The Conservative Cat

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October 19, 2008

NMPDR - The NMPDR Grant Renewal

It is a very difficult thing for a conservative extremist like myself to have a pet whose livelihood is based on government funding.

Part of the problem is that the government is such a big player that private foundations like to follow the government's lead: if you can't con Uncle Sam into funding your project, then you clearly don't know what you're doing, and nobody else will touch you. The one exception is stem cell research. Because pro-lifers are opposed to it, everybody thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread. If Obama wins, Bruce plans to start a rumor than DNA mapping is a form of satan-worship. Stem cell funding won't stand a chance.

Yes, my poor pet is exactly that desperate.

But the potential for this research is both staggering and immediate. We're talking about the ability to selectively disable sections of DNA in disease-causing bacteria. So, if we can find the gene that turns Listeria monocytogenes from a peaceful swimmer into a killer and use a drug to turn it off, we're saving very real lives.

But it turns out that bacteria are more complicated than we think. The infamous Staphylococcus aureus MRSA that has been attacking our children is dangerous because it can fight off antibiotics. But the antibiotic resistance is not a characteristic of MRSA itself, it's an attribute of other bacteria that tend to travel with it. This realization is part of a whole new science called metagenomics. In metagenomics, you're studying a community of organisms instead of a single cell. The NMPDR includes a tool for analyzing the genes of these organism communities. If there's a cure for MRSA, that is where it will be found. So, his work really is important.

Bruce's father was a libertarian, and it was his father who taught him how to talk to cats, so Bruce finds it creepy to talk to me while he's begging for government money. But as a conservative, I understand that you have to live in the world as it is, not as it should be. In the world that is, the Department of Energy owns a gigantic supercomputer grid, and it takes a gigantic supercomputer grid to map metagenomes, so Bruce is part of a bytzantine relationship between the Energy Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and (this is the weird one) the Department of Homeland Security. The universe has a very odd sense of humor, when you think about it.

Hopefully we'll be back to normal in a few days.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Sun 4:00 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More NMPDR | Tags: bioinformatics biology DNA annotation listeria metagenomes NMPDR philosophy science staphylococcus aureus

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