July 2009 | Issue 07July 2009 | Issue 07

03 04 05 07Making inroads into diabetes and obesity

A symbiosis between lab notes and art

‘Lab Rats’ make it to the top

On holiday in the lab

NEWSLETTER OF THE INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN BIOMEDICINE

in vivoNew call gives PhD students a headstart

IRB Barcelona has stepped into the sum-mer season with a new mission: to provide more opportunities for talented PhD stu-dents to do research toward their degrees. The new PhD fellowship call closed at the end of June.

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President Montilla pays a visit to IRB Barcelona

José Montilla, President of the Government of Catalonia, joined IRB Barcelona Directors Joan J Guinovart and Joan Massagué on July 17 to launch the MetCentre, a new multidis-ciplinary and collaborative initiative focusing on research into metastasis.

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It’s good to get advice from people who know

The IRB Barcelona External Adviso-ry Board convened at IRB Barcelona from May 4-5, 2009 for their second meeting to hear about the great science and other developments going on at the Institute.

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Scientists for a day

Kids Day at IRB Barcelona, held on June 29, provided the perfect excuse to experience some of the wonder of science.

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Faces to Names

A conversation with IRB Barcelona prin-cipal investigator Jordi Casanova about his new book ‘A brief history of mankind', released this past May.

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in vivoJuly 2009 | Issue 07

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candidates arrived at IRB Barcelona for in-terviews on July 20 and 21 to secure one of the fellowships available.

“Most funding agencies launch their calls in the Autumn, creating a down time where students have to wait to be able to begin their research. The advantage of this new IRB Barcelona call is that it allows students who have just finished their degree to start PhD training right away,” explains Clara Caminal, Academic Officer at IRB Barcelona. “Since they’ll be able to take up their positions in September, it gives them a valuable headstart.”

PhD students spend up to four years at IRB Barcelona to complete their training and research, and do so in a unique international and multidisciplinary scientific environment. They receive close mentoring, have access to a wide variety of activities and services and

IRB Barcelona principal investigator Antoni Riera with PhD student Maria Moreno.

Whenever you are working on a really big project, it’s always good to get some

advice from people who have had experience in what you are trying to do. Carving out the future for IRB Barcelona certainly qualifies as a big project, and the 15 eminent scientists who form the Institute’s External Advisory Board undoubtedly have a lot of experience.

The group of experts convened at IRB Barcelona from May 4-5, 2009 for their second meeting to hear about the great sci-ence and other developments going on at the Institute. After listening to presentations from group leaders within the Cell and De-velopmental Biology and the Structural and Computational Biology Programmes as well as from the group leaders and core facilities heads recruited since the last board meeting, the panel of experts visited services such as the new Advanced Digital Microscopy Facil-ity, a joint initiative with the Barcelona Sci-ence Park, and chatted with representatives

from the postdoc and predoc communities. They also had a valuable working session with the President of IRB Barcelona’s Execu-tive Board, Miquel Gómez.

To offset their hard work, the board members were treated to a concert of Vival-di’s Four Seasons performed by the Dniprop-etrovsk Symphony Orchestra, at Barcelona’s Palau de la Música Catalana.

Once back from Barcelona the board compiled the many pages of notes they took during their visit and came up with a report outlining their recommendations. IRB Bar-celona’s next task is to take their advice on board and ensure that the Institute goes from strength to strength and continues to occupy an increasingly important position in the land-scape of international biomedical research.

IRB Barcelona has stepped into the sum-mer season with a new mission: to provide

more opportunities for talented PhD stu-dents to do research toward their degrees in a top-level scientific environment. The new IRB Barcelona PhD fellowship call, which closed at the end of June, seeks to comple-ment the ”la Caixa”/IRB Barcelona In-ternational PhD Programme. Short-listed

New call gives PhD students a headstart

It’s good to get advice from people who know

can take advantage of an extensive network of academic and industrial contacts.

