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What I Read In June and July

Posted on 31 July 2026 by Henry Gee

I apologise once again for the reduced frequency of my book blog. Frankly, I blame myself. However, I am enjoying a brief respite from my current project (working title: The Only Way Is Ethics) so I can catch up.

John Gribbin In The Beginning I do love a secondhand bookshop and found this in the secondhand shelves at Aberglasney Gardens in Wales in May. You’ll both know I’m sure that Gribbin is a prolific writer of popular science books mainly on hardcore physics. This one, from the early ’90s, is out of date in some respects (pre Higgs boson) but is a great read nonetheless, mainly because of  its core idea – that Universes propagate according to a principle akin to natural selection. If one takes as read that new Universes form from black holes, those most successful Universes are those that produce the most supernovae, which then collapse to form black holes. It so happens that life is ultimately the product of supernova explosions, but forget the Anthropic Principle – the Hokey Cokey black holes are what it’s all about.

Stella Rimington Riptide In which our intrepid heroine at MI5 Liz Carlyle and her colleagues get involved with Somali pirates and a dastardly Islamist plot closer to home.

Stella Rimington The Geneva Trap In which our intrepid heroine at MI5 Liz Carlyle and her colleagues get involved with a dastardly Russian plot to penetrate the West’s most closely guarded secrets. I do enjoy a Liz Carlyle novel, but after reading a few, I feel I still know rather little about Carlyle save the externals. She seems a bit of a goody two-shoes to me. I do wish she’d have some endearing dangerous characterful flaw that would render her as more than a LinkedIn profile. But one can’t fault the action, and the Liz Carlyle novels just get better and better.

D. B. John Red Star Down This is one of those airport-lounge thrillers I don’t often read, but Mrs Gee saw it and thought I’d like it, and as Mrs Gee so often is, she was right on the money. It’s unusual in that it’s about North Korea (the author is one of the few westerners to have been there) and the power dynamic of the ruling dynasty, which in itself was fascinating. What really got me though was its other setting — the White House of Trump’s first maladministration, capturing the febrile atmosphere of a White House in which everyone is trying to guess what ‘The Boss’ will do next.

Chloe Dalton Raising Hare The author, a high-powered policy wonk, finds herself rusticated thanks to the Recent Unpleasantness and doing something she’d never imagined – raising a young leveret (that’s a baby hare). Rich in detail and totally unsentimental, this is a wonderful memoir and a stellar piece of nature-writing.

Posted in Jenny of my book, Writing & Reading | Leave a comment

Across The Sea

Posted on 29 July 2026 by Henry Gee

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The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire is now available in paperback in a land run by criminal gangs with no respect for democracy, human rights or the rule of law universally applied, where disease runs unchecked across the burning land, and advocates for reason, science and truth are persecuted by star chambers as if they are witches. 

Also, Canada. 

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The White Heat of Creation

Posted on 28 July 2026 by Henry Gee

I wrote somewhere that there is no surer sign of an unwillingness to write than an untended blog. I should perhaps qualify that statement, because blogs might remain untended for all sorts of reasons, chief of these being, in my case, that no-one cares what I think, but coming a close second is that one is far too busy writing something else. So it has been with me for the past few weeks.

I have been contracted to write another book. As it’s in the early stages let’s pretend it’s a popular work on moral philosophy called The Only Way Is Ethics, even though it’s neither. Getting the synopsis right was hard work. In the early days it would take a year to get the synopsis into a state that my agent would not feel embarrassed showing it to a publisher. Even today, with a substantial oeuvre on my shelf, publishers still like a synopsis, and they are still hard to get right, though they don’t take as long as a year.

Eventually the synopsis passed muster but two things happened.

First, my UK publisher bought it, and I have a contract, but my editor announced that he was leaving for another publisher (editors do this) which was a shame because he is in my opinion something of a wunderkind and his ideas for reframing the synopsis were on point. I’m sure he’ll go on to do great(er) things. Happily his replacement is highly experienced and well-thought-of, but different editors have different opinions.

Second, my US publisher declined the option to publish The Only Way Is Ethics, citing poor sales of my earlier works (publishers often say this) but it reflects a declining market for popular science in the US, perhaps as that country lurches into a new Dark Age.

The third thing, out of these two things, was that a book appeared with a similar theme and title to mine. The publisher didn’t think this was a problem, but I felt I had to recast things somewhat. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

One of the subjects in The Only Way is Ethics, which I tackle in the first chapter, is something I know (or knew) very little about — too little even to make a kind of plan. I had to research the subject from the ground up. Writing was postponed until I was practically OMT on it and was ready to start writing. This was an amazing experience as I like learning new things, but one chapter became two, and I ended up writing the equivalent of a scholarly Annual-Reviews type article on this subject, though with more jokes. (The abbreviation  ‘OMT’ is Gee-family slang and not suitable for polite use).

