A surprise beginning for RNA

The beginning of RNA.

In October 1993, Reinhard Luhrmann organized a small RNA meeting in Marburg, Germany, and invited me as a speaker. This was the same year the Nobel Prize for Splicing was awarded, and many of the meeting talks concerned the mechanism of splicing. I was excited that Joan Steitz, who had first proposed that snRNPs were involved in splicing, was the Keynote Speaker at this conference. She had also...

A Modified Orcinol Reaction for RNA Determination

Messenger RNA Degradation: Beginning at the End

The mechanisms responsible for mRNA decay in mammalian cells, and how specific sequence elements accelerate decay, are unknown. Recent work indicates that 'ARE' instability elements recruit the exosome to promote rapid 3'-to-5' degradation of the mRNA.

Preparing for Financial Surprise

This essay shows how Todd LaPorte’s work on reliability-seeking organizations contains insights for how we might understand the financial crisis of 2008–2009. In particular, the financial system was not perceived and described as critical infrastructure, there was a regulatory overemphasis on routine operational practices at the entity level, and there was insufficient countercyclical leadershi...

Searching for Surprise

Inspired by the notion of surprise for unconventional discovery in computational creativity, we introduce a general search algorithm we name surprise search. Surprise search is grounded in the divergent search paradigm and is fabricated within the principles of metaheuristic (evolutionary) search. The algorithm mimics the self-surprise cognitive process of creativity and equips computational cr...