Competition to join the programme is steep. “Candidates are required to have an academic record of at least 2.5 in order to guarantee the standards of excellence es-tablished by the Institute,” says Caminal. Applicants go through a rigorous selection process, and successful candidates are chosen on the basis of their academic and technical excellence.

Next year’s call will be open from February to June to allow for a greater number of Spanish applicants. IRB Bar-celona is also planning to organize an Open Day to increase its visibility in the university community and attract new students.

External Advisory Board members Karen Vousden and Sir Tim Hunt discuss the latest developments with IRB Barcelona group leaders and core facility managers during their meeting on May 4-5, 2009.

Tanya YatesP

hoto: MB

Hansen

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Ninety percent of all cancer deaths are caused by metastasis, yet little is

known about how cancer cells escape a pri-mary tumor site and infiltrate and colonize distant vital organs. Metastasis has long been the focus of intense research efforts at IRB Barcelona through initiatives such as the MetLab, led by Roger Gomis. On June 17, directors Joan J Guinovart and Joan Massagué stepped up IRB Barcelona’s efforts in this area and announced the cre-ation of the MetCentre, an interdisciplin-ary collaborative programme for research into metastasis. The announcement was made during an official visit by the Presi-dent of the Government of Catalonia, José Montilla.

“Cancer and metastasis are complex diseases and understanding them will re-quire innovative and multidisciplinary ap-proaches that go beyond the capabilities of any one single laboratory,” says Joan Massagué who will act as the MetCen-tre’s scientific coordinator. The MetCentre will bring together IRB Barcelona groups

President Montilla visits IRB Barcelona to help launch MetCentre

working in the fields of chemistry, biophysics and computation, which in turn collaborate with expert clinicians in other research centers around Bar-celona. This expertise, combined with the range of cutting-edge technologies and experimental methodologies avail-able at IRB Barcelona, in addition to those offered by the Barcelona Science Park which houses the Institute, will help scientists within the MetCentre achieve their goal of unravelling the ge-netic causes and biological mechanisms

behind cancer and metastasis.

Initial projects to be undertaken at the MetCentre include research on breast cancer metastasis, funded by the BBVA foundation, led by Roger Gomis and involving collaborations with Joan Massagué’s laboratory at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and groups from Barcelona’s Hos-pital Clínic-Idibaps and Vall d’Hebron-VHIO.

Future projects include colon can-cer metastasis, to be led by Eduard Batlle, in collaboration with the groups of Elena Sancho, Modesto Orozco, Patrick Aloy and Roger Gomis. This project will also benefit from the pow-erful computing resources available at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which hosts the MareNostrum super-computer. Research on colon cancer metastasis is expected to begin once re-sources have been secured from philan-thropic sources.

Today, almost 250 million people world-wide suffer from diabetes and over 300

million adults are clinically obese. To un-ravel new clues to fight these epidemics of the XXI century, a group of researchers from the Molecular Medicine Programme at IRB Barcelona has recently taken on the challenge of coordinating an ambitious Eu-ropean project aimed to find new pre-drug compounds to treat diabetes and obesity.

“The DioMed project emerged from the need to bring to the market more effective drug compounds against diabetes and to fill the scarcity of treatment drugs available for obesity,” says Antonio Zorzano, project co-ordinator and principal investigator at IRB Barcelona. Researchers at Zorzano’s lab will be working hand in hand until 2012 with a transnational group of technology clusters and organizations –including the Barcelona Science Park– to find molecules that exert a pharmacological effect on three target pro-teins linked to diabetes and obesity. If the compounds show to be effective in animals, the next step will be to make the jump to clinical trials.

Making inroads into diabetes and obesity

The DioMed project’s kick off meeting was held at IRB Barcelona on May 22, 2009.

Photo: M

. Gavaldà

Writing grant proposals can be a difficult

and time-consuming task, but for many

researchers at IRB Barcelona it’s simply part of

life. As opportunities for funding arise, scien-

tists often find themselves putting their research

aside to complete the mountains of paperwork

that can be involved in submitting a proposal.