During the course of this I thought some more and got a richer, deeper appreciation of what the book should be about, so having drafted these chapters I drafted a prologue – which acts as an overture to all the chapters – as well as writing chapter summaries and a new statement of intent. Phew! So, almost 40,000 words later, I have a document I’m happy with, which I have sent to my agent; my editors old and new; and the foreign-rights department of my UK publisher who want to start hawking the idea abroad.

During this process I avoided AI for the actual writing. I’m a writer, dash it all, and people actually pay money for words put together, in some sort of order, by me. I didn’t use AI to correct anything. I did use AI, though, as a kind of search engine when I wanted to look up papers, using specific prompts such as ‘is there any evidence that Southend Pier is made of toenails and treacle?’ and then I’d take it from there. For the final check, before sending, I had the computer read the text to me at a slow pace, while I followed along. This picked up the kind of mi$takes it’s easy to miss when reading silently to oneself, as one often skips across things without noticing.

So, there we are. I might take thirty minutes off, or even half an hour, before I start researching for chapter 3, during which break I can catch up with this untended blog.

 

 

Posted in Research, Writing & Reading | Leave a comment

In which human scientists are losing the battle

Posted on 25 July 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

This is the year that AI in science first began to scare me.

(Disclaimer: I’m not talking about machine learning, which is a useful and powerful scientific tool. I’m using the term AI here as shorthand for Large Language Models.)

It’s been building for a while, of course. Starting as a quirky curiosity, AI soon ramped up to a minor annoyance: a cringeworthy ChatGPT approach letter here, a too-polished student essay there. On the one hand it made marking student work less frustrating – the preternaturally perfect grammar being something I’ve never witnessed in all my decades of undergraduate evaluation. But the novelty soon wore off, to the point that, these days, when I stumble over a rare essay with a comma splice or the lack of subject/verb agreement, it now approximates the pleasure of listening to an authentic vinyl album with its faint crackle of dusty audio blemishes.

This is all just cosmetic stuff, nothing existential. Recently, however, it’s begun to snowball: a search engine result summary containing misleading or false scientific information. An author response to peer review clearly generated by LLM prompts, resulting in nonsense replies. Entire submitted manuscripts so heavily steeped in the queasy tone of AI – half used-car salesman, half sycophantic cheerleader, alongside its entourage of conspicuous Oxford commas and M-dashes – that you no longer trust the data behind it.

You can almost imagine a day when the grants will be written and reviewed by AI; the papers will be written, peer reviewed and rebutted by AI, and selected for publication by AI editors – at which point, science will eat its own tail. Maybe they’ll still need actual people to pipette the small amounts of clear fluids from one tube to another in a physical lab, but liquid handling robots already exist and could soon render the entire process human-free.

For me, it is grant writing that’s the most endangered: the burning crucible where research questions and testable hypothesis are born in the fire of the mind. I have now started to witness the ultimate betrayal: a few ride-or-die wordsmith colleagues who previously revered the process of writing as strongly as I did, and executed it so well, now turning relentlessly to Claude and CoPilot to “refine their thoughts”. It’s a lonely feeling, thinking I might be the last scientist on earth who composes her own sentences, and finds it enjoyable. Of course I might be left behind in the process, dying on a hill that’s already been conceptually bulldozed and turned into an motorway – destroying a string of charming hamlets in the process.

You could argue that the keyboard did the same thing to the pen, but I disagree: the keyboard didn’t replace your thoughts; it just made it easier to get them down. (Mind you, I also still use a pen to scribble both my personal and scientific thoughts, as this process seems to mine different parts of my brain.) The use of LLM is something else entirely: the potential death of independent and original human endeavour, until everything is a regurgitated remake of last season’s Netflix hit, the Chinese whisper errors rippling until the result is a hopeless muddle of slop.

We are already seeing the first lines of defence being hastily erected. The UK Medical Research Council is now requiring live interviews before making the final decision on who should receive major grant money. Can you look the panel in the eye and persuade them that the ideas in the grant are yours, and can you extrapolate further into the future without AI prompts? It’s like a Turing test, except now we poor humans are the subjects. A friend of mine thinks that even this doesn’t go far enough, as any smart scientist could memorise and swat up on an AI-composed grant. No, they say, we will need live “grant camps” where you show up, get locked into a Faraday cage with ten key papers, and have to bash out your entire application with no internet in a limited amount of time. In theory, only the true originals and visionaries would rise to the top.

