I spent two days last week in Liverpool. I was visiting two professors at the University there to discuss projects in Ploen. Basically, they are writing models about how the complex life cycles of parasites may have evolved and we are trying to test them empirically. Though I spent most of the time discussing parasites and evolution, I did manage to wander the city for a couple hours. Liverpool is one of the two European Capitals of Culture for 2008. However, after visiting the city, I'm unsure as to why. In my humble opinion, it didn't have the charm of older European cities. With the exception of the many typical, red brick buildings (often run down, see pics), there were a lot of 60s and 70s style buildings that have not aged well. In my opinion, Liverpool is a cultural capital simply because the best band ever came from there. The Beatles formed in Liverpool, and a number of entrepeaneurs are keen to take advantage of this...Beatles shops, museums, statues of Elanor Rigby, clubs that still boast "The Beatles played here". The poverty was also palpable, at least in comparison to places like Leipzig. The city (the whole region) has suffered from the slow draining of manufacturing jobs.

Other observations...a major similarity to the U.S.: unfriendly border officials. A major difference to the U.S.: language. I noticed a number of colorful phrases used by my British hosts, but unfortunately only managed to remember a couple. For example, jacket potato = baked potato, rat run = back-alley shortcut.

In a previous post, I wrote that "Guitar Hero" is crazy addictive. Here is the statistical proof.

So it has been a couple months since I've posted anything. Here is my first excuse: science is hard. Yeah, I spend a lot of time in the lab. Some of this is simply the professional environment I'm in...people here in Plön spend a lot of time working, more than was the case in Finland. But some of the extra hours I put in because I'm still new on the job and I feel like I have to prove myself. I don't know if this pressure is real or simply imagined, but want to produce some tangible results quickly to show that I am capable of doing the job they want me to do. I also spend a lot of time in the lab because there is really nothing else to do in Plön (pop. 13,000...but there’s a movie theatre!). At least Plön is scenic…the picture is the view from my 14^th floor apartment.

To stay in touch with the title of this blog, maybe I should say a few things about the project I'm working on. The project is called "evolution of complex parasite life cycles", and essentially we want to understand why parasites use so many hosts in their life cycles. Parasites commonly have up to 3 hosts, but why they do this is a bit of an evolutionary conundrum. That is, wouIdn't it be easier to survive and reproduce when only one host is used? Well, parasites that add a host to their life cycle that's higher on the food chain (e.g. a bigger fish) may actually be able to grow larger and produce more offspring. A parasite that adds a host lower in the food chain may be able to increase their probability of transmission if the new host is frequently eaten by the old host. Though interesting, these ideas are difficult to test because most parasites have set life cycles, so there is no variation that can be used to design experiments. Instead, an indirect approach is necessary, such as examining the costs and benefits of parasite traits likely related to life cycle evolution. In this vein, I plan to examine the growth strategy of a particular tapeworm species in its different hosts. Here are some of the questions I hope to test…Does faster parasite growth increase the likelihood of host death? Natural death or death by predation? If it is costly to grow fast, what do parasites gain by growing fast and large? Do these costs and benefits apply to every host, or just some of the hosts a parasite uses? Is there any flexibility in parasite growth rates and what factors influence this? By pursuing these questions for the next 2 years (maybe more), I hope to further our understanding of how parasites divide up their life cycle (why do they grow a lot in some hosts, but not much in others?). In about a week, I'll go to the U.K. to discuss this project with some professors that are mathematically modelling the evolution of complex parasite life cycles, and, who knows, maybe we'll come up with some fantastic ideas and I'll take a whole new approach to the project.

What else has been going on the last couple months?? Ines has been furiously writing her Diploma thesis. Her deadline is in a couple weeks. Afterwards, she will be a high-earning, diploma-carrying journalist! Maybe then I could quit my job, and become a professional blogger. Or better yet, a profi gamer. I got completely addicted to Guitar Hero over the Xmas holidays. For those who don't know, Guitar Hero is a playstation game in which, using a guitar shaped controller, you have to press buttons and strum chords to the rythym of different rock songs. Here in Plön, I'm going through withdrawl. I felt a bit bad about my addiction, because I actually gave the game to Ines for Xmas. I was hoping that it would add to our playstation-based party games, such as singstar and eyetoy.

