The Mysterious Albino Redwood Trees Defying the Laws of Nature

For years, other scientists have referred to the pale branches of albino redwoods as parasites, but it didn’t make sense to Moore that a tree that ruthlessly gets rid of any unproductive branches would just tolerate such a peculiar parasite for years. There had to be more to this mystery than simple parasitic relationship, so the young scientists teamed up with arborist Tom Stapleton to document the locations of the trees, in search for clues.

What they found was very interesting: all of the albino trees were found on the outer reaches of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Due to specific soil and environmental conditions, redwood trees don’t grow beyond a certain point, and it was near these edges that most of the albinos were located. After analyzing the soil in these areas, Moor and Stapleton stumbled upon another interesting aspect – it contained higher levels of heavy metals, such as nickel, copper, and cadmium. And testing clippings from albino redwoods and normal ones, they found that the former had double the levels of heavy metals than the latter, on average.

Interestingly, these levels of heavy metals would be deadly for a normal, green redwood, but not for the “ghosts”. Heavy metals poison the pathways making chlorophyll, making it impossible for the tree to photosynthesize, but that’s not a problem for the white, chlorophyll-free branches. “It’s kind of like heavy metal poisoning, a human example would be lead poisoning,” Moore says.

The 22-year-old albino redwood expert believe that the white branches have a symbiotic relationship with the green ones. They suck up all the dangerous heavy metals, keeping the green parts healthy, and in return, the regular branches supply it with the chlorophyll needed to survive.

“It’s like an investment, that’s a good way to look at it,” Moore told VICE.

“If you think about it from a plant perspective, if the plant invests a little bit of its sugars into creating this white useless structure, and that useless structure actually worked, actually allows the plant to grow quicker, then the plant would want to do that again. And year after year grow that out and that’s how you get these big albino branches.”

That still wouldn’t explain how completely white redwood trees survive, but apparently, as long as they are close enough to a healthy redwood – usually their parent tree – they can graft their roots onto theirs and receive enough nutrients to survive. Most albino trees, especially those that are completely white, look weak and malnourished, because they only receive a small quantity of chlorophyll, definitely not enough to thrive.

Redwood chimeras, those trees that are half green and half white, are even more fascinating, because they have two different sets of DNA, which is like having two different people living in one body. Such specimens are very rare. Zane Moore has only found 10 specimens in the giant redwood forest.

His theory regarding the symbiotic relationship between albino and healthy redwood trees is only that, a theory, at least for the time being. He and other researchers are conducting experiments to test out this hypothesis, and even if it turns out to be wrong, it will at least offer some information to eventually crack the mystery. “It’s literally a matter of time before we have a good idea of what’s happening,” Moore said.

As a former plant biologist, this article bothers me. Albino plants are pretty cool, visually, but certainly not a complete mystery.

The article itself points out, barely, that redwood trees are interconnected. A stand-alone albino tree would die of course, but redwood "trees" are colony organisms. The roots of a number of trunks link them into a single organism, and any given "tree" that you see is effectively a single branch of a larger being. So having one or two be albino is very do-able.

The article says the supporting plants send chlorophyll to the albinos to keep them survive - one, this isn't possible in any plant to my knowledge, and two, if they had chlorophyll they wouldn't be white. The supporting plants would just send the raw sugars and nutrients needed to keep the cells running - no chlorophyll necessary.

In terms of absorbing heavy metals, plenty of plants do this. It is very common to have a "sacrificial leaf" on a plant that will accumulate unwanted chemicals, and when it gets too toxic the plant will intentionally drop that leaf.

It doesn't mention that a very plausible additional reason that the albinos are all near the edge of the forest is because the center of the forest has only strong, green plants that will crowd out and outcompete plants with albino parts.

Lastly, the "chimera" aspect sounds more interesting than it is. It isn't an entirely additional set of DNA, almost certainly, rather just a sprinkling of common mutations. Many houseplants have patches of the plant with different or no colors. It's referred to as variegation. The albino plants of the article are just a "large scale" version of this very mundane effect.

All this being said, I would love to see one of these.

>>149953
>The article says the supporting plants send chlorophyll to the albinos to keep them survive - one, this isn't possible in any plant to my knowledge, and two, if they had chlorophyll they wouldn't be white. The supporting plants would just send the raw sugars and nutrients needed to keep the cells running - no chlorophyll necessary.

