Academic relationship

My graduation is round the corner and all I think about is my dissertation(Master thesis) and the glorious Grad walk ceremony after 2 years of struggle to survive through the course work. And what after that? Don't know. Blank. Not certain is what my answers are. Well a natural progression after Masters is PhD. Interestingly, it just occurred to me that master's is beginning a relationship with your subject of interest and commitment to it is PhD. You can be in "n" no of relationships but you always have to give a deep thought before you commit and be married to it. As of now , I like my work but commitment. Hmm! Not like I don't want to do PhD. Everyone wants to get married eventually (totally talking in the academic sense) but have to decide the right partner you want to devote your life to. Right now I am just concerned about getting the dissertation done and working for a while in a few research areas to find the right match!I hope you guys have found your match or in the process of finding one. Good luck and wishing a happy married life to my friends who are already committed! :)

System's biology

One day I come back home happy with the fact that I have learned a new term – System’s biology!  In broader terms it’s a new field biologists have borrowed from the electrical’s field to understand the cell mechanisms in a whole new way with fewer assumptions and simple lovely equations(courtesy: Occam’s Razor) , after all mathematics rules the world and apparently mother nature has also used a calculator to design her system ! I never took an electrical class in my undergrad and was not familiar with the terms like feedback loop, feed forward loop, negative/positive auto regulation and was amazed by the fact that these technical terms can also be used to describe cell interactions or protein production in biology.
But on second thoughts, it occurred to me that these loops are used in electrical engineering to control electrons which are also a part of nature and all natural things have the same basic way of regulation! And then during my cognitive sessions with myself, I realized these loops are part of our mundane life.
For instance, talking of time response and auto-regulation.A negative reaction or a doing something bad takes a faster action time from the people or spreads faster. Whereas a good piece of work always takes ample amount of time to reach its steady state, sometimes appreciated posthumously! Again different network motifs determine the on and off state of an emotion in an individual and also the AND and OR gate channels.
For example if we discuss the coherent type 1 Feed forward loop (FFL). X motivates your friend Y and you, but after some threshold time your friend Y might just get bored with work and starts complaining about it.Now if you choose an AND gate, you would also stop working and start complaining about work and life just like your friend without paying any heed to X’s incessant motivation. However if you choose OR gate, you will continue to work with dedication because you have X’s support even if Y has left.Now you would be thinking OR is a better Gate. Well both these systems have delay time and it is for us to decide which one is best for us in a particular situation.In nature all these interactions are co-ordinated in a timely manner and any mutation or delay in one off the network leads to deleterious circumstances which is also the same in humans and their network of social relations.It is not very difficult to see science in everyday life – the positive auto-regulation of the water cycle or the negative auto regulation of pollution by global warming ! It is indeed fascinating when you realize the power of nature and how it regulates its cornucopia of networks(including human emotional network) by these simple loops!

Live Inspired !

Each one of us have a philosopher inside them can give an opinion about life and its manifestations from their personal experiences. And I will also be not writing any different. Just that a small lesson I learnt a few years back . This goes to all my friends and specifically to my fellow research mates who has a dream like me to win the Nobel prize some day ! Then the PI, whom I give all the credit for the scarcely detectable trait of researcher people see in me if they see at all - used to motivate the lab members saying “a negative result is also a result” . I never understood the importance of it until I started with my own Master thesis . Now I know what one goes through when what u think and what results u get in the lab are like poles apart and you wonder how did you think that your hypothesis would work ! You suddenly feel so stupid and think all the answer was right in front of you and how did you not see it. It happens all the time in a research lab and I know I am speaking all my friend’s minds ! Now here I talk about effective “Google search”! We research on things about which we don't know and most importantly nobody knows ! Because if you realize after 2 years of hard work, some other great person from some other university of a beautiful country has already published the data and how did you miss that damn paper ? Now that is stupidity(or at-least what people will think of you even after giving countless days into the research)! SO the first step of any research is to make sure nobody is working on it or at-least not published anything on it ! The next big question is , is there anything left to be discovered  ??? Human minds so curious in nature and has touched every possible corner of this world , every single iota presented by the mighty nature and still digging ! Is there any topic our seniors have left for us !However, I finally settled on a topic on which i am almost confident that nobody has touched this subject yet.But this again brings doubt like if nobody has worked on it ,does that mean its not worth looking into ? I am still in this quandary  but I decided to go ahead with my idea.And well well the bad news comes faster than the good news.My first two experiments failed and I was almost sure this is not going to work. Going back to what my teacher said “a negative result is also a result”and my findings will guide someone in future to not go this way if he happens to be thinking of the same idea as me.Everyday in the lab is an exciting day,because you don't know what you may hit onto by the end of the day.U may have eureka days (which is comes like leap years) ,a good day ( this is when by the end of the day you get what you expected) and then comes the bad days (when...well you know what happens !!) and their frequency is very good!With due respect to all my researcher friends and Phd students, I now understand what it takes to be in the research world ! I hope results good or bad inspires you and me as we work for the same goal..Understanding SCIENCE !