Literature and Philosophy in the Laboratory Meeting

by Jalees Rehman Research institutions in the life sciences engage in two types of regular scientific meet-ups: scientific seminars and lab meetings. The structure of scientific seminars is fairly standard. Speakers give Powerpoint presentations (typically 45 to 55 minutes long) which provide the necessary scientific background, summarize their group's recent published scientific work and then…

Synthetic Biology: Engineering Life To Examine It

by Jalees Rehman Two scientific papers that were published in the journal Nature in the year 2000 marked the beginning of engineering biological circuits in cells. The paper “Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli” by Timothy Gardner, Charles Cantor and James Collins created a genetic toggle switch by simultaneously introducing an artificial DNA plasmid…

Google Zeitgeist: Annoying Philosophers, Weird Germans and White Pakistanis

by Jalees Rehman The Autocomplete function of Google Search is both annoying and fascinating. When you start typing in the first letters or words of your search into the Google search box, Autocomplete takes a guess at what you are looking for and “completes” the search phrase by offering you multiple query phrases. The queries…

Should Doctors ‘Google’ Their Patients?

by Jalees Rehman Beware of what you share. Employers now routinely utilize internet search engines or social network searches to obtain information about job applicants. A survey of 2,184 hiring managers and human resource professionals conducted by the online employment website CareerBuilder.com revealed that 39% use social networking sites to research job candidates. Of the…

Scientism Reloaded

by Jalees Rehman The “Reclaim Scientism” movement is gaining momentum. In his recent book “The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions“, the American philosopher Alexander Rosenberg suggests that instead of viewing the word “scientism” as an epithet, atheists should expropriate it and use it as a positive term which describes their worldview. Rosenberg…

Three Seconds: Poems, Cubes and the Brain

by Jalees Rehman A child drops a chocolate chip cookie on the floor, immediately picks it up, looks quizzically at a parental eye-witness and proceeds to munch on it after receiving an approving nod. This is one of the versions of the “three second rule”, which suggests that food can be safely consumed if it…