But not to worry – help is at hand. In June,

IRB Barcelona was awarded a three-year

grant by the Spanish Ministry of Science

and Innovation as part of the ‘Eurociencia’

programme, an initiative that seeks to crea-

te and reinforce existing support structures

to promote the participation of researchers

Eurociencia to provide helping hand for grant writers

in FP7 projects. “With this grant, we’ll be able

to help IRB Barcelona researchers with their

EC grants, saving them valuable time that

they can put back into doing research,” says

Sònia Saborit, IRB Barcelona project officer.

IRB Barcelona is one of 17 centers in Spain

to be granted funding from the programme.

(From left to right) Roger Gomis, President Montilla and Joan Massagué celebrate the launch of the MetCentre.

Photo: M

. Pérez

in vivoJuly 2009 | Issue 07

Scientists for a day at Kids Day

course) and headed off for hands-on tours of the labs. They visited the Guinovart lab where they observed some real scientists at work and then discussed what they saw. Then it was off for a demonstration of some principles in chemistry, expertly presented by predocs in the Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Programme. After that it was time to take a closer look at those pesky fruit flies under the microscope, guided by researchers from Jordi Casanova’s group. Once the tours were finished, the younger visitors took crayons in hand to draw what they had seen during their visit, while the older kids went off for a special microscopy session led by Marta Llimargas.

In addition to all the merriment, giggles and squeals of delight, the day had a much more serious purpose: to awaken curiosity,

prod the imagination, and instill a sense of wonder about all things scientific.... oh yes, and to show the kids what mum or dad really gets up to all day long. The success of the day was thanks to the efforts of the superb team of volunteers, the support of IRB Barcelona direction, and of course, the kids and parents who came to take part. We look forward to doing it again next year! If you missed out on the fun, check out the gallery of photos and artwork produced by the kids on the IRB Barcelona intranet. http://intranet.irb.pcb.ub.es/

VIEWPOINT — What was the most exciting part of the visit for you?

“The most exciting part was to see that huge man with a big nose and a white moustache shaking hands with us. I also enjoyed the theater show and watching the strange things they do at work.”

Sara Altafaj, 4 years old

“I was shocked to see that rubber gloves filled with water freeze and break when placed in liquid nitrogen. Somehow I managed to guess correctly all the colors the liquids were going to turn to!”

Enric Ramon, 10 years old

“I want to be a doctor when I grow up—I really like to in-vestigate the details of things. I had no idea the eye color and wings of the fruit fly were so different under a microscope.”

Carolina Gallès, 11 years old

Sarah Sherwood

Photo: J. P

areto

Ahhh, to be a kid again. Remember the first time you gathered kitchen ingre-

dients to make slime? Examined an army of ants under a magnifying glass? Or even saw a rainbow? Seeing science through a child’s eye is a unique and wonderful thing. Kids Day at IRB Barcelona, held on June 29, provided the perfect excuse for the children of IRB Bar-celona scientists to experience some of the wonder of science, to enter into the world of research and become scientists for a day.

Things got off to a frolicking start, when our scientist friend ‘Einstein’ greeted our young guests and led them to the auditorium for an entertaining and interactive theatre session about some basic scientific concepts. After a quick stop for a snack, the kids were split up into groups (flies, frogs and mice, of

“I already knew liquid nitrogen freezes things very quickly (my dad works in a lab) but I had never seen it live. I was pretty im-pressed when I saw the egg yolk freeze in a matter of seconds.”

