I am Old

No, not me. It's a quote from Tim during our discussion.

Recently I've struggled a bit on the storyline of my research. In brief, I am interested in a big question which can be divided to 4 or 5 small questions. Those sub-questions are different but all correlate to one another, making it difficult to pack into one story.

Thus I went to Tim and Chris asking for opinions. We then discussed details and problems in each direction. Questions in cytokinesis are difficult to tackle, since usually in there are more than one system working at the same time. You need everything to do anything.

At one point, Tim suddenly laughed and said:

"If it's five year ago, I would never do that. Ha-ha, I couldn't believe I make this suggestion to my student. You can try to fuse some kinases with kinesins, transfect to the cell, and see what happens."

Tim continued: "As a cell biologist, usually you take out things from a system and see what changes. If you are creating something not existing in the system, it is fake. That's why cell biologists don't use that kind of approach. I always thought in that way."

"However, after I talked to Windell Lim, suddenly I felt I am so conservative! I am old! What the hell! Maybe it's time for us to move on and try something bold."

Windell Lim, a UCSF professor, visited our department and had a discussion with Tim last week. Tim seemed to be very impressive on Lim's work. He even suggested Aaron, who just gradutaed, doing his postdoc in Lim's lab.

Lim works on synthetic biology, adding new components to systems, pretty cool.