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In which I mark a milestone

Posted on 22 April 2025 by Jennifer Rohn

A garden scene with table and computer

I have been putting off writing about a special twenty-year anniversary. But first, apologies are in order.

Yet again, I find that another season has passed without me writing here. This was never meant to be a quarterly affair, but so it’s proved in recent months. The neglect is not solely down to lack of time – I find that the slowly unfolding horrors of the world (wars, bird flu and climate catastrophe, alongside bigotry, cruelty, and the wholesale dismantling of democracy and science in a certain quarter of the world) have stifled my inspiration. What can one possibly say that could encapsulate – gestures weakly at all of that – ? Future historians will have plenty of material to dissect, so I’ll leave them to it.

My paper journal, which I still tend to most days, is so lost for words that it’s lapsed mostly into descriptions of my garden, whose inspiration, on the other hand, is boundless. I feel a strange urgency to record its infinite charms, even though there are only so many ways that I can rejoice in my tulips, or the way that it feels to tug a particularly long chain of sticky goosegrass from among them. Flip through its pages and you will occasionally find other musings: impressions from my many travels, jotted down in airports, hotels, foreign café tables, interspersed with worries about keeping the lab stocked with fresh grants. Otherwise it’s the orderly succession of snowdrops to crocuses to daffodils to hyacinths to tulips to bluebells. Seedlings in indoor propagators under artificial light slowly graduate to larger pots in the greenhouse, waiting until it is reliably warm enough to plant them out in the beds, where they will battle it out with weeds, slugs, drought and insects. All of this, playing out each year like a well-oiled West End production, with only a few minor variations keeping up the tension: one year it took three successive sowings to get courgettes that did not rot away, a mystery that we never solved; this year, it is the etiolated tomatillos that have terminally failed despite multiple attempts, and the first rows of parsnips did not germinate at all.

graph showing increase in lab lit by year

An encouraging upward trend of fiction about scientists

But I promised you news, appropriately belated as are all things in my blog now. March marked the twentieth anniversary of LabLit.com, my humble science/literature/cultural magazine launched as part thought experiment, part guerilla action, to shed light on the relative scarcity of scientists in novels and, perhaps, in my own small way, to try to rectify it. LabLit.com still has a following, despite recent years of shocking neglect, and I’m proud of having hung in there despite lacking the time and energy to coax it into anything bigger. Alongside the original fiction we publish, its crown jewel is the List, a curated database of realistic fiction featuring scientists plying their trade. When we launched in 2005, the compendium only contained about a hundred novels – now it stands at 495. While part of this is down to continual searches amongst older literature, it’s also driven by a year-on-year increase in new ‘lab lit’ novels, as you can see from the graph above that we complied for the magazine’s anniversary edition. (If you’re interested in reading more about the project and the people behind it, all the links can be found in my 20th anniversary editorial.)

Today is my last day of Easter break before returning to the lab. It’s been a restful and much-needed time away from the stresses and anxieties of work, with cold sunny days spent in the garden and not much accomplished (a good thing in this case). I’m sitting here at my table under the grape arbor in the far back, next to the cascade with its soothing rush of water. The pond into which it empties is a green baize of duckweed dotted with pink cherry blossoms; beyond it our bees seethe industriously around their hive. The air is scented with blossom. Birds sing, and the sun warms my face. All is green, liquid, dreamy.

One last day, just for myself.

Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening, Lablit | Leave a comment

An anniversary anthem – the gift of love

Posted on 14 April 2025 by Frank Norman

At the end of August 2024 I set a hare running which has just reached its destination. A brand new piece of music now exists, because I commissioned it.

Church of the Immaculate Conception, Penzance, Cornwall

Church of the Immaculate Conception, Penzance, Cornwall

I have written before about the big part that singing in choirs has played in my life – symphonic choirs, chamber choirs, church choirs. A few years ago one of my sisters, A, started singing in a choir too.  She joined a community choir and then more recently joined her local church choir in Penzance. I enjoyed hearing about her experiences, and talking to her about singing church music. I remembered that it can be difficult when you first start and she found the same, so I sympathised but told her it will get easier. A is just two years older than me, so of all my siblings she is the closest to me in age and we had many shared experiences from our early years. Now we have a new shared experience.

Commissions

An anthem is a short piece of devotional music performed in church. Sometimes they are called motets, if the words are Latin rather than English. Anthems are sometimes commissioned for particular occasions or places. I’ve often noticed the dedications on anthems giving the details of why they were commissioned.

One famous commissioner was Walter Hussey, a clergyman and lover of the arts. He was vicar of St Matthew’s church, Northampton for 18 years and then Dean of Chichester Cathedral for a further 22 years. In both places he commissioned many pieces of music. The anthem Rejoice in the Lamb by Benjamin Britten was written for the 50th anniversary of St Matthew’s church. Hussey also commissioned Lo, the full, final sacrifice from Gerald Finzi (1946). At Chichester Hussey’s most well-known commissions were Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and the 1975 Chichester Service by William Walton.

Benjamin Britten wrote many commissions – his Antiphon was written for the 30th anniversary of St Michael’s Tenbury and his Wedding Anthem was composed for the marriage of the Earl of Harewood and Marion Stein.

William Matthias’ anthem Let the people praise thee, O God was composed for an even grander wedding – that of (then) Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. The choirmaster of a choir I once sang in wrote an anthem for two members of the choir who got married, a setting of O Perfect Love. We sang it at their wedding.

A golden wedding

When I realised last year that my sister A’s golden wedding anniversary was coming up in 2025, an idea started hatching in my head. I subtly enquired whether she was planning to have some sort of party. They had thrown a party for their ruby anniversary, and for their thirtieth anniversary they’d made a renewal of vows in their church in Penzance. My sister said that they were indeed planning a party.

I mulled over the idea of commissioning of an anthem to mark their golden wedding, like those I’d observed. I contacted the choir director at my sister’s church, and ran the idea past him. He was positive about the idea, though was concerned that the new piece should be appropriate to the choral forces available.

Composer’s Edition

I knew nothing about commissioning music, so I wasn’t sure where to start. In March 2024 I had attended a Making Music webinar on sourcing music and I remember hearing Dan Goren talk about Composers’ Edition (CE), a contemporary music publisher that he founded. Among other things Dan said that CE aimed to make it easy for choirs and orchestras to commission new music, so I looked further at them. I put an enquiry into their website describing my plans and soon after that Dan himself called me to discuss the potential commission. He explained the process and asked a few questions about what I wanted. Dan said he would send details of my proposed commission to all the composers on the CE list, to solicit ‘bids’ from them.

