Today, as the weather breaks and the sun warms the ground, there are so many stories coming out from little old Frederick County, I won’t be able to do justice to them all.
In the Frederick News-Post today there are three interesting articles: The Tech Transfer Boon at the Fort, Our Resident Supply of Infected Mosquitos and an infestation of “cRusty crabs” in the Monocacy.
The first article is about The Fort Detrick Technology Transfer Initiative (FDTTI), where start-ups like me have access to technology developed at Ft Detrick. 11 companies have received FDTTI funding, nine of them are from Maryland, four from Frederick, with three from FITCI.
I was very interested about the growth of genetically-modified mosquitoes within Fort Detrick, because I am sure someone will read this and mount a new round of protests about GMO and all of the wide-spread pain and pestilence that is cultivated behind the concertina-wired walls of the Fort.
Actually, I found it interesting because we know one of the PI’s at the lab through our daughter’s primary school. They are not really making GMM’s (genetically-modified mosquitoes), not there’s anything wrong with that or that they’d tell us if they were. I’ll bet there are plenty of GM-drosophila (fruit flies), though.
The third story is about the invasion of the Upper Monocacy with “rusty crayfish“, theorized to come form dumped bait buckets. So the DNR would like to ban fishing with crayfish in the Monocacy to prevent further spread of the invaders, which overwhelm the native crawdads and compete with game fish food resources. From the sounds of it, the rusties are much bigger and reddish in hue. Maybe they can be farmed for human consumption?
On to the other news:
Since posts about Jobs seem to popular, I saw a news feed about a Bioscience Career Fair in Bethesda. I’ll just cut and paste the feed:
BioSpace, the world’s leading online bioscience job board and life science career fair company, will host
the BioCapital Career Fair in Bethesda, MD on Thursday, April 17, 2008. The
event will take place at the Bethesda Marriott from 11 am to 4 pm. Life science professionals from across the BioCapital region including
Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., will attend the biotech
job fair to meet in person with leading biotech and pharmaceutical
companies. Candidates will interview for careers with Aerotek Scientific,
Emergent BioSolutions, Lockheed Martin, SAIC-Frederick and many others.
Companies at the event will be hiring to fill clinical research jobs,
science jobs, engineering jobs, pharmaceutical sales jobs, formulation jobs
and a myriad of other opportunities.
The last BioCapital Career Fair, held on October 23, 2007, provided the
employers with over 500 pre-registered job seekers. Before the event
several exhibitors took advantage of the private BioSpace Career Fair
resume database to scout talent and schedule interviews ahead of time.
BioSpace encourages interested career fair candidates to pre-register
for the event at:
http://careers.biospace.com/Jobs/Public/CareerReceptionDetails.aspx?RECEPTION_ID=139
Candidates are required to hold a four year degree in a relevant
discipline and have at least two years of experience in a
bioscience-related field or industry.
The Bethesda Marriott is located at 5151 Pooks Hill Road, Bethesda, Maryland.
And last, but not least, a nice bit of news coming out from ImQuest, on Executive Way. ImQuest BioSciences, Inc. announced today the publication of the results of an important structure- activity relationship study to investigate the efficacy and toxicity of a series of pyrimidinedione analogs against HIV-1 and HIV-2.
Maybe they need to have a Job Board, too!