Protein synthesis: an epic on the cellular level - a flash from the past

Aggregate, filter, connect - the TK Manifesto - requires occasional examples demonstrating how one gets from "here" to "there". Thinking about this I'm often reminded of the Gary Larson Farside cartoon in which the scientist is writing the steps mathematically deriving an relationship and gets to a point where he writes "and here a miracle happens" to get past an otherwise impassable sticking point.

In the process of monitoring twitter feeds I got a wonderful reference to a blog post by one of the more insightful business innovators around. A good tip then if you're interested in innovation in technology and its impact on business transformation is to read the posts of Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairmen Emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology, among many other roles in his 37 years with IBM plus his academic career that has burgeoned thereafter.

One of the comments to Irving's post on "Reflections on Surviving Disruptive Innovations" was by Chris Ward (Advisory Software Engineer, IBM) who authored an article on IBM's on website called, "Protein modeling with Blue Gene/L: Real-world scientific advances through modelling and data visualization on a supercomputer". There is a beautiful visualisation on YouTube titled "Part of the total ten microseconds of life inside a living cell" embedded in Chris's article. Watch it - it's visually stunning and shows a chicken lysozyme in normal and mutant form.

On the side bar of related videos that you get when you go to YouTube were just that, some related videos. But one was a flash from the past. It was from 1971 directed by Stanford University professor of chemistry Robert Alan Weiss to demonstrate the synthesis of a protein in a ribosome with t-rna, m-rna, start and stop codons, ATP energy sources and all done in dance by some 150 or so Stanford students to the music of a flower power gathering of the early hippy period. It was even narrated by Prof. Paul Berg, 1980 Nobel prize for Chemistry! This you GOTTA see:

I'll comment later on the value of and integration of rich media in learning science concepts, levels of scaffolding and their impact on learning and more. But for now..... Enjoy!

-- pdl --