I was excited about the idea and put out a post on Bluesky:

Just had a call with someone from Composers' Edition, about my plan to commission a short choral anthem to celebrate my sister's golden wedding. This is a new thing for me – looking forward to the next step, when I will hear from some composers.

— Frank Norman (@franknorman.bsky.social) 2024-09-04T09:24:32.800Z

A few weeks later I had responses from eight composers, with varying backgrounds. I considered all of them, looking at the composers’ experience of choral and church music in particular, and listening to recordings of some of their music via the CE website. It was a bit like sifting through job applicants. Some of the composers addressed the points I’d made in my proposal, some ignored my proposal and just wrote about the music they would like to create.

After much cogitation I settled on Liz Lane. She has written church music previously and has a style that is very approachable. We had some email correspondence and then a Zoom call, during which I was able to fill in a bit more background about myself and A and the reason for the commission.

Realism

I had heard my sister’s Penzance church choir sing a few years earlier and they seemed very competent, singing a wide range of music. However lockdown had a negative impact on many choirs, and this one has shrunk in size to between 6 and 9 singers.

My own regular church choir has shrunk too and now typically has between 6 and 12 members on a Sunday morning so I’m very familiar with the challenges. We make regular use of OUP’s Easy and Flexible Anthems collection and the Novello Short Anthems collection. I think many church choirs will be in a similar position.

When talking to Liz Lane I mentioned the need for flexibility, referring to the examples of collections like these two. While a large-scale anthem for many singers would have been lovely, I wanted my commission to be performable by more meagre forces – a modest number of voices plus keyboard accompaniment.

I also passed on to Liz the comments that the Penzance choir’s director had made about the need for the new piece to be readily singable, not excessively discordant, and straightforward to learn.

I put some more Bluesky posts out.

I've had some proposals through & have chosen a composer. We had a good chat over Zoom yesterday and made good progress. I think she will do a great job. She asked whether the church choir has any instruments other than organ available. I said no, but now I wish I'd said 'onde martenot and tamtam'.

— Frank Norman (@franknorman.bsky.social) 2024-10-08T09:24:10.072Z

(This morning I've been listening to Messiaen's Trois Petites Liturgies, but you probably guessed that!).

— Frank Norman (@franknorman.bsky.social) 2024-10-08T09:25:08.508Z

 

Text

The next challenge was to choose a text to be set. I wanted it to be clearly suitable for religious use, but not overly ‘holy’ if you know what I mean. It should be a celebration of enduring human love. Consulting with friends who knew their liturgical music they advised that I might choose a poem, or Biblical text. I liked the famous words from 1 Corinthians 13, and also the words of the hymn ‘O Perfect Love’ seemed apppropriate. I looked at a few psalms, but they didn’t seem to fit the bill.

Liz told me that she had previously set texts by the poet Jennifer Henderson. Jennifer kindly drafted an original poem for consideration, called Joyful Promise. I liked it, but again it didn’t feel right for the anthem I had in mind. Eventually we settled on the Corinthians text and I chose some of the lines that I wanted to be included, leaving it to Liz whether she included additional lines. This is the final text that Liz set:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love never fails.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love

Confirmation and composition

In late November Composers’ Edition drafted a contract and Liz and I both signed it, so we were legally committed to the project. I paid Liz the first instalment of the commissioning fee. CE kept in touch periodically, checking that things were proceeding OK.

My sister already knew that I had been in touch with her church choir’s director, but she didn’t know the reason. Now that everything was confirmed I told her what was going on, resolving the mystery. I think she liked the idea of the commission.

As luck would have it I visited Bristol in December and was able to meet up with Liz as she teaches at UWE and lives in the area. We met over a cup of coffee at St George’s Brandon Hill and had a good chat.

In late January Liz sent a draft score of the new piece. I sang through it and found it very tuneful. I don’t have the ability to imagine how the whole score sounds just by looking at it, so I couldn’t judge what the complete effect would be but it looked good.

I sent the draft score to my sister’s church choir director for him to review. He and Liz had some conversations about a few points. Soon the final version was agreed and everyone was happy with it.

Production and performance

Liz sent me a selection of possible cover images and I chose one. We agreed on the precise wording that would appear on the score, to describe the commissioning and the occasion. Jennifer also kindly agreed to allow her poem to be printed in the score booklet.

Cover of the new anthem, The Gift of Love, by Liz Lane

Cover of the new anthem, The Gift of Love, by Liz Lane

The anthem was printed by Composers Edition and a set of copies was sent to A. The choir started to rehearse the music and they liked it. They put in a good deal of work to learn it ready for my sister’s wedding anniversary in April.

The score is very well produced – the printing is clear and legible and it is a good size. The setting is SATB with an optional descant and an optional congregational part. The choir sing sometimes in unison, sometimes in four parts. The main theme comes round several times, so you become familiar with it. It is written to be singable. The accompaniment can be played on piano or organ. It moves at some pace, and is about 3 mins 30 secs long.

The church choir generously allowed me to sing with them for the first performance.  I travelled down to Penzance midweek and joined them for their Wednesday evening rehearsal, then sang with them at the main morning mass on Sunday 6 April. The Gift of Love was sung as the communion anthem that day.  At the end of the service the golden wedding couple were given a blessing by the parish priest.  Their four children were in the church to witness this and to hear the new anthem.

I liked the title which Liz chose – The Gift of Love. This struck me as very apt. The anthem is about love, 50 years’ worth of love, which is a great gift. The anthem itself is also a gift, from me to A and her husband, in recognition of my love for them.

I hope that other church choirs will want to sing this new piece. I have bought a set for the church choir I sing with regularly and I hope we can schedule it in a service when appropriate.  If you know of a wedding anniversary (or even a wedding) coming up then it would be a good choice.

Thanks to everyone involved – Composers Edition, Liz Lane, the choir and their director in Penzance, the organist, and of course my sister and her husband for showing us what a gift love is.

Posted in family, Music | Leave a comment

Introducing Humungous Biosciences

Posted on 13 April 2025 by Henry Gee

There has been much fuss and flapdoodle about a company called Colossal Biosciences that aims to use the wonders of modern genetic technology to call extinct species back from the other side of the rainbow bridge. Their latest scheme has been to ‘de-extinct’ an ice-age predator, the dire wolf, by inserting various genes copied from DNA retrieved from fossil dire wolves and inserting them into regular ordinary grey wolves. Critics say that the result isn’t so much a dire wolf but a duck with a hat on a designer dog. But those puppies do look adorable.

