I recently blogged about some hard times that developed over the past few months. They sucked, indeed, but more than enough has been said about them already and I am tired of being sad and pathetic. Now it’s time to focus on the happy portion! I spent most of February traveling and interviewing at different schools around the nation, and was fortunate enough to receive multiple offers. It was very difficult decision, but I eventually decided to accept a PhD partnership program at Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The more I learn about the program the more I feel that it is a perfect fit for my interests… at Johns Hopkins I will be studying cellular, molecular, developmental biology & biophysics (CMDB), providing a very broad background of training in biology, with the thesis portion of my education at NIH in one of over 1200 labs. I am very excited about both prospects, and the engaging opportunities they will provide. Picking an area of focus beyond that broad training is quite difficult, but I have spent considerable time considering those options…

Over the past few years I have developed a strong interest in immunology and cancer, and moreover the potential of utilizing immunotherapy as a modality towards treating cancers. Cancer seems the summation of coinciding maladies: be it genetic susceptibility, mutation events, environment, infectious influences, or other insults. Following this premise, I feel that future treatments to cancer are going to require appreciating the interaction between cancer and the immune system; to what extent, be it causal or secondary, remains unclear. That interaction is specifically what I would like to study — potentially attempting to understand inflammation and consequential changing susceptibilities to cancer, the progression/promotion of cancer by inflammation, autoimmune disease pathophysiology, immunoediting, or another theoretical event connecting them.

Here are a couple of links describing the program:
- Graduate Partnership Program: JHU-NIH
- Johns Hopkins CMDB Program

The time-line of events that are going to occur over the next few months feels extremely abbreviated; this is exciting but also a significant portion of stress and worry. I have decided to sell my home, and most of my things. Maybe I will blog when they go online; in short, if you are looking for a two-bedroom two-bath condo in downtown Seattle near South Lake Union please contact me!

At some point this summer I am going to have to leave the job that has placed me on this exciting path. The past five years I have worked in drug discovery at Amgen in Seattle in the inflammation department. I have moved around a bit, and have worked in the areas of immunology, protein biology/biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology. I can’t really say enough; it has been an awesome experience and amazing company to work for. I will greatly miss it, and all the exceptionally talented people I have been able to interact with over this time — they took me in a week out of my undergraduate education and taught me how to conduct scientific research.

So the plan for how to sell, leave, move, orient, return, spend a week in HI (to shoot a wedding), and fly again is somewhat convoluted, and requires me to be on opposite ends of the country for a couple of different things throughout the month of June. A cross-country drive is definitely required. The current planned route includes: Seattle, Boise, Pocatello, Salt Lake City, arches area, Denver, the big wide open, Omaha, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington DC. Any suggestions for additional stops and/or highlights would be most appreciated. I am planning a lot of photography on this journey. =] Here is a visual version.

Edit: this linkmight be useful.

It will be a very sad thing for me to leave Seattle, my family, friends, and Amgen. I have been exceedingly fortunate and happy here; complex times definitely bring those elements to light. The important point to appreciate, as I have been reminded, is that this is a fantastic opportunity that will let me continue my education (something I have wanted for a long time now) and put me in the position to go wherever I wish. That is exciting indeed, and something I won’t pass up.

Then things did change. I met a girl who changed them, overwhelmingly for the better. She was kind, she was smart, and she was incredibly attentive to my feelings. We had our first date three days or so before my 26th birthday. She gave me the absolute perfect present, only a few days after knowing me — socks, as it were. Everything was suddenly good. I was happy. I had a newfound focus at work. We had awesome and amazing dates. Things were just…fantastic.

As things have developed, I ended up doing reasonably well on the GRE. I applied over the holiday break to graduate programs around the country, and to-date I have had reasonably good feedback from graduate schools. I have interviewed at two highly competitive and attractive programs, and I am flying out tomorrow to visit yet another.

But…today I find myself back in that same awful place. The girl I have had such an amazing time with is leaving the Seattle area, and potentially so am I. As unlikely as it may have been, I learned to love again. In many ways I am very thankful. She revived a part in me that I thought was forever destroyed. Things, however, are not well… and yet again I find myself utterly heart-broken. In some ways I knew this was coming. Distance has very recently and persistently shown its exceedingly un-welcome head, and gut feelings have manifest into real issues. I have had no appetite for the past couple of weeks, and sleep has been rare and incomplete. Some things don’t seem to change. Events and outcomes, explicitly, have repeated.

Progress, aspirations/ambitions, timing, and feelings have always conflicted in my life. They present huge challenges reminiscent of choices of which I seem to have no part. I suppose in some ways I do. Today I lost something I cared immensely about — a relationship with someone I have come to love. I could never tell her, and it was hard enough to admit it to myself…but it was candid and unfettered. Life is hard. I don’t know how to react other than reiterate words I have previously: sometimes life sucks.

New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also “alternatives” to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.

What the hell is this??!! Is this article to suggest that top Democrats in Congress would propose to punish ALL students who receive Federal aid and in effect sacrifice / destroy the opportunity for many students to receive education at the whim of the music / movie industry? How absolutely reprehensible and abhorrently pathetic. An extreme example of lobbying hurting education, our youth, and America — for profit, plain and simple.

File sharing, P2P, BitTorrent, etc were prolific when I was in college and it requires no overt skill to recognize their continued (exponential) expansion. Many efforts, however, have been made by the RIAA (CRIA in the example) to combat distribution channels, including shutting down aggregation [torrent] sites, filing lawsuits against individual distributors, colleges, and also against individual users. I won’t try to defend piracy… but will suggest that people do it for a very simple reason: things are expensive (i.e. times are tough, i.e. the USD sucks), and usually retail prices are absurd. For example, the iTunes lesson: ‘people would prefer to obtain things legally if prices seem reasonable’. Steve Jobs has done an excellent job of combating the music / movie industry and their continued efforts to increase prices (i.e. read here about Apple vs NBC). Doing so would revert people to piracy. What is upsetting is that the music / movie industry knows this, why else would they be selling DVDs for $3 in China (US prices were $14.99-24.99 last I checked, hmm).

Well, that last part was kind of a tangent, but back to HR 4137. If this is indeed the case and something that Congress is considering, it needs to make headline news (CNN, Google, NY Times, are you listening?!). Punishing all students, with the explicit ramifications of students losing funding, is inappropriate, ridiculous, and unacceptable.