Surely you are wondering whether I ever use LLMs myself. The answer is, of course. It’s a useful tool for shortening longer text, although I always have to edit heavily to exorcise the techbro tone and fix the inevitable errors. I sometimes try to use it to find papers, but the choices are almost always wrong, whether that be because papers have been hallucinated, or just aren’t quite right. AI summaries on search engine results, while again often misleading, at least point towards useful links on occasion, sometimes in a more organised way than the traditional first page of results. But beyond that, I have not embraced the tool for anything meaningful. Maybe that is a personal failing; maybe I am actually missing a trick. I do not know, and I do not want to find out. Not yet, anyway.

In the meantime, writing that is genuinely human becomes incredibly rare and thus, increasingly precious. I recently received a thank-you gift bag from my outgoing flock of medical students; tucked in among the gifts were a few cards containing multiple paragraphs of heartfelt sentiment, written by hand – with a pen. Sure, there were smudges and a few crossings-out, but the true feelings leapt off the paper with a brilliance and humanity that is as luminously unmistakeable as it is irreplaceable.

I found my eyes filling with tears, as if these scribbles were a missive from the past.

Or a warning about the future.

Posted in academia, AI, Nostalgia, Science Funding, Scientific thinking, staring into the abyss, students, Teaching, Writing | Leave a comment

How did we manage before the Internet?

Posted on 20 July 2026 by Athene Donald

If you’ve read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (the Guardian’s recent choice as the best novel in the English language), you will recognize the problem Mr Casaubon faced in trying to write his magnum opus, relying on multiple books in a range of languages. It is no wonder that he never completed his Key to all the Mythologies, and even if Dorothea had been allowed to help him (and had been educated enough to know all the languages which he felt he had to be able to read), it would have been a nightmare of a challenge. Any researcher knows the challenge of (re)finding the right reference or quote to insert into their own work. Yet now, how different life is from Mr Casaubon’s. A few clicks on a computer and the world is (almost) at your fingertips. Many e-books are available to me, at least to read, through my own university library. Many archived papers can be found on JStor, or on the publication’s own pages. Unlike my predecessors, I don’t have to get a ticket to the British Library Reading Room in order to access obscure journals (or, at least, I have never felt the need so far in my life).

Reading a book by an American Catholic priest and Vice President of Notre Dame University, written in 1913 about women in science, reminds me how different access to information was for him. HJ Mozans was the pen name of the Jesuit scholar John Augustine Zahm, 1851-1921. (He also wrote about Darwinism, for which he got censured as a Catholic priest). His book, The Story of Women in Science: From Ancient Greece to the Early 20th Century (also referred to as Woman in Science in the Gutenberg edition) uncovers a wide range of women whose names were previously unfamiliar to me. It is, of course, ‘dated’ and yet it strikes me as far ahead of its time, written before either Oxford or Cambridge – let alone Princeton or Yale – had admitted women fully to degrees. He seems to have been prompted to write it when travelling around Greece, in particular considering the absence of recognition of the site of the ‘salon’ of Aspasia, consort of Pericles in the fifth century BCE. She was a courtesan and not an Athenian and therefore – unlike Athenian matrons – allowed to consort with men and circulate outside the home. This she did with great skill and effect. Contemplating this woman, he

‘began to realize, as never before, that women of intellectual eminence have received too little credit for their contributions to the progress of knowledge, and should have a sympathetic historian of what they have achieved in the domain of learning.’

Hence, over many years, he laboured over this book.

It must have been a startling revelation to those who read it, long before Margaret Rossiter pointed out how women had been systematically excluded from the scientific narrative, and coined the phrase, the Matilda Effect, for the way men appropriated the ideas of women. But how did he uncover the names of all these women when there was no internet? It is a puzzle. Many of them are still names that don’t turn up very often in discussion, and searching the web today often provides scant information about them. I did not previously know, for instance, that abbess Hildegard of Bingen (ca 1098-1179) – whose plainsongs turn up quite regularly on Radio 3 these days – wrote two ‘scientific’ books, one about healing and the aetiology of disease and the other concerning the natural world.

Or, from a much later period, I had never come across the name of Janet (or Jane) Taylor, 1804-1870. She became an expert navigator and astronomer, and was the first to recognize that the Earth was spheroidal, bulging slightly at the equator. This discovery changed how people navigated for the better, and she was able to correct locations at sea and recalibrate instruments. Given the name, I can turn up more information on the web easily enough. But for Mozans/Zahm, how did he manage?

We are spoilt for information these days, but inevitably too often these are not primary sources. That AI summary at the top of a Google search – is it accurate (and of course the answer is often not)? Does it give the original source so that one can check it and expand the information. Again, often not. But how much easier it is for me now, than for a Mozans, or indeed a Casaubon. I could even, although I’ve not attempted this yet, use a translation programme so that I don’t have to learn Greek to find out about Aspasia, nor use my schoolchild French and German to explore more recent learned women, such as Sophie Germain, Emilie du Châtelet or Dorothea Christiane Erxleben.