Others suspect that the enterprise isn’t so much driven by science as fantasy.  It has not escaped our notice that one of the authors of a preprint announcing the. retrieval of dire wolf DNA is George R. R. Martin, the creator of the sprawling Game Of Thrones series of fantasy novels, which engendered a popular televisual adaptation, and in which fantasy animals called dire wolves play a small part. (For those who have never watched Game of Thrones, the plot is basically this — that people have sex a lot, and then die).

Nonetheless, Colossal plans to reanimate the dodo and the thylacine, and has made some progress with the woolly mammoth, though the results so far do seem — how would one put this? — petite.

To the many critics of Colossal, and there are many, I say — Pish! Tosh! and Fie! We wouldn’t be living in the world today if scientists didn’t go off on one occasionally and engage in projects that seemed to their less visionary contemporaries as dribblingly insane. They laughed at Galileo. Also, Tesla.

And then there’s that name: Colossal. It’s the kind of moniker that puts one in mind of fictional corporations such as ACME, or Stark Industries, often founded by ridiculously wealthy but genius-level megalomaniacs who live in James-Bond-style lairs beneath extinct volcanoes in Secret Locations.

Being as I really am a genius-level megalomaniac who lives in a James-Bond-style lair beneath an extinct volcano in a Secret Location (near Cromer) I can only view Colossal as a challenge. So, in the spirit of free-market capitalism, I have set up a rival. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Humungous Biosciences. Unlike many genius-level megalomaniacs who live in James-Bond-style lairs beneath extinct volcanoes in Secret Locations, however, I am not ridiculously wealthy. This means that the hand-pickled picked, top-flight scientists I’ve recruited for Humungous Biosciences have often had to resort to low-budget rather more creative solutions than those available to Colossal. But necessity is the mother of Frank Zappa, and they have achieved great things with squeegee bottles and miles of sticky-backed plastic the resources they have. Privation certainly hasn’t stopped them coming up with a raft of projects to bring back creatures from their unquiet graves, whether they want to be so reanimated or not. Some of their schemes are even possible using ordinary everyday household objects, so in the spirit of openness and citizen science, readers are encouraged to try out some of them at home (at their own risk). Here therefore is a selection from the latest call for funding prospectus.

Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius)

Take any ordinary everyday elephant — such as you might find around any home — and cover it in russet shag-pile carpet.

Woolly Rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis)

See ‘Woolly Mammoth’.

Giant Deer (Megaloceros giganteus)

Also known as the Irish Elk, this can be recreated by taking a red-deer stag and glueing very large branches to its head.

Glyptodont (Doedicurus sp.)

This gigantic relative of the armadillo can be recreated by covering a VW beetle with egg boxes.

Aurochs (Bos primigenius)

This legendarily ferocious progenitor of domestic cattle may be recreated by taking a large white bull; fattening it on testosterone, antibiotics, and supersized Happy Meals; and then shoving a scotch bonnet up its bottom.

Steller’s Sea Cow (Hydrodamalis gigas)

This project is still in the planning stages but prospective investors can get a good idea of what it would be like by watching me sea-bathing (from a safe distance), at least until the Sea Mammal Research Unit arrives.

Macrauchenia (Macrauchenia patachonica)

Macrauchenia was a litoptern, a group of extinct mammals only known from South America. Its claim to fame is that it was discovered by Charles Darwin. Macrauchenia looked like a large ungulate with a short trunk. It can be recreated by getting two short lengths of shower hose, glueing them together side-by-side, and attaching them to the forehead of any conveniently located llama. (Special orders only).

Giant Ground Sloth (Megatherium americanum)

There are no plans as yet to recreate this species. However, I’ve seen some of our scientists watching attentively and taking notes when I sit down to lunch.

Diprotodon (Diprotodon optatum)

This rhinoceros-sized cousin of the wombat can be recreated by feeding LSD to ordinary wombats. The wombats won’t actually be any bigger, but THEY’LL think they’re HUGE.

Aepyornis (Vorombe titan)

In a preliminary study, scientists  have attempted to  recreate the aepyornis, or elephant bird, by crossing an elephant with a bird. First results are not encouraging, producing elephants that can’t remember anything. They’re also lighter than air and tend to float away, endangering air traffic.

Giant Trilobite (Isotelus rex)

Efforts to recreate this 70-centimetre aquatic Ordovician monster are well advanced. The project involves glueing medieval plate armour to Roombas and letting them loose. The problem  is that when placed in water they invariably explode. The Humungous Biosciences marketing department is thinking of rebranding this project as a recreation of the giant Carboniferous (and land-living) millipede Arthropleura.

Unicorns

Humungous Biosciences is also responding to the challenge, set by Colossal with the dire wolf, of creating animals that never existed in reality. The first project is the unicorn, which can easily be created by taking any pure white horse that has been reared and handled by virgins, and glueing an ice-cream cone to its forehead.

Ents

In ‘Project Treebeard’, scientists at Humungous Biosciences have been trying to create ents by splicing actin and myosin genes into banyan trees. The results have been encouraging, if disconcerting. The trees really do seem to move around, but only when nobody is looking.

FINALLY: there is a good reason for not making fun of projects at Colossus. If they are as keen on creating animals from the Game of Thrones franchise as they seem, there can really only be one aim: to create the gigantic fire-breathing flying dragons responsible for incinerating so many of the cast … and, presumably, the competition. That’s why we at Humungous Bioscences intent to get there first.

Posted in Cromer, Dreaming, Research, Science Is Vital, Science-fiction, Silliness | Leave a comment

Gender Pay Gaps: Getting Worse

Posted on 10 April 2025 by Athene Donald

This is the season when all larger employers have had to report their gender pay gap. Is it good news? No, things appear to be going backwards.

“Enduring gender pay disparities in Whitehall reflect low female representation in senior roles and over-representation in junior positions.”

says the Financial Times about the widening gender pay gaps in the Civil Service. The same newspaper reports that Lloyds Banking Group’s median pay gap rose by 2.7 percentage points to 35.5 per cent last year, meaning that Lloyds Bank had the fourth-largest pay gap of any employer with more than 5,000 staff.

