Coming up: the recent incident at UU

Hello everybody!

The character of this blog entry is: sarcasm! If you can't handle that then please don't read any further. Intolerance of sarcasm can be expressed as seizure, heart attack, brain damage and blablablabla....

I will write a blog entry on the recent small incident between me and the Dept. of Cell and Molecular Biology (ICM) at Uppsala University. At this moment, I just sent an email to the prefect, vice prefect and secretary at the ICM. Incidentally, I found out that the vice prefect of ICM is one of the professors I contacted earlier, before this incident started. Well I guess he must've been too busy to look into this matter. Hopefully my email will be well-received. Also, I posted a status update on my twitter to make sure that people know I sent the email. To tell you the truth, when I heard from my sources that people still follow the event by checking my twitter, I felt honored. I mean, when so many professors and faculty members put down their work to make sure a poor little student like me can receive so much unwanted attention, how can you not feel you are in the center of all the spotlight? Just like a Hollywood star! And guess what, one of my friends who happened to have a law book next to his hand, showed me this:

Tryckfrihetsförordningen 2 kap §1

Till främjande av ett fritt meningsutbyte och en allsidig upplysning skall varje svensk medborgare ha rätt att taga del av allmänna handlingar.

Tryckfrihetsförordningen 2 kap §14

Myndighet får inte på grund av att någon begär att få taga del av allmän handling efterforska vem han är eller vilket syfte han har med sin begären i större utsträckning än som behövs för att myndigheten skall kunna pröva om hinder föreligger mot att handlingen lämnas ut.

Tryckfrihetsförordningen SFS 1949:105

If you don't understand Swedish, use Google Translate. Basically it says that since I am a Swedish citizen, I should be able to get all the information per request. And the government is not allowed to speculate what I am doing in a broader-than-necessary spectrum to try to stop me from obtaining the information I'm after. University is a governmental organization, thus, it is bound by offentlighetsprincipen. Theoretically, all the documents are public, even the emails circulating inside the ICM can be accessed by me whenever I want. For instance, one of my friends at KI even told me that it's not recommended to write down personal stuff using the work email, because everything can be seen by any random person. At KI, it's said that some journalists ask the institute for more information than necessary, just to test if KI staff knows the law. I have a feeling that UU should also be put on the test, and I do worry about the performance of UU staff relative to KI staff.

Anyway, when I have time I will collect the information and write down a timeline for the events that occurred. If there is anything that I demand of ICM, it's a formal apology. I want the person who wrote down my twitter "Leo Kinmann" to step out, and apologize to me for exposing my privacy in front of the whole department. I dare to say this, now that I know my rights as a Swedish citizen.

An email to one of Uppsala University's professors

Hi professor,

I understand your concern. I have heard that my email was seen with skepticism from Prof. Stefan Pålsson of the IT department. Somebody thought that my request was a fraud and as a result, dug up my twitter account. Some faculty even urged people to "search further", which could totally compromise my anonimity on the internet. I know the thing about not registering the student's nationalities after asking all the Uppsala and SLU faculties and international master programs for similar information. After living in Sweden for 10 years since my childhood, I am aware of the Swedish way of handling things. However, my duty as the president of Chinese Student and Scholar Association in Uppsala sometimes forces you to walk the line. The reason I asked for the name list is because the system won't register the nationality. So I figured if I could read the name list, I can pick out the number of Chinese students with ease. My true intention is not attempting to breach confidential information, but simply reducing the amount of work for the university staff. And on the legal matter, one of the many coordinators I asked took advice from the university's own lawyer, and he came back to me with the numbers I needed. SLU even sent me a 38-page document with the names of all the students admitted into their international master programs for the past 3 years. I never expected my emails could stir up so much trouble. However, I can assure you that I will contact the university staff in orderly manner and clear the misunderstandings. Thanks for your concern and we might run into each other another time! Until then, I hope you will do well.

Thank you again for everything!

