Bureaucracy in Germany

I have been sitting on two letters from the TV company for about a month but finally got Philipp to help translate for me. As expected it was an invoice for use of the TV which is fine but I do not appear to be able to pay online. Instead I need to provide them with my internet banking details by snail mail so they can deduct the amount from my account. We can arrange for automatic debits of such things as power, telephone etc in NZ but usually there is the option of a direct bank transfer to them but this does not seem possible for this one.

A couple of days ago I received an email with an invoice for renewal of my Bahncard. My mistake again as I should have had someone translate the fine print for me. Apparently, DB Bahn automatically renews your Bahn card and charges you unless you cancel 6 weeks in advance of the expiry date. This could never happen in NZ. The company would be hauled before the Commerce Commission and required by law to change their practice as the default would never be renewal. The default would be expiry of your subscription. Very bad business practice. I suspect playing the foreign card will not work as "The rules are the rules". So looks like Euro 40 for a card that I will never use!

Homing in Braunschweig

Understanding the process of cell-cell self recognition and fusion is a biological process important in the development of many multi-cellular organisms. Neurospora crassa is a great model experimental system for understanding this process. I am currently in Braunschweig visiting Andre Fleisner's group in the Institute of Genetics, Braunschweig Technical University. I have thoroughly enjoyed my visit here meeting and talking with the students and Andre about how cell-cell fusion occurs and some pioneering studies on understanding whether N. crassa in nature is an endophyte. The attendance at my seminar was quite overwhelming - a great audience with lots of good questions.

Remarkably, I had an email last week from Torsten Thuenen who I first met in 2000 while I was in Germany for the International Endophyte meeting in Paderborn when we had discussions about possible PhD study in my lab. He had just been reading my Blog. He now has a position at the Julius Kuehn-Institute here in Braunschweig and is keen to set up an Epichloe endophyte research program. So great we were able to catch up after my seminar. Also nice to briefly catch up with Chris Eickhorst who did an internship in my lab in 2012 and Barbara Schulz who I have known for a long time and has had a long standing interest in endophytes. I just have to come back to Braunschweig next year.

I also enjoyed talking to Ralf Schnabel about Phainothea, a tool he has developed to generate abstract images that capture the phenotype of C. elegans. Wonderful science and terrific scientific art. Very generously he gave me a copy of his book entitled Aletheia that captures these abstract images and some others that express his views about science and education.

Ralf Schnablel's distance maps

Barry, Rheinhard, Andre and Ralf

GFP tagging in Göttingen

I am referring to tagging of the protein kind not the the street graffiti kind which blights many of our cities. Using GFP-labelled proteins as a handle to pull out components of protein complexes and identify them by Mass Spectrometry has been put to very good use in the Dept of Genetics and Biochemistry at Georg August Universitat in Gottingen where they have identified and characterised a number of new protein complexes in fungi including the STRIPAK complex. Its a nice example of the need for good infrastructure and equipment to do modern biology. Yesterday I visited the Dept to meet and talk with students and post docs in the labs of Gerhard Braus and Stefanie Poggleler and to give a seminar. While I had seen some of the work before at Asilomar it was nice to hear the stories again and first hand to better understand the work. Stefanie, Eva, Britta and Antonia were asking after Berit who is now in my lab in NZ. 

Georg August Universitat in Gottingen has a remarkable history in science with no less than 45 Nobel prize winners associated with this University - nearly all in Physics and Chemistry. The most recent award was in 2014 to Stefan Hell at the Max Planck for Super Resolution Fluorescence Microscopy - confocal at the nano level! 14 of the awards were for work  done at the University itself.  While out on my morning walk today I was wandering through the Stadtfriedhof (City Cemetery) to find a special memorial dedicated to the 8 Nobel prize winners buried there. 

Today I caught up with Ivo Feussner to discuss a collaboration we are setting up linked to my recent Marsden grant proposal. I first met Ivo in 2012 on my first visit to Gottingen when we discussed possible joint projects. One of the objectives in the Marsden proposal is on metabolite fingerprinting with Ivo. I think this will provide a great opportunity for exchange between our respective labs.

Nobel laureate memorial at Stadtfriedhof in Göttingen

Max Planck

The 100 h rule

Its done – well almost. Just a summary to write and then push the button to upload to Research Services at Massey for a final check before they send on to the Royal Society. I have a ‘rule’ that you need to spend around 100 h working on a Marsden full proposal. My log for the present one is around 90 h but that does not take account of all the preliminary work before seriously starting to write it. But there is a lot more to preparing a good grant than spending lots of hours on it. First you must have a really good idea supported by some preliminary data. Then you need to crystallise that into a good hypothesis and good biological questions. It must read like well written prose so it’s easy for the committee and referees to assimilate. I doubt most members of the committee for the panel my grant proposal is going to will know what a sclerotium or a stroma is! One exception noted. At least you hope your referees will be but don't count on it. I had a dream run with Marsden grants getting 5 in a row from 2000 through to 2010. Then my second round proposal fell over last year and was not funded even though I applied the 100 h rule! After booting my office door I sat down a day or two later and rationalized why it was not funded. I concluded that it simply was not a compelling enough story even though it was founded on good science. That's what you are up against from a fund that has an overall success rate of around 8% (up to 25% for the second round). Lets hope this one will fair better. I think the story is compelling and I have assembled a great international team to work with but on Friday I was not so chipper – I hit the wall. One of my colleagues pointed out a flaw in the logic of what we were proposing. At this point I deleted large sections and rewrote them. There is one component of the story that is complex and committees hate complex. With the help of Daniel, whose project this proposal is based on, we turned this one around and now have what I think is a compelling story. Working closely with someone on the writing helps a lot. This time it was Daniel who I enjoyed working with. We both learnt a lot in the process. Lets hope it is a winner.