“The wind blew unseasonably bitter the day my sister and I took Mom to her first oncology appointment. As Mom leaned into the gale, her jaunty hat flew up suddenly and whirled away. The hairstyle she’d arranged with such care was defeated.”
You can order them in yellow, two-tone (black-and-tan), “misty,” beige, “chinchilla” and lots of other colors and tints. They’re not handbags or home appliances, but like those other products they’re designed by humans and available for purchase on the Internet.
Neither Jennifer Fox nor Robbie Allen is a poet. But when explaining their work to others, these scientists often rely on that pillar of poetry, the metaphor. That’s because for most people, picturing needles in haystacks, keys in locks, and spaceships in docks is a lot easier than getting a clear image of high-throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry, 3D virtual screening or other esoterica in the field of drug discovery.
In the life of Bo Park, there’s a quirky connection between her early childhood in South Korea and her pharmacology research at Oregon State University: fish.
Biomedical research takes on a towering presence in Portland.
In the north tower of the 500,000-square-foot, LEED Platinum-certified building, investigators from Oregon State occupy seven of the 26 third- and fourth-floor research modules. Many of OSU’s Portland-based pharmaceutical sciences researchers, filling more than 9,000 square feet of research space, have joint appointments with OHSU, and are involved in collaborative projects with investigators from the Knight Cancer Institute and the OHSU Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine in areas of investigation such as nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems.