The joy of (not) being sick.

German, Spanish

No one should ever discuss back that the most important thing in life is to stay healthy, everything else just doesn’t matter compared to your physical and mental health, and they should have the highest priority because your entire life depends on them.

There are times that one gets sick either with a harmless cold or an undesirable more serious disease. These are the days that will make you miss what being healthy is to be. However, even from these uncomfortable situations there are things to learn.

I will write for now from personal experience (and hopefully only) from the first case where to be healthy again is just a matter of resting and keeping yourself hydrated.

It is my 4^th day with a crappy cold, but there were some moments in the past few days that I could only describe as “joy” for a number of reasons.

How often I have the opportunity in a regular day to please me with a hot tea with lemon and honey in bed? That is what my body screams for now and likely is much healthier than the regular 3 coffees per day to keep the

senses up and running at work.

How often I cooked and ate a soup with absolutely no time pressure?  Well, in a Monday to Friday routine I can just wait to go to the canteen and eat a lunch fast enough to continue work and finish on time. I really like to cook (on the weekends) but often I prefer to skip the cooking part and treat my family and myself with some foreign food.

In my particular case, exercising in a regular manner is as important as breathing, and when I don’t train I feel terribly unhappy (and unhappiness is not really appreciated at work or home). It does really make a difference in my life that little hormone kick that a short routine of exercises brings. However these feelings toward sports led me since I was young to stress myself and push “the machine” to its limits. Resting time is just as important as training time. Because at the moment I am not able to do 3 push- ups in a row, here again I have the perfect opportunity to have some rest. I might do a full stop until New Year as well, so that all those extra-calories from Christmas get a fair opportunity to integrate themselves around my belly button.

Regarding sleeping times, I have never had a better nap than that when I fell asleep in my son’s bed while the kids were playing over me. I don’t have to mention that the closest to a nap in a regular week is that 3-minute eyes shut on my way back home in the train avoiding by all possible means all physical human contact.

This kind of sick state is an opportunity to concentrate on your health and your personal needs. At the end you are the only one who can please what you deep in your heart need, just some peace in body and mind.

And by the way, if you find a mate with whom you can share your illness, even better. This time I am sharing the sickbed with my 6 month old son who also has a cold. Last year was with my back then 2 year old son. They, like me, do not appreciate when one is not able to breath with all those colorful things coming out of your nose, but at least we had and have each other to complain and stay the whole day in warm jammies.

The Nobel prize for a green-coloured protein

German
In memory of Roger Tsien 01.02.1952 - 24.08.2016

The 2008 Nobel prize package for chemistry (1.4 million Euros including the trip to Stockholm) went to Roger Tsien, Osamu Shimomura and Marty Chalfie for their work on a protein called GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein), a protein that glows green in the dark.

Osamu Shimomura had a lifetime work collecting and studying the crystal jellyfish (Aequorea Victoria) where this protein can be found (that’s why these animals are bioluminescent). Shimomura was the first one to isolate the pure GFP protein (1962)

Douglas Prasher had in the 80’s and early 90’s seminal papers reporting the isolation of the DNA that encodes for GFP. Without this work it wouldn’t have been possible to use this protein in organisms other than the Jellyfish. (GFP has nowadays several applications, many animals are glowing green right now...for medical investigation).

http://www.conncoll.edu/ccacad/zimmer/GFP-ww/images/shine0.jpg

Chalfie, who already by then made important discoveries on the neurologic architecture of worms (his papers were published in top class journals in the 80’s), got very interested in GFP after he heard a talk on bioluminiscence. He wanted to make their worms glow green using this protein and for this he contacted Prasher.

Unfortunately for Prasher, his money run out and couldn’t continue with his research on GFP, but as any other good-hearted scientist, he provided the material he created to many other scientists including Tsien and Chalfie. Chalfie, with this material, managed to make bacteria and his worms glow green (a paper published in “Science” 1994 where still Prasher was co-author).

Tsien, on the other hand, managed to improve the fluorescence of GFP by creating several mutant proteins (“Nature” paper in 1995).

To make a long story short, Shimomura, Tsien and Chalfie got the Nobel prize for GFP, while Prasher end up as a shuttle driver for a car dealership (for 10 dollar/hour).

As good gesture, Prasher was offered to assist to the Nobel Prize ceremony (it must had been something like going to the wedding of your ex-girlfriend) where he was acknowledged for his contribution to Chalfie and Tsien work.

In june 2010 Prasher was finally able to return to science with a small contract with a research firm. Later he was able to work in Tsien's lab (2012-2015)

Its not only important to know what you are doing, but also to be in the right place and the right time to have Nobel prize winning papers (or at least papers)

All the best to Prasher and those anonymous heroes who pave the way for the very few to the top. (Someone knows who or where are the guys that worked on those papers? And what are they doing now?)

Unluckily Roger Tsien passed away at the age of 64. It seems unexpected and he will be for sure missed by colleages, friends and all the community that got to know him (even through only his papers)