Best wishes,

Leo Kinmann

今天是个好天气吗？

我有时候，心里有些不平静的想法，就会来这里写几行字发泄。

今天请了一个朋友吃午饭。我事先跟她做了一笔交易。我给她跑腿，帮她一个小忙。她回头要做我安插在某人身边的耳目。从波士顿回来之后我一直都在感情问题上纠结。最后跟这个朋友约好了，她今天代替我问某人一个重要的问题，我作为回报请她吃饭。

其实在她转告我答案之前，我就已经猜到了。只是从她口中听到会帮助我下定决心。按她说，某人对我没有感觉。某人自己认为她已经把态度表明得很明白了。同时她说也怕伤害到我，所以没有说死，没有给我一个 full-blown rejection 的拒绝。我跟亚洲女孩相处的时候，最讨厌的就是这一点。相比之下，白人女孩更加直白。如果她们喜欢你绝对不会让你如此猜测，不喜欢你也会立马说明。喜欢就是喜欢，从第一次见面起几个小时内可以进行到底。不喜欢就是不喜欢，话不投机半句多，上来一句“我已经有男朋友了”，“let us just be friends”，简单明了。男生很快就会知道自己有戏没戏，不会在一个人身上浪费时间。从这点来看，我其实更喜欢欧美人。

当然，什么话都不能说死。我找朋友看的是性格，不是年龄人种肤色身高体重三围。这次喜欢上某人就算是被她成熟气质加天真的组合吸引了。我那位朋友当初听我问起某人，她第一印象就是：“Leo Kinmann的眼光不低啊”。可惜啊可惜。

上面那句可惜是说某人，不是说我。我在波士顿给你买的礼品也要送给别人了。

我这个射手座最阴暗的一面又要亮出来了。人人都说射手男花心，其实不然。射手男是见十个人爱一个，而且两人好起来以后会很专注。很多人们见到的花心射手，其实正是属于寻找模式的。他在与十个人来往之后才能决定谁最适合自己，从而选出那一个进行追逐。那另外九个女生以为自己也被人家看上了，等到射手转移目标才发现，原来醉翁之意不在酒。这下好了，九个女生以为射手欺骗了她们的感情，不专一，花心等种种名号被冠在射手头上。还有一点是射手男事业心很重，这好比当年我在康奈尔忙着找科研实习，仅仅两周就使得Selina被别人先下手为强抢去了。我从那以后就成了现实主义者，不相信什么“总有一个人适合你，你只是还没等到”。因为我知道，即使在两人性格兴趣爱好等等都很般配的前提下，也会因巧合导致阴差阳错而走不到一块去。什么事情都是要人去争取的。只有打了该打的电话，约出去了该请的人，才能有进一步的发展。尤其作为男人根本不能等待天上掉馅饼。何况周围还有那么多竞争对手。

唠叨这么些，我也烦了。末了再说一句话：你要是给我rejection，当我的面直接说。自己心里没那个胆儿面对我还说什么“不想伤害人家”。难道人的心都是纸做的吗？担心会伤害我这个行为本身就是一种对我的侮辱，认为我没那个承受能力。你要么跟我好，要么直接拒掉我。拒了我，跟我做朋友是完全可以的，我接受。但是，不给我任何明了的解释让我等待的所有这类中间行为都是玩弄感情。要把我逼急了，后果会很严重。

The first weekend after iGEM

I'm back in Sweden and things seem to be back on track again.

The day I came home, I slept for over 12 hours and woke up at 1pm the day after. I was going to have lunch with an old friend at BMC that day. But since I overslept so much, there was nothing to it. I have had a few very unproductive days recently. In my opinion, I should deserve some of that for working so hard before the Boston trip.

The iGEM Uppsala was not entirely hopeless. We received bronze medal, as I found out once MIT posted the result on their iGEM website. Forgetting to write down the safety questions on wiki wasn't that detrimental to getting the bronze. However, considering most of the teams got gold and there were fewer silver, fewer bronze, and even fewer non-medalists, the bronze is well-deserved but not something I would brandish.

Aside from the academic experience, I met with quite a few Boston-residents that I planned to meet. Allen, Sophia, Mengxiao, and of course my mother's old colleague Jifa. I'm still glad I managed to meet everyone of them during this short visit. After having lunch with Mengxiao in a Harvard dining hall I went shopping. Macy's was a gold mine. Copleys Place and Prudential Center sold mostly expensive stuff for the rich. In the end, I bought a pair of Converse for 45 USD, two shirts and two pairs of pants for 120 USD in total. On top of that I had great food in New England: clam chowder, 1-1/4 lbs lobster times two, great Chinese food, Mexican burritos, and more. In fact food almost got me miss my flight back home. I went away from the boarding gate at Boston Logan airport to buy some takeaway from Panda Express. By the time I was walking back all the way with my fried noodle, kung pao chicken and walnut prawns, my name was called by the staff. They said if I failed to board the plane within 5 minutes, they'd leave without me. I had to rush with my 5 kilo bag and finally made it in time. Although the food was so good it certainly made up for every second of stress I went through.

