“Whoa, this place is huge and there’s so much happening here,” I thought to myself as I entered AveXis, a start-up gene therapy company where I worked for a year and a half as a Bioprocess Engineer. On my first day, the enthusiastic atmosphere was contagious, surrounded by energetic colleagues scurrying around the office and…
When I was younger, my parents gave me an encyclopaedia for children (clearly I was already the biology nerd I am today). Eager to learn as much as I could, I started at page one and continued page by page until I finished the entire book. This is still my preferred way of reading any…
Dr. Jan Kooter started with cultivating plants and ended up studying genetics. What was his journey from a future in horticulture to his current position at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam? Before the well-known VU lecturer, education coordinator and life scientist Jan Kooter retires, we decide to go back to his roots.
Have you ever been reading a research paper, looked at the methods or data analysis sections, and felt they were rather incomplete? Has that made you feel like you cannot reproduce their conclusions without emailing the authors back and forth?
As a life sciences student, I struggle to keep up with science news. With a lot of generalizing and provoking popular science like ‘All people who drink black coffee are psychopaths’-news, it is a challenge to find good science news on my level. Of course, there are plenty of journals I could sit down with…
Power, Sex and Suicide: three words that grasp attention like little else would. It is not what you think; the subtitle reveals that this book is actually about the elusive mitochondria – to many a mystery. This combination describes exactly what Nick Lane’s book encompasses: rather complex biological concepts, but accessible for anyone interested.
Have you ever wondered who invented vaccination or how we came to know how digestion works? Did you know that experiments were once performed to test for the contraceptive effect of Coca-Cola? Why it’s not all rocket science: scientific theories and experiments explained describes…
For a long time, illustration was the only way for humans to capture the beauty of flora and fauna around them. Even though photography has made it possible to capture all the flora and fauna of the world with only the click of a button, illustrations are still widely used by scientists for clarification. Not…
A team of researchers recently claimed to have developed a new treatment to remove all traces of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from the mammalian genome through a combination of using an antiviral drug regime and genetic engineering. Published this summer in Nature Communications, the landmark paper describes how a combination of pre-treating HIV-1 infected…
“Dear applicant, I am sorry but all internship positions in the lab have already been filled.” As a first-year master student I received a lot of emails like this when I was looking for my first internship position. What a nightmare! So many applications sent, yet so few responses and then mostly rejections…