Yah that seems like obvious journalist can't science, probably heard the trees with chlorophyll support the albinos and misrepresented it.

Regardless good read, rare for /news/.

Now let's cut them all down and make some nice conference room tables.

>>149953
This post was more informative than the article, I think. Maybe as a former plant biologist, you could enter the exiting world of plant journalism and turn the tide of yellow novelty pieces overwhelming the profession

>>150246
Thanks. I left the field mostly due to disillusionment with the way science is structured. Journalism has plenty of other problems as well, that share some fundamental similarities. You can see with so much shifting in the press from long investigatory pieces (that no one has the attention span to read or comprehend) to click-bait titles.

Scientists absolutely need to cut out the (often scientifically illiterate) journalist middlemen and speak directly with the general population. Right now, no full-time researcher has time to do that, and there's no part of the system that encourages doing so.

Of course, it's a vicious cycle where journalists misrepresent or overstate research, the public doesn't really understand what's happening, not enough funding is directed towards science, researchers are more rushed to get good results, and can point to the ignorant public as proof that any press releases on their part would be wasted.

On the other hand, plenty of people will say that articles like this are "beneficial" white lies, in that it sounds cool and might lead people to support more science funding. Of course, only politicians control that.

>>150248
As a scientist myself I find your assessment to be accurate, sadly. I would like to point out that journals like science, nature and cell are a bit more accessible to the general public and can provide a more direct insight than their smaller, more technical subsidiaries. Unfortunately, even those tend to be "interpreted" by journalists and reprinted in click bait articles that make their way to the general public much more easily then the primary literature. Sites like IFLS are among the most egregious offenders.

I'm not really sure the best way to handle this situation. Being a liason to the general public has been an issue coming up more recently within my field, especially as the forefront comes into opposition with current public policy. To this end I feel committees and organizations such as thw ISSCR are a good start, though more can certainly be done.

>>150253
The big three in biology that you mention are somewhat accessible, except for the fact that you need to pay to access the articles. Reading abstracts (summaries) isn't enough, and the articles themselves are of course too detailed for someone with only cursory familiarity with the subject. In turn, it's no surprise that they are interpreted in the manner you describe by other media groups. I am thankfully unfamiliar with the details of IFLS, and I won't be checking it out!

What field do you work in? I did some work with GE plants, and my European colleagues were very disappointed when the US public began to move against GMOs. They had thought they had managed to escape that "backwards" thinking when they left Europe to do research in the US.

Plenty of societies exist, but neither I nor anyone I know outside of science is familiar with any of their work. Are there articles somewhere? Do they subsidize journalists? I just don't know what impact they are having.

The publishers like Elsevier should be doing some of this, but they are too busy fucking everyone for cash. They don't do the science, they don't review the science for legitimacy, and they ask the researchers to pay them thousands of dollars for the "honor" of having their paper in the journal. Heaven forbid you want your graphs in color, pay extra for that!

I think all of the problems are somewhat exacerbated by the low amount of funding for science in the US, but it isn't the root cause. I don't see a reason for publishers to exist (what do they contribute, really?), and the government should be actively bridging the gap between the general public and researchers. Scientists don't have time to do it, regular journalists can't do it, so these funding agencies that decide who gets to do what research should be communicating these results to the public, since they are the "experts" on what matters and is worth funding. Better public understanding and involvement can only be a plus (only if both!).

>>150255
I am still working on my Ph.D. at the moment, so I am not going to claim as much familiarity with the frustrations that you have experienced. I am working in germ cell development using hESCs as well as iPSCs to develop therapies for infertility. As you can imagine, the lab I am in is particularly worried about public opinion given the nature of our work and the materials we use.

I completely agree that the journals "pay to publish" and "pay per view" model is a problem. This is particularly true when you consider that the journals are aiming for high citations and are more willing to publish "sexy" science from a big name which will gain a lot of attention as opposed to solid research. Journals like PLOS are a little better given their open access model, but the pay to publish is still there.

The societies I know of try to act as a liason between scientists and policy makers. At least that is how ISSCR works. They try to engage with politicians and lobby for the importance of stem cell research and the like. I assume other societies perform similar roles, but I am not entirely sure. As for success, that is a bit questionable given how there hasn't been any significant funding increase since 2000, but I suppose not losing funding is a start.