Back home, Sweden was covered in snow. Compared to Boston's autumn colors, one could imagine how a flight trip can bring you from one season to the next within hours. Quite a few things happened when I was gone. For example, one of my friends got himself involved in quite some drama. But for me, it's time to start working on that damn report and paper. Duh.

At 2:31pm, Randy said: "iGEM 2010 will be over in just a few minutes."

When you read this text, iGEM 2010 is over.

How did it go for us? Not good I'd say.

The night before the award ceremony, after all the presentations and poster sessions and talking and preaching, MIT sent every iGEM kid they could find to Jillian's in Boston, a sports club specially reserved for iGEM social. As we saw how the people were dancing, bowling and having such a blast, those of us who went there just weren't in the mood for it.

Because we were all too tired. The road to iGEM Jamboree 2010 of hard labor, late hours in the lab, in-fighting between group members and communication issues made the project anything but enjoyable. Reaching the end of the road wasn't much of an accomplishment. It was more like the end of hell. I have had two loyalties: the CSSAU community and iGEM team of Uppsala. Bouncing between these two wasn't easy, especially when the long hours in the lab consumed all of your time. One day I missed two calls from a diplomatic attache when I conducted experiments. He got angry. It took both me and Mr. Shi considerable amount of effort to quell his anger. And it was just one of the many instances when my two duties clashed.

After coming back from the party, it turned out our team didn't submit the safety questions. Me and three others finished the questions at 4am. The day after, well, I mean later that day, the iGEM award ceremony was held in Kresge auditorium, after the six finalists did their project presentations for the second time. The awards were delivered soon after. Team Uppsala didn't have much to do with it. Since the medal requirements for iGEM was criteria-based, meaning by fulfilling certain criteria, one could get a gold, silver or bronze medal. The number of medals weren't necessarily skewed, with fewer gold than silver. In fact, a lot more teams received gold than silver this year. As it turned out, so many of the teams who actually put their effort into the project were bloody serious about winning. There were also awards for each track and aspect of the Jamboree, e.g. best project in environmental science and best presentation at Jamboree. This year the winner of the iGEM grand prize was Slovenia, the team who streamlined BioBrick production and submitted 151 finished genetic constructs as a result. The 1st runner-up was Peking University. They tried to genetically engineer a bacteria to fight water pollution. They were also the winner of the Environmental track. The 2nd runner-up, or third place was Bristol, who constructed bacteria for agricultural purposes. The other three finalists were Imperial College London, Cambridge and TU Delft. Aside from their gold medal, they were all winners of their respective track or specialty.

Bing had to leave earlier to visit her relatives in New Jersey. Hsin-ho and Imtiyaz also left for New York City. Me and Antonio went separate ways. I ran into Sophia at the entrance, must to my amusement. We exchanged a few words, and she told me how little I changed since 2006. She recognized me right away. I ate lunch with Allen, who happened to be a judge for the Human Practice aspect of various projects. On Tuesday, I'm meeting Mengxiao. My mother's old colleague Jifa invited me to dinner. I told him to pick me up at my hotel, because I had to get my gift for him. So I walked the same way me and Antonio did on the first night of this event.

Without the excitement and anxiety of my iGEM anticipation, I felt like I was drained off all the energy. Without any glory or honor in competing against the other teams, I was just another visitor lost in Boston. Or Cambridge. Back in my hotel room, I called my parents and told my friends about what transpired here. Also, I've been thinking about the next year's iGEM in Uppsala. This time with a regional qualification round. You have to beat more than half of the European teams to make it to the iGEM final in MIT. The scale of iGEM Jamboree is growing out of control so MIT won't even have a big enough auditorium to gather all the participants. Hence, this decision is a necessary pain. If Uppsala is to make it to the final round, the information from this iGEM must pass on to the next. Furthermore, the organizational structure, team dynamics, interaction with the university, company and social sector must undergo major improvements. At the moment there is one guy at the X program who's involved himself with the iGEM 2011. But he has no prior experience. In my opinion, many of the guys who are currently recruited don't seem like the kind of people you'd expect to see in the lab. After the iGEM Jamboree, I have lots of ideas I'd like to try with iGEM 2011. If my ambitions of iGEM 2011 are to be realized, first I have to find myself in a position where my experience can come to use. I suspect it requires more aggressive negotiations than I like. One of the possible obstacles is the influence of a certain person. But that we'll have to see. In order to get the International student coordinator involved, initially our team discussed the possibility of showing our image as a way to help recruit foreign master students, countering the drop with the fee introduced. However, right now I've got reasons to worry that it might not turn out as planned. For personal reasons, I'm not going to disclose this part further.

