrow the need for signatures on everything what will be the -ve consequences? I strongly believe time saved & reduced cognitive load outweighs these consequences.

3. Final paragraph: "based on our data we propose the following model", have fun, be creative think big. remember this rule "you can show nothing but you can speculate anything ".

2. paragraph 2-5: make a list in point form of 4 things you showed in the paper. Each one will get a paragraph. These paragraphs will go like this: Distil finding, explain what it means to field, put in context with literature, discuss any weakness, connect to next finding

1. For lots of people the hardest part of the paper to write is the discussion. Here is a a very brief guide: Paragraph 1: is a restatements of the two or three most important conclusions (starting with "here we showed", each conclusion gets 2-4 sentences).

my hot take is that we can assess the quality of science in broad terms (are controls/experimental design/stats/techniques appropriate & properly done). But specific assessment (is it interesting/important/impactful) that determines hiring/funding/publishing? 100% subjective

it gets better (or worse, depending on your perspective)

I don't know if this says more about how small my contribution to science is compared to my cousin andy @ecochangegroup or how far chat GPT is from being a reliable tool.

On this #HolocaustMemorialDay I remember my great grandfather Jacob Klein (here in his Austro-Hungarian army veterinarian uniform in 1914). He, my great grandmother & 6 of their 8 children perished in the death camps, his daughter, my great aunt Aranka, survived auschwitz.

My fantasy is that soon we'll all have AI write our grants & then use AI to review the grants & the end result will be basically a lottery system weighted based on productivity. Which is the system we should have in the 1st place & actually have time to read & think & do science.

🎉 The Developmental Mechanics Seminar Series is back! 🗓️ Thurs, Jan 22 🎙️ Opening talks: 🧬Guy Tanentzapf (UBC)@TanentzapfLab — How cell adhesion molecules wire into the cytoskeleton 🌀Juan Manuel Gomez Elliff (EMBL)@_Pulzar — Mapping tissue mechanics with Brillouin microscopy