We really do need to push for more public involvement, but I feel we need to start from the ground up revamping our education system. The level we teach to students is remedial at best. I learned more in my rotation in an Arabidopsis lab about plant development and genetics then in all of my prior years of schooling, including an undergrad plant biology course. It is sickening how behind the course materials are from the actual science. Another area which can be improved is by adding some sort of exclusivity agreement with journals where after a period of time the articles become open access. This happens with some bigger articles, but there is no reason 5 year old paper should still be exclusive.

>>150262
I actually left only with a Master's, and decided not to progress after what I'd seen and heard, so in the end you'll be more familiar than me.

The stem cells certainly explains your familiarity with ISSCR! Your field had a pretty rough time under the Bush Jr. era, but even out of the spotlight it's still a volatile field to be sure. When the moods and concern level of the public can change as fast as the winds, and politicians are always eager to cut funds to ensure votes based on those whims, I'd be scared to be in your lab as well. Working in China doesn't seem very enticing, does it?

Your point about the journal incentives is hitting the nail on the head - where is the push to double check earlier results and corroborate other labs? Science is becoming a house of cards, with no one willing to double check things until later explorations collapse due to bad assumptions. A lot of effort is wasted due to independent work on the same negative results.

Like I point out above, in the end I think the politicians are more beholden to being re-elected than having good relationships with people whose livelihoods depend on the good will of the former. Cynical to be sure, but they could be doing quite a bit, even if funding hasn't dropped.

Can't agree more about the education system. I will forever be blown away by how lackluster undergraduate courses are compared to the reality of grad school, hitting the ground running. A bachelor's in no way prepares you for science, IMO. Not sure why it's such a joke, but considering how poor of students many of my peers were coming from high school, I can sort of understand. I did some work in Arabidopsis, so I know exactly what you're describing.

Your idea about open access is fantastic. Five years is plenty, and it would help a lot with international researchers or those who don't have the funding budget at their institutions to just "get all the subscriptions".

You in the University of California system?

>>150267
>>150262
just swap kik and fug already

>>150267
Funnily enough I am in the UC, though I would rather not delve much further then that lest I dox myself.

For your point on journals not incentivizing independent review I completely agree. Even more worrisome is that it promotes image/data manipulation and other fraudulent means of pushing a paper out as fast as possible. The recent retractions for "beautifying" western blots is evidence of that. Unfortunately in this "publish or perish" environment there is not much that can be done unless there is a paradigm shift in how we measure whether a scientist is "successful."

I think a big problem with the current undergrad biology system, in the US at least, is that it is aimed at students who are interested in going premed as opposed to young scientists. Now we can debate the readiness of some of those premed students for the harshness of med school, but most of the training I got came solely from my time working in a lab part time. I ended joining for a few years after graduation to improve my CV and truly decide whether I wanted to do this for the rest of my life before taking the plunge for grad school. It was in that 3 year stretch I learned how to be a good scientist. Looking at the other students in my cohort, it is remarkable how different people just out of undergrad are from those of us who spent time in the field.

I think one of the PIs I talked to at a conference summed up the current struggles best. "All I want to do is meet with other researchers, discuss methods openly and work on wide ranging collaborations to get at the big issues. Unfortunately no one is going to pay me to do that though."

>>150268
I'm sorry that science policy is not an interesting topic for you. Would it help if I claimed that Donald Trump stole the trees chlorophyll in an attempt to hide his ties to the Russian government?

>>150272
Don't want to dox - it's a small group of people in the end, just had to test out the ol' "educated guess".

The fradulent results problem is certainly the other half of the coin - you seem to be very aware of the potential pitfalls in science. You said you weren't so familiar, but if you haven't talked much with other researchers about this I think you'll see it's a widespread concern. Of course, what you said about the PI discussion means you probably are.

Like they point out, their hands are a bit tied; and when only the first past-the-post gets to publish about a finding, labs can't meaningfully collaborate anyway out of risk of being scooped.

The pre-med thing is a definite concern. I feel like I encountered less in my 3rd/4th year classes, when they became more specialized, but unfortunately if you majored in human biology than you probably had them the whole way. For what it's worth, my undergraduate career segued very directly into my graduate one, and the same problems were apparent, sans pre-meds.