We spent New Year's in Leipzig, which was a blast. Ines and I went to a party at a friend's apartment. After midnight, we went dancing in the most famous indie club in Leipzig. Good food, cold beer, loud music. A good way to start 2008. Hopefully this year will be as a good as 2007. Though in retrospect I did manage quite a lot last year (finished my PhD, started a new job, published 4 papers, learned to speak German...at least a bit anyways). I didn't make any resolutions, but maybe I should have resolved to be a better blogger...

Ines and I visited Ines' cousin Alex in Hamburg yesterday. It was the first time I was in Hamburg, with the exception of a few transfers at the main train station. I had high expectations because Hamburg, the second largest city in Germany, is considered one of the hipper cities in Europe. I'm not so sure if we partied in the hip, cool parts of Hamburg, but we at least experienced the most famous. We went out on the Reeperbahn last night. Numerous bars, discos, fast food joints, sex stores, and strip clubs are located along the Reeperbahn and its surroundings. Just like Las Vegas, the whole area appeals to that part of us that just wants to get drunk and be naughty (I was neither drunk nor naughty last night, for those wondering if this post would get a bit more sordid). Though it doesn't have as much of an international reputation as Amsterdam, Hamburg is famous for the conspicuousness of its prostitutes, and perhaps the most interesting sight in this regard was Herbertstrasse (see the wikipedia link above). The street is blocked from view by a wall. Behind the wall and along the street sit prostitutes in tall glass windows lined with red lights. Only males above the age of 18 are allowed in; women cannot go and gawk at the hookers (and they also prefer to have only serious male customers on the street). Actually, last night felt more like a sight-seeing evening than a night out. Next time, hopefully, we'll find some of those ultra-hip clubs and avoid the tourists. The city is less than 2 hours from Ploen by train, so the next time could be rather soon.

Also, just as a follow-up to the last post. I discovered another thing that makes N. Germany like America. The bars and restaurants here offer pitchers of beer, something that I have not seen outside the U.S. before. I'm happy that this wonderful aspect of American drinking culture (there aren't that many) has been adopted somewhere outside the States.

As a warning, this post may involve some over-generalized stereotypes that some will disagree with. If you don’t like agree with me, comment or start your own blog. After such an ominous forewarning, you may expect me to write something stupid, like Nobel winner and DNA pioneer James Watson recently did. For those that don’t know, he inferred that blacks were inherently less intelligent than Europeans. Oops. No surprise that he was then suspended from his position at Cold Spring Harbor. Nice to know that a Nobel prize doesn’t give someone unbridled freedom to say whatever offensive thing they want. I’m digressing. This is the thought I wanted to share: regional cultural differences in Germany have taken me a step closer to America. After leaving America, I spent over 2 years in Finland, a land known for the quiet, withdrawn nature of its citizens. Finns just are not big talkers. Adjusting to Finnish culture was not difficult for me, because I was never very good at forcing petty small talk, a skill that’s often expected of Americans. From Finland, I moved into another stereotypically quiet culture, Germany. The Germans, though perhaps more outgoing than Finns, also tend to maintain a social “wall” when meeting new people, and cheery American yammering is often met with suspicion, even if it is well-intended. In my experience, this has been kinda true. Germans, like Finns, tend to be pretty quiet unless you know them, but my experiences are largely confined to Leipzig. It has been two weeks since I moved from Leipzig, in East Germany, to Ploen, in North Germany, and my opinions about the German character are changing. Here, most everyone in the office says “good morning”, which was not the case in Finland. When I go jogging, the people nod and perhaps utter a greeting, something that never happened in Finland or in Leipzig. Two days ago, a little old lady kept telling me how nice it was that I held the door for her. In Finland or Leipzig, I expect I would have received a “kiitos” or “danke”, but nothing more. A realtor that I met with in Ploen was more than happy to discuss various things about America (e.g. dollar to euro exchange rate, weather in Florida), instead of getting straight down to the details. Such social interactions, in my opinion, are more typically American, so, by moving here, have I entered a culture more compatible with my own? I have to admit that the difference between Leipzig and Ploen may reflect differences in city size than regional differences in culture, i.e. small town folk are just uber-friendly. Seems like I need to consult more Germans on this…maybe they could tell me an appropriate way how to end this post.

