Author Archives: Jennifer Rohn

For those of you who’ve been away on holiday and are struggling with your first few days back at the bench, I feel your pain, brothers and sisters. It is a truth universally acknowledged that in the wind-down to significant … Continue reading →

Having just touched down in London from SciFoo 2008, I stare, tinged with jetlag, at the blank page and wonder how anyone could adequately summarize a get-together so bizarrely wonderful. Spoiled for choice Dueling, self-organized sessions at the Googleplex in … Continue reading →

The scientific method, it seems, isn’t just a professional ethos. It’s a way of life. I thought about this today as I was fly fishing up a tricky stretch of Chalk Creek, an icy, milky-green stream that cascades downward through … Continue reading →

Sometimes even the most innocuous events can have serious consequences. In a recent post, Henry related a lab nightmare of Hieronymus Boschian proportions which, on waking, made him thank Dawkins that he was no longer a practicing scientist. This, in … Continue reading →

When I think back to what influenced me most to become a scientist, I have never been able to pinpoint a precise moment. Like many children, I captured moths and fireflies in jam jars, played around with chemistry sets, polished … Continue reading →

At the end of this week I am taking the Life in the UK citizenship test as part of my bid to secure indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom. So I spent much of this weekend cramming from … Continue reading →

I was chatting with Richard the other day about his pet protein ZRANB2. Something about the name rang a bell, and sure enough I found that one of its orthologues was present in my own cell morphology screen. I was … Continue reading →

Hell hath no fury like the temperament of a bureaucrat designing immigration forms. I cannot think of anything other than a vengeful spirit, possibly brought on by a thwarted love affair, that could have led anyone to compose the sentence … Continue reading →

Our first Fiction Lab – a monthly book club at the Royal Institution dedicated to great science novels – was a rousing success. A diverse collection of scientists and non-scientists gathered to pick apart Philip Balls’ The Sun and Moon … Continue reading →

If you view biology as spanning a scale from the very large (blue whales) to the very small (organic compounds), I have almost always lurked around the miniscule end of the spectrum. My first stint of undergraduate research involved trying … Continue reading →