Women, Pheremones, and Lent

I have readers now!! because I finally decided to tell someone about it, and so this collection of ramblings is officially a blog. Yea!

Yesterday, I had the honor of meeting Linda Buck, the 2004 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, for elucidating mechanisms of the olfactory system. She was an alumnae of the graduate program here, so her talk was especially inspiring. She discussed some work on TAARs, a receptor subtype that are potential candidates for pheremone receptors. They did their studies in mice, but humans have TAARs too..

Since I am on the committee that organized her talk for the University Lecture Series, I escorted her around campus to all her meetings with different professors and got to go to dinner with her last night. A dinner of 14 strongly opinionated women quickly turns into a bitch fest. Okay, well maybe it started just before dessert, but one well-known professor, who is chair of her department was of the opinion that the higher ranks in science will never approach gender equality because, "being at the top in science means dealing with a lot of crap that most women are not willing to put up with." This is disconcerting for several reasons. 1) I have heard this pessimism before (I got to have lunch with Dr. Ben Barres, formerly Barbara Barres, who feels that the women who train in his lab are less likely to pursue a career in academia, read his commentary here). 2) Does this mean I'm screwed? 3) Do I want to be one of these women who deals with crap? 4) Can I just do science and not worry about this crap?

Okay, so it is a little overwhelming to process all this information, so I am just going to focus on what needs to get done now for the time being. I need to decide what I am going to do for God during Lent this year. Give up complaining? or Exercise (at least 2X a week)? My indecisiveness kills me. On one hand, giving up complaining would be difficult to define. I mean did I just spend a paragraph complaining? - I guess Webster's says complain means to express grief, pain, or discontent. This would be pretty f#cking hard to implement. On the other hand, adding exercise routinely is pretty tough for me. This week is already pretty much over, and I just missed my plan to go to step aerobics tonight...