It's sad that students get so few opportunities to work in labs, there are far fewer openings (even though many are unpaid) than applicants. A bachelor's degree should probably have mandatory lab time in science, so that even if you don't work in the field you have some first-hand exposure to actual science. It would help distinguish universities from just "high school, round 2". Obviously, working for a few years in the field like you did is better, but that's even harder to pull off. On a personal note, I'm glad you did it and made an informed choice to continue on for your Ph.D. Sounds like you'll be a great researcher.

Wanna swap kik and fug?
Sorry, couldn't help myself.

>>150274
Thanks for the encouragement! I was definitely lucky to be able to do research during my undergrad, even more so because I landed a paid position as an undergrad technician. While it is not the same, the UC system has a minor which requires research experience in a lab and a short dissertation on what they researched and results, which is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately looking at several of the undergrads, there are definitely good and not so good ones. Due to their unpaid position and the minor requirements a lot of PIs are hesitant to fire them despite being subpar which does kind of defeat the purpose and breeds a sense of laziness.

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this. It is really refreshing to actually talk about something with substance as opposed to the vapid trolling which predominates. I hope that you can find your way back into science or, if not, find something else which you can enjoy more. It may not be perfect, but there is nothing else quite like it and the ability to work on and discover things no one else has ever known before is really a one of a kind experience!

>>150275
You're certainly welcome. One thing I loved about science was working with an international team of very intelligent people that are often highly motivated by the desire to make the world a better place. I can't help but roll my eyes when I see posts here or on /pol/ about climate change scientists or others being a secretive cabal trying to control the world. Scientists bust their ass for often shitty pay, a lot of the time just to help the same people that distrust them so much. Talking with you gave me that same sense again, and it's how I know you'll be a good fit.

My major had the option to apply for a small grant to cover the costs of having you in the lab, in exchange for sharing your results. I did that, but it wasn't even a minor. Still very grateful I had the opportunity. Always surprising how shitty some undergrads are, you'd think the PIs and postdocs that primarily work with them would be better at vetting them after so many years.

You're right about the uniqueness of science, and I miss it from time to time. It was a personal weighing of things to leave; the things I had to tolerate to further my career were starting to overshadow the parts I liked. Do you think you'll stay in academia, move to industry, become a liberal arts professor?...

I wish there were better discussions on this site, but again the incentives aren't right. High image spam and fast, shitty posts overwhelm the slower and more methodical threads. The few good posts are often ignored as the trolls and morons claw at each other ad nauseum.

Reddit has a different issue, with a sort of IFLS taint to it and a userbase with a poor understanding of the role of up/downvotes. Not sure where else to try, but at least here I can still try to win some hearts and minds by speaking to a large enough audience.

>>150279
I'm hoping to stay in academia and ultimately work towards professorship. Still I am a few years from graduation and after some post doc work who knows where I will end up. Still the idea of running a lab and controlling the direction of research is very appealing.

The distrust of science is a problem, but I think it stems from what we discussed earlier about how the public does not really have access to the scientists or their work directly. If we can address that then the distrust should fade as people begin to realize how rigorous the field actually is and what sort of vetting is done internally to root out those who violate the rules.

There really is not a good forum anywhere to have these kinds of discussions, or at least not ones which are easily accessible/popular. Even on /sci/ it is just shit posts and bait to try and stir up controversy or point out how smart they are. At least here it is slow enough that discussion is not completely lost in the sea of trolls. I try to avoid reddit for the same reasons you outlined. The up vote system just destroys any form of quality discussion. At least here if you make a controversial post it doesn't get pruned instantly, for better or worse.

What are you doing now that you left with your masters, if you don't mind me asking?

>>150282
You can certainly control the direction of the research, if you get the right grants! I hope the situation is improved when you're a professor in a few years.

I haven't discussed this recently, so I'm trying not to rant TOO hard. You're right about distrust of academics, but there's also research by corporations. I had a hard time convincing people that GE plants are fine, even if Monsanto has a poor track record (though most of the "facts" I heard about them are false). People couldn't separate hatred of companies and the idea of genetic modification. There can be ulterior motives in play, but the public is very bad at applying Occam's Razor to these situations.

