Buff Up Your Website, Write an Essay, Win Cash

By Jeff Miller

If you watched the video segment on Communicating Science in last week's interview with Keith Yamamoto, "UCSF and the Future of Science," you already know his views on the responsibility of scientists to explain and excite the public about their work.

Part of that communication, of course, is web communication. Now, we all realize that research laboratory websites are not usually designed for public consumption. More often than not, they are clubby, targeted to their scientific peers, not the lay audience.

And maybe that's appropriate in one sense — the strict sense. But the web connects UCSF to the world and we should use that opportunity to talk plainly and persuasively to those non-scientists in the global audience who might be curious about life sciences research. You never know. One of them might want to send a donation.

Would they know where to send it? Not always. Few of the science sites at UCSF carry the official UCSF web banner. And in some cases, UCSF is not even mentioned on the front page, a kind of "missed" communication.

So, as part of what we will now call the Yamamoto Challenge, Science Café is announcing a website contest with a prize of $750 to the winning laboratory, center or institute as the case might be.

The contest, judged by representatives of the UCSF Department of Public Affairs, will evaluate research center, scientific institute (or program) and laboratory websites on the ucsf.edu domain in four major areas:

The contest judging will begin the week of July 9. The winning site will be announced and showcased on the main UCSF web page in mid-September. If there are sites you would like to nominate, please do so via the Science Café email.

Speaking of contests, Seed magazine is conducting its second annual science writing contest.

This year's topic: What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century? How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value of this literacy? Who is responsible for fostering it?

Essay submissions will be judged by a panel of Seed editors and special guests. Winning entries will be published in Seed magazine.

  • Submission Deadline: July 1, 2007
  • Maximum Word Count: 1,200
  • First prize is $2500. Second prize is $1000.

He might not get a monetary prize for his work, but Science Café alumnus, Ken Dill, PhD, professor of biophysics and pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF and associate dean of research in the School of Pharmacy (see Bring Back the Ivory Tower, Part 1, Bring Back the Ivory Tower, Part 2), has earned a bow after working with his graduate student, Justin Bradford, to develop a model that answers the question: What were the pre-life steps that caused the earliest chemicals to come together, setting the stage for metabolism or RNA machinery? You can read the full news release here.

Speaking of another Science Café alum, Voelker Doetsch (see German Science Stirs (With a UCSF Spin), Part 1, German Science Stirs (With a UCSF Spin), Part 2), I was reminded of my conversation about the surge in German science while reading Alison Abbot's feature, "Science in Germany: A Beacon of Reform," in the June 7 issue of Nature. In short, Abbot uses the example of the Charité Medical School in Berlin to describe how changes in funding and attitude have invigorated the 300-year-old institution. Quoted in the article is a former UCSF postdoc from Roger Nicoll's lab, Dietmar Schmitz, who returned to Germany in 2002, lured back in part by a state-sponsored incentive program for émigré scientists. "I'd be a liar if I said the atmosphere here was quite the same as San Francisco and Berkeley but there is already a huge difference compared with when I studied here in the mid-1990s," says the Charité neuroscientist. "It's getting there slowly."

Another former UCSF postdoc, Christina Karatzaferi, once in the laboratory of Roger Cooke, emailed Science Café from Greece to say that she has landed at the University of Thessaly. Check back soon for a report on my conversation with her about the importance of the UCSF experience in advancing her career.

Finally, let me know what you think about the work of Connecticut sequencing technology company 454 Life Sciences. This is the company that sequenced James Watson's DNA as a prelude to doing the same for other prominent — and agreeable — scientists.

I already know that I'm not on their list.

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Related Links

UCSF Web Development Resources
Understanding Identity
Seed Magazine Science Writing Contest
Scientists Propose the Kind of Chemistry that Led to Life
UCSF News Release, June 8, 2007
Science in Germany: A Beacon of Reform
Nature 447:630-633, June 7, 2007
Nicoll Lab
454 Life Sciences