Beads for Bears

Squeee! I've been so excited waiting for them, and they're finally here!



Terry went to the giant bead show in Arizona, and, as she always does, she asks us for our shopping lists so she can find us what we're looking for. I told her I was looking for bears, as I want to make earrings to sell as a fund-raiser for the sun bear repro biology informatics project.

Terry's been back and traveling again--it's school recruiting season--and between her and my chaotic schedules, it took a while for us to connect up. I've been on pins and needles waiting to see the bears she got me. They're wonderful!

I had asked her to look for some golden bears for me, and she came through! She found some lovely golden bears in the shape of black bears, as well as some black bear fetishes, and a selection of polar bears in different colors.

I am going to have such fun making these into earrings, and selling them to raise funds to support the research. The tricky bit is going to be parting with them, but Terry tells me I am not the first artisan to struggle with that.

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More details on Mother Bear's Day fundraiser, Part II

As I was saying before I interrupted myself, the details for the fundraiser are shaping up. For the motherhood of the bears, we're going with a Mothers' Day Brunch theme. It will take place the day before Mothers' Day, though, so that it won't get in the way of family plans on the day itself.

Below is the invitation to a Donor Appreciation Dinner to celebrate Mother Bear's Day. The donors who contribute to this fundraising campaign at the $250 and above level will be honored at the brunch, and I'll be reporting to the donors on the progress of the research over the last year, and projecting what we'll get done in the next year to promote sun bear reproduction.

We've still got room at the brunch--if you care about bear reproduction, love a good meal, and are going to be in Seattle on Mothers' Day weekend, you should consider joining us!

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Happy Mother Bear's Day!

The first fund-raising campaign to mark the new direction I'm going in to support my research is a small one to raise some immediate funds for the sun bear reproductive biology informatics project.

While the details remain to be nailed down, the concept is already taking shape--a traditional Mother's Day brunch-style celebration with the donors, to toast the prospect of possibly helping the sun bears to become mothers themselves.

Of course, we can't have it on Mother's Day itself (Sunday, May 11, this year), because people already have plans with their own families, mothers, and spouses. So we'll create a new holiday just for this purpose, Mother Bear's Day, and celebrate with a donor appreciation brunch on Saturday, May 10, instead.

The program and details are still taking shape, but I need to finalize them soon, as April's already on the horizon. But I do know we'll be raising a champagne toast to the prospective mother sun bears over a Mother's Day-style brunch, accompanied by a program that shows the donors how their funds go to help our research to promote these efforts.

If you're going to be in Seattle that weekend, and you're interested in more details about this event and the research it supports, I'll have more details up right here in the next couple of days. Of course, I can always be reached in the meantime by email at ravens.research@gmail.com , as well.

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A new direction

What does a newly-fledged young* scientist do to avoid leaking out of the "broken pipeline" and getting lost, in a stagnant funding environment**, where grant money to support research is getting harder to obtain?

She becomes an entrepreneur! (Actually, there is precedent: Benjamin Whorf supported his linguistic work with a day job as an insurance agent, so I'm in good company.)

I'm actually taking a three-pronged approach to building financial and logistic resources to support my research, in order to diversify and minimize risk:

1. Donations. Since I am not a financial or legal specialist myself, I am currently working with grants administrators at a variety of appropriate philanthropic organizations (depending on project) in order to ensure full compliance with all state and IRS regulations regarding philanthropic donations.
   
   
2. Purchases. I am developing an offering a wide variety of products and services whose proceeds go to support my research. I'll post a catalog here when it's ready.
   
   
3. Investment. This is the part about which I will probably blog the least, simply because the state guy I am working with cannot provide guidelines for what is appropriate and what is not. There are a number of rules which a Small Corporate Offering Registration (SCOR), such as I am preparing for continuing education classes I am developing, fall under. I am preparing a microcapital offering with all relevant documentation under relevant state and SEC regulations.
   
   One of those regulations is that all advertising for the offering has to be approved in advance. I asked about blogging about my SCOR, and the guy I spoke to didn't know what a blog was. Needless to say, the policy has not been set, and since the last thing I want is the SEC coming after me, I'll only blog about my experiences putting together a SCOR if I can get assurance that it won't be an issue. If not, then not a peep--I'll talk about it only in meatspace, in Washington state, as per the residency requirements. So you may hear about it here, or not, depending on what they decide their rules are (or are not) about SCOR blogging.
   
   

All of these income streams converge to support my commitment to Research Projects, Education, Service, and Outreach in three areas:

• Basic Science Informatics: Sun Bear Endangered Species Reproduction Knowledge Representation (KR) Project (culminating in 40% Full-Time Equivalent [FTE])
  
  
  
  
  
  1. Knowledge representation and computerized reference ontology of bear anatomy. Develop and publish natural history of organ development in hibernating vs. non-hibernating species. Research questions: do these differences provide any information re: development of hormone-resistant cancerous tumors in those organs (breast and prostate) in humans? What are the medical implications of the different kinds of cells in bears and in humans?
     
     
  2. Anatomical atlas-—publish second edition of reference atlas for sun bear cytology, and make it freely available to wildlife conservationists in limited-resource areas.
     
     
  
  
  
• Clinical Informatics: Evidence-Based Massage (40% FTE)
  
  
  
  
  
  1. Best Practices in Massage: What are the information needs of the stakeholders in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and what information-gathering, information visualization, and information-presentation methods fit those needs best under what circumstances?
     
