CELL*WISE

I don't have time to go into all the details and give much of my own opinion right now. I may possibly write a follow-up post.
For now, some quality links of the most popular stem cell news currently.

"From Mice to Men: Tracing the Skin Cell to Stem Cell Path" Wired Science from Wired.com
In this article, you can click on a link (the first November 2007 link in the "timeline") to actually get the full scientific paper (PDF) from the Yamanaka lab group (Japan) titled "Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Human Fibroblasts by Defined Factors" published in Cell. Even I'm still waiting on getting the full paper from the Thomson lab group (Wisconsin) titled "Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Somatic Cells" published just yesterday online in Science, because most people need a subscription of some sort.

Additional current articles from Wired.com:

"Why You Should Believe the Latest Stem Cells Breakthroughs"

"Skin Cell-to-Stem Cell Alchemy 'Like Turning Lead into Gold'"

Other current news articles:

"Embryonic Stem Cells without embryos - they're here" VentureBeat (Life Sciences category)

"Skin Cells Can Become Embryonic Stem Cells" from NPR (where you can listen to an 8-minute audio of the news if that's more convenient for you)

"New Method Equalizes Stem Cell Debate" from NY Times (if you're into more of the political
viewpoint / impact)

Fellow bloggers are starting to write...and there will be many many more:

"Middle Ground For Stem Cells?" from Hope for Pandora

"Induced Pluripotent Cells from Adult Skin" from Fresh Brainz

"The Next Stage in the Stem Cell Debate Begins!" from Framing Science

This may be the beginning of the end of the controversy, but it is still just the beginning for these scientific methods. As with most anything, there are advantages and disadvantages. It will probably still take many years for improvement and before any of these techniques can be used clinically. The important (hyphenated) keyword right now is "embryonic stem cell-like".

I don't know if I'll have much time to write my own posts this week because of a lot of work and Thanksgiving (but trust me, they will start happening soon, and then I will stop with any excuses), so I would like to share these fun, thoughtful, and brief articles written by other people.

"Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming" (Erren TC, Cullen P, Erren M, Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming. PLoS Comput Biol 3(10): e213 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030213), which is basically a condensed and annotated version of the excellent and timeless suggestions made by mathematician Richard Hamming in his 1986 talk "You and Your Research".
This was also summarized yesterday by the entertaining and informative blog Bayblab, with "10 Simple Rules to Be a Successful Scientist".

"15 Reasons to Be a Scientist" by a happy Nick Oswald at the very clever and helpful blog Bitesize Bio.

"10 Reasons NOT to Be a Scientist" by a frustrated Nick Oswald at the very clever and helpful blog Bitesize Bio.


And because I will be giving several presentations in the next couple months...

"10 Tips for Better Presentations" by Nick Oswald at Bitesize Bio.

Plus two more from the "Ten Simple Rules" series in PLoS (Public Library of Science):

"Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations" (Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations. PLoS Comput Biol 3(4): e77 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030077)

"Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation" (Erren TC, Bourne PE (2007) Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation. PLoS Comput Biol 3(5): e102 doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030102)

Thank you to Richard Hamming, the authors of the PLoS articles, Bayblab, Bitesize Bio, and to Jorge Cham at PHD Comics for the above comic strip image.

For anyone who may have visited CELL*WISE in the last week, you probably noticed that I totally changed the template. Actually, to let you know, it wasn't all done until now, so you may have viewed an incomplete version. I will always be updating and improving aspects of this blog, as I learn more and become more experienced, but for now the template is mostly done.

A major improvement was upgrading to a 3-column blog template. When I started this blog about 1 month ago, I just had a 2-column template before, and specifically the template was called Tekka. At first I liked the rather minimalist look of this template and it had some convenient unique features. For those of you who can remember it, I had a slightly different title header image which I created, and I don't even remember what else at this point. The main thing that I started to not like anymore was the 2-column template. Mostly because I had many link categories that kept growing, and the one sidebar I had to work with was getting quite long and looking somewhat disorganized.

Therefore, I now have the new 3-column template, which of course has the large middle column for posts, but also two sidebars on the left and the right. It even has three extra links at the top right of the blog, but I don't know what exactly I will use them for yet, so right now they don't link to anything important.
I like the look of this 3-column template very much now, and the idea was again to try to keep everything clean looking and organized in a somewhat logical way. By having two sidebars, it increases the number of items that the reader can see on their screen in one view.
There are still some little things that I want to change about this template, but I will have to go back into the HTML to fix these when I have more time.
For any readers who may have read my original"Welcome to CELL*WISE" post, the links available on the sidebars haven't changed themselves that much at all, just the look of them.

On the left sidebar, (after the blog description, my profile, and my blog archive) most all links are now within "drop-down menus". First, I even have "Labels for CELL*WISE" within a drop-down menu, because it is expected that this list may grow rather long with time. All of the other link categories within drop down menus should be rather self-explanatory. One thing to note for the link categories of "Biomedical Engineering", "Tissue Engineering", "Stem Cells", "Biomaterials", and "NanoBiotechnology" (which are all specific focus topics for this blog) is that the links contained in these drop down menus are mostly websites of organizations and/or directories that I feel to be the most relevant and prominent to each of these categories.

Oh, I just remembered, I still need to finish the link category "Companies". I have a list of about 50 companies that I need to add in there!