I feel like I'm moving up into the scientific big leagues. Some of the work done here (not mine) is of interest to a general audience, i.e. it does not strictly revolve around exotic parasites. How do I know that laypeople are interested in this research? I saw this article on the msn homepage after signing out of hotmail this afternoon. Some of my new colleagues published a very interesting study on how gossip affects people's willingness to cooperate. It seems that a comment or "gossip" about someone can be more important than that person's actual behavior with regard to forming an opinion about the person. To me, this suggests that we can be rather shallow and lazy creatures. Instead of forming an opinion by honest observation, it might just be easier to trust the gossip we hear. Though I'm working with worms and not humans, my work isn't likely to turn up on msn.com or any other website for that matter. However, if it does, this blog will be the first to break the story.

It has been quite a while since a post…3 weeks to be exact. Those three weeks can be broken into 3 distinct phases: (1) travelling with my parents, (2) preparing to move from Leipzig to Ploen, and (3) moving to Ploen and starting my new job. So, obviously there has been material for me to blog about, but I’ll simply say that an overabundance of anxiety has proven an effective obstacle to more prolific blogging. Anyways, I’ll try to report here and give some reflections on the last few weeks following my PhD defense.

After my defense, we had quite the party, as would be expected, lasting until well after 3. The very next day Ines, my parents, and I took the train from JKL to Helsinki at the unfortunately early hour of 1 p.m. (I slept off my hangover the whole way). The rest of that weekend was spent seeing the sites in Helsinki before flying to Berlin on Sunday. On Monday, I showed my parents around Berlin, and we took in the major sites. For both my parents, Berlin felt somewhat unreal. The history there is so fresh...and no city has a history like Berlin. Since I’ve been there several times, my fascination with the city’s cold war history has been partially replaced with my enthusiasm for its nightlife and overall vibe. Nonetheless, it was kinda fun to share in my parents’ astonishment while touring the city. That evening, we took the train to Leipzig. After a morning spent seeing Leipzig, we headed south to Sprechtsbrunn, Ines' home town. We arrived in the evening to meet Ines' parents. A homemade sign hung from the door and said (in english) "Welcome for Dr. Dan, his parents, and our Ines". Awesome. The crash of cultures that Ines and I feared was certainly dampened by our good friend alcohol. Language barriers really do get much lower after a few glasses of wine. Actually, I think the whole experience of dealing with language barriers made a big impact my parents; it was probably the first time they’ve been in a situation where they just cannot communicate. Of course, Ines and I spent the night translating back and forth, which also kept the conversation dynamic and humorous. The next day, we drove to Dresden. The entire old town in Dresden is a UNESCO world heritage site, perfect for touristy Americans keen to experience old Europe. The last stop on the trip was Prague and more touristy excursions. Besides a bit of trouble finding the hotel and some heavy rain during our city tour, Prague was relatively enjoyable.

