Thursday, September 16, 2004
From Wired Magazine:
But it isn't the food or the furniture that lured Martin Hibberd from his tenured post at London's Imperial College to run the population genetics lab at the Genome Institute. It's the equipment. Biopolis labs are lavishly outfitted with mass spectrometers, robotic microarrays, and a computing room that can house a petabyte of data storage. On a tour of his facilities, Hibberd proudly notes the $600,000 sequence variation analyzer purchased by the government. The system can sequence 4,000 DNA samples a day. Then there are the four $400,000 Applied Biosystems DNA analyzers. "At Imperial, it was hard to get funding for new technology, but here it's available," he says. "We've gone from nothing to this in only a short period of time."
It disgusts me to see that my motherland is moving into the "money-can-buy-you-anything" direction. Yes it is for our future (undertone: we have no choice but to seek a new niche to sustain this flailing economy). Just the kind of excuse people give when they become unscrupulous, over-pragmatic hypocrites - I don't want to turn out this way too, but I've got no choice, this is for survival. How do we expect our younger generation to grow up untainted when daddy himself is not leading by example?
But it isn't the food or the furniture that lured Martin Hibberd from his tenured post at London's Imperial College to run the population genetics lab at the Genome Institute. It's the equipment. Biopolis labs are lavishly outfitted with mass spectrometers, robotic microarrays, and a computing room that can house a petabyte of data storage. On a tour of his facilities, Hibberd proudly notes the $600,000 sequence variation analyzer purchased by the government. The system can sequence 4,000 DNA samples a day. Then there are the four $400,000 Applied Biosystems DNA analyzers. "At Imperial, it was hard to get funding for new technology, but here it's available," he says. "We've gone from nothing to this in only a short period of time."
It disgusts me to see that my motherland is moving into the "money-can-buy-you-anything" direction. Yes it is for our future (undertone: we have no choice but to seek a new niche to sustain this flailing economy). Just the kind of excuse people give when they become unscrupulous, over-pragmatic hypocrites - I don't want to turn out this way too, but I've got no choice, this is for survival. How do we expect our younger generation to grow up untainted when daddy himself is not leading by example?