Recently UKRI also reported an increase in the gender pay gap of their own employees. As they put it, this is

“largely influenced by distribution of males and females within the workforce rather than differences in pay within the bands”.

In other words, there are more men than women towards the top of the pay scales in senior roles at UKRI.  The explanation for the increasing differential in male and female salaries at UKRI is attributed to a refreshed scale for employees involved with research (for instance, scientists in one of their institutes) compared with others, such as clerical staff handling grant proposals. It won’t surprise anyone to know that there are more women in the latter, less well-paid roles and more men in roles that might take them out to sea on a NERC boat (the one that isn’t named Boaty McBoatface) or to running a large research group at the John Innes, Sanger or LMB. At least these institutes are still allowed to have links to EDI initiatives on their websites, unlike their American parallels, but the numbers speak for themselves.

Thus, across all these examples we are seeing a similar sort of gender segregation in roles. Changing this requires a total cultural rethink of who does what. However good anyone’s intentions – and I’m absolutely sure that from the top of UKRI down, intentions are good – our society still tends to push women one way and men another. This is, of course, not just a UK problem. It is well-known that the Scandinavian countries score highly on equality issues, and yet they are as susceptible to this sort of role segregation as any other country. Indeed, in some ways they are even worse. Nordics Info state clearly that

“Nordic countries also have greater horizontal segregation by sex than the rest of the EU, that is, most women work in different occupations than most men.”

They go on to say:

“In Denmark for instance over 60% of all workers are employed in a profession where their own sex accounts for 75% or more.”

– sectors such as education and the public sector. Clearly, creating a more equal society where, for instance, parental leave is more genuinely shared, is not sufficient to eradicate societal norms about what a ‘nice girl’ does and, just as importantly, what she isn’t expected to do.

Relevant to this, I’ve just finished reading Fiona Erskine’s book Phosphate Rocks: A death in ten objects, which highlights some of these issues.  Woven into her story about an unexplained body in the disused chemical factory at Leith, is her alter ego chemical engineer Fiona, the first graduate woman to work shifts at this factory producing fertiliser. She only hints at the problems she must have faced in the ‘80’s, but the reality is that, for the real Fiona working in this factory in a minority of one, it must have been hard. Fiona can’t be much younger than me, and also a graduate of Cambridge. In my own cohort of students there were precisely two women who took the engineering tripos (although I can’t be 100% sure there weren’t others doing chemical engineering, which was a final year option at the time, but one you could also approach via the Natural Sciences route).

But, somewhat younger than either of us was Shima Barakat, a woman who was the only female working on the Cairo underground many years ago, an experience she can now laugh about but which clearly wasn’t very funny at the time. Engineering remains stubbornly male-dominated at every level and, if anything, the profession is heading in the wrong direction. A 2024 briefing from Engineering UK showed that the percentage of women working in engineering and technology occupations had actually dropped from 16.5% in 2022 to 15.7% in 2023. Their analysis further showed that, although more women were entering the profession, the drop out at mid-career more than offset the increasing entry level numbers.

This is not the way to close the gender pay gap. What are organisations doing wrong? Are they not flexible enough for women whose caring responsibilities are typically more arduous than for men? Are their working environments so inimical to a pleasant atmosphere that women get to a stage of just not wanting to hack it anymore? Or do they get fed up when they see younger men being promoted over them because of unconscious bias in those doing the promotions? The EngineeringUK report simply looks at the statistics, so those questions are not addressed.

I have never forgotten a 2014 report from Murray Edwards (a women’s only College in Cambridge) who had surveyed their alumnae, which stated that

“the most difficult challenge they have faced in their careers is the non-supportive culture of their workplace. Shockingly, this is just as true for women aged 20-29 as for our older age group.”

That was true whichever sector the women were working in, but is likely to be heightened by isolation if, like Fiona Erskine, you are the only woman on a shift. OK, the report is more than ten years old but, given the statistics, it is hard to see the world has changed much.

Women still face workface harassment; they are still too often discouraged from entering some sectors, even if the discouragement is only subliminal; and society has not yet adjusted to the fact that it is not only women who do the caring, so that men taking (for instance) parental leave are too often stigmatised. The gender pay gap will never close as long as these and other systemic issues persist.

Posted in Equality, Fiona Erskine, parental leave, Science Culture, Shima Barakat, UKRI | Leave a comment

What I Read In March

Posted on 4 April 2025 by Henry Gee

I apologise for the late arrival of this month’s book blog. I have been distracted by the publication of my own book, the subject of which is somewhat fin-d’espèce, if not fin-du-monde, and which you can read all about here.

Screenshot 2025-04-04 at 09.13.12Laura Purcell: The Silent Companions You’ll both no doubt recall that Mrs Gee gave me an anthology of horror stories for Christmas entitled The Winter Spirits, thus introducing me to a host of authors of whom I had not previously heard. One of these was Laura Purcell, whose story Carol of the Bells and Chains was High Victorian gothic horror set in the nursery of a grand house. The Silent Companions has a similar setting, and starts when newlywed Elsie Bainbridge comes to the decaying country pile of her new husband, who has – inconveniently – just died. Her only companion is her late husband’s rather vapid sister. With nothing else to do but explore the huge building, she unlocks a door that she shouldn’t, unleashing nursery crymes. The story intercuts with a tale in the same house just before the English Civil War, when the nursery horrors (the ‘silent companions’ of the title) first came into the house, bought by the Lady of the House from a remarkable curiosity shop run by a man called Samuels – a shop that subsequently disappears without trace. So, take Victorian Gothic and mix in aspects of Child’s Play and Needful Things. My concern, being a Red-Sea Pedestrian, is the anachronistic nature of Samuels, who is plainly Jewish, yet Jews were absent from England until the Protectorate. But this is a tale of the fantastic, so one can perhaps excuse it. And it is a fine spine-chiller.

Screenshot 2025-04-04 at 09.18.00Jess Kidd: Things In Jars Another author from The Winter Spirits here, of a story called Ada Lark about a street urchin who becomes the assistant to a fraudulent medium (is there any other kind?) Things in Jars is a mystery in which Mrs Bridie Devine, private investigator extraordinaire, is asked to track down the missing daughter of an aristocrat – a girl with remarkable powers. Mrs Devine, despite (and perhaps because of)  a chequered personal history, is quite at home in the rambunctious stews of Victorian London, and mixes with a cast of characters is picturesque and outlandish as anything in Dickens – from Clara Butter, Mrs Devine’s giantess housemaid, to the ghost of a dead prizefighter who claims to be in love with our intrepid heroine. All this and bottled mermaids too in a tale told in that spellbinding, endlessly creative yet somewhat elliptical style one finds in Irish-born writers from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to Roddy Doyle and Spike Milligan. All in all an absolute cracker. I want to read more about Bridie Devine.

