September 21, 2008 - "The ideal of beauty for a he-toad is a she-toad" (Spanish proverb). Fall 2008 group meeting schedule here.

September 2, 2008 - Young guns for the Eicosanoid Research Division. Graduate students Lucía Peña y Luis Gil de Gómez join our labs today.

July 11, 2008 - Pics of the Second International Workshop on Lipid Mediators here. One month delay, not too bad (could've been worse!).

July 7, 2008 - Our little experiment with city trackers has come to and end after one year (see May 28, 2007 entry). Visitors from all over the globe, with the notable exception of Japan (sob). The cities from which we received more visits were, quite expectedly, Madrid, Valladolid and Barcelona, in this order. What was not that expected, however, was to receive so many visits from places such as Omaha, Nebraska, Sunnyvale and Emeryville, California, and several Irish cities. Exotic places from which we received visits include Bangkok, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Burkina Faso.

July 1, 2008 - "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" (US President Harry S. Truman). Summer 2008 group meeting schedule here.

June 23, 2008 - Today, Javier Casas brilliantly defended his PhD dissertation. Javi is our second student to graduate from the University of Valladolid. He will remain with us until December, when he moves to San Diego to receive postdoctoral training. In the meantime, there is still much confocal microscopy to do!

June 16, 2008 - The Second International Workshop on Lipid Mediators was held Jun 12 and 13 here in Valladolid. It was much fun indeed. We will be posting pics of the meeting as soon as they come. The final program can be retrieved here.

June 4, 2008 - "Fed of being fed I got tired of asking the world why, why". That is from a Joan Manuel Serrat song, and reflects quite nicely the way we feel every time we are summoned to those national panels for the evaluation of grants, fellowships, etc., and are confronted with the argument that JBC is a lesser journal just because of its low impact factor. We have decided not to dispute anymore. Instead, we will translate this article into Spanish and distribute it among the unenlightened. Maybe it works, who knows.

May 23, 2008 - So many things to do, so little time... to update this site. A bit more than a month ago, Magdalena Canali, a graduate student from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina, joined us for a short stay. She will remain with us til mid June.

April 26, 2008 - The Second International Workshop on Lipid Mediators is on its feet, up and running. Website of the workshop here. First announcement here.

April 16, 2008 - After the last political changes in Spain, we now depend on the newly-created Ministry of Science and Innovation. This is the third change in the denomination of our ministry in five years. 

April 11, 2008 -  Here is the logo of CIBERDEM, the biomedical research network we belong to. Orange color is definitely an optimal choice and font looks somewhat familiar. In other words, two thumbs up to the designer. CIBERDEM website here (in Spanish)

April 8, 2008 - Latrant et scitis estatint praetesquitantes estis. That is Latin, and summarizes quite well some recent happenings. Tip for lurkers: Google does a good job as a language translator. By the way, this site has never had an I.P. tracker. No plans to place one at all.

March 19, 2008 - "Science and religion are sisters: the one seeks knowledge of creation and the other of the Creator" (attributed to Wernher von Braun). Spring 2008 group meeting schedule here.

March 3, 2008 - Clara Meana, a postdoctoral associate, joins today as a new member of the Eicosanoid Research Division.

February 20, 2008 - In the Nov 30 issue of JBC, Olefsky an co-workers published a study demonstrating that free fatty acids can activate inflammatory signaling in macrophages via engagement of TRL2 and TLR4 receptors (Nguyen et al., JBC 2007: 35279-35292). This is the article we have distinguished as Paper of the Year 2007.

February 6, 2008 - We welcome Gema Pérez-Chacón as a new member of the Eicosanoid Research Division.

January 24, 2008 - An interesting commentary on the potential pitfalls of translating mouse studies to humans has been published in the Jan issue of Immunity (vol. 28, pp. 1-4). It is good that someone reminds us from time to time that, regardless of the many genetic similarities between mice and humans, a mouse is a mouse and a human is a human.

January 21, 2008 - Pretty amusing that exchange of correspondence between the editors of some highly-reputed journals, and Thomson Scientific representatives (the creators and maintainers of that infamous impact factor thing), about... uh, impact factors (latest installement appearing in J. Exp. Med. (Jan 10, doi:10.1084/jem.20080053). Great if something comes out of this.

January 16, 2008 - Beginning this year, our division forms part of something called Biomedical Research Center on Diabetes and Related Metabolic Disorders (CIBERDEM), a virtual network sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Health. This initiative supersedes the Thematic Network we were associated with for the past year.

January 15, 2008 - Continuing with musical references, Tommy Shaw used to sing about people with too much time on their hands. Case in point: the Bio-Rad people singing PCR to find out who the daddy is. Simply brilliant.

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