UPDATE: I asked the Academy for the funding rates for the Academy Professor positions, but there are so few of these positions that you don't get any usable statistics out of that data. I received a very transparent answer from the Academy (including the numbers I was asking for). The decision to preferentially cut funding from postdoctoral researchers was a conscious one by the Academy to preserve the means to do competitive research for projects and Academy Research Fellows. However, the trend to move funding from younger to older researchers seems to be general and has been going on already for half a century in the US (see e.g. here: http://metamodern.com/2009/11/27/great-science-great-scientists-and-icons/ or here: http://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2012/02/13/age-distribution-of-nih-principal...). Our future depends on new ideas and innovations. I am not sure, whether it is true that younger investigators come up with more new ideas and innovations as claimed in the blog post above (http://metamodern.com/2009/11/27/great-science-great-scientists-and-icons/), but if that is the case, moving money away from them would a bad idea in the long run.

The 6th edition of the the book Erkrankungen des Lymphgefäßsystems (Diseases of the Lymphatic System) is out. It's a German language textbook, for which Kenny Mattonet, Jörg Wilting and myself wrote the fifth chapter (Genetic causes of primary lymphedema). Get it from here, since Amazon still sells the old, 5th edition. If you have a really good excuse why you should get one for free, mail me! I have a few copies.

The Neon transfection device from Life Technologies (oops, Thermo Fischer nowadays and former Invitrogen) was introduced about five years ago to the market. It is designed for easy electroporation of mammalian cells. We have had the device available since 2011, but it was not much in use. I don't know whether the low adoption rate is due to the user-unfriendliness (I still don't know how to put the electrode tip to the pipettor despite having done this hundreds of times, it's just really finicky mechanics), expensive running costs (for its desposible gold-plated electrodes and the proprietary transfection buffer) or something else I cannot figure out...