As some of may you know, scientific journal clubs are organized meetings of groups of scientists (mostly graduate students) that analyze recent articles in a particular field. Usually they are structured in a way that either the entire group discusses the article's results figure-by-figure or a member presents the article to the entire group and the other members challenge that person's understanding/conclusions from the paper. Potential topics for the journal club that I have in mind are: virology, cancer biology, heart disease, microbiology, and auto-immune diseases. I'm open to other topics (limited to molecular or cellular biology), but those are topics that I'm better able to bring some expertise to.
The goal of this is to be able to introduce people, who may never have had formal study in the field, to primary scientific literature and bring them to a point where they are very knowledgeable about a specific topic. Questions and spin-off threads on specific methods (western blot, DNA sequencing, gene delivery, etc.) or concepts (transcription, translation, apoptosis, etc.) will be encouraged (and hopefully make this forum more active).
We probably need at least five active members willing to participate for this to be somewhat successful (I would be happy with at least one good in-depth paper discussion).
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