UntitledNatasha Pulley: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Pulley was the author of The Salt Miracles, my favourite story from The Winter Spirits — a mist-enshrouded and highly original tale about pilgrims to the Hebridean shrine of an obscure saint. In January I lauded The Mars House, a simply gorgeous SF trans bromance set on Mars, which is now Offspring#1’s favourite book. When we enthused to Offspring#2 about Pulley, she passed me The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which was Pulley’s debut novel. It takes place in a slightly alternative Victorian London in which Thaniel Steepleton, a government telegraph operator, comes home to find a beautiful watch on his pillow. Pocketing it, the watch sounds an alarm just before a terrorist bomb explodes that destroys Scotland Yard. The works of the watch are traced to Keita Mori, the Japanese emigre watchmaker of the title, who is suspected of having made the bomb. Steepleton is tasked with keeping tabs on Mori, and eventually comes to live with him. A parallel strand has a young female scientist who is trying to prove the existence of the luminiferous aether before her mother forces her to marry. The writing is crisp, the plot clever, the dialogue (in places) laugh-out-loud funny in an Oscar-Wilde-Noel-Coward kind of way, but I have a sense that, like some of Mori’s clockwork, it’s all wound up a bit too tight. Perhaps this was stress-to-impress in what became a widely acclaimed debut, before Pulley learned to relax and let some more of her affectionate style in. Having said that, there is plenty of humour in the form of Katsu, Mori’s seemingly intelligent and wayward clockwork octopus. Having read more of Pulley, her signature, apart from gay romance, seems to be the gratuitous insertion of a loveable octopus, in the same way that Trollope put in scenes about fox hunting.

Screenshot 2025-04-04 at 09.47.33Natasha Pulley: The Half-Life of Valery K By now you’ll have guessed that I have become quite a fan of Natasha Pulley. Apart from anything else, she impresses by her range: from steampunk in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street to SF in The Mars House and now historical fiction set in Russia that seems in every way as authentic as anything by Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, Wolves Eat Dogs). It’s 1963, and Valery K, a scientist sent to Stalin’s Gulag for some invented infraction, is transferred to a secret radiation lab not far from the Urals to be part of a team led by his old doctorate supervisor. The task is to monitor the local environment as part of controlled experiments on the effects of radiation on the flora and fauna. But there’s more to it than that, or course, and Valery risks being shot (or worse) as he tries to expose the secrets beneath the secrets. It’s rather grim (at times not even Pulley’s humour can alleviate the bitter cruelty and the Siberian chill) but is a fabulous read for all that, and contains her by-now-familiar bromance (Valery cultivates an unlikely friendship with his KGB minder). And, oh yes, an octopus. Because, why not? I have only one quibble — did they really have TV remotes in 1963?

IMG_8857Sophie Hannah: Haven’t They Grown? Beth hasn’t seen her former best friend Flora for twelve years, not since their children were small. Taking her now-teenage son to football practice, Beth drives past the house where Flora now lives, and, without being seen, sees Flora in her car with her own children who look exactly the same as they had been twelve years before. Such is the set-up for a crime thriller in which Beth dives down the rabbit hole to discover what’s really going on. No, not time travel, but a thoroughly convoluted, entirely unlikely but ultimately page-turningly compelling thriller. Once again, Sophie Hannah is an entirely new author to me, despite her having written scads of books (although she didn’t feature in The Winter Spirits, you’ll be relieved to know). Offspring#1 picked up this copy at a charity shop because he knows that I’m dead easy to buy presents for. I love books. Also, liquorice allsorts.

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A new development in scientific integrity

Posted on 1 April 2025 by Frank Norman

Recent changes in US scientific research are very worrying. The ‘anti-science movement’ is being spearheaded by Robert F Kennedy – a leading figure of the modern anti-vaccine movement for many years. On their own his views are nothing new – the Skeptics in the Pub movement was spawned in 1999 to act as a corrective to science denialism. I remember that homeopathy attracted much criticism from the science community at that time, such as this 2002 systematic review by Edzard Ernst. The difference now is that Kennedy is in charge of the USA’s leading biomedical agencies – NIH, FDA, CDC – so is likely to do real damage.

There is great concern too about political interference in NIH funding.  Trump appointees will screen new funding proposals “to ensure the research that will be funded aligns with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration”. A recent article in the EHN Newsletter says:

Political interference in federal research funding compromises scientific integrity. It could skew national health priorities, delay urgent studies, and have a chilling effect on research related to topics like racial health disparities and vaccine confidence.

In another very worrying move the NIH’s Scientific Integrity Policy has been rescinded.

Will these worrying developments lead to an increase in the quantity of unreliable research results in the published literature? How can we detect research that has been compropmised?

A new information tool is launching today to help sort genuine science from fake science. CrapMed is an index of dodgy science. It contains 1) articles published in journals with suspect peer review, and 2) articles reporting research that has been compromised by political interference.

There are plans to rapidly scale-up the service as there is expected to be a huge growth in this sector (mis-research) over the next four years.

A team of scientific integrity experts has been assembled and many contributors in the broader community have volunteered to help to monitor the literature to identify candidate articles. Developers are also building links to Xitter, another rich source of mis-information.

Commenters have suggested that CrapMed could serve a useful purpose by identifying research that no-one should take seriously. By subtracting the results of a CrapMed search from the results of a PubMed search genuine investigators can derive a set of results that is free from compromised or fake research results.

CrapMed leaders are also negotiating with CrossRef to ingest the Retraction Watch database of retracted articles.

Noted researcher Lunchtime O’Gilson said that ’CrapMed is the highest quality database of utter dross that I have ever seen’.

Initially the focus is on biomedical crap, but observers suggest that it will soon be necessary to expand to cover all branches of research. The Web of Crap is likely to be needed before the end of 2025.

Plans are also under way for a new bibliometric indicator based on CrapMed. The working name for this indicator is the ‘Crap-Index’ but there are worries that this name is not sufficiently descriptive – there are so many other bibliometric indicators that people think are crap.