Instead of drop-down menus, I actually really wanted to have hierarchical menus, just like the one that is used for my Blog Archive, but I couldn't figure out how to have those for additional sidebar links lists. If anyone knows how to do this for Blogger Beta, please do leave a comment with any info.

The right sidebar is currently dedicated to the "Newsreel" powered by Google (select different keywords same as before), Ads by Google which are targeted specifically for this blog, and a Google search box. Everyday, I even find at least one very interesting article in the Newsreel, so this is still a great feature for daily news relevant to this blog.

I am sure that I will be adding many more interesting things to each sidebar as I learn more about all the new Blogger features and fun/useful add-ons for blogs. I definitely have plenty of room now!

But now I need to focus on the most important part of this blog - writing my own posts.
Now that all this new template stuff is done, I can finally write on my blog!
And now I'm too tired. I plan to get back into the groove of posting with my own style soon.

This is kind of old, but I found out about it when I started this blog (about 1 month ago), mainly because another blogger, Hope for Pandora, wrote a great detailed post about it here. It was new to me, so I just wanted to write about it briefly as well.
Although the real Fall 2007 school semester only has about 1 month left, you still have about six months to "take a course" in Tissue Engineering from a joint program of Harvard and MIT. The course "HST (Health Sciences & Technology) 535, Principles and Practice of Tissue Engineering" has been available online since the beginning of September. Available free to the public (anyone with an internet connection), with no login necessary, are all the lecture Powerpoint slides and even webcast videos of each lecture (although these are 90 minutes long). The lecturers are definitely some of the top and leading researchers in the field of tissue engineering! How cool is that!
As an added bonus, you can even email questions to the Course Coordinator during the lecture times. Of coure, any person that is not registered as a student at Harvard or MIT cannot receive course credit.
I will be looking at all the slides when I have a chance, and there are a few that are of particular interest to me. For me, probably some of the material in the lectures will be review, but there will also be details of new and exciting research going on in some of the best cell and tissue engineering labs. For anyone interested learning more about detailed aspects of Tissue Engineering, this would be an excellent place to start. There is a lot of content covered, so you can always look at the lecture schedule and find specific lectures that are of interest to you.

This "online course" is only a very small part of the ambitious and large MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) initiative. Here is a brief description on Wikipedia.
MIT's OCW shares resources (lecture notes, homework, exams) for more than 1700 undergraduate and graduate courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum! That is an insane amount of lectures and knowledge!
I only featured the Principles and Practice of Tissue Engineering course above. But here are all the undergraduate and graduate courses offered by the Departments of Biological Engineering (at MIT) and the Health and Sciences Technology (at Harvard-MIT), and they all have their lecture notes free and available to anyone on the internet. Wow.
Of course you can also search through all 1700+ Courses that are part of MIT's OCW, and also find any subject/class that may interest you. It looks like now there about 1800 courses available online.

I was just thinking, if people want to really gain knowledge about a certain subject, and they are not enrolled in school/college, they can always buy books (even textbooks on the internet), or find articles on the internet (Google Scholar) for free, or read books and articles in libraries for free. But with MIT's OCW, there is such a great convenience of anyone with internet being able to freely view and download lecture notes (or even videos) from almost any class, and also the content of the lecture should be current. Now you just need time and motivation!

That kind of leads me to the current state of this blog, CELL*WISE. My initial plan was to be writing more interesting posts than I have been, which of course takes time and motivation. And an internet connection.
I'm not overly concerned about the quantity or frequency of posts, because honestly I don't have the time. There is definitely not a lack of material, and most of the time I get too overwhelmed with the amount of science / stem cell / tissue engineering-related things or news that I could write about or at least link to.
But, CELL*WISE is intended to be more of a weekly blog, compared to other daily science news blogs. What I want to be sure to have, are quality posts at least every week so that CELL*WISE stays alive and going strong.
But I also need to decide on a style that I want to have for my posts. So far, my posts have been in the style of longer articles, with some originality but also with a lot of linking to other sites that I am writing about. Since I just started this blog a little more than 1 month ago, I guess I am still finding the style that I want to have for CELL*WISE. I am still trying to figure out how I can maximize the originality of my posts, yet still have enough interesting content to really keep this blog going at a steady rate. I would also like to write posts (maybe weekly) that cover and link to several significant news items (scientific research, business, etc.), and I am thinking about how I would like to do that as well.

One thing that I had to work on for a while was putting all the links in sidebars. Having all the links and categories mainly started as a resource for me, so I could have all the relevant websites and companies available in one place on my blog. Hopefully, other people that visit this blog will find the organization of all these links helpful too.
Recently I have also added a way to make CELL*WISE printer-friendly, if you want to print out a post to read during your commute or when not online, or just to have a hard-copy of it. Instructions and the printer-friendly "Print this Page" Link are available at the bottom of the left sidebar.

As I mentioned in my first "welcome" post, there are many other blogs (listed in the left sidebar in "Blogroll") that already exist and are well-established, and that cover the similar topics and news that are to be the focus for this blog.
I am still finding my "niche" within the science/stem cell/tissue engineering/regenerative medicine blogosphere. We'll see what all this blog "differentiates" into with time.

Above image reference: MIT HST.535 Prin. and Pract. of Tissue Eng. (Fall 2007) course homepage.
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/HST/fa07/HST.535/index.html