A year ago today Occam’s Typewriter made its debut on the blogosphere and I published my first post at the new home of Reciprocal Space . It’s been a good twelve months. OT has established itself as a home thoughtful and lively writing with a great range of different voices.
Last week I went to Germany to talk to a pharmaceutical company about my work on the blood protein, human serum albumin. It set me thinking. But first I need to tell you about albumin. Albumin is a surprisingly abundant protein in the human body;
I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago at a Biochemical Society meeting on the subject of the Research Excellence Framework, the process that will assess UK academic research quality for the purpose of determining how a large tranche of public funding will be distributed between universities. I dealt in particular with the impact component, which will count for 20% of the assessment and has caused a degree of consternation.
Last night, having rounded off a busy week with a day of manual labour helping to repair my mother-in-law’s kitchen floor, I retired to bed early with the newspaper. Saturday’s Guardian , if you want to know. It was delightful. I hadn’t taken the time to read the paper for ages and was pleased to rediscover that singular pleasure. Unfortunately, it’s a pleasure that is unlikely to endure.
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.
Today sees the release of the new trailer of my latest and most ambitious film project. In doing so I am following the sound advice of Richard Hamming and forcing my own hand. With the trailer now on public view, I will definitely have to finish the film. The video started life in the midst of bloody battle — when I was a participant in the online competition I’m a scientist, Get me out of here back in June last year.
Michael Brooks has scratched beneath the glossy surface of science to write a revealing and thoroughly entertaining book about its practitioners. By cutting so close to the scientific bone that it spills blood, his “Free Radicals” departs violently from the textbook image of white-coated professionalism. In eight gritty and gripping chapters Brooks uncovers the anarchy at the heart of many of the most famous advances made by scientists.
Some say April is the cruellest month but I found July to be more punishing. You might think that, for university staff like myself, July would bring respite from the tiresome enslavement of exam and project marking that fills all of June. At the end of that gruelling month the students are granted their grades and degrees and finally quit the campus.
I am presently attending a conference on Caliciviruses in Chile and am enjoying being immersed in both the warm spring sunshine and the latest research on this important group of pathogens. Any of you who has suffered at the hands of the ‘Winter vomiting bug’ is already closely acquainted with caliciviruses.