Marc Lizana, 13 years old

A symbiosis between lab notes and art

Like an undercover journalist but without the risk of be-

ing discovered, an artist from the nearby Faculty of Arts, Luz Broto, infiltrated IRB Barcelona labora-tories and followed scientists for a year to try to transform lab routines into art. The targeted IRB Barcelona laboratories were the Combinato-

rial Chemistry for the Discovery of New Compounds, led by Fer-nando Albericio, and the Design, Synthesis and Structure of Peptides and Proteins, led by Ernest Giralt. “I spent several months observing scientists, taking pictures and writ-ing notes in order to translate the hidden routines of research into art

and start an online journal of im-pressions about what goes on in a research lab,” says Broto. Her artwork, ‘Laboratory diaries of Dr A and Dr G’ (left), was exhib-ited on June 5 and 6 at the Fac-ulty of Arts of the University of Barcelona. To follow the online journal visit www.luzbroto.net.

05

The competitive efforts of the IRB Bar-celona football team ‘Lab Rats’ have

finally paid off. The team, formed by ten re-searchers from several laboratories, was pro-nounced the winner of the first football tour-nament organized by IRB Barcelona, which ended on June 30. “Our victory in the cup competition was pleasing because the oppos-ing team was the only one that beat us in the league,” says Nina Görner, PhD student in

‘Lab Rats’ make it to the top

Where in the world...? IRB Barcelona travels to Vietnam

How did an IRB Barcelona t-shirt end up in Vietnam?

Apparently, this free advertising is not a result of international market-ing efforts but simply a coincidence. The wife of Jordi Pedrola, an IRB Barcelona collaborator from the ‘Institut d’Estudis Catalans’, hap-pens to be from Vietnam. She was wearing her t-shirt for this snapshot

(From right to left) Hoa, her 9-year-old daughter Trang and her cousins Tu and Huy.

during their recent family vacation to her hometown of Nghe An, in central Vietnam.

If you plan to travel to a re-mote country this summer, take your IRB Barcelona shirt along and take a photo. You could be fea-tured in the next edition of Where in the world...? Send your pics to info@irbbarcelona.org.

While many funding programmes and

training initiatives exist for research-

ers at early stages of their careers, and for more

experienced researchers starting up their own

groups, the needs of postdocs – a major driv-

ing force behind science of excellence – are of-

ten overlooked. The postdoc years are indeed

a critical time in any scientist’s career.

Postdocs need to be highly productive

scientifically, creating CVs with a solid list of

publications. They also need to gain a wide

range of skills, contacts and experience nec-

essary to prepare them for their journey to

take up positions as independent scientists.

Often they are expected to do all this with

very little support. Identifying the needs of

postdocs and finding ways to help them fill

the gaps was the focus of an open meeting held

on April 17 between IRB Barcelona’s director

and members of the postdoctoral community.

IRB Barcelona postdocs take their future by the horns

The encounter proved highly productive

with participants coming up with a stream of

suggestions to enhance their experience at IRB

Barcelona. Ideas included organizing courses

and workshops to gain and share specific ex-

pertise as well as establish collaborations with

researchers in the other areas of the lab.

Training in ‘soft’ areas such as lab manage-

ment, scientific writing and preparing grant

proposals were identified as a crucial area to

IRB Barcelona hosts an established community of nearly a hundred postdoctoral researchers.

Photo: M

B H

ansen

help make the transition to more senior po-

sitions. Another suggestion was to organize

a ‘Career Day’ where young researchers can

meet and get advice from people who started

their training in science and later developed a

career outside the lab. And finally, in order to

better integrate the postdoc community into

the social fabric of IRB Barcelona, postdocs

will now join the predoc community in the or-

ganization of the monthly ‘Cool-off sessions’.

To make sure things keep on track, the

postdocs have formed their own council,

comprised of two representatives per pro-

gramme. It will be their job to gather feedback

to organize activities and networks of value

to their community. If you have suggestions,

get in touch with them at postdocscouncil@

irbbarcelona.org and keep an eye out for the

new postdoc web pages currently being pre-

pared for the IRB Barcelona intranet.

the Biomolecular NMR spectroscopy group. “The league turned out to be a great way to meet people from other labs.”