When Jifa was paying for the nicest dinner I ever had in America, I took a fortune cookie from the table and opened it. The paper strip said: If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it. I saved this paper to remind myself in times of difficulties and doubt, like this one.

The first days at iGEM Jamboree, Cambridge MA, hosted by MIT

Let me tell you what happened these two days.

I flew with Antonio to Boston via Amsterdam. The landing at Amsterdam felt extremely dangerous. It started with the wings shooting two jet streams from below the wings; next you knew, the plane started to bounce randomly like it was caught in a turbulence. Well one could've believed it was indeed turbulence, before seeing the plane was actually 50 m above the ground, at most. Then came the landing. The first touchdown pushed the plane right back into the air, like an athlete's final step on the ramp when doing the long jump. Fortunately, this time the athlete didn't fall over. It was the worst landing I ever experienced.

The flight to Boston from Amsterdam had its AC turned a bit too low. I couldn't help my runny nose. Once we landed, Antonio was "random selected" by the border control. I waited for him outside, and he was angry why I didn't try to find him. Well, I said, if he got sent back to Europe, I don't wanna follow him by claiming to be his friend. The road from Logan airport to Hyatt Regency in Cambridge was long and painful. The hotel turned out to be 15 min from the nearest public transport and food. So strategically located, I thought. Now you have no choice but to buy their expensive food, like the 20$ breakfast buffet.

On Friday, me and Antonio got ourselves haircut. I also bought the iPad for my friend, draining my HSBC bank account almost empty. In the evening we tried to practice the presentation at MIT, and saw another group having their presentation. To our horror, our presentation lacked a lot of information. We spent hours correcting them all. Today we finally got over with the presentation. It was alright.

Actually it was not "alright". One day ago, I thought that me, Antonio and Hsin-Ho are the only ones representing Uppsala. However, Bing and Imityaz got their US visa approved last-minute. The pity was, Nagarjun who made the modeling couldn't come. We convinced Bing to take part of our presentation. Imityaz was persuaded into explaining the modeling. And he got so nervous during the presentation that it was almost funny to watch. When being asked a question that was expected to come from the judges, he tried to point at the huge screen 30 meters away with his fingers. I'm not saying my part was flawless either. I got a bit high in the midst and dragged out my part like always. If things stopped there, then we would've thought our presentation was "alright".

When the next team took over, we were totally stunned. At least I knew I was.

Imperial College London tried to create a biosensor for fast detection of Schistosoma parasite. It was done through a simple protein-protein interaction mechanism. They incorporated engineering designs and modules into the project, something Prof. John March at Cornell also taught me. The most scary part was, by the end of their presentation, they showed a "prototype" of their biosensor. Actually it was just a fake prototype, a wooden model showing how the product should look like. With their over 50 slides, we wondered how they could keep the presentation to less than 20 minutes. When I saw how the guys were alternating paces from fast to slow to fast, I realized how much they must have practiced the entire speech and timed it perfectly. Maybe they even planned ahead as much as knowing which minute shall finish with which slide. Their over 50 slides finished almost exactly on 20 minutes. My first impression of the overall project along with its presentation is summarized in one word.

Flawless.

Yes flawless indeed.

Compared to Imperial College London, our presentation looked like a pathetic attempt to sneak into this prestigious International competition. It was like a kid showing the mother the first poem he wrote, while your brother just composed something Shakespeare-ish. We looked like a bunch of fools.

After the break, an even stronger Cambridge showed up. They submitted 20 parts, recorded stunning footage of what their genetic product was capable of, and wrote a RFC for future BioBrick standards. On the way to Jamboree, they wrote three biochemical calculator and file conversion tools. Other than software, the Cambridge people even invented a device for bioluminescence measurement. The Cambridge team of iGEM 2010 is pure awesomeness.

After all the presentations, it was poster session. To cut the diary short, I'll just explain what I found out about the other teams. Things that the future iGEM team of Uppsala should know about.

Rumor say Heidelberg ran a 4 million SEK project. Each member gained 20 000 euro for completing iGEM, and they have 20 members. Uppsala's budget is around 2 % of theirs. Heidelberg's studies involved testing of viral strains on mice, which in itself is expensive enough.

