This is shameless, shameless self-promotion but I was interviewed back in May by Carl Carruthers for his Meet a Scientist Monday podcast, which has gone live today. The interview was long enough ago for me — being of advanced years — to have forgotten what I’d said, so I’ve just had a listen.
Today sees the release of my new film: I’m a Scientist . It’s about scientists. Please take a look either here, or on the web-site that I have created specially for it*. The film was a long time coming.
The job of a newspaper columnist is to agitate and George Monbiot did exactly that last week with a furious rant in The Guardian about academic publishers.
Back in April — it seems so long ago now — I wrote about the problems created in university life science courses by the relatively low uptake of maths by the student intake. It provoked a very long and thoughtful discussion, both beneath the blog post and in email exchanges that I had with many of my colleagues. I am extremely grateful to everyone who took part.
Regular readers of this blog will be probably be aware of the ongoing campaign to reform the libel laws of England and Wales. These laws have pernicious effects in many aspects of public life — including science and medicine. They place a dangerous constriction on the freedom of scientists and medics to engage in robust debate on matters of public interest.
In UK scientific circles and the wider realm of academia impact has been around for a while now. Grant forms incorporate large blank spaces in which applicants are required to outline their plans for ensuring that the work they hope to do will have impact.
I spent most of last weekend and all of yesterday finalising a chapter I had been asked to contribute to an upcoming monograph on human serum albumin. Monograph is a fancy word for book in academia. And academia is a fancy word for the people who work in universities and research institutes and consider themselves smart. Yesterday I was polishing the text of my latest draft and assembling the figures.
The fourth edition of Voet & Voet’s Biochemistry , which is currently the recommended undergraduate text on our degree program at Imperial College, weighs three thousand and thirty-nine point two four grams. It has one thousand four hundred and eighty-two pages of text and pictures (page 945 is particularly good) divided into thirty-two chapters covering the whole of the core curriculum. The book is in every sense a weighty tome.
What is the best seminar that you have ever attended? And what made it so good? I pondered this question after my name appeared on the list of speakers for our internal divisional seminar series this term. I thought that, rather than give another run-of-the-mill progress report, I might have a little fun with the format. And perhaps make a useful point at the same time.
I was back at the Diamond Light Source today — the synchrotron that we use to blast protein crystals with X-rays to figure out the structures of protein molecules. The beamlines at the synchrotron where we do our experiments have some very fancy kit and, in explaining the apparatus to one of my students, I was reminded of how much things have changed in the past twenty years.