So, hats off to Mozans. He is impressive, but inevitably a bit dated. He sometimes slips back into the language of those who want women to be merely decorative and good housekeepers, even while he wants to laud these women from the past. For instance, of Nicole-Reine (also Hortense) Lepaute, an astronomer, who worked with Jérôme Lalande and Alexis Clairaut on calculations regarding when Halley’s comet would return, he says

‘it is also gratifying to be assured that her engrossing work in astronomy in no wise caused her to neglect her home duties or to lost that sweetness of character and delicacy of refinement for which she was noted before she entered upon the absorbing and taxing career of astronomical computer.’

Not many female astronomers would like to be remembered for their attention to home duties these days, however much the reality is they are likely to be doing it with more or less input from a partner. The reality is the chores still have to be done, but we – as women – no longer have to do as Mary Somerville said she felt obliged to do:

“I hid my papers as soon as the bell announced a visitor, lest anyone should discover my secret”,

something which would have been close to Jane Austen’s heart too. We – male or female – can do literature searches from the comfort of our own computer. But, as young women have told me too often, they may still get written out of the narrative of a research team’s endeavours, when a male student is allowed to lay claim to a woman’s research – and which historian of science will be able to track that down, by whatever means?

 

Posted in Aspasia, Hildegard of Bingen, HJ Mozans, JA Zahm, Research, Science Culture, Women in science | Leave a comment

Team Working and Loneliness

Posted on 12 July 2026 by Athene Donald

Some years ago, the Science Council created a list of ten different kinds of scientists, to showcase the fact that not every scientist does the same kind of work. Ranging from technician scientist to entrepreneur scientist via the more obvious researchers denoted explorer and investigator scientists, it covered many different aspects of the work scientists do. This list was created some years ago, although I suspect the case studies are being regularly updated. However, as someone said to me when we were discussing it recently, it can feel a little outdated. In particular, we were considering explorer scientist which was described as:

The Explorer Scientist is someone who, like the crew of the Enterprise, is on a journey of discovery “to boldly go where no one has gone before”. They rarely focus on a specific outcome or impact, rather they want to know the next piece of the jigsaw of scientific understanding and knowledge.

They are likely to be found in a university or research centre, or in Research & Development (R&D) at an organisation, and are likely to be working alone.

It was that last phrase we took exception to. Few scientists now work alone. Team work and collaboration, possibly across continents, is much more the flavour of the work these days, and implying we still live in the age of the ‘lone genius’ who is putting the jigsaw together on their own, strikes me as misleading and potentially off-putting to a teenager considering a career in science.

That idea of fitting in the next piece of a jigsaw reminds me of a description in Nobel Prize winner Venki’s book Gene Machine, where he refers to his then postdoc Brian Wimberley (at that point working in Venki’s old lab in the US, after Venki himself had moved to the LMB in Cambridge). Trying to place proteins within the so-called 30S subunit (part of a bacterial ribosome) had been ‘so exciting that Brian said it had been like eating crisps. Once he did the first one he couldn’t stop.’ Definitely like putting a jigsaw together; definitely not working on his own. There were many steps required to get to the point where the jigsaw could be completed, done by an array of different (kinds of) scientists on both sides of the Atlantic.

Venki was of course the team leader, and that – as fellow Occam’s Typewriter blogger Jenny Rohn said recently – can be a lonely role. There, one may be on one’s own, trying to make decisions about how the group should be run and funded. When a student turns up feeling lost or stymied by their research, how do you give them confidence, either at a personal or professional level? Indeed, how do you learn what is the right thing to do in such a situation? When group dynamics go astray, who does one turn to to get them on a sounder footing? Group dynamics can go wrong for many different reasons. Where there is a bully, it is the leader’s job to step in and try to effect behaviour change: to rein in the bully. Sadly, such people are often of the variety who ‘suck up and kick down’, so without a victim stepping forward such behaviour may be hard to spot by the head of the group.

That is a hard enough nut to crack. One of the hardest challenges I remember facing was when one of the senior postdocs in the team decided to undermine me because he felt the wider department was not appreciative of his work and therefore it must be my fault. It took me a long time to discover this was going on, because, of course, no one  mentioned it to me. But it became apparent when a more junior postdoc was being pushed to turn against me, even though they were working on a completely different project from the person trying to sway them. Here, I was indebted to the group secretary for drawing this to my attention, who served a wonderful role as a pastoral carer for everyone (myself most definitely included). Sadly, with ‘efficiency savings’, such local support has been phased out of my department, and probably more generally too. Such a vital component of care is lost when everything is centralised and there is no local non-academic present to be a safe pair of ears for anyone in the group.