The final phase of the league ended with three teams with a clear point difference over the rest. During the final qualifying round the teams were very much on par. Under a scorching sun, the teams brought out their best to gain positions in the final leg. At the top of the table (Champions), the unbeat-

able ‘Brutal Deluxe’ finally lost their place of honor to the ‘Lab Rats’. In the middle of the table (UEFA), the team ‘All Blacks’ gave no respite to their rivals and won all the decisive games. At the bottom of the table (second division), ‘Surrounding Berrow’ managed to beat their rivals in the final knockout rounds and save themselves from the last position.

Dan Maldonado

Photo: J. P

edrola

in vivoJuly 2009 | Issue 07

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FACES TO NAMES

Jordi Casanova. Principal Investigator, Development and Morphogenesis in Drosophila Group

“There are many things in life that are really worth it and that one should never miss because of fear”

- How does a biologist end up writing a book full of philosophical reflections?

“I would rather call these personal view-points on the implications that science dis-coveries have for the way we perceive our-selves and the rest of the world. I started writing after surgery, during a long period of convalescence I had to go through. It was all about coincidences, I never really planned to publish anything.”

- Coincidences?

“A friend of mine, a publisher, was the one who pushed me into producing a book after she read my scattered notes.”

- One of the first chapters of the book tack-les the safety and tranquility of ignorance. Does ignorance make people happier?

“One could assume that the less one knows, the happier one is, but this is a pretty sad approach to life. I’ve heard people say that they would have rather not met a really good friend if they had known that this person was going to die soon because they wouldn't be able to stand the suffering. It’s true that if you apply this way of thinking you’ll never miss anything or anyone, but you won’t be able to enjoy life as much either. There are many things in life that are really worth it and that one should never miss because of fear.”

ANNA ALSINA

IRB Barcelona principal investigator Jordi Casanova has recently uncovered one of his hidden talents: writing beyond the format of scientific papers and grant

applications. His first book, ‘A brief history of mankind’, hit the bookstores in May and shows how science today can help people understand the way they

are. His essays tackle how knowledge gained through research conditions the way people perceive nature, ethics and the evolution of society.

Photo: S. A

rmengou

- Sometimes we take life for granted and postpone decisions because we think that we’ll live until we get old...

“When I was doing the compulsory military service I had a bus accident and I saw seven of my colleagues die. Seeing death from that close made me more aware of my own vul-nerability. The probability of each of us to have come into existence is an absolute coin-cidence, we shouldn’t take it for granted. The world wasn’t created for us to be born.”

- You’ve also written about how people try to find the meaning of life.

“Human beings have tried really hard to find reasons to justify things and life in general. You can certainly try to find these, but no-where it is written that life should have a

meaning. I’ve found this approach very use-

ful to counter ‘finalist’ ideas in science, such as affirming that the heart beats in a specific way so that blood can reach the extremi-ties. Technically, the process goes the other way around. Evolution has taken advantage of changes in organs to acquire new possi-bilities. The same logic applies to vision. We don’t have eyes to see, but thanks to having eyes we’re able to see. This tendency to have a finalist way of thinking is so built into the unconscious that even scientists get it wrong sometimes.”

- How do science and the unconscious get along?

“It’s a fine line. One of the things science is starting to support more is that it’s really difficult to think about man as a dual entity, a material body completely independent from the spirit. Today, more and more, we can identify in the brain certain intellectual aspects that in the past would have been a sole characteristic of the soul. I don’t deny that man has a spiritual side, all I’m saying is that this side is rooted in the same chem-istry that governs our body. It’s a fact that love is all about neurotransmitters, but that doesn’t mean it’s less important or that you won’t be able to reach a higher level because of that. It’s all based on the coincidences that our brain has acquired in life through natural selection.”

in vivoJuly 2009 | Issue 07

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IN BRIEF

IRB Barcelona Director Joan J Guinovart received on April 22 the 2009 Prat de la Riba award, given by the Institut d’Estudis Cata-lans for his pioneering work on the mecha-nism that suppresses glycogen synthesis in neurons. The panel of experts chose Guin-ovart’s work for its breakthrough approach, and also for his long research trajectory and accomplishments in biochemistry.