Stop Press

Rumours emerging from the Department of Ghastly Egregiousness suggests that the NLM will be renamed as the National Library of Misinformation and will divert resources from PubMed to maintaining CrapMed.

Posted in Research tools, Searching | Leave a comment

My lovely sister, 1946-2025

Posted on 27 March 2025 by Frank Norman

This week my much-loved eldest sister, M, died. I want to share with you some memories of her through my life.

In a few weeks it will be 30 years since my mother died from cancer. It was a difficult time – the uncertainty of waiting for test results, the assaults of chemo and surgeries, the time for recuperation. M had trained and practiced as a nurse so she made it her job to see that my mother received the best care. M navigated through all the healthcare decisions, keeping the rest of the family in the loop and explaining every stage. When my mother needed to recuperate for a bit before returning home, M made space in her own home and looked after her.

I was reminded of that time this week. M’s caring and dedication, her clear idea of what had to be done and her willingness to step in. Giving of herself. Now she was the one who needed all our love and care.

Growing up, we were a family of six children. I was the youngest. One sister died in a plane crash 40 years ago, leaving M as the oldest. We were a close family, though as we scattered across the UK we saw each other less frequently. The bonds remained strong.

When M left home to train as a nurse I was still a small child, so I don’t have strong memories of her until later. When she married I was 12 years old. I had my first taste of champagne at the wedding. (I don’t remember but apparently I enjoyed it!). That was the start of a long and happy marriage. A few years later she accompanied her husband when he moved to work in (pre-Ayatollah) Iran for six months and later they lived in Jamaica for a spell. I remember feeling very sad when she went away the first time, as it seemed such a far-off place.

Back in London they lived in a flat in Notting Hill and I remember as a teenager making trips to visit her in school holidays. M was beautiful and stylish as well as loving. She took me to visit smart department stores like Biba’s, Whiteleys, Barkers and other swell places. I remember on one of those trips watching her cooking in the flat – she was making a curry by mixing different spices rather than by spooning out ready-made curry powder. I was amazed to discover all the individual spices that went into it – their smells and colours. I think that set off my own love of cooking with spices. She was a great cook and her meals were always great treats.

I had many happy times visiting M, on my own or as part of family occasions. She and her husband moved house several times – Newmarket, Stansted, Chelsea, Putney, Rye. She was a great home-maker and relished the challenge of creating a new home – reshaping the house, decorating and choosing furnishings. Her sense of style was impeccable and her homes always had her imprint. She was also skilled in many crafts, things I know little about. She took up beading, making beautiful things with tiny beads. At one point she acquired a knitting machine and used it to create amazing clothes. She made me a jumper with a musical staff on the front; on it were the notes of the first phrase of Colonel Bogey. That was my favourite jumper for many years.

In the mid-1990s I started to have more impact in my library career, and received invitations to speak at professional events. I needed to smarten up my image. M took me shopping and helped me to select a new outfit. I still have the lovely double-breasted jacket that we chose. She also suggested a colour scheme that would suit me. I often veer towards that colour palette when I buy clothes even today.

After our mother died I felt closer still to M. I was no longer her baby brother of years gone by but a middle-aged man, so we related more equally. By then she had started her own family but she always had time to listen and talk. When at a late age I came to understand that I was gay, M was the first family member who I told. She was of course lovely, encouraging and reassuring. Tears were shed on both sides. When I found love with my now-husband, M welcomed him into the family. She was one of the witnesses at our Civil Partnership ceremony.

My sister at my Civil Partnership ceremony

My sister at the Civil Partnership ceremony

M was a very good hostess. She organised family get-togethers and parties for birthdays and anniversaries, always ready to open up their house. Over the years I came to know some of her friends too, through meeting them at her parties.

A few years ago when M and her husband celebrated a major wedding anniversary with a big family lunch, I was moved to stand up and make an impromptu short speech. I’m not good at spontaneous speechifying but the urge to speak overcame any nervousness. I told them that their relationship had been a firm point for me – they were so solid all my adult life – and I thanked them for their generosity to friends and family.

The last few years were hard for M. Four or five years ago she started complaining of a sort of brain fog. Slowly her speech became more restricted. It wasn’t obvious at first but in conversation she would repeat what you said. Later she would repeat just one particular phrase in response to anything you said. Diagnosis was very slow, but eventually we learnt that this was due to Primary Progressive Aphasia, a form of dementia that affects speech especially. This robbed her of the ability to communicate.

Slowly her world shrank as she could not talk or read, then she could not cook or do her craftwork. Later on her condition affected her ability to swallow, making eating a very slow process. Life became very complicated and increasingly fragile. She was cared for at home almost the whole time of her illness, by family and excellent carers, one in particular was so devoted and caring.

I tried to visit M regularly over the last couple of years. It was hard to see her so changed but it was heartening when she recognised me and gave a smile. She was still there inside, responding to loved ones but unable to tell us what she was feeling or thinking.

Last week M caught an infection and over the weekend it became serious. She was taken to hospital. Antibiotics did not help. Her family and close friends came to be with her, and I was able to be with her too on Tuesday. Early in the following morning she passed away.

Grief comes in waves and it’s still hard to accept that M is gone. Writing this has helped me I think. I’m sure everyone who knew M will have their own memories and stories of special times with her, and times when she has helped them. M was important to all of us, inspiring love and loyalty in all who knew her.

I remember that when the Guggenheim Bilbao first opened in 1997 we talked about travelling there together to visit it. Of course M was interested and knowledgeable about art and architecture. Sadly we never did see that plan through. I think I must make that trip soon, in her memory.

Posted in Biographical, family | Leave a comment

Is Ballroom Dancing like Academia?

Posted on 24 March 2025 by Athene Donald

One of my secret loves is watching each series of Strictly Come Dancing. It is a feel-good vibe we all need in these dark geopolitical days, however much I don’t care how many sequins are sewed on by hand.  So, when head judge Shirley Ballas’ memoirs were for sale at 99p on Kindle, I splashed out. What I wasn’t expecting was to find how much her world of ballroom dancing resonated with experiences many women in the sciences would be familiar with. Perhaps most spheres have similar problems.

Sentences like

‘The more successful I became as a female in that [ballroom dancing] world, the more it seemed the men at the top wanted to put me down.’