Preparing students and postdocs, not just for how to work in teams without attempting to hog the limelight, but also how to lead projects and write grants, should be part of their training. Although grant writing is probably a skill most useful if staying in academia, the ability to project manage is likely to be useful in any sphere in which science is at the heart. Yet, too often, it isn’t one that gets much attention. Being taught some relevant skills could be helpful, but it won’t solve the problem of being a lonely leader. The best advice I can give to current and future leaders is to remember to cultivate a circle of trusted allies. These may be academics from a different department/university – be they collaborators or not – with whom difficult group personalities can be discussed without obvious conflicts of interest, or the group secretary (assuming such a person still exists). It could simply be a neighbour who has experience of managing conflict in a very different sector.

This ‘loneliness of the leader’ occurs in any sphere, but is probably as acute in academia as in politics, because competition is inherently always present. Who do you trust with your inner fears? I was lucky to have a school friend who ended up in personnel and professional training (not in academia), who was excellent at taking my rambling concerns, extracting a few key facts from my narrative and then asking the awkward questions I didn’t want to ask myself. In one case this boiled down to ‘ok, you don’t get on with this influential person, but what do you want from him?’, and I realised the answer was quite simple. I wanted their respect. That does not, of course, answer how to go about getting it, but it was a useful insight.

This set of musings was set in train by annoyance with the idea that anyone can still propagate the view that scientists largely work on their own, but there is no doubt that loneliness can still be a key component in a senior scientist’s life.

Posted in collaboration, Jenny Rohn, Science Council, Science Culture, Venki | Leave a comment

Tackling the NEET Crisis

Posted on 30 June 2026 by Athene Donald

We hear a lot about NEET’s (those not in Education, Employment or Training); they are a major source of concern and form the focus of the recent Milburn Review. His recent, if interim report, has dug down into the characteristics of those who become NEET. They are certainly not a homogeneous group, but there are some key pointers early on in their school life that highlight those at most risk of leaving school disengaged and without substantive qualifications. Whether a new Government will change policies, for instance around FE, to attempt to staunch the growth in the NEET population, remains to be seen. It is an area Andy Burnham has previously shown he cares greatly about. What Milburn says in his final report will no doubt influence this significantly too, but Burnham has already said he takes the (interim) Review very seriously.

Those for whom school has not ‘worked’, who leave without qualifications, may have been let down by many different parts of the system, but it by no means necessarily implies they have no inherent skills or potential yet to be uncovered. Reading Francis Spufford’s 2004 book, Backroom Boys: The secret return of the British boffin, is a salutary reminder that leaving school with no fixed destination in mind may just mean the loss of untapped talent.

One chapter in the book is devoted to the story behind sequencing the genome. As this work under John Sulston at Wellcome’s Hinxton Hall campus expanded rapidly in 1998, in the face of the private enterprise of Craig Ventner entering the sphere as a ‘competitor’, there was a great and sudden need for more technical pairs of hands. Sulston took a radical approach:

‘We decided we would hire outside the box. We decided we would not hire in the conventional sense.’

Spufford goes on to describe what that meant in practice.

‘They advertised in the Cambridge Evening News, not in Nature. They hired lots of people with doctorates and lots of people with biology degrees, but lots more people who had just left school with minimal GCSEs or who were returning to the workforce after twenty years of child-rearing.’

They were looking for applicants who were careful, whether or not they had paper qualifications. As a consequence of this radical approach

‘In no time at all, we had people asking if they could take day release or do evening classes’…’Maybe they’d dropped out of school, and now they realised they did like science, and they really did want to be part of the larger picture, because now they were doing something practical.’

It is hard to know how many students are indeed put off science today because of (at least at secondary school) the heavy emphasis on textbook learning, with ‘practical’ work limited to teacher demonstrations or YouTube videos. The 2023 report on the Science Education Tracker showed just how significantly this is having an impact on teenagers’ interest in science. The report stated:

‘Practical work was considered the most motivating aspect of science lessons at school, especially for students in years 7–9…However, access to hands–on or teacher–demonstrated practical work2 becomes less common as students progress through school. In year 7, 65% reported doing this at least once a fortnight, but this percentage fell steadily by school year, such that only 39% reported similar frequency of interactive practicals in year 11.’

It has to be hoped the revision of the school curriculum consequent on last autumn’s Francis Report (Curriculum and Assessment Review) facilitates the much greater component of practical work at key stages 3 and 4 that it recommends.

