Foxconn, Restriction Enzyme Buffers, and The Developmental Hourglass

Today I Learned:
1) A bit more about the Foxconn suicides. I had known that Foxconn had a lower suicide rate than the rest of China, but today I dug a bit more into the numbers.

There are a few complications with my blithe statement above about Foxconn. Firstly, Foxconn is a *huge* company, and many of its employees don’t work in the Chinese plants that were such a focus during the suicide spates. Also, China itself has a pretty high suicide rate, so it might not be the best country to compare against.

Turns out accounting for those two complications doesn’t really change the picture much. There are varying estimates for how many employees work in Chinese Foxconn factories (anywhere from 200,000 to 450,000), but even if we take the lowest number of estimated employees, at the height of the Foxconn suicides, Foxconn’s Chinese factories had a suicide rate of about 7 in 100,000 people. If Foxconn’s Chinese factories were a country, it would have about the 100th highest (or 70th lowest) suicide rate of countries with suicide rates according to the WHO 2012 report on Wiki, or right around Costa Rica, Cameroon, and Singapore.

Now, I’m not saying Foxconn is a nice company — I can’t speak to the working conditions at their factories, but from what I hear it’s pretty miserable — but I do think this is an important lesson in number-checking. 14 suicides at a company may sound like a lot, but if that’s the *highest ever* reported suicide rate for Foxconn (talk about a selection bias), then they’re doing a better job of keeping their people suicide-free than, oh, the Netherlands, Swizerland, Germany, the US, Canada, or New Zealand. Just saying.

2) The restriction enzyme BsaI works just fine in T4 ligase buffer. Whatdyaknow.

3) There’s this idea in developmental biology of a developmental hourglass — super early embryonic development, when the enbryo is just a few cells, is really, really different even in closely-related animals; late embryonic development is also really different between different species; but among relatively closely-related species (say, among insects or among mammals) the embryos in the middle stages are very, very similar, to the point where they can be quite difficult to tell apart. Today I learned that the developmental hourglass seems to hold true for gene expression as well as morphology and developmental patterns.