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Handel’s Messiah

Posted on 14 May 2026 by Frank Norman

I’m having a big clearout at home and have been discarding most of my collection of old concert programmes. These are a mix of concerts that I’ve sung in and concerts that I’ve attended, going back to about 1973. It’s a bit of a wrench to throw things away that represent old memories, particularly of my choral singing career, but I’ve decided that I am not defined by old bits of paper. I am keeping just a handful of them.

One I am keeping is one of the oldest – an old concert programme from 1974. It was a folded A4 sheet, printed in that blue ink that used to be commonplace in the 1970s. It was for a concert of Handel’s Messiah and I’m pretty sure that I sang in it.  It was memorable as both the first concert I had sung in that was not a school thing, and also the first time I had heard a countertenor singing live. The programme is dated ‘Saturday 2nd March’, but with no year specified. That day was a Saturday in 1968, 1974 and 1985 and 1974 is the only year that makes sense to me.

The previous year my school choir (Salesian School, Chertsey) had performed the Messiah, under our new head of music Father Thomas Carroll. This school performance was the first time I’d sung such a large piece of music, with soloists and orchestra. The soloists were competent but not fantastic. I remember the soprano was one of the nuns who taught at the linked girls school and she had a rather shrill tone. The tenor was a teacher from another school – he was called Trevor I recall – and I experienced a sense of jeopardy whenever he went for the top notes. Anyway, me and my mates in the choir had learnt the music pretty well and it was very rewarding to sing – the first of many times I’ve sung the piece.

Then in March 1974 Father Carroll arranged for a few of us tenors and basses to join in another performance, in south London. This was being put on by a young man, Peter, who was a past student of Fr Carroll at the Salesian School at Battersea, where Fr Carroll had taught music before he came to us at Chertsey. Peter needed some extra male singers to boost the choir – there’s never enough tenors and basses – and he turned to his old teacher to provide some young voices. It was a bit of an adventure for us. Fr Carroll drove us in the school minibus all the way to Streatham.

In my memory the concert took place in the Catholic cathedral at Southwark, but I think I must have imagined that. The fact I possess this programme suggests it must be from the performance that we sang in. I don’t think I would have attended a concert in Streatham, south London to listen to Messiah in 1974.  I didn’t make that kind of excursion far from home back in 1974.  I’ve looked at my old 1974 diary for corroboration but there was nothing marked in for that date.

I don’t remember much about the performance. I had a general sense that it was a big deal (well, it was for me but probably not really on the scale of things). The church we sang in was far more atmospheric and acoustically satisfying than the school hall that we had previously performed in. The orchestral players were good – probably semi-professional players – and the soloists were far better than at our school performances.  The sound of the countertenor soloist in particular entranced me – so pure and bewitching. His aria ‘But who shall abide the day of his coming’ stands out in my memory.

I was pleased to re-find the actual programme for this concert and to remember that occasion. When I looked at it I was somewhat astonished to read the names of two of the soloists: Rod Williams and Ms Rozario. Both are superstars of the UK and international classical music scene today. I couldn’t believe that as a schoolboy I had sung Messiah with these two in a church in Streatham.

I looked more carefully, and was surprised to see that Ms Rozario was listed as a contralto. She is known as a soprano, able to sing very high top notes, and famed for her work with John Tavener’s music. Rod Williams is known not just for his fine baritone voice but he also conducts and composes.

I then looked at these two singers’ Wikipedia pages. Patricia Rozario was born in 1960, so she would have been 14 years old at the time of this concert. It seemed unusual and unlikely that she would take on a solo role at that age. Roderick Williams was born in 1965 so he would have been just 9 years old. That seemed impossible.

Programme for performance of Handel’s Messiah, 1974

I felt perplexed, as though I was experiencing some time warp phenomenon. Then I looked at the programme more closely. The contralto soloist was named as Rita Rozario – not the now-famous Patricia Rozario. The bass soloist was named as Rodney Williams – not Roderick Williams. I don’t know where Rita and Rodney are now, nor whether they were ever mistaken for Patricia and Roderick in the past 50 years.

If I had been more switched on I might also have noticed that the concert was conducted by Peter Hook, co-founder of the popular beat combo Joy Division. I’m not familiar with their music. He was born in 1956, so he could almost have been conducting Messiah in 1974, but I note that he was born in Salford and attended Salford Grammar School, not the Battersea Salesian School. So it was probably a different Peter Hook.

Just imagine that fantasy concert though – Patricia Rozario, Roderick Williams, Peter Hook and Frank Norman all on one stage singing Handel’s Messiah!

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What I Read In March And April

Posted on 11 May 2026 by Henry Gee

Oh, gosh, I wrote somewhere that a sure sign of unwillingness to write is an untended blog. I really ought to have qualified this. I’m just about to almost fast approaching coming to the top of another book deal – more about that anon – which will indeed involve a lot of writing, but first it requires a great deal of reading. Being the kind of person (that is, a trained scientist) who when making a statement about anything without a reference will feel as if venturing out of doors in a state of deshabille, I will always go back to the sauce tzores source, take notes, and follow up further references, which accumulate faster than I can read them. This has generated a large pile of light reading amid which I currently find myself.