Sound familiar to mid-career women? It reminds me of the newly minted female FRS who, a number of years ago told me her department wouldn’t celebrate because it ‘wasn’t her turn’. Clearly she had put someone’s nose out of joint, because some male colleague had felt more entitled than her, as a mere woman.  Entitlement is such a pernicious emotion.

When I was writing my book about women in science, I conducted an entirely unscientific survey to find out what mid-career women of my acquaintance, across a range of disciplines, felt about how they were treated now they were successful. I explicitly asked them if things were better or worse, so as not to phrase the question in a leading way. Most had reservations about their experiences (although some noted how much less they were susceptible to sexual harassment, undoubtedly a massive improvement). But answers often indicated similar sentiments to Ballas, such as:

‘My main observation is that my achievements are not as important as those of other researchers. “Excellence” is a perception not an absolute. And I often get the impression that my successes (e.g. high impact publications) are resented, rather than celebrated.’

In a slightly different vein, to take another couple of sentences from the Ballas book:

‘Was it because I didn’t do exactly what I was told? Was it because I didn’t toe the line, because I didn’t always agree with what was said?’

Another feeling I strongly recognized, as did others. For instance, one woman of my acquaintance said

‘If I return conversational fire at even half the intensity I’m receiving it people will back off, frightened and sometimes even complain that I am threatening. This acts to exclude me from robust discussion that others can participate in.‘

Women are, it would seem, too often expected to do what they are told without fighting their corner, a sure-fire way to get trampled on and fail to progress.

It probably is the case that many men feel similarly, that if they don’t metaphorically fight for themselves they will get squashed, and if they do they will be seen as not behaving properly by those who try to control things, but it’s a double whammy for women because we cannot help but be ‘different’. The reality is that, in any, even perhaps in all sectors, there are those (cast your eye across the Atlantic) who want women to remember they are not entitled to anything very much at all except do what they are told – amounting to coercive control in a domestic situation, although I’m not sure there is an equivalent phrase professionally – and bear and bring up children.

When I lived in the USA, back in the years around 1980, I remember seeing flyers in windows around Ithaca saying of Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate back then, ‘This man has what it takes to set the world back twenty years’. By comparison, what followed that election was a relatively benign period compared with what we are seeing right now. But, I come back to that word ‘entitlement’, which many men seem to feel but far fewer women.

The other side of the coin is, of course, the issue that this week’s HEPI report highlighted – how many male teenagers don’t make the grade at GCSE and thereafter. We should indeed worry about these boys, who are brought up in a world which seems to work against them, and which spits them out at a higher rate than young women. And it spits them out into a world which fuels their resentment in dangerous ways, rather than offering them a safety net, a way to get back onto a ladder which will lead to employment and a secure home and life.  There is no doubt that this is a massive problem that we have to find ways to overcome, to ensure that teenage boys don’t feel disaffected from society before they’ve even started on their adult trajectory. But many of them will react at least as badly as Professor X when they see a contemporary female achieving more than they manage and some deeply rooted societal message implies ‘that’s not fair, men should be the top dog’.

I have no solutions to this problem. Maybe it will take many generations for the idea of true equality between the sexes to take firm hold. All I can point out is, if you are a woman – at any stage of your career and probably in any sector – if a man is determined to demean you it does not mean the criticism is legitimate. It is so easy for a woman to feel that somehow she has transgressed if a diatribe (or silent action) is directed at her to suggest she should know her place. The reality, although it may be small consolation, is that a man may be feeling threatened when his own inadequacies are being shown up, or his status implicitly questioned. Unfortunately, it is all too often impossible to avoid such people and work with those – of whom there are many – who are genuinely supportive.

Posted in demeaning, entitlement, equity, Science Culture, Shirley Ballas, Women in science | Comments Off on Is Ballroom Dancing like Academia?

Another Year, Another IWD: What’s Changed?

Posted on 8 March 2025 by Athene Donald

Every year International Women’s Day sparks a momentary bout of reflection about the state of women in our society. The  House of Lords has an annual debate, for instance, this year about women in STEM.  Social media will showcase many women’s stories, past and present, highlighting both those known well and those less so. For myself, and I’m sure many like me, multiple invitations turn up on my desk inviting me to give a talk here or there (which typically clash so I cannot accept them all). But does anything fundamentally change?

At one level the answer is obviously yes. There are more women on FTSE Boards and running universities. The Supreme Court is not all male and about half of Cambridge colleges are now led by women, although some colleges are still at the stage of appointing their first female head (most recently Selwyn). Compared with when I was growing up, huge progress has been made. At another level, at the level of inherent attitudes to what men and women can do, there is still too much question about whether women are ‘up’ to any particular challenge. Leaving aside what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic, one can still see fainter echoes here.

Take the scrutiny over Rachel Reeves’ qualifications as an economist; no one questioned George Osborne’s or Jeremy Hunt’s experience or degree relevance. It is hard not to see this as a double standard being applied to a woman. Such scrutiny implicitly weakens her authority. Or the current anxiety over boys doing less well at school (of course something that everyone should be worried about), compared with decades of indifference when the gender gap was the other way round. I suspect the recent analysis of EPSRC grant data that shows that women are much more successful at obtaining fellowships than men (by some 80%; I’m not sure if there is a clear explanation of this yet) may provoke concern, despite the fact that university leadership and the professorial ranks remain stubbornly male, particularly in a subject like my own (Physics).

I would like to think progress was well and truly being made, but the reality is, when I go to talk – as I still do – to groups of young researchers about these issues, the same concerns raise their heads. How do I get taken seriously? What do I do when my supervisor isn’t supportive? Why is it always the women (and the minoritised ethnics) who have to do the heavy lifting in making improvements happen? The very fact that student women’s groups feel the need to invite me to talk about my own experiences is testament to the fact they don’t want to feel alone in what may feel like splendid isolation in some groups. In that sense, no, things have not progressed to the point where these are no longer matters of concern.

Then there is of course the small matter of the gender pay gap. In the 55 years since the original Equal Pay Act that Barbara Castle introduced in 1970, there is still – almost universally across sectors – a significant gender pay gap. Again, yes, it has been decreasing, but it still stands at 7%, according to the last ONS data. It has actually increased for managers, directors and senior officials, according to the same data. Some, but not all of this, will be down to grade/role segregation. This is just as true in the supposedly egalitarian Scandinavian countries, as this commentary on Norway demonstrates. But we must all worry whether the backlash against DEI initiatives in the USA spills over to our own shores. It is of course right to worry about the numbers of working-class boys becoming NEETS, but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that girls who do well at school may well find their subsequent progression up the career ladder stalls and that their pay falls behind their male contemporaries.

