Sickness and health

In my job as a professor of Pathobiology, i teach students every day about the horrors that can befall the human body. But that's all academic: today i am dying. A little bit, anyway. A slight fever, a sore throat, and enough mucus to drown a small southern town has me whining like a little girl. The funny thing is, i have been shot, blown up, survived helicopter crashes, and had to stitch up my own wounds in the jungle while being shot at. Perspective, peter, perspective. I'm off to whine some more...

The maiden blog...

Having recently begun packing up the notes, files, and data from the last four years of my research at an academic medical center, I was astounded by the number of experiments that I hadn't published. This experience got me thinking about just how much research never makes it into print- data that becomes either lab lore, or is simply lost forever. The observation that most data never get published is certainly not new, and one needn't be in the field for long to realize that the quest for the elusive least publishable unit (LPU) necessarily involves many experiments that you'd rather not think about, much less discuss with someone else. But this seems terribly wasteful, and made me wonder what could be done about it. Then I heard a snippet of a story on NPR about blogging. What better place for the shameful, inconclusive, or negative data that I have acquired over the past 23 years? The interwebs are the ideal, searchable, permanent home for terabytes of experimental data that are not of any use to me. Or are not of any use that I am currently aware of...

I'm not sure about the best way to format this stuff, and will be trying various structures over the next few weeks. Feedback is, of course, very appreciated!