George Whitesides on Simplicity

Sometimes, while I have lunch and no one to share it with (poor me), I like watching videos at TED. Today I saw this one by Professor George Whitesides. I don’t know how I could miss it. It was posted back in February. It probably slipped through my Google Reader (thank you Google for not letting me filter my RSS feeds, I only have to deal with 1000+ items per week).

Anyways, Dr. Whitesides talks about simplicity, technology and his paper microfluidics. As usual he gives a slight different angle on the subject and explains how complex systems can become simple and what simplicity is.

But it’s better if I don’t try to explain it and you just watch it. Enjoy!

John Wikswo and the Understanding of Biology

Today we had lunch with Dr. John Wikswo from the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education. After lunch he gave a seminar with the title: “Can we comprehend the full complexity of our own biology?”. Who would miss a talk with such an appealing title!!

The talk was brilliant. Definitely one of the top 10 talks I have ever witnessed live. It was full of uber interesting technical aspects such as the fact that a mathematical model of a complex biological system might require Avogadro’s number of differential equations (apparently this is called a Leibnitz). How can we tackle such a problem? Dr. Wikswo, his team and collaborators are trying to use robot scientists and genetic algorithms to try to find the right equations that fit the data. He also talked about the concept of having biological invariants, just like in physics, which blew my mind away. Again lots of fascinating concepts and technicalities that I might talk about in future posts.

The most interesting thing for me, however, was the philosophical question that he enounced in the title. He separates the problem of understanding biology into two problems: an ontological one and an epistemological one. The ontological problem might be solved by all the interesting technicalities mentioned above. It’s a matter of getting enough data so that we get a picture of what ‘is’ (the ontological meaning of ‘is’).

The epistemological problem however is the one that worries Dr. Wikswo. And I have to say I don’t share his worry. I would argue that depending on how we define ‘understanding’ we don’t need to worry about it. Other scientific areas such as quantum mechanics and astronomy deal all the time with concepts that epistemologists might consider beyond our ‘understanding’. Do we really know/understand what entangled states are? Do we know/understand what’s the size of the universe? I think these are the same type of epistemological problems and yet we are able to use our knowledge about them and thus one might argue that we do understand them.

Anyway, I am no philosopher and I am nowhere near the level of understanding of Dr. Wikswo so I should stop writing before I embarrass myself talking too much about what I don’t know. But wait… how do I know I don’t know what I don’t know? Good question.

Paul Yager at UCI

Last Friday I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Paul Yager. He came to UCI to talk about his work in point-of-care diagnostics for the developing world but before he stopped by our lab to see what was cooking. It turned out I was in the middle of an experiment… luckily it was working!

During his seminar Dr. Yager started with his Gate’s Foundation funded project. They call it the DxBox (yes it’s a reference to Microsoft’s xBox) and it gathers the efforts of PATH, Micronics, Epoch BioSciences and the University of Washington. They already have a couple of prototypes and it is meant to be a RNA-DNA diagnostic platform based on microfluidic cards. It will be able to diagnose Dengue, Measles, Influenza, Malaria, Typhoid and Rickettsia.

The microfluidic cards are laminates of laser cut Mylar and PMMA and the DxBox contains the pumps and imaging capabilities to control flow and analyze data. In order to increase shelf life they have dehydrated the antibodies or antigens required for each assay and stored them in the cards. They published a paper in 2008 about this in LOC.

The most interesting stuff however was when he talked about their work in paper microfluidics. Paper microfluidics it’s not new and others, like Dr. George Whitesides and his group at Harvard, have been working on the concept. The things that Dr. Yager showed however were pretty impressive. They can control flow pretty well considering it’s all capillary driven and you just need paper. H-filters, flow meters, sequential delivery, delayed flow lines… it’s all pretty much a done deal in Dr. Yager’s lab. I am definitely keeping an interested eye on their future papers regarding this!