Tomorrow is Confederate Memorial Day. According to this site, C.M.D. is on the 10th of May because on this day in 1865 the Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured near Irwinville, Georgia. I never knew that before. As a state employee, the fact that it's a day off is something that I should remember, but of course I didn't (and never do), at least until the person at work who takes care of these matters (and many more) reminded me. I have a C.M.D. block. Growing up in Virginia, it was not a holiday that anyone really talked about (at least in my world) - it was just lumped in with Memorial Day. In South Carolina, however, they celebrate this day - events are scheduled, something my friends up north always find a little funny.
Now, a day off is always a good thing, but I generally work on this holiday and try to find my own personal way to celebrate...like maybe after it gets dark tomorrow night I'll walk down the street and take down that annoying confederate flag that a neighbor has hanging from a tree. I've been after that flag for awhile now. Where I live could be described as eclectic, that would be kind - it's the kind of place where when a neighbor is moving and you want to celebrate, it's perfectly legitimate to make a mad dash to Lowe's and get some potting soil and chrysanthemums, and then plant them in someone's gas grill that's been sitting by the road for weeks. It's also the kind of neighborhood where a few days later, someone even adds some plastic flowers to the arrangement - and honest-to-god - I think for awhile someone was even watering the grill - the chrysanthemums thrived for a few months. My friend and former neighbor, Kate, took this photo of the grill in its prime - we always refered to it as our Copahee Beautification Project.
Planting a grill in the dark is a long way from what I do during the day in the lab, and I was thinking today about the on-going blog discussions (here and here)about writers and writing for a living and whining about writing and...I whine about writing all of the time because I have to write all of the time. I need to get over it. It's how I survive professionally, writing grants to support my students, writing grants to support myself, submitting publications to peer review journals, reviewing publications for journals and writing reviews...writing that's informative and concise but constrained, like this paragraph I was working on today:
"When crude oil is reintroduced into the environment, a selection process favors the growth of microorganisms able to utilize compounds present in the crude oil (Walker et al., 1975a; Walker and Colwell, 1976a; Ford, 1994; Al-Gounaim et al., 1995). Genes associated with either aliphatic or aromatic degradation were observed in 6% of the total microbial community from Alaskan sediments examined after the Exxon Valdez spill, with 32% of these genes associated with both pathways (Sotsky et al., 1994). Genes associated with aromatic degradation predominated in the sediments where lower molecular weight alkanes were no longer present in the residual oil, but enrichment of these populations in fresh crude oil resulted in an increase of aliphatic degradation genes. Microorganisms isolated from sequential enrichments with increasingly biodegraded extracts of a distilled Arabian Light crude oil demonstrated that microorganisms enriched in oil with high saturate hydrocarbon concentration were able to degrade saturates but not aromatic compounds (Venkateswaran and Harayama, 1995). However, on subsequent enrichments where the saturate fraction had been considerably depleted, the predominant populations shifted to organisms that degraded saturates and aromatics."
Pretty exciting stuff, eh? Actually it is, but there's rarely the opportunity anymore to truly express it in a publication. With words that is. Scientific journals are changing - since "publish or perish" is the guiding light, more and more is being submitted and in response journals are putting limits on the length and content of manuscripts. The result: little to no literary freedom, bare minimum descriptions, brief discussions. "Data not shown" and "as previously described" are commonplace. There's rarely the opportunity to tell a "story" - only a part of a story, a glimpse perhaps, and while a few find opportunities from time-to-time to escape these limitations, I know I still struggle with the writing. Writing is hard. It's definitely work.
Sometimes I write here to hide from the constraints - I'm procrastinating right now - I have a manuscript open on my computer that we are submitting to a journal that has a 6000 word limit (with figures/tables each considered as 300 words). Right now I need to delete 1,720 words to make the limit, and I want to submit it tomorrow. I've also got to review a protocol for screening microbial metabolites for anti-microbial properties. We're trying to design an assay to screen coral-associated microorganisms, as well as a bottlenose dolphin epidermial cell line (we're helping out a student who is in search of dolphin anti-microbial peptides associated with skin) for anti-microbial metabolites...it's a challenge - the selection of microorganisms to test. We can go for some routine organisms, Staph aureus, E. coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa...but then how relevant are these organisms to a coral or a dolphin? The funny thing is that they are more relevant than you think - most are ubiquitious - and the interesting thing is that often in the environment they are loaded with more genes that produce "virulence factors" - factors that help them survive and cause disease. The current obsession with bird flu and H5N1 (not to mention the highly virulent Florida strain) - sure, it could be a problem. But I personally think that it's gonna be some common everyday microorganism that is going to cause us the biggest problems in the future - antibiotic resistance running rampant in an opportunistic pathogen / microorganism that can can live and survive and thrive almost anywhere - an organism whose reservoir is the entire planet.
Boy am I procrastinating. Gotta start deleting words now.
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