As a crystallographer from County Antrim in Northern Ireland, it should come as no surprise that I am much taken by the Giants’ Causeway, an impressive basalt rock formation on the north coast that boasts some of the largest crystals in the world. Hexaogal crystals in Co. Antrim – each column is about 60 cm across.

Attending the spring meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in sunny Harrogate earlier this week I had the chance to hear Stanley Prusiner deliver the SGM Prize Lecture on “Prion biology and diseases”. Not bad as talks go, though he would never win prizes for the design of his slides. Prusiner won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine back in 1997 for his work to establish the prion hypothesis.

If this paper is the future of open access publishing, then we are in for an interesting ride. And it’s a journey that will reveal a great deal more about the process of science than most outsiders will have seen hitherto.

In a letter that I received this week from the Wellcome Trust about my grant application I read: “The Committee commended your engaging lay summary, which was deemed to be one of the most entertaining ever presented.” That was very good of them to say so. But it was not good enough . That’s because the statement was preceded by the news that “whilst the Committee agreed your application had merit, the competition was strong, and as a

There is something inherently confessional in a blog, even in a science blog. There is an urge to reveal—do you feel it?—that is normally kept safely in check. Mine is pretty well locked down. And yet I admire those who, on occasion, have cast off their reins and opened their hearts with great honesty. I think particularly of Richard’s pieces on “depression” and, more recently, faith.

Working at home last Thursday, trying to get some quiet time to focus on a review article, I caught the lunchtime news and heard of the untimely death of the actress Wendy Richard. She was best known as Pauline Fowler from long-running BBC soap Eastenders.

I know, I know. He’s been done to death, but I realised this morning that I have been walking past this poster for some weeks now and it’s always pleased me. I think, somehow, it still seems a little… subversive .

Oh wait, I’ve just checked the poster and we’re 129 years too late. Damn. But if you had been in the Piccadilly area at 8 pm on Monday 16th Feb 1880, you could have attended his talk on ‘The characters by which dogs resemble and differ from other animals’, the first of a series of six lectures on ‘Dogs and their forefathers’. The whole series would have set you back a mere sixpence.

There was an old man from Downe, Kent Who found man arose by descent He said, “This may grate: But my friends we’re primate, Give thanks for life’s great accident!”

Charles Darwin Was a star in Eighteen fifty-nine His theory Caused a fury Among lovers of design “No Adam? Far too random – That’s never a solution!” But Charlie smiled – He was not riled: “Sorry, that’s evolution.”   It’s catching on, this Darwin thing.

Last week I took the train through a snowy landscape to Warwick University to give a seminar at the Department of Chemistry. I arrived a little early to catch up with a couple of virologist friends; in the coffee bar we chewed over funding politics and hot topics in viral replication. I met my hosts for lunch and a pleasant chat about common interests in serum albumin.