Two thumbs up for glycogen research

IRB Barcelona research-ers from the Gene Translation Laboratory Noelia Camacho and Manuel Castro attended

the latest ‘Live Research Fair’, held at the end of April in La Pedrera. They spent two days behind an exhibition stand answering questions from visitors of all ages about the malaria parasite.

Fighting parasites for all audiences

NEWS FROM THE PARK

When holiday time comes around everyone wants to break from

the routine. Some choose to visit Pa-tagonia or to do a scuba diving course, while others opt to spend their summer doing research in a laboratory. This is the case of the 40 young students par-ticipating in this year’s edition of ‘Spend the Summer at the Park’, an initiative organized by the Barcelona Science Park. The university students, selected from more than 150 applicants, come from all over Europe as well as South America, Morocco and Asia. This ex-perience will serve to strengthen their curriculum and help them to decide their future paths.

For Catalans Marta and Ferran, who are on placement with Medichem and the environmental consultancy Me-teosim, the programme allows them to gain experience and become familiar with R+D in the private sector. Marta studies chemistry and is working on the optimization of some of the pro-cesses used to obtain active principle ingredients. Ferran is a student in in-dustrial engineering and is working on projects aimed to determine the suit-ability of a geographic area to build a wind farm.

Catherine (France) and Malgorzata (Poland) are particularly interested in gaining further training. Catherine has joined the biotech enterprise Omnia Molecular –devoted to the develop-ment of new antibiotics– and has start-ed to work with proteins, a field which is new to her. Malgorzata is on place-ment with the Peptidomimetics and Bioactive Heterocycles group (Biosyn-er) at IRB Barcelona and was encour-aged to participate in this programme by a friend at the faculty who had done so previously.

On holiday in the lab

For Xavier (Catalonia), the experi-ence has an added bonus because he’s interested in doing his thesis under the supervision of a tutor working at CoS-mo LAB, the group that he has joined for the summer. Montserrat, also from Catalonia, is studying environmental sciences and is on placement with the ‘Institut Català de Ciències del Clima’ (IC3). She has already visited several places around Spain to measure the envi-ronmental contamination index and has also accompanied students when taking CO2 samples, an activity included in the European project Carboschool, which addresses the impact of Europe on the carbon cycle. She sees wide professional openings in her field, and that people are now more aware of the environmental challenges ahead. She feels this is not the case for degrees that are more scientific or for fields of research the public at large is not well informed about. Jokin, a chem-istry student from the Basque Country, thinks it’s necessary to boost the dis-semination of science and to bring it closer to the general public because an audience that doesn’t understand what scientists do can’t value research.

Ugo, an Italian studying computa-tion who will join the company Micro-art, and Josep, a Catalan with Ernest Giralt’s group at IRB Barcelona, share a few opinions. They propose several ini-tiatives, such as schools offering more activities to promote scientific vocation among young people –an initiative that the Park has been supporting for sever-al years through the ‘Research in Soci-ety’ programme–, as well as talks given by researchers who have set up busi-nesses aimed at explaining their ideas and promoting entrepreneurship.

Carme Pérez, PCB

Science and politics went hand in hand on May 27, when a delega-tion of the Catalan so-cialist party, headed by

European deputies Maria Badia and Raimon Obiols, visited the Barcelona Science Park and IRB Barcelona. The visit included a guided tour of some of the laboratories and facilities hosted in the park.

Politicians make a stop at IRB Barcelona

At their meeting on July 15, IRB Barcelona’s Board of Trustees welcomed director Joan J Guinovart’s suggestion to create an on-site childcare service for the Institute’s research-ers. Such a service has been up for discussion with the Barcelona Science Park as part of their expansion plans and would provide a valuable and pioneering service to research-ers with young families.

