Gazing at the very first model of a protein structure determined by X-ray crystallography Max Perutz, one of the founding fathers of the technique, was disappointed. It may have gone unspoken at the time but the initial coiled, worm-shaped creation resembled nothing so much as a giant turd. “Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral-looking an object?” lamented Perutz.
Blogging is mainly writing and writing—according to one informed source—is like having a poo. I have just seen the excellent Screenwipe , hosted by Charlie Brooker on BBC Four (that’s the TV, not the radio). It doesn’t appear to be on their iPlayer, I’m afraid*. There’s a re-run on at 00:50 but that’s in less than an hour’s time, so you’ll have to be quick!
I’ve rolled my rock to the top of the mountain and sat down for a rest. Tonight I will allow myself a brief respite from my labours. I’ve been working very hard of late but the job is now done and I feel a great sense of relief. Having been made a professor about a year ago, on Wednesday night I finally got around to delivering my inaugural lecture to an audience of family, friends and colleagues.
In the past couple of weeks I have been trying to convey to my students something of the glory of thermodynamics. It’s not an easy or popular subject, especially given the mathematical content. But I do love it so! I know it seems dry: heat, work, entropy, state functions, the second law. The zeroth law for God’s sake.
Quick! Look! This is a coucil flat in Southark but it’s cool and blue and rather beautiful. There was a brief report about it last night on Channel 4 News, which you can watch here. They explain how the artist Roger Hiorns created the work by flooding a derelict, sealed flat with hot, saturated copper sulphate solution. Seizure by Roger Hiorns. The whole of the interior is coated in deep blue crystals.
The inestimable Dr Rohn has, on more than one occasion, sung the praises of the engineering prowess of her lab-mates. But in this week’s Nature music and ingenuity were combined to produce a new high note of technical wonderment. A fascinating News and Views piece directed my attention to a recent paper* by Hua-Zhong Yu and colleagues at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
Taking my cue from Martin’s excellent suggestion, and following Henry, Steffi, Eva and Maxine, here’s my tuppence-worth: 1. What is your blog about? Usually about 500 words… on the subject of the underbelly of science. The guts and bolts, so-to-speak. 2. What will you never write about? Real-time experimental results – my lab-books are closed until peer review. Sorry Cameron.
Cath Ennis wrote back in June about the reluctance of some of her colleagues to write lay summaries of their work when applying for grants. Clearly for some scientists the effort of casting their work into a form that is accessible to the general public is just too much like hard work. But, as has often been stated on NN, making our science intelligible to the public is a valuable activity.
On Tuesday, following a tip-off from Maxine, Richard noted the passing of the Daresbury Synchrotron in Cheshire, which shut down finally in August. This gave me pause for quiet reflection since I had been a Daresbury user since 1991, cutting my teeth as a crystallographer by spending long nights in the darkroom developing the film packs that we used to record the X-rays scattered by our crystals.
Let’s face it: scientists aren’t in it for the money (except perhaps those with a more entrepreneurial bent). More often we are preening our egos and chasing a kind of immortality—the chance to create a legacy that will outlive us. Of course, this is an entirely irrational goal, coming oddly from a profession that often spouts its single-minded adherence to rationality!
Taking my cue from Ben Goldacre’s comments at SciBlog08, I’d like to unleash the power of the blogosphere.