     
  2. Research Literacy for Massage Therapists textbook—finish contract (almost halfway through now!)
     
     
  
  
  
• Public Health Informatics: Information Access (20% FTE)
  
  
  
  
  
  1. What are the information needs of practitioners, patients, and software developers in the development of an open-source electronic medical record (EMR) in Haiti and other low-resource locations, and what information-presentation methods best meet those needs?
     
     
  2. What are the information needs regarding neonatal skin barrier development and biochemistry of traditional remedies of mothers and caregivers of newborn infants in Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan? What information would they require in order to synthesize the beneficial aspects of traditional infant oil massage with what we know about best practices for which oils build up the skin barrier against infections and hypothermia, and which oils hinder that barrier development?
     
     
  3. What information about massage and other self-care could improve the quality of life of Haitians living with the effects of gross lymphatic swelling caused by worms, as well as giving their caregivers and families effective ways to support them? What are the best ways to provide that information in such a resource-limited area?
     
     
  
  
  

As this is my job now (though I may take other day jobs as appropriate to support this initiative), I'll be blogging about it more regularly here. That means kibitzing at other blogs less, but for now, that's ok.





* 49 years old, actually; 50 on May 1. But the term "young researcher" doesn't refer to chronological age, but rather to how long it's been since the scientist finished her degree. Since I graduated in August 2006 with my PhD, I'm a "young scientist", academically speaking.

** Actually, I agree with Orac that the problem isn't just as simple as blaming the NIH and the Bush administration. No matter--I'm not talking about why there is a problem, only about what I'm going to do to solve its impact on my end.

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Yay, anonymous donor and The Edge of Glass!

(I'm going to have to change this slide, now that PZ has staked out Comic Sans as the "crank font"...

I need to re-do it for another reason, as well--Schutte did not discuss keratinization, a change in the cells' biochemical composition which lends a golden color to the cells. Durrant [1], by contrast, uses the color change associated with keratin as a marker for ovulation in the panda:

A second chromic shift was consistently observed 2 days prior to ovulation when keratinized (orange) cells replaced acidophils as the majority of vaginal cells.

So here's a wonderful example of modeling physiological processes across species: Schutte details the reproductive cycle of the dog, Durrant adapts that information and applies it to the panda, and then Durrant's group and ours uses that panda information to study other species of bear.)

Anyway, this is a presentation slide that I adapted (animated, colored) from Schutte 1967 [2,3,4] for a talk on using informatics to aid in the reproduction of endangered species at the 2004 American Veterinary Medical Association conference:



What you are seeing, as you read left to right, is the change over time in the shape and color of the vaginal epithelial cells, collected by swabbing the animal. Shape changes (from more round to more irregular and from a high nucleus-to-cell size ratio to a much lower one, approaching or reaching zero in some cases), and color changes between pink/red (acidophilic) and blue (basophilic) can be seen as the cycle progresses. Although the hormone level peaks and the white and red blood cells (leukocytes and erythrocytes) are shown as well, we'll ignore those for the moment to concentrate on the changes in the colored cells in the middle of the diagram.

With a break in between, the cycle resumes at the left, and the whole process is repeated over and over again through the animal's reproductive life.

The important take-away points from this slide are the irregular borders and small nuclei of the aging cell, and the colors blue and pink (depicted above), and golden (which is also significant in pandas, but which Schutte did not address in dogs in his work).

So keeping those factors in mind, you can see why I was practically dumbstruck when I walked into a glass art studio in Fremont (a Seattle neighborhood) and noticed the piece by James Curtis titled "Little Bang":



I mean, it's all there! Large, irregular cell borders, tiny nuclei, and pink (cranberry), blue (teal), and golden color. Even the rack on which it is mounted looks like a graph over time of a cycle. I swear, if I had commissioned the artist to render mature vaginal epithelial cells in glass, he could not have carried it out more faithfully.

A huge shout-out to James and his assistant Tara for patiently working with me while I arranged financing and donation of the work to our sun bear reproductive project for auction at a later date. If you're looking for glass art, I would recommend The Edge of Glass in Seattle unconditionally for their quality, their vision, and their customer service.

And to our anonymous donor, who prefers to remain behind the scenes to put the work at the forefront, our deepest gratitude and appreciation for your help for the bears. We will keep you posted on the progress of the project.

UPDATE: I forgot, before I published this post, to mention that James told me he probably will not use the teal again, or if he does, it won't be very often--it is simply so hard to work with that it's not practical. So the bears and I did indeed get very lucky to get in there before someone else bought the piece, and we would never had known about it. I thank Mr. thalarctos for deciding to surprise me with a drop-in visit there; it worked out so much more beautifully than I could have predicted.

References:

[1] Durrant B, Czekala N, Olson M, Anderson A, Amodeo D, Campos-Morales R, Gual-Sill F, Ramos-Garza J. Papanicolaou staining of exfoliated vaginal epithelial cells facilitates the prediction of ovulation in the giant panda. Theriogenology. 2002 Apr 15;57(7):1855-64.

[2] Schutte AP. Canine vaginal cytology. I. Technique and cytological morphology. J Small Anim Pract. 1967 Jun;8(6):301-6. No

[3] Schutte AP. Canine vaginal cytology. II. Cyclic changes. J Small Anim Pract. 1967 Jun;8(6):307-11.

[4] Schutte AP. Canine vaginal cytology. III. Compilation and evaluation of cellular indices. J Small Anim Pract. 1967 Jun;8(6):313-7.

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