I think the next generation of scientists (yours) will change the field, and we need it. The older generation bemoans the poor public awareness, but do very little to change the status quo. A more science-capable US would be a greater nation in so many ways. Still a big problem with the religion here though (my friend told me the "humans aren't monkeys" debate rages on in his church).

Had to laugh, /sci/ is ironically one of the worst places to discuss science, just as /lit/ gives me poor results on literature. "Point out how smart they are" is a painfully accurate description.

Yes, Reddit is solid on paper but in practice the zealous moderation and downvote censoring is self-destructive. There will almost certainly be negative repercussions as that model of gathering social power and applying it takes hold. I like /news/ but don't often see interesting threads; the image restriction can be a little aggravating sometimes.

I definitely don't mind, it's a very legitimate question. I only left somewhat recently, and took some time off (I only worked and took classes my entire life) to see the nation and the world; I actually just got back to the US and am starting to look for more permanent employment than what I have. So, unfortunately not much to say on comparisons to working in the field, yet!

>>150284
I completely understand the frustration your friend suffered with some of the more zealous religious folk here. I myself recently had to explain my work with human stem cells to a group of church goers and they responded as if I was insane. To be fair though, it is getting better with the younger generations and I have had equally tense discussions about my use of animals in research. We actually had our building on lock down recently due to an animals rights protest. Scarily enough, some of the professors here have been stalked by protesters and had houses vandalized because of their outspoken nature on the topic. I don't know too much about the corporate bias so I can't say too much on it.

I hope that you will be able to find work now that you are back on the lookout. There are certainly a lot of good bio tech companies here if you want to stay that route.

>>150286
What's the story with the church goers? Seems like a bizarre situation.

You're right that the younger generation is getting better (every generation sheds some problems of the last one, I think), but the animal rights issue will probably be bigger in our generation. That's another great example of a bridge between researchers and the public that desperately needs attention; animosity is going to build to dangerous levels otherwise, as you have already seen beginning. We were always very lucky that our research was on plants, which aren't so "cute" in the public eye, although we certainly had some research plots damaged by protestors.

I appreciate the good wishes; I am not worried at all about finding employment. I did some seasonal work to bridge the gap between graduating and going abroad, and being up in the ivory tower made me forget how, to be brutally honest, unintelligent and incompetent most people are. I applied on a whim to a job in corporate analysis, knew nothing other than what I'd read on the company website "about" page, and had the position probably two minutes into my interview. I don't mean this to toot my own horn, rather, to show that the situation outside of science is far from dire for those that can hack it in that field.

Dancing on the edge of going off-topic, I hate the idea of working for a large company, so I won't consider biotech. I might try and get a position elsewhere in the government, and it's getting easier all the time to do biology from one's own garage...

Out of curiosity, do you ever catch shit from people asking why you work in that field in light of how many unadopted children exist, or of global overpopulation? I don't want to probe too deeply or expose you or something, but I'm curious as to how you ended up in a lab on infertility with a path that also included something as far from that as Arabidopsis work.

>>150291
The churches are honestly not as big a deal as people make them out to be. Sure there are fundamentalists who kick up some dirt every now and then, but for the most part the church based protests seem to be over.

I haven't really had too much trouble with people questioning my work. I tend to frame everything around pediatric cancer patients who received high doses of chemotherapy at a young age and are now infertile. While the work could be theoretically be applied to any individual, the primary goal is to help young teens and children.

The Arabidopsis work was actually something I did while rotating before joining my current lab. We were looking into better understanding the complexes which alter the epigenetic landscape with an emphasis on in depth biochemical analysis. I was actually really surprised how few plant labs really do in depth protein interaction mapping and biochemistry compared to the mammalian field.

It's good to hear that you won't have a problem finding work. Corporate work is rather stifling so I definitely see where you are coming from.

>>150293
Yeah, I agree the churches don't hold the power they used to - just meant to point out that penetration of science has a long way to go.

I caught that you said it was a rotation, just that it seems a little out of place if your background was in human biology. I did some work on Arabidopsis epigenetics as well, tangentially. PPI mapping? Like Steven Jacobsen (UCLA) / Bob Fischer (UCB)? I feel like, yeah, yeast two-hybrids and things are used for protein interactions, maybe moreso in the future with some of the neat quantum dot / FRET type stuff being worked on. I do feel that, usually, the focus is on more typical genetic pathways until the overall system is understood at a high level, and once a model is made you try and tease apart what the exact structures are.