Slovenia submitted 151 new parts to the registry. They won iGEM twice already. Uppsala this year: of the 6 parts to be submitted, only 2 got submitted.

Cambridge got most of their funding directly or indirectly through the university sector. One of their advisors is a lab director with extensive connections to the biotech-industry (my guess is he's Gos Micklem). He could personally get all the sophisticated equipments borrowed from companies to campus for wetwork over the summer. Our lab certainly didn't have all the equipments, nor the same kind of connections.

BIOTEC Dresden came up with a smart reporter system to normalize the fluorescence expression to a reference. They made a construct where the expression of YFP is induced; on the same construct, they inserted a constitutive RFP generator, using the red fluorescence as the reference value to the yellow fluorescence. The result was great. Apart from the companies they contacted, the university department offered them frequent and free sequencing. The Rudbeck lab at Uppsala was such a bitch about sequencing and getting the primers. While they agreed to sequence our construct, they did not want to make the necessary primers for us. So we had to ask some company to make our primers. In the end there was so much hassle that we never sequenced anything.

Imperial College London had all the company contacts taken care of by the university administration, as well as all the lab equipments. Furthermore, they received money for working and living over the summer.

Students from UCL had to contact the companies on their own, as told by a person from Imperial College London.

Chris Andersen of Berkeley is a judge at iGEM this year. His students worked on a cool project, and an open source program called Clotho. A super-senior of the Berkeley team told me how good it is for coordinating group works in synthetic biology. Uppsala students used Google Wave. The useful information was easily drown among the useless information. Mostly it wasn't up-to-date.

It seems like Cornell did something relatively trivial this year, they used a few somewhat non-conventional fluorescent proteins so they could contribute to the parts registry. We should have submitted all our intermediate parts, if they weren't in the registry already.

That's all for now. Tomorrow I'll check out Slovenia, UCSF, MIT, Harvard and some other big shots in this field.

Multiple Man

While in Cornell, one of my best friends said he admired me for living a three-men-life: Asian, Swedish, and American. This dude saw me as an Asian-born human being, cultivated in European values and moral, while learning the American attitude to find success. There are some truth in it after all. While in Sweden, people see me as just another immigrant dude, in US, I could sell myself labeled as Asian European in America, and people would buy it.

Living like this however, is not always that easy.

Sometimes it's all about choosing your side(-s). It could be from the smallest thing of who to hang out with on a Friday night, to big issues such as forming relationships. For example, if I were to pick the wildest party animals to get most out of partying, in Uppsala I might end up with some exchange students. For the long term benefit however, going for the Swedes is better. But the party won't be as wild, besides, it also takes some time for them to relate to you. The Chinese students usually never party in nightclubs, instead, casino nights, game nights appear periodically on their calendar. It's fun from time to time, but it won't give you the same adrenaline kick.

Since I have the options, choosing becomes a problem. Sometimes I envy the average dude who grew up in one place, and never moved outside his country. If you can't speak Chinese, you don't even think about hanging out with Chinese. That somehow forces you to only meet the locals, and in the end, you don't have as many "what ifs" in your mind.

Before finishing this post, I need to clarify something. What defines if a person is Asian, European or American? To be an Asian, you somehow have to know a lot of Asian stuff. Like what kind of pop singer is on the chart today, what Korean drama is on the air, etc. Your real-Asian friends wont bring up Bossa Nova with you. Likewise, the Swedes don't know anything about Jay Chou. However, if you find yourself having so many commonalities with all the groups of people, will that make you a many-faced person? If I'm with Swedes, I can sing drinking song with them, they see me as one of them; when I'm with my Chinese friends, I can talk about the trendy personalities on the Internet, they also see me as one of them. If this is the case, then what am I? Am I half Swedish, half Chinese, or neither? Maybe I'm a Swedish undercover in the Chinese, or an Asian undercover in the western culture?

I remember when we were kids, we dreamed of having superpowers. Forget teleportation, flight, eye-beam, or time travel. If there is anything that I can get good use of, it is self-duplication. I'll make clones of myself, sending one into the Asian crowd, one to chill with Swedes, and one more to pursue my California dream with the American attitude. Once in a while, all of my clones return to me to share their experiences. Maybe then and only then, I can finally figure out a way to live in the present.

It sounds crazy eh? Hahaha you don't have to take it seriously.