Working machine
I am working like a machine this week, time on, time off, all day long to finish my full plans…and then thinking stops, though not the swimming. I feel being numb, yet still respond to stimulates now and then, with smile and posture and some sloppy words…there’s still a paper to be finished, two books to be read, and 3 travel blogs to be written…and I need to sit down to make plans for the exams…
however, it’s not difficult to find something intersting everyday, like this new view of life and disease reported. That’s something worth to celebrate, like periodic table of elements discovered by Dmitri Mendeleev. The author claimed 68 molecules as building blocks for life, and encourage researchers to intergrate the knowldge we have gained at a expotional scale.
"The physical sciences developed the periodic table of the elements to convey the composition and relatedness of matter. A related construct for biology may provide a more balanced view of the cell and its biochemistry. The four fundamental components of cellular life are derived from 68 molecular building blocks. Unlike the genome and proteome, the glycome and lipidome are not directly encoded by DNA. Nevertheless, the glycome and the lipidome contribute to the pathogenesis and severity of an increasing number of diseases, and are usurped by pathogens as receptors for infection. Scientific discussions that encompass these components remain relatively infrequent in the protein centric world of cell biology. Some scientists lament the ‘complexity of the molecules’. Yet our alphabet of 26 characters, let alone Chinese characters, is rather easily assimilated. Imagine a world in which each of us knew only a fraction of the alphabet." __Jamey D. Marth