My parents flew from Prague back to the States. I went back to Leipzig to think about the next phase of my life: a move to Northern Germany and the tiny city of Ploen (13,000 inhabitants). I spent a week in Leipzig trying to get my head about me…it took a surprising amount of time to actually realize that the PhD thesis and defense were finished and behind me. While soaking in that realization was (and is), naturally, pleasant, I began to focus on moving and beginning a new job. I must admit, I was sad to leave Leipzig. In the 9 months I lived there, I managed to become comfortable in Germany and I developed a fondness for the city. Such is life though. Moving and leaving one’s comfort zone are sometimes unavoidable, often unpleasant, but also frequently beneficial. For example, if I never left Nebraska for Finland, then I would not have met Ines and we would not have a blog with the ludicrous title “parasites and rock n roll”. The worse part is not what I left behind in Leipzig, but who. Ines has to stay in Leipzig to work and write her thesis. So, for the second time in our relationship, we are separated by some distance. On the positive side, the distance between Ploen and Leipzig is much shorter than between Finland and Germany.

For those who don’t know, the reason I moved to Ploen is that there is a research institute located here, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. For reasons which are still not entirely clear to me, this prestigious Institute offered me a post doc position for an undetermined amount of time. I’ll be studying the evolution of complex life cycle parasites using a particular tapeworm species as a model organism. Actually, the topic fits my interests very well and it’s related to my previous research, so that is probably the reason for their job offer. Hopefully, I’ll be able to work here for a couple years, but one can never know. At the moment, I’m just trying to stay positive in the face of all the unfamiliarity (a more positive thinker would say novelty): new colleagues, new boss, new city, new lab system, new expectations. Ines is, of course, keeping me focused on the opportunities, not the challenges, presented by this new situation. I can never thank her enough for that.

The defense is over! Wow, what an experience. There were points in which I didn't have a good answer for the opponent's questions, but, overall, it was a good discussion. I'm glad to have it behind me. Now comes the party. Juhu!

p.s. there will be no post tomorrow. Surprise.

It is about 3 hrs before my defense and man am I nervous. Ines says that my eyes look bad...large, dark rings, like a raccoon. But what can you expect? This is a stressful experience. I suppose if it were easy to get a doctorate, everyone would do it. I try to talk myself down "c'mon how hard can a two or three hour discussion be? Besides you spent three years thinking about these problems." Unfortunately, reasoning with myself seldom helps at this point. I'm gonna be nervous no matter how confident I am or how confident I can talk myself into being. The only real solution to such a problem is go through with the event itself. And so I will in about 3 hours.

There is no place like Nebraska. Though this was a recruiting motto for the University of Nebraska, it could apply equally well to this wacky story. A state senator in Nebraska is sueing God. After reading the article, it is still not very clear to me as to why he is sueing God...something about language use in some other case. Actually, the point does not need to be clear. All I needed to know was that it was Ernie Chambers. I'm from Nebraska, I already know he's crazy. This guy only wears t-shirts, has a show on public TV in which he rants about societal injustice, and made enough enemies in the senate to have a law passed to implement term limits (because they wanted to stop him from continually being re-elected). When I lived in Nebraska, I never had anything against the guy. In fact, I thought it was probably a good thing to have an angry black man to stand up against all those honkies in the Nebraska state legislature. Maybe he would keep some balance. However, after being through more than one of these ridiculous episodes (he plays the race card a lot...that gets tiresome), he has lost all credibility to me. Is he really changing anything or helping anyone by sueing God (who I imagine won't appear in court)? No. At least the incident is not only sad and pointless, it's also a bit humorous. We Americans love to blame our problems on other people and sueing is the way to do it. And when you can't find a mortal being to blame, why not pin your bad luck on the big kahuna?

There is a certain amount of narcissism involved in maintaining a blog (i.e. please read about me and my opinions!). Thus, I will not feel too guilty or self-involved posting this link. It is the university’s press release announcing my thesis defense. The page is all in Finnish with the exception of my thesis abstract. I must say, when I see announcements about my impending thesis defense, I start to get both excited and nervous for the actual event itself. The reality of it all is slowly seeping in.

