Things to do when lonely...rediscover the masters

They have always been my greatest consolation and one of the most entertaining companies. My masters, my teachers, my idols. And by this I don't mean either my highschool professors (although some of them I still remember), nor the crude foot-balling genious of Dimitris Saravakos or the legendary figure of Che (whose posters could still decorate my bedroom). By masters, I refer to the people, whose work not only I admire but above all has always acted on my frustrating, vertiginous anxieties with an utterly recomposing effect.

In times of stress, I turn back to my favourite beacons of wisdom, which by doing nothing but having done everything already, by saying nothing but by having written all that is worth to write, by not letting out a single sigh but by having composed music to last until the end of time, they put me back into place. It is exactly then that my sense of what really matters becomes crystal clear. Feeling melancholic on a rainy Sunday morning loses any excuse on the sound of Ravel's "Tombeau de Couperin" (perhaps exactly because it lifts melancholy to a level of exhilarating perfection). Getting bored with the daily routine of work, work, work gets a whole lot different meaning when you remember that a previously un-discovered collection of articles by Eduardo Galeano awaits you at home (and I thank myself for choosing this book to give to Bianca as a farewell present).

Because it is the "masters" that come to your aid in all kinds of difficult situations. You think there's nothing left to be said until you come upon a well-placed phrase by Tolstoi. You think there is no way to sort out the simplest possible model about the results you produce on your screen when you remember that Feyerabend once advised you to use exactly what you are completely forgetting about: your intuition. Evenmore, you feel that an inspiring five minutes of peace are impossible until you suddenly discover that Rachmanninov once wrote 14 songs, the last one you think only for you to listen to on this dull Tuesday afternoon (Julien, I ll be forever grateful for this).

Inspiration may remain evanescent, peacefull breaks will always be short-lived, unocmfortable silences will keep occurring and intuitive models will hardly ever work. But what remains is the feeling that we are not alone in this complicated world, full of puzzles and challenges, where we can also make a difference as long as we turn to the right people for advice and councelling.

Insignificance

Here it is, another post with reference to a song title (Pearl Jam again, but I am slightly biased these last weeks since I am listening to their Athens concert over and over).

But insignificance has a meaning in this case. It is meaningless in science so I struggle against it but it keeps occurring with a disturbing persistence.

It often happens in research, that enthusiasm decays exponentially. You come up with a brilliant idea, then you formulate a satisfactory theoretical model, you implement it with a bit of a sloppy programming, you validate it against unreliable experiments and end up with insignificant results. You just can't help it.

Nonetheless, I am satisfied with myself. In my case, this Friday produced results that are less insignificant than already published ones so I can go on to read my papers for this end of the week with no guilt whatsoever. Nucleosomes are somewhere out there (or to put it better somewhere in there) waiting for someone to locate them. I am close to that but it is Friday, Medya just invited us over to her office to have some chocolate she brought from the Netherlands and I am in the middle of three books that have reached their peak of climax...so no more nucleosome predictions for this week!

Jokes aside, science can be stimulating. In fact most of the times it is. It just needs a bit of the right perspective like everything else. In the same way our girlfriends will never be perfect but we still love them, or in the way we normally hate our work but sometimes find it interesting, most important of all, the way our favourite football team is crap most of the time but we never dare forget the good moments the guys in green and white (or whatever the colour) have given us, doing science is equally appealing in a masochist way. We struggle against all our misfortunes, waiting for that 0.5% increase in sensitivity, that positive control that does not proove to be a total disaster, that protein finally making its shy appearence in the form of a dubious band on a polyacrylamide gel.

The right perspective comes in knowing that these moments appear with a rather small frequency, linearly diminishing with the increasing stress of expectance (and that IS the only significant scientific fact my experience would fully support). The right perspective is to keep in mind that if progress was linear we would be not working in science because it would be as meaningless as a factory production line. It is understanding that if our results actually MEANT progress this world would have been a better place since centuries and it is all about realizing that we are just playing around with everchanging concepts and theoretical constructions that probably won't be here when are children decide to do science. People have become rich, famous and reknown not because they discovered some ultimate truths about the universe but because, at their time, they were clever and brave enough to put forward a new concept that explained a certain problem. In the end, all it takes is some guts and some time off work to think "out of the box" for a while.

So maybe, I ll take the rest of the day off to come up with a weird, uncompromising and extraordinarily strange theory about why these bloody nucleosome predictions are so insignificant!

From the Romans to the Muslims to the Christians ...to the "geeks"!

This is Spain! I am not always obliged to be in Barcelona when updating barcabios. So there I was in Zaragoza, the city of the most bars per capita in Spain, home of the "jota", the "piedras del Ebro" and the "Basilica del Pilar".

Zaragoza, capital of Aragon is a beautiful city, built by the Ebro river by the Romans almost 2000 years ago (for a Greek it is not very old of course but for the Spanish it means something). I was there for a geek conference that consumed most of my time but at least I had a few hours off (or more precisely I gave myself a few hours off) to take a long walk around the city center, along the riverside and by the most historical buildings.

The variations of age, architecture and styles reflect the passing of the centuries and civilizations Zaragoza has suffered (or benefited from). From the Roman walls by the river, to the Aljaferia castle built by the Moores originally made entirely out of alabaster and from the mudejar cathedral of La Seo to the "Pilarica" constructed by the Spanish after the "Reconquista". The subsequent layers of the universal spanish soul lie at the feet of the visitor. And when our geek (that is bioinformatics) conference left us time, we also had the chance to have a couple of drinks in "el tubo", Zaragoza's main nightlife zone.

Sitting back at my desk in Barcelona, alternating my playlist from Theodorakis (thanks to Sarah), to Pearl Jam (thanks to Maria) and Brad Mehldau (thanks to Julien) I am trying to dig my way back into nucleosome prediction, based on some ideas I had in Zaragoza. People would say that conferences serve exactly for these things, meaning to steer new ideas to the participants and it is true but only partly. Because the ideas I had, no matter how mediocre, I had them all while walking around the city looking at this cathedral by the river...