Think Ink
I realize this has little to do with working out, but I thought it interesting and cool: Carl Zimmer is a science writer in New York who blogs under The Loom. He recently blogged a post about scientists and science tattoos (Flickr set here) after noticing that his friend Bob, a postdoc in Richard Axel's lab at Columbia, was sporting a DNA tat:
It turns out that the strand represents his wife's initials (EEE) in genetic code. Technical details from Bob:
Bonus question:I knew someone in this crowd would ask about the 12 bases but three codons thing! So, 3 codons don't give you two turns (wanted to approximate real DNA dimensions), so I needed at least four codons, all of which in this case are E (the single letter code for glutamate). E translates into GAG or GAA (I went with GAG GAA GAG GAA for variety), and used the colors green for G and amber for A. The complementary bases were coded C=Cyan and T=Tomato Red (ok, a bit of a stretch). So, you can see from the left - following one strand - Green Amber Green Green Amber Amber, etc.
My wife's first name is Eliza, and is known affectionately as Li, so I'm thinking seriously of getting a second tattoo (the first was her engagement present to me in exchange for the ring) of a Bohr model of a lithium atom. Helps too that we have two kids (so 1 Li + 1 Theo + 1 Jasper = 3).
What barbiturate's chemical structure is depicted in the second tat above?
6 comments:
And I thought I was a geek!
What's the story on the Diazepam tattoo?
Found the link through Boingboing, but I'm enamored with it in part because I went to med school with Bob, who sports the DNA tattoo that inspired the post. He was a MDPhD as well who bypassed a residency to go straight to a postdoc - what kind of nutjob would do that?
No story was given for the diazepam tat, but if you page through the Flick set some of them have pretty detailed histories, many of which fall along the line of, "After 8 years of research on my totally arcane dissertation area, I defended my thesis and promptly got this..."
Thought you would appreciate this one in particular.
Some crazy ones, to each his own...
I dodged a bullet, I shudder to think what my PhD tattoo could have been...
Something along the lines of this or this?
As kenway pointed out in an early blog entry (that I cannot find) one of the best science tattoos is
this.
hey eric, you up in boston already?
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