{"id":717,"date":"2013-07-19T14:15:21","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T14:15:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/?p=717"},"modified":"2013-08-29T12:57:20","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T12:57:20","slug":"happy-birthday-dc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/2013\/07\/19\/happy-birthday-dc\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday DC"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DC\"<\/a>It is a pleasure to wish a Happy Birthday today to my friend Professor David Colquhoun<\/a>, who, as he reaches the palindromic age of 77, is still fighting the various fights for good science – and reality in general – and against ‘Unreality’, managerial bullshit, Prince Charles and his ‘knight-starved’ toadies, and all sorts of other things. To see the kind of pace David is maintaining (which makes me tired just to read about it) see the ‘Diary’ page on his blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I got to know David reasonably well a few years ago through our shared interest in debunking ‘pro-Unreality’ folk (like homeopaths)<\/a>, and managerial bullshit<\/a>, as well as a shared admiration for the late, great AV Hill<\/a>. I was particularly pleased that when I was editing Physiology News<\/em> we ran David’s wonderful article on ‘How To Get Good Science’<\/a>, (or PDF<\/a>) which seems more prophetic with every passing year.<\/p>\n

However, I actually first met David much longer ago – thirty years ago , in fact – when I was a callow and very inexperienced PhD student at UCL. I think I will take the risk of embarrassing David – if he should ever read this – by explaining how.<\/p>\n

As a very green first year PhD student one of my main jobs was to ‘validate’ the use of the resonance frequency of inorganic phosphate, in 31-P NMR spectra, to estimate the pH of the solution the inorganic phosphate was dissolved\u00a0 in. The interesting point was that this solution might be the cytoplasm of a living cell, including inside an intact organ. However. in practise what I mostly did for my first year was run a lot of titrations of ‘model solutions’, generating numerous rather dull titration curves.<\/p>\n

In these days of ubiquitous personal computers, Excel and stats packages, it may seem surprising that the issue of fitting a titration curve to the experimental data was not one with an easy off-the-shelf pre-packaged solution, but back them (1983 or early 1984) it wasn’t – at least not in the lab where I worked. If we wanted to fit a theoretical curve to the data we would need to work out how. My supervisor didn’t know how, and nor did the lab head. A statistician we consulted via the UCL ‘Stats Clinic’ was clearly both startled and amused we would ask him anything so basic, and referred us to ‘a man called Colquhoun in Pharmacology… he’s written a basic stats book and knows about these things’<\/span><\/p>\n

So I rang David up, and trotted along to see him with my question about fitting titration curves. Thinking back, he was also clearly a bit surprised the answer wasn’t obvious to me, muttering something like “Errm… well, it’s a sum of least squares, isn’t it?”<\/span> On spotting that this wasn’t something that automatically made sense to me, he took the time to explain least-squares curve fitting, so that I could go back and program it on my lab\u2019s much-prized Hewlett Packard – and only – computer (probably one of these<\/a>, from the look of it). . He was very gracious about it, sparing an hour of his time (which I dare say he couldn’t afford), and never actually saying anything like: ‘Surely you know how to do this?’<\/span> – even if he might have been thinking it. Many years later this data finally appeared in a paper here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Looking back from the perspective of being not-too-far-off the sort of age David was then, what strikes me is that he treated my question with complete seriousness, even though I wasn’t his student and it wasn’t really a very interesting question. I was reminded of this some years later when I read something David had written in a beautiful piece about one of his heroes, Bernard Katz<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“[Katz\u2019s] lack of pomposity is nicely illustrated by an occasion in 1974 when a young PhD student was giving his first demonstration at a Physiological Society meeting. The demonstration involved voltage-clamp of muscle fibres, and his supervisor had properly suggested that when a visitor came in to see the demonstration, he should be asked if he was familiar with the methods before launching into an explanation. A middle aged man came in and \u2018I went through the motions and asked him if he was familiar with the method, to which he replied \u201c..a little…\u201d. I then explained my demonstration, to which he listened patiently\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was only later that the student discovered that his visitor had been BK, who had spared the student\u2019s blushes by not revealing his identity. It was the universal experience of his colleagues that he was a person with enormous enthusiasm, always willing to discuss with the most junior of them the details of their work and to offer advice.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Somehow, that description of BK always reminded me of my first meeting with David three decades ago, and also made me think of the way in which the best of scientific traditions are passed on down the generations. Though as a scientist I am several leagues below David, let alone BK, I’d like to think that over the years I have tried to do the same when approached by students and colleagues with queries and questions.<\/p>\n

Anyway – happy birthday, DC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is a pleasure to wish a Happy Birthday today to my friend Professor David Colquhoun, who, as he reaches the palindromic age of 77, is still fighting the various fights for good science – and reality in general – … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,8,5,9,1,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-getting-old","category-history","category-pseudoscience","category-the-life-scientific","category-uncategorized","category-universities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}