I could definitely be incorrect, but I seem to vaguely recall something about alternative splicing / difficulty in predicting exons being more prevalent in mammals than in plants. It could just be that our domain prediction software is more reliable in letting us guess which interactions exist in advance, whereas it tends to be a poor assumption in mammals. Been quite awhile before I've even had molecular biology pop up in my brain, so not 100% sure on why that discrepency exists.

What are the biggest sources of infertility? It's something I know very little of (whether it's mostly males, females). Apart from chromosome count mismatches (not too common in humans) I can't guess what the biggest issues would be. Lots of places things could go wrong in that messy system. Honestly surprised it works as much as it does.

I'd love to continue this conversation, but I don't want you to feel pressured to stay up. For me right now Mondays are basically bonus Sundays, but I'm sure it isn't the case for you.

>>150296
We were primarily focused on utilizing techniques like BioID to pull down proteins from specific tissue in order to get a better understanding of what is going on in regions such as the meristem. We were then able to do mass spec to really get at the interacting partners and verify they were genuine. There is definitely more splice variants and a lot less defined enhancer/promoter elements in mammalian tissue, but I think as we get a better understanding of the Arabidopsis genome it is becoming more clear that the assumptions on the promoter being 1000 - 500 bp upstream of the tss may not be true in all cases. I suspect there will be a bit of rehashing of older work which was based on that as the research becomes more fine tuned using more targeted gene editing techniques like CRISPR.

My work is primarily focused on chemotherapy induced infertility and not so much on more natural causes. The end goal will be to devise an iPSC based therapy in order to treat patients autologously. Currently the best solution available to patients is a testicular biopsy prior to undergoing chemo which will then be stored until they want to have kids. Then the sample can be thawed and the immature progenitors stimulated in the hopes enough will convert into sperm for an IVF.

Yeah, I should probably head off to bed. I probably won't respond to this thread tomorrow just because I don't want to keep bumping it up when it is just a discussion between us. It was great talking with you, good luck finding a position somewhere you enjoy and I hope you have a great night!

>>150305
Right back at you. Thanks for indulging in my curiousity. Felt great to get a good dose of intelligence in my day's Internet diet.

Wish you the best in your career, a satisfying future, and good sleep in this shitty heat.

>>149939
i have a plant, named Jeffrey, but he hasn't been well under my care, he keeps fighting for survival, as i can tell he tries to sprout out some green leaves, means he's not given up, but everytime, there's this 'white fungus sticky mould' thingy stick unto him.. and i cant get them out! i thought of hosing those fuckers down with water but im living in a apartment and Jeffrey is out at my balcony. So i do not have access to hose him clean.

Advice is much appreciated !

>>150321
you can get fungicides at garden stores but I can't guarantee it will work

>>150248
>I left the field mostly due to disillusionment with the way science is structured.
This is the wrong attitude tbqh.

Whatever happened to "your resistance only makes me harder"?

>>150321
Hosing it down? So this is a pretty big plant? If it's small, you can obviously try and wash it off in your sink or shower. Is it your only plant? The new fungal spores might be coming from a nearby plant, so check those for infection as well. Apart from a fungicide, as noted above, there actually isn't that much you can do at this point. Besides aggressively removing any tissue that is contaminated to avoid infection of new growth, it might be too late. If the leaves are strong/waxy, you might be able to use a soft cloth like a tissue to rub off the growth every day. Never leave the leaves (sorry) wet.

>>150341
The "wrong" attitude? There is no single correct attitude for all situations. In my judgment, my effort was better spent working in a field that didn't make me feel like there was a 20% flat tax on my motivation and results. It's not like the field is sorely lacking my presence either; competition for funds means I was opening a slot for someone not as bothered by these issues, net effect on number of scientists = 0.

Resistance should certainly be met with redoubled efforts, but only to a point. There are many ways to achieve a goal; trying to cram the circle piece through the star-shaped hole isn't the "right" way. I can still make positive contributions to the world, and in a way that I feel is efficient.

>>150274
>>150272
Sup mongoloids.