The reasons behind these social challenges are many and varied, and initiatives that help one part of our community may not work elsewhere. However, that we live in a society where equal pay for equal work does not automatically fall out from decisions in the workplace – by managers and HR departments – is a disgrace. This is not even a case of trying to work out whether ‘dinner ladies’ and ‘bin men’ are doing equally skilled jobs (as in the Birmingham City Council tribunal some years ago), but whether two people sitting at adjacent desks doing identical roles get paid the same. If one negotiates on hiring and the other doesn’t (stereotypically male and female traits), the difference in salary may perpetuate and even grow throughout a career, without anyone noticing or indeed intending such a discrepancy.

And finally, in this IWD rant, if society continues to assume the woman is the primary carer, even when it has been pointed out – to a school or nursery for instance – that it is the man who should be contacted in case of an emergency, for instance, we will continue to reinforce these stereotypes. As long as such assumptions are made, by the individual and by society, we are not making the best use of all our talents by looking at the reality not some out-of-date vision of what ‘should’ be.

When it comes to International Women’s Day, it is a good moment to pause and think both about how far gender equality has progressed, but also how it is stuck. For the specific case of women in STEM, let me do my annual IWD reminder of the list of things anyone, whatever their gender, age or occupation, can do to improve the situation for aspiring and practicing female scientists. I originally entitled this Just1Action4WIS (Just one action for women in science) and, although it’s all but ten years old now, it is still as important now as then.

Posted in Barbara Castle, EPSRC, Equal Pay Act, Equality, gender pay gap, Women in science | Comments Off on Another Year, Another IWD: What’s Changed?

The Importance of Manufacturing

Posted on 2 March 2025 by Athene Donald

How many factories have you visited in your life? Do you have any sense of what goes on there? When I was a postdoc in the Cambridge Materials Science Department, helping out with undergraduate projects, I was offered a chance to visit what was then a major ICI production plant at Welwyn Garden City. Forget the fact that neither the factory nor indeed ICI exist now, this was an opportunity for me to visit a full-scale manufacturing site, where vast expanses of polymer film were produced. I leapt at the chance, naively mentioning during the visit that I had never been to a factory before. The ICI personnel seemed stunned. But why would I have?

Since then, I’ve been to a fair few such places. To Baxters on Speyside for a fun family day out, watching how soup and jam are produced from a safe distance. (At the time I refrained from pointing out my food physics credentials, despite my husband’s urging, to identify myself as a member of the Government Office for Science Food and Drink Foresight Panel, meant to be crystal-gazing at the future of the sector twenty years hence from the early ‘90’s.) To a breakfast cereal factory on the Welsh borders during my days of researching starch granule structure. That was a day memorable not least for being, however respectable, totally unsuitably dressed for climbing up and down ladders to look inside vats, dressed as I was in a skirt and heeled shoes. Back then I felt I needed to look serious if I was to be taken seriously (this would also have been in the ‘90’s). To later ICI factories, in Slough for paint and Teeside for more polymer films produced at phenomenal speeds….And so on.

However, impressive though large machinery is, and interesting though it is to see production lines, have I ever really stopped to think about manufacturing as a ‘thing’? Of course, the answer is no, not really. So much of what surrounds us it is all too easy to take for granted until it goes wrong (think of the glass vial shortage when there was a pressing need for them to store vaccines during the pandemic). Supply chains matter. Where some vital component comes from to complete an everyday product, suddenly becomes important when the Suez Canal gets blocked by a ship making a mess of a tricky manoeuvre. This we discovered the hard way during our house refurbishment, when all the replacement, fire-proof doors needed for our house renovation got stuck on the wrong side of the Canal. Who knew doors came from the other side of the world?

So, if you are in the same position of not having given manufacturing much thought, an easy solution is at hand. My Churchill and Cambridge colleague Tim Minshall, head of the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge, has just written an informative but easy-to-read book about the world of manufacturing: Your life is manufactured: How we make things, why it matters and how we can do it better. It is a great read, full of informative nuggets of information dispensed in a light-hearted but also serious way. I thoroughly recommend it.

As a society we constantly demand more: more stuff, more sophisticated stuff, more variety of stuff and so on. As academics we are often charged to be entrepreneurial, to take our discoveries out into the world of impact to make a better widget. But the reality is, there is a huge gulf between the germ of an idea, even if elegantly written up in some top-notch journal, and making something at scale at a cost that will sell and having sorted out all the logistics to make that happen. Few academics have that skillset and certainly not without a lot of trial and error to achieve a satisfactory end result.

Furthermore, these days anyone trying to produce some new product/widget needs to pay attention to the ‘cost’ in the broadest sense: to energy use and air miles, to impact on the planet and pollution. The last chapter in the book is concerned with what changes are ongoing and are needed to be developed so that, as the chapter title says, we ‘survive’ despite our apparently insatiable desire for more stuff. As he points out, manufacturing is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after electricity and heat production. We need seriously to tackle this issue, including by cutting back on our desires – as an example, buying fewer clothes and wearing them for longer is a good place to start. But we can also consider the production of the clothes we do buy so that they generate less (water in particular) pollution and make sure that far less ends up in landfill to rot over decades.

Food is of course essential, but we waste an awful lot of that too. In my time working on food all those years ago, people were already considering how to make better use of ‘waste’ from large-scale food production. I recall a cunning plan to use onion skins to make novel glues, for instance (apparently there is a lot of onion waste in the fast-food market). But all of us, even in our own homes, waste a lot of food. The figures of food wastage that we buy and then toss away because it’s past it’s sell-by date or rotted in the bottom of the refrigerator, is stunning, although admittedly the rotting vegetables probably don’t count as ‘manufactured’. Around 9.5 million tons of food waste is generated in the UK each year, the vast majority in domestic not commercial settings.  Globally around a third of food produced gets chucked. We could do so much better on this and many other fronts. Read the book if you want to know more about what you could do in changing how you live to waste less of the manufactured goods we are surrounded by.

I hope I’ve whetted your appetite. It’s an entertaining and informative book. Having talked to Tim during the writing process, I know he worried if he had got the balance right between being too technical and too ‘popular’. I’d say he’s found a pretty happy medium.

 

Posted in factories, food waste, Research, supply chains, Tim Minshall | Comments Off on The Importance of Manufacturing