As Burnham said in this week’s key Manchester speech, the education system needs to work for those for whom university is not the right route, just as much as for those for whom it is. Over the issue of the unsuccessful bid to introduce an MBacc (Manchester Baccalaureate) with an element of technical training included, he has expressed his frustration with the Department for Education, for whom a local qualification was not acceptable. In the same vein, this week’s speech stressed how he and his team in Manchester had worked with local employers to ensure every local T Level student got the requisite 45 day placement. In order to facilitate more technical education via the T Level route, this will need to be replicated across the country. No mean feat when placements are one of the major hurdles as regards increasing T Level numbers (see my blogpost on this from a couple of years ago). Currently fewer than 30,000 students are studying for T Levels across the country.

But T Level students have already committed to staying on at school or college. They aren’t the NEETs, of whom there are too many. Would they be attracted by being able to do something with their hands that didn’t require paper qualifications in the early years of secondary school? Can the system be changed to facilitate that? As Spufford says of Sulston’s Hinxton Hall experiment:

‘It was quite possible to answer an advert in the Cambridge Evening News, arrive at the Sanger to push a trolley and to emerge a few years later with a biology degree.’

As the Department for Education ramps up its R+D efforts, tries out some Test and Learn pilots, maybe here is a model that could be facilitated around the country, to take those whom school has failed to provide the nucleus of a new generation of technicians we so badly need.

The technical workforce we have in this country is ageing, numerically insufficient and in some cases lacking the skills needed in the modern workplace. This is not just about those who look after large, sophisticated bits of kit – for which a PhD may be required – but those who are involved at a much more modest level, perhaps doing fairly repetitive work, such as was required on the genome project at Hinxton. Such work can still bring its own reward: knowing you are part of a team or contributing to your community and wider society. For instance, to become a phlebotomist in the NHS, a 1-day course is advertised requiring no formal qualifications, although some course providers ask for 2 GCSEs. Having my blood tested annually for various potential problems as a senior citizen, I know what a vital role that is. A recent report produced in association with the Gatsby Foundation (David Sainsbury has a keen interest in technical skills) highlighted the need to (amongst other things) raise awareness of technician careers early and widely; close gender gaps through outreach and support; and simplify qualification routes and strengthen T-Level and Higher Technical Qualification (HTQ) uptake.

Bringing down the number of NEETs is something the new Government will need to tackle, with all the advice from the Milburn review and the experience of Manchester that Burnham seems set to bring. If more of them can be facilitated to enter the technical workforce, via T Levels or straight in after an unhappy period at school, it will benefit the individuals, the science base and the economy.

Posted in Andy Burnham, careers, education, Milburn Review, practical work, T Levels | Comments Off on Tackling the NEET Crisis

In which my list becomes achievable

Posted on 28 June 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

A wooden trug filled with courgettes, chard and potatoes, with secateurs and a trowel nearby, all on pink and grey patio stones in dappled sunlight.

Finally time to actually enjoy the meal

It never seems as if the academic stress will end, until suddenly, sometime in late June, it just does.

The students disperse for the academic year like fluffy tree pollen on the wind. The final marks are generated, moderated and uploaded; exam boards come and then recede into the past. Teaching noise subsides to low-level signal: letters of reference for master’s programs, open day activities, preparations for the new term. In this new-found quiet, other priorities can finally be heard.

Any scientist with a hefty teaching portfolio will look forward to summer as the chance to regain a small amount of time for research. It’s a bit like your energy bills, which are sky-high in winter, but relatively bearable in the warm months; it doesn’t mean your overall annual burden isn’t scandalously heavy, but you can breathe a bit easier when you aren’t hammering the central heating day in, day out.

For me, the release has not been like a pin popping a balloon, but rather a slow asymptotic hiss along the x-axis. There will always be some low-level of anxiety, but the past week was the first that I looked at my list and could finally start addressing items that had languished for months, patiently and modestly, at the very bottom. Important items with no deadline, meaning that, of course, they’d been perennially overlooked, like the person sitting in the Emergency Department for ten hours with a broken arm while around her, heart attack and stroke victims keep getting wheeled in.

My next major grant (or grants, depending on how I decide to slice the cake) is the most beloved but overlooked list item, finally cresting the top. I’ve been putting in grants all year, of course, and succeeding in many cases, but these have been either smaller bids, or as a module of larger consortium grants. Now, I’ve got my eye one something uniquely mine, substantial enough to keep the wolf from the door for a longer period of time.

Ideas have been bubbling up over the past year, pushed in various directions by my team’s latest results and by what’s been published by others in the field, but I just haven’t had the chance to grapple with them, mould them into shape. I suspect I’ve got two grants here, one either standalone, or a solid module of a more ambitious one. There’s also a third idea that I really want to pursue, but at this stage I’m not sure if it is the priority, should I decide to choose. It’s all very exciting, and during last week’s heat wave, while the trains stalled on their expanded rails, historic temperature records were broken repeatedly, and events were cancelled all over campus, I worked from home in front of the Dyson fan, spending several hours each day on the growing universe of my ideas. It’s a very solitary activity, combing through the literature, gazing at pilot data, resurrecting long-ago scribbled notes and sketches from brainstorms with collaborators, making that first foray to aims, objectives and hypotheses. But of all the work that I am required to do, this type of effort is both the most professorial, and also, the closest to the ideal I signed up for when I first decided I wanted to become a scientist.