I was actually part of a virology research lab for 2 years studying baculovirus AcMNPV. I would have loved to delve into the original PhD track and talk with you fine gentlemen but life events steered me towards medicine instead of research.

God bless you both fighting in the forefront of discovery

>>150447
Well, I don't work in research anymore for now, so it's all the other guy that's advancing knowledge. He can have my blessing.

Plenty of research in medicine though, MD-PhD? Medical research as a doctor is, to my understanding, quite possible. What are your plans in medicine, if you haven't already finished med school?

>This whole thread
Almost brings me to tears. Maybe there's hope for this place yet.
Thank you for the read, it was utterly fascinating. Good luck to both of you in your future endeavors.

>>150451
Well, MD-PhD is my life's end goal. I'm applying this cycle so hopefully I'll be matriculated by 2018.

I actually prefer research over healthcare, but the general trend in med school right now favors applicants with experience closer to social work than that gained from a laboratory.

My plans right now is to get through med school and take a residency in California, but eventually hopefully I can work for the CDC when I switch my career more over to research. That's still 15 years from now though.

>>150455
Thanks, and I'm glad you enjoyed the read. My under-employed ass will still be checking up if you have opinions to share on whatever topic, or even have questions. I think /news/ has some good potential.

>>150456
I have some friends graduating soon from med school, but haven't heard about that social work aspect - fascinating. Seems like you would want a good mix, ideally that mix within each applicant.

I've always felt that doctors have too much on their shoulders: far too much to memorize and understand, ridiculous work schedules, large range of research to stay abreast of, and all the joy that comes from working directly with patients from every walk of life. I would rather some of these things be split over different professions, I don't think being a doctor now is at all like being a doctor forty years ago. I'm sure quite a few physicians cut corners to manage it. Of course, I have never been in the medical field, and am just guessing.

CDC seems like it would be a cool place to do research, good on you. What makes you want to residence out in California, just the fact that most of it is a paradise?

As a big aside, these CAPTCHAs are killing me. This last one took probably 60+ clicks...

In strange eons even /news/ can have a good thread

>>150457
The east coast is alot faster with med school trends and it only really started to solidify the last half decade.

I'm actually working as a med scribe with a couple of doctors and they tell me that they google things on the fly all the time. It's definitely a change from doctors in not too long in the past. Interestingly, the work is split pretty well between med techs, psychologists, nurses, PCPs, and specialist. It depends what you are though, since family health doctors need to know almost everything to avoid being sued for neglect while specialists have it a bit easier in general/esoteric knowledge ratio.

I want to stay in CA because it's always been my home, but I'm not sure anymore because the people in my cohort are insufferable. I don't even care about what their political views are, they are just absolutely shut out and against anything that doesn't perfectly fit their world view.

>>150566
Thanks for expanding on the work distribution subject. Sorry you don't much get along with your cohort - maybe I was lucky, but my cohort was excellent. There were a couple that were pretty gung-ho about their specific ideals, but the rest didn't take them very seriously.

Would these be cohorts during the residence as well? No, right? Seems like you'll move on from them soon enough, and then you can enjoy the glorious Republic of California without those ostriches.

>>150571
That would be awesome, but we'll see. I recently went to a UC Irvine conference and almost everyone there were embarrassingly emotionally weak. During the introduction the speaker wanted everyone to scream on top of their lungs to "let out their frustration about Trump". It's even more surprising that almost everyone did exactly as told. What the fuck are these children doing in premed programs?

Hopefully they get weeded out so that more robust and stable candidates can get into the schools for residency.

>>150582
I'm not sure I would chalk that up to emotional weakness as much as a speaker trying to use pathos to get an "in" with the crowd they were working. It's certainly in very poor taste though, for the speakers and the audience. Not to mention cringey.

If they are truly weak though, then I have no doubt that they'll not continue in the program for much longer. One of my professors in grad school was quite frank when he told me that he realizes that seeing an "A" in an undergraduate course means a lot less to him about their knowledge of the subject than it does about their being willing to put up with a lot of bullshit to do work, and it's the latter trait that he was looking for in new graduate students.

>>150585
I left out a bunch of other detail that would definitely change your mind. I agree that the inflation of As and 4.0s make it hard to discern truly deserving candidates in higher education.

Dam...