The Manitoba Liberal Party two days after the election; Steve Jobs, and Nobel Prize Winners.

Manitoba Liberals two days after the election:
It is now two days after the election. There have been many compliments on my success in River Heights - and I thank those who have sent them to me, or offered them publicly. My immediate focus is now on attending to what needs to be done after the election, cleaning up, storing signs and other campaign materials, thanking my volunteers and organizing to ensure we have any campaign debts paid off. Thank you to all who are helping in these efforts.

Steve Jobs: Yesterday, the passing of Steve Jobs marked the passing of an icon, pioneer and inventor who together with Steve Wozniak gave the world the apple computer, and in recent years produced the iPhone, the iPod and the iPad. He was an amazing creative genius and a visionary leader who was a great entrepreneur. I have a particular affinity for his leadership, after working in the federal cabinet in the 1990s promoting the development of technology and the information highway in Canada. Jobs died after a several year battle with pancreatic cancer. As I have highlighted recently, we need action on pancreatic cancer to find better treatments for this deadly disease. http://manitobaliberals.blogspot.com/2011/09/pancreatic-cancer-need-for-action-and.html

Nobel Laureates: There have been several recent Nobel Prize announcements. I want to highlight two.

Ralph Steinman, who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine this past Monday, was a Canadian who discovered dendritic cells in 1973. Dendritic cells play an important role in initiating the immune response, essentially binding to the antigen of concern and presenting it to the immune system in a way that triggers an immune response. His initial finding was met with skepticism, but is now very well accepted as a very important finding which may be of importance in many areas, including presenting tumour associated antigens to the immune system in a way that enhances the body's ability to fight cancer. I have a particular appreciation for his work as a result of my own research in the cell biology area in the 1970s and 1980s. His death, three days before the Nobel Award, like that of Steve Jobs, was from pancreatic cancer.

Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli scientist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry this week for his discovery of an important new crystalline chemical structure, now called quazicrystals, that can be rotated one fifth of a full turn and still look the same from the outside. Normal crystals look the same when turned by a quarter turn, but different when turned one fifty of a turn. Quasicrystals are particularly strong, have hardly any surface friction, and cannot oxidize and become rusty. They have been found in a very durable type of steel used for thin needles and razor blades. It is of interest that Shechtman was initially ridiculed for his work and it took some time before his findings and their importance were accepted. It is good to see his work recognized this week. As I know from my own career as a scientist and a politician, leadership and good ideas often take time to be appreciated.