Meanwhile on the home front, something similar is happening at this tail end of June. All the major frenetic chores of early spring and summer are past: the sowing, the nurturing, the potting on, the planting out, the constant vigilance towards tender seedlings against pests and weeds. Now, aside from watering, everything is more or less self-sufficient, spooling out with the usual inevitability. The soft fruits are peaking: raspberries, redcurrants, strawberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants. Courgettes lengthen, and we deep-fry their flowers. Lettuce, kale, chard, pak choi and beets are ready to harvest; chilis, tomatillos and tomatoes set and ripen. We dig up new potatoes, and await the peas and beans. On the trees, the cherries are past, along with the honeyberries and serviceberries, but apples, pears, plums, figs, hazelnuts, sweet chestnuts and blackberries swell on the branch. The grapevines send out tendrils in real time, unfurling hundreds of bunches of baby bunches all over the estate, while the parsnips and pumpkins bide their time, waiting for colder days. The bees fill their combs will honey, with minimum input from the clumsy white-clad humans who occasionally inspect their handiwork. My container flowers on the patio spill over with blooms.

With all the heavy industry behind me, I can now sit out back this weekend in a deck chair and just enjoy it: a list item I can seldom indulge in when there is gardening to do on top of academic chores. The heat has eased and the trees wave in the cool breeze. I read a novel. Fountains tinkle, the hens cluck, birds squabble at the feeders or sing, invisible, from within the foliage. All is dreamy and green, and Sunday doesn’t have that edge of pre-Monday dread. There are exactly 12 items on my list tomorrow, short enough to fit on a post-it note.

For once, I’ve got this.

Posted in academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Research, Scientific thinking, Teaching, The profession of science, work-life balance | Comments Off on In which my list becomes achievable

A Man of the People?

Posted on 21 June 2026 by Athene Donald

In the run-up to the recent Makerfield by-election, I saw comments to the effect that Andy Burnham couldn’t be the ‘man of the people’ he claimed to be, because he had been educated at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge. A remark like that implies that all the outreach work the University and all its constituent colleges do is pointless. That whether you came from a millionaire’s family and went to Eton, or were in care from an early age, coming from a dysfunctional family and going to the local comprehensive, you are equally a toff as soon as you set foot through an Oxbridge door. It is, of course, nonsense.

The role of any college is to give those whom they admit the best opportunity to achieve their potential. Those who came from Eton have many advantages that the comprehensive kid lacks (even knowing which cutlery to use for which course at formal dinners can be a strain for the latter; the former may not even notice it could be a challenge). An undergraduate in Oxbridge does not lose their background because they have entered a new world. There are of course many kids who go to Cambridge who carry with them a great deal of entitlement, which they then take on with them into later life. In Oxford, MPs from the Bullingdon Club seem to exemplify this issue. But that doesn’t mean you can write off every individual who went to Fitzwilliam or any of the other 30 Cambridge Colleges. That is merely simplistic, media laziness to promote such an attitude.

Do those people who automatically scoff at those who went to Oxbridge regardless of their background, have a pecking order of which universities allow you still to claim you have a disadvantaged background? Does UCL sit above or below this line? What about St Andrews? Fiona Hill, currently Chancellor of Durham University, is an interesting example of an alumna from this ancient Scottish University. She has written movingly about it in her 2021 book There is Nothing for you here: finding opportunity in the 21st century. She went to St Andrews University from a disadvantaged family background in a run-down former mining village outside Bishop Auckland, to a place where she said she felt very out of her depth. Of her background she said

‘Having aspirations wasn’t normal – or perhaps it just seemed pointless when you were unlikely to escape poverty or ever leave County Durham.’

As she put it, when she arrived she was surrounded by hordes of students who seemed to know what they were doing.

‘They were coasting along. They seemed to know everything. They exuded confidence. I was filled with self-doubt every time they spoke in class. They knew things I didn’t even know I should know. They sounded intelligent. I sounded hesitant.’

She did not have an easy time at St Andrews. In one case, a much posher student (who had attended the private and expensive Cheltenham Ladies College, no doubt another place which encourages a sense of entitlement) accused her of unfair tactics to get a good mark:

‘Did you sleep with [the tutor]? How could you have done so well? You’re just a common northerner.’

