and you think your job is hard

I don't usually blog about what I do for a living. One reason is that a big part of what I do is writing about what I do (and more so with every passing year). So by the time I get to blogging, I've pretty much got science written out of my system.

Another is that I'm just interested in lots of things I don't get paid to think about.

Still, I am incredibly lucky in that I do essentially get paid to think for a living, and that's pretty cool. And even though the nature of modern science is that you specialize in something very, very narrow, every once in a while, I do get to think about the bigger picture.

My colleagues and I study biological barriers. There are a lot of reasons to be interested in biological barriers--one is that they fall apart in disease, and this can be very bad. Another is that they can keep you from getting drugs where you want them to go. As you might imagine, the latter is of great interest to the pharmacuetical industry.

Today I was thinking about this, and it occured to me that what this boils down to is getting molecules into, through, or around cells. Sounds simple enough. The thing is--cells are pretty good at regulating what goes in, through, or around them. If you think about it, this is really all a cell is--a bag of lipids around some water that regulates what goes in and out of itself.

So it's fine and good to say that we're trying to control what goes from A to B. But we should probably keep in mind that the cells have agendas of their own. Plus, they have a bit of a head start on figuring out how to implement them. Of a couple billion years.

Man, I'm glad I didn't think of this until after I finshed grad school.