Planting a seed for a kindergarten

in vivoJuly 2009 | Issue 07

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NEW AT IRB BARCELONASPOTLIGHT

Published by the Institute for Research in Biomedicine. Office of Communications & External Relations. Barcelona Science Park. Baldiri Reixac, 10. 08028 Barcelona, Spain. www.irbbarcelona.org Editor: Anna Alsina. Associate Editor: Sarah Sherwood. Contributors: Tanya Yates, Dan Maldonado, Carme Pérez. Design: Aymerich Comunicació. Printing: La Trama. Legal deposit: B-30893-2009. © IRB Barcelona

www.irbbarcelona.org

Anne Daulny (France, 1975) was excited to come back to Eu-rope after her five years of research at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab-oratory (New York, USA) where she worked on the regulation of transcription by the Ubiquitin-Proteasome pathway. She joins the Chromatin Structure and Function laboratory as a postdoctoral re-

searcher and her efforts will be now devoted to understanding the molecular mechanisms of heterochromatin formation using the fission yeast model. Anne looks forward to set-tling down in Barcelona, a city, she says, that has pleasantly surprised her because of the low levels of stress its citizens seem to have.

The challenging art of simplifying science

Writing about scientific breakthroughs for general audiences is a challenging task

that not all journalists are willing to undertake. Ludek Svoboda, editor of the official monthly magazine of the Czech Academy of Sciences, spent five days in June in IRB Barcelona labo-ratories doing advanced training to get an idea of what it’s like to be a scientist and gain deeper insight into the world of biomedical research.

- What moved you to come to IRB Barcelona?

“Science journalists and editors are obliged to share and convey complete and unbiased in-formation to the public. Establishing a good relationship and ongoing communication be-tween reporters and scientists are crucial steps to achieving this goal.”

- What did you learn from the experience?

“Working intensively with researchers and be-coming aware of the daily routines in science has definitely improved my editorial work. I’ve gained, beyond doubt, a deeper perspective of the efforts behind science and become more fa-miliar with the appropriate forms needed to re-port scientific results.”

- What’s the relationship like between journal-ists and researchers in the Czech Republic?

“From my perspective, I believe Czech scien-tists are still not accustomed to popularizing their research results. The relationship between both worlds needs to be strengthened and rein-forced. It’s just a matter of time to get there.”

Suvi Aivio (Finland, 1981) has recently joined the Genomic Instability and Cancer Laboratory to put her skills to work as a research assistant. She’s been very busy helping principal inves-tigator Travis Stracker to set up the laboratory, which started its activities this past March. With a background in biochemistry and cell biology, Suvi has been recruited from the University of California in Los An-geles, where she worked for two years as research assistant at the Mikkola Lab. She says she likes spending part of her free time practising yoga and zen meditation.

Biochemist and molecular biologist Leila Njimoluh (USA, 1986) left IRB Barcelona in August and moved back to her hometown of Baltimore to start a new journey: seven years of medical school training. She says her experience as a research assistant in the Microtubule Organization Laboratory was very interesting and challenging. “Using C2C12 mouse cells to study the roles of gamma-tubulin protein during the formation of myotubules is a pretty complex process.” Leila is now in the process of readjusting to her old way of life.

Cristina Horcajada (Spain, 1976) has made a career move after more than ten years of working as a scientist. Tempted by her interest in the industrial applications of research, she has left behind her previous responsibilities developing new vaccines in a biotech company in London to take up a position as Technology

Transfer Officer in IRB Barcelona’s Department of Innovation and Strategic Projects. Cristina’s work will focus on identifying and protecting potentially transferable re-search results generated by scientists at the Institute.

ON THE MOVELudek’s visit was part of the EICOS programme, an initiative by the European Union to improve commu-nication between journalists and scientists.

Photo: S. A

rmengou

Upcoming Barcelona BioMed Conferences

• Modelling Cancer in Drosophila14-16 September 2009

• Peptide Engineering: Therapeutic Peptides (PEM5) 26-28 October 2009

with the collaboration of the

generously hosted by