As this shows, bias comes in many forms, and it’s usually unpleasant. It is hard to imagine that any of Hill’s contemporaries went on to have more successful careers than she herself achieved: she became an official at the U.S. National Security Council when she was a presidential advisor to Donald Trump in his first term, specializing in Russian and European affairs. This same excelling over his contemporaries is likely to be true of Andy Burnham at Fitzwilliam, although it seems unlikely anyone accused him of sleeping with his tutor in order to get on, given common attitudes to double standards between men and women.

Too often, people want to put other people in boxes. It’s just another form of stereotyping, but like all such it is lazy and based on simplistic assumptions. A ‘common northerner’ could not be imagined by some to be competent in Hill’s case. For Burnham, that he studied at Cambridge eradicates his Liverpool roots. I know nothing about his upbringing, but he certainly – as Manchester Mayor – has made it clear he does not only represent the so-called metro-elite, even if inevitably he is seen as now belonging to it.

As I write, the likelihood of Burnham becoming Prime Minister shortly seems to be rising fast. Given my own interests and activities around education and skills, I will be watching with interest to see whether nationally he expresses as much interest in FE as he has within Manchester. Will this be done with actual funding or just warm words? What difference will it make to Alan Milburn’s recommendations around NEETs? Although they did not overlap in the Cabinet, they certainly overlapped as MPs. Time will tell how much control he might give to devolved regions to sort out their education system to fit the local economy, as he had wanted to do when he talked about an MBacc, wanting to create a qualification that he felt would serve local needs more than the national (and now out-dated) EBacc.

We need diversity in perspectives in Government as everywhere else. It is important that not all judges or MPs, for instance, have identical backgrounds, and I’m not denying that an Oxbridge education is typically a good one and is likely to convey advantages on their graduates, sometimes simply because employers take an Oxbridge degree as a crude form of credentialing. But one’s roots matter too, roots in terms of geography as well as ‘class’ or financial circumstances. All of these factors will impact on perspectives and need to be recognized as separate aspects of an individual. We live, as they say, in interesting times but please, media folk, can we avoid lazy stereotyping!

Posted in Andy Burnham, careers, education, Fiona Hill, Manchester, Oxbridge, stereotyping | Comments Off on A Man of the People?

Alex

Posted on 17 June 2026 by Richard Wintle

Jenny’s recent post about mental health in higher education seems, unfortunately, very timely. Seven months after the fact, I’ve learned that a singer, songwriter, and social worker I know has died. While I am privy to a few details, I don’t know much. She did speak openly about her own struggles with bipolar disorder, and you may, I suppose, make some inferences based on that.

In any case, here – for what it may be worth, and I hope the answer is “something helpful” – are a few words and a photograph. Alex McCulloch, friends.

 

“I have been in love, I’ve traveled, I’ve made art and I’ve helped people. Remember me as an artist, a lover, a friend, a niece, a sister and a daughter.”

Alex McCulloch, Rod Gun & Barbers

Alex McCulloch – a talented singer, songwriter, and performer – died one day after her 30th birthday, on October 20, 2025. I only knew her a little, through shows I went to at some well-known Toronto music venues. A staple on both Danforth Avenue and Queen Street West, Alex is missed by her audience, her friends and family, and the network of musicians that she knew, performed with, and supported.

I first met Alex in May of 2022. I’d gone to the Free Times Café to see folk musician Zack Elliott. As a bonus, Jessica Spurrell, filling in for an ailing Jessie Gosling, was also on the bill. The third act was Alex, completely unknown to me – and a revelation. A singer with a big voice and bigger words. I learned over the ensuing years that while she frequently surrounded herself with other talented musicians, she could also hold a room by herself – voice, guitar, and those songs that dipped into many personal experiences. In hindsight, it seems that some of those words described parts of her life that may have contributed to its end.

Alex leaves a legacy of astonishing music, full of incisive, clever wordplay and beautiful melodies. Her voice could slide, seemingly without effort, between raspy and silky-smooth. Her lyrics often blended the angular, rhythmic rhyming of hip-hop with the poignant poetry of the best folk music. Think Eminem-meets-Joni Mitchell, and you’re in the right ballpark. Drum Circle and Silver Spoon, both from her last EP Gord, are among the best examples. I suggest that you listen to those, and then dig deeper into her catalogue. You won’t be disappointed.

No-one, I suspect, can know what led Alex to the end of her life. What is left are the memories of those who knew her, and that astonishing body of songs, which should forever continue to be worth our attention. There is more information here, including an opportunity to donate to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, should you wish to.

Goodbye, Alex. I’m sorry you left us so soon, and I hope you’ve found peace. Thank you for your songs, your fearless words, your willingness to give them your voice, and your genuine happiness to see me when I made the effort to show up. I’m glad there are pictures left to look at, and songs we can listen to.

Posted in Alex McCulloch, mental health, Music, musician, singer, songwriter | Comments Off on Alex