From the cartoon, you may be able to guess what I did today. That’s right, I started to clean my desk in preparation for moving out next week. In the region above and around my desk, a considerable amount of entropy has accumulated over the last few years. ..scattered papers, folders with meaningless labels, equipment borrowed from other people 2 years ago, specimens unsystematically piled together, etc. The most interesting part of this activity is seeing how my work haphazardly proceeded the last couple years. By haphazard, I mean that my work was never clearly directional; I didn’t start with a clear plan about which questions I wanted to answer and what my ultimate goal was. To some degree I regret this, because it may have been more productive to have one well-construed project to pursue. It would have given me some boundaries. Instead, I had the freedom to pursue any zany idea that popped into my head (which I often did), regardless of whether or not it was good. The zeal of youth, which is fading, was party to blame for this. As I went through some of this stuff on my desk, I saw the manifestations of this zealousness, i.e. various ideas scribbled on scraps of papers. I could see and realize how much time I spent on ideas that simply didn’t result in anything tangible (besides my indecipherable paper scribblings). But that is how science goes. There is not usually a straight, clear path to any goal, and the failed, underdeveloped, and outlandish ideas are probably always gonna outweigh the genuinely good ideas.

A museum dedicated entirely to parasites? Yep, one exists in Japan. Check it out. I would go there just so I could buy stuff in their shop. Particularly exciting is the keychain with a seal nematode inside (Anisakis). Cool.

The intellectual showdown we've all been waiting for...baby humans vs baby chimps. Who performs better in simple tasks? Some researchers recently set about to find out. Turns out the humans outperformed the chimps (hurray for our species!). What I find amusing though is the thought that they were probably kids in this study who couldn't figure out these various tests. How would that make their parents feel? Would they tell their son or daughter later in life that, when you were 2 years old, you couldn't outsmart a monkey? I'm glad I wasn't subjected to such a tough comparison early in life.

I'm flying to Rovaniemi, Finland tomorrow for the meeting of the Scandinavian-Baltic Society of Parasitology. Three days of talks about parasites taking place on the arctic circle. Should be fun. I'll give a talk about how parasites alter the behavior of their hosts through time. The talk is right after a coffee break, so if I notice people nodding off, I'll know my talk is very, very boring. Let's hope a few people stay interested. I'll be in Finland most of September, so I may not be posting too often.

Ines and I were at the Games Convention here in Leipzig yesterday. It is the biggest games fair in Europe and it was wild. Tony Hawk was even there promoting his new game. Things sure have come a long way from Pong. I was a rather big "gamer" until high school, but after I went to college there just seemed like too many other things to do (note: there was one exception, Conker's Bad Fur Bay for N64...we played that game, perhaps the best of all time, quite frequently in the dorms). In college, I started to view video games as a time waster, something more for bored kids than high-strung students. So, I have not really been paying too much attention to the gaming world. Yesterday, though, I saw how much the industry has grown. The graphics are wildly life-like, most everything can be played multiplayer online, there are controllers with built-in motion sensors, and many games push the boundaries of decency (to view one game, Ines had to show her ID to prove she was 18). All the attending "gamers", mostly male of course, were being wooed by the game designers and console manufacturers. For example, at the booths of many games or demos, scantilly clad women were willing to (read paid to) pose for photographs with any given nerd. It was like a car show for geeks, but cool none the less. In fact, Ines and I want a Wii after playing one for all of two minutes.

When it comes to human behavior, I have a tendency to look for biological explanations, i.e. it's in our genes. Not that I discount cultural explanations, but they just seem weaker in my eyes. I suppose that shouldn't be a surprise...I am a biologist and I like to think most traits evolved to serve some kind of purpose. Anyways, in the nature vs. nuture continuum, I would suppose that something like color preference would lie on the nuture end of things. I mean, why would someone's favorite color be innate? Well, here is an interesting piece of research that shows that females have a clear preference for red/pink, yet males and females do not differ in their preference for blue. The study was conducted using adults, so genetic and environmental influences are indistinguishable; they need to do a similar study using infants to show that the preference is innate. Nonetheless, I find it fascinating that pink may be inherently more attractive to females, which would just further demonstrate the extent that our biology unconsciously affects our decisions. Makes me almost feel a bit guilty that I bought a pink shirt awhile ago.

