Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tedium: it has its uses. Biological research is a complex activity requiring many different approaches. We spend a lot of our time making tools – modified plasmids, say, or a transgenic cell line – and the rest of the time … Continue reading →

Over the past few weeks, I’ve stepped in to help a colleague in need. I can’t go into any details, but let’s just say that owing to an astonishingly pedantic visa renewal technicality, a particular country’s immigration policy has necessitated … Continue reading →

I have always been fascinated by the untold narrative behind the precise dryness of scientific papers. So much is unsaid: the surges of triumph, the stupid mistakes, the bitter failures that litter the road to any accepted manuscript. Chronology is … Continue reading →

It’s Friday in many parts of the world, so I feel compelled to report the results of a very important experiment just performed by Rohn and colleagues. I don’t know about your institute, but our building manager occasionally distributes freebies … Continue reading →

OK, I admit it: Gravity’s Rainbow was even less popular a choice for Fiction Lab than I could ever have imagined. Book clubs, I am reliably and belatedly informed, are supposed to be about good clean fun, fairly easy reads … Continue reading →

Scientific methodology seems to come in distinct phases for me. One month I’m knee-deep in biochemistry; the next it’s all confocal microscopy on cells, or annotating images onscreen. This is part of what I love about research: the familiarity of … Continue reading →

I think there must be a gene for it: the innate ability to think about biological cause-and-effect as an abstract pathway instead of as concrete machinery. Classical geneticists do it effortlessly. Their vocabulary is old and rich: synthetic lethal; partial … Continue reading →

Remember the days when at the end of a postdoctoral stint, you could copy all of your files – documents, spreadsheets, presentations, data images and email – onto a couple of 5¼ inch floppy diskettes and sashay out of the … Continue reading →

It’s a sunny holiday weekend, and a young woman’s thoughts turn to murder. Gastropod murder, in particular. I’ve been doing a lot of gardening over the past few weeks, and it’s all-out war. In addition to the usual complement of … Continue reading →

I am back in London after nearly a month away in Germany, and it is an incredible relief to be home. In my absence, the UK Parliament imploded, my seed potatoes sprouted into healthy plants, swine flu came and (possibly) … Continue reading →