Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

Following on from the ingenuity of our French post-doc, the ante has recently been upped by the lab’s Italian contingent. Continental shelf A cheap solution for all your live microscopy needs Feast your eyes on this little beauty. Necessità was … Continue reading →

This past Friday, though I didn’t realize it until well after midnight, marked my completion of a full year back in the lab. Time, as it always seems to do these days, has sped by more quickly than I would … Continue reading →

Biomedical research is a costly business. You don’t really get a visceral understanding of just how costly until you become the principal investigator on a hefty source of funding and start monitoring your own balance sheet. You can easily drop … Continue reading →

What, you may ask, is a rainy bank holiday weekend good for? I’ve have plenty to do in my self-inflicted rota of Purgatory extracurricular tasks, such as preparing the next issue of LabLit, giving my novel one final polish before … Continue reading →

Can being a writer actually make you a less efficient scientist? For the past few months I have been knee-deep in a high-throughput RNAi screen for pathways that affect cell shape and the actin cytoskeleton. Automated image analysis has come … Continue reading →

Sometimes works of the past can reach out across the centuries and speak directly with a timelessness and universality that their creators never dreamt they’d inspire. Still life Old natural history drawings continue to resonate Yesterday I attended an RSA … Continue reading →

Back in the days when my hair was longer, my blood hotter and my T-shirts, more tie-dyed, I used to be a rampant feminist. I earned my undergraduate degree at Oberlin College, which my fellow Americans will recognize as one … Continue reading →