The other day, I was watching a nature documentary on deep sea research. Of course, it was very interesting, because our knowledge of this ecosystem has exponentially increased over the last few decades. In this show, the researchers were studying the ecology of whale falls. Whale carcasses are like oases in the desert of the ocean bottom, and a wide variety of bizarre critters seem to find their way to the buffet. Amazingly, some described species of worms seem to be found exclusively on these rare but bountiful sources of food. There are many valid and interesting research questions being asked about whale falls, like how these critters manage to find whale carcasses and how they travel the vast distances between carcasses? While I find these questions intriguing, I could not help but wonder about the logistics of this work and how it is funded. After working in science for a good 6 years or so, I’ve learned this fundamental lesson: money does not come easy for basic research (i.e. research that doesn’t obviously have an application that will benefit people). There are lots of curious scientists that want to do basic research, and they all tend to think their ideas are interesting and exciting enough to deserve loads of funding. But, like most any other pursuit, there is never quite enough money to go around and make everyone happy. I’ve accepted that, and it is part of the reason that I try to do research that is relatively light on spending, e.g. paying my salary and buying me a bit of equipment. My applications appear to have a good profit ratio in the eyes of the granting agency (hopefully); they think they will get a lot for their money. To do this kind of deep sea research, on the other hand, the budget must be huge. There are projects in which dead whales were towed out to sea, and then regularly visited to study the progression of the ecosystem on the carcass. To do something like that, you need to pay for a ship (a big one), deep sea submersibles (which I can only image are expensive), a crew, numerous scientists and graduate students, and the equipment for the any desired analyses (e.g. DNA sequencing of collected critters). And you got to pay for those ocean voyages a couple times per year. What do the funding agencies get in return for this huge investment? Well, they will be acknowledged in a variety of papers reporting the expedition’s discoveries, perhaps even in rather good journals given the uniqueness of such studies. Nonetheless, that hardly seems like a reason to fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars. Actually, I think the clearest justification for this work is that it captures people’s imagination. If they can make a TV show out of it, some non-scientists must find the work fascinating and worth doing. That can not be said about most basic research, which is almost totally inaccessible to non-scientists. Just take the name of my thesis for example. Does this seem inviting: “Larval life history, transmission strategies, and the evolution of intermediate host exploitation by complex life cycle parasites”? Sometimes I think, not too seriously, that I should have been a paleontologist, my dream job when I was a dinosaur-crazed 6-year old. Then I’d be able to receive grants to travel to Siberia, East Africa, China, etc. to excavate dead animals and go on TV to tell people about my amazing discoveries. But then I wouldn’t get to work with living worms, a much more exhilarating, although equally useless (in the eyes of laymen) experience.

We had a surprise visit from an old friend of mine this week. Eliot, an acquiantance from my college days, wrote me an email on Monday saying "hey, I'm in Germany, where do you live?". I was a bit shocked, but happy to find time to host a wayward American. He happened to be in Berlin, which is just an hour from Leipzig, so on Tuesday afternoon I picked him up from the train station. You can read about some of our activities on his blog, which happens to be much more active than this one. Ya see, Eliot is an internet "somebody", just check out his list of blogging and editing duties. Other internet nerds know of him, though they may have never met him in the flesh. In fact, he was in Germany to attend a computer camp and learn about hacks, new technologies, and other things that he explained, but I didn't really understand. He did manage to enlighten me in one respect though. Apparently, during my three years abroad (yeah it was 3 years this month), I have picked up some kind of indistinguishable accent...not American, not Finnish, not German. Oh well. I'll start to worry when Germans tell me that I speak funny English.

This is interesting. Exertion sweat (from exercise) has a chemical composition different from stress sweat (from anxiety). The stress sweat seems to result in a worse smell. I reek regularly of both varieties, but I think the stress stench will be more common in the next 2 months. I'm rapidly finalizing my thesis and preparing for the events and party thereafter. I think it is a bit like planning a shotgun wedding...