Money 4 Drugz

A rap about Wes Van Voorhis' lab in the UW Department of Medicine, where we do research on drug development for infectious diseases.

MUSIC CREDITS

Songwriters: Greg Crowther and Jeff Barrett. Producer: Jeff Barrett. Musicians: Conor Barrett, Jeff Barrett, Greg Crowther, Jake Houser.

VIDEO CREDITS

Director: Ryan Choi. Executive Producer: Steve Nakazawa Hewitt. Cast: Janhavi Bhandari, Greg Crowther, Angela Gillespie, Rob Gillespie, Steve Nakazawa Hewitt, Paul Newling, KK Ojo. Camera: Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W120.

LYRICS

Working in the lab is a pretty sweet gig
The people are smart and the toys are really big
But we can't be chill when our homies are ill
So we write a new proposal to create another pill

If you have malaria we wanna take care o' ya
And if we succeed then no one has to bury ya
And so we beg for grants, even though it's so demeaning
'Cause you need a good stash for a high-throughput screening

Chorus:
We need money for drugs
We ain't no thugs
But it takes more funds
To kill more bugs (parasites yo!)

We start with expression of recombinant protein
A soluble product is a reason for emoting
We quantify its function and look for inhibitors
And find the delimiters of active-site perimeter

When the SAR is leaving us baffled
We call in the chemists to create a new scaffold
It's not like making meth -- it's really hard to do it
But we've got to break through to a brand-new therapeutic

Chorus (repeat and fade)

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• pathogen
• disease
• research
• drugs
• malaria

[kristiansmith]

I can't believe I paid for this!

[trappedinlab]

@kristiansmith NSF money did not finance this video. Please see my previous comments to @SuperBillStanley and @slayerswine.

[SuperBillstanley]

Can you support that assertion? I've seen the Coburn report "NSF: Under The Microscope" and it seems fairly straightforward in its assertion and cites the NSF grant itself: "NSF Award Abstract #0956196, “RCN-UBE Incubator: Trial network to bring music to the study of biology." So Coburn has cited his source, can you cite your source for denying the assertion?

[trappedinlab]

@SuperBillstanley: My lab made the video and we did not use money from that NSF grant in making it. A much fuller explanation is available on my old blog. YouTube won't let me post the link here, but if you do a Google search for keywords like "crowther coburn nsf taxpayer" you should find it.

[trappedinlab]

@slayerswine: Taxpayer money did NOT pay for this. That is a misconception propagated by the Coburn report.

[SuperBillstanley]

@trappedinlab Well OK then, thanks for the added clarification.

[TYCOON129]

TYCOON129 

[4mmedia]

I am a researcher physician an I am very interested in clips you makes. I think we can cooperate together in making scientific clips(you; by songs and music and me; by animation and drawings). Kindly need your mail. my mail is drmissiry@yahoo.com

[ZZJaminBen]

Most excellent. I'm going to share this with my friends from DNDi.

[DBNtheUnmentionables]

Bombdiggity!