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Some light reading, recently. This box contains almost 200 references on a subject people know almost nothing about. Exhausting but not exhaustive.

This means that I don’t have much time to write this blog, in particular to update my list of books read in the preceding month, which is becoming every two months. So here is what I read (or, mostly, listened to) during the past couple of months. Apologies for the brevity.

John Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders – The human habit of drawing lines on maps seems no more strange than when one is flying  above the ground in an airliner, or even in a spacecraft, revealing that these borders don’t really exist. For all that they are so insubstantial, they do cause a great deal of trouble. This entertaining read reveals the secret plans of Britain and France to carve up the Ottoman Empire (and we all know how well that went) to revealing why Bolivia has a navy, even though it’s landlocked. And other stuff.

John Le Carre: Smiley’s People – the conclusion of the trilogy that began with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and continued with The Honourable Schoolboy in which self-effacing spook George Smiley finally gets … well, that would spoil it. The writing is gorgeous, stately, measured. The character studies precise and detailed. You can practically smell the raincoats and cigarette ends and see the haloes of smog round the lamp posts.

Stella Rimington: At Risk When I discovered that my longtime friend Professor A. L. of London shares my new-found love of spy thrillers he recommended the works of former real-life spy chief Stella Rimington as easy reads that go down without touching the sides. Or, in my case, easy listens while walking the dogs. At Risk is the first of several novels featuring MI5 agent Liz Carlyle.  Lots of twists and high drama, well plotted and straightforwardly delivered. I objected to one thing – the author’s habit of dividing sentences to show that the character is doing two things at once. As Dr Gee took another swig of his coffee, he noticed a spelling mi$take. But that’s really just a matter of taste.

qntm: There Is No Antimemetics Division This was a recommendation from Natasha Pulley, one of my favourite authors of modern fantasy, so was not to be missed. And it’s a doozy. Weird, sui generis, inventive to a degree, I’ve come across nothing remotely like it, the closest (and for weirdness rather than setting) is The Vorrh by Brian Catling (which made my Book Of The Year some years back). The premise is simple – we all know about memes – that is, ideas that propagate themselves, perhaps to a greater degree than their inherent worth deserves. But what if there are antimemes? Ideas, concepts or even objects that hide their own existence, and even compromise the memories of those who come across them? Compelling, thought-provoking, terrifying – this will be a contender for my best book of 2026. Thanks, Ms Pulley, for that recommendation.

Stella Rimington: Secret Asset Here our heroine Liz Carlyle is worried about her agent working to foil an Islamist plot, but is taken off the case to expose a mole in MI5.

Adrian Tchaikovsky Children of Strife This is the fourth in the increasingly inaccurately named Children trilogy (Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Children of Memory). Tchaikovsky bows to no-one in his ability to get inside the minds of aliens, and Children of Earth deservedly won awards. But the problem with sequelae of books with long, complex plots and vast casts of characters is that it’s increasingly hard to move the plot along without losing people, unless you can constantly revisit past lives and past contexts. Children of Strife suffers rather badly from this. The story is great, but moves with the speed of an arthritic sloth. And it’s not helped by the fact that many of the characters are really, really unsympathetic.

Stella Rimington: Illegal Action Liz Carlyle goes undercover to protect Russian emigre, art connoisseur and Putin critic Nikita Brunovsky, who MI5 think is at risk of assassination by a Russian secret agent. But is he?

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Jealousy, Bullying, Harassment and Other Bad Behaviour

Posted on 10 May 2026 by Athene Donald

Recently I sat down to dinner with two old friends, one male,one female. Our conversation turned to harassment and what emerged was pretty grim. The man referred to an incident when an older and powerful woman had groped him during an important conversation (presumably under the table), which I guess was not a story I was expecting. The woman, like me, could share many incidences of petty indignities and inappropriate behaviour occurring at different career stages. We had all survived, but were no doubt coloured by our experiences.

But harassment, and its close relation bullying, comes in many flavours. It doesn’t have to be sexual in nature, but it almost invariably involves some sort of power imbalance, real or perceived. That is why it is so particularly common directed against early career researchers, but power can take many shapes. Who controls budgets, teaching loads or signing off of grants, for instance, each of which will give a measure of power regardless of seniority. Does it count as bullying when a senior professor, I’ll call them Professor Z, refuses to teach, because it’s more important to get grants, and so leaves the work to junior faculty (Dr Y) – who of course can’t then find the time to apply for grants themselves? This is such a common problem in my experience (although not, I’m glad to say, in my own department where such behaviour was not tolerated). If that does count as bullying, who is the perpetrator? The junior faculty member is put in an impossible position since who do they complain to? Should it be the head of the teaching committee (or equivalent), the head of department or Professor Z? Each will pass the buck undoubtedly, and the complainant will gain a black mark against their name simply for complaining. Yet the reality is that the power imbalance is being used in ways that hinder the career progression of Dr Y.

That is a clear case of egotism/selfishness driving bad behaviour. There are many other motivators ranging from anxiety to jealousy, causing bullying across the faculty chain, and so often no one does anything. On one occasion, when I was on a panel appointing a new lecturer, one professor (Professor A) essentially accused me of not knowing what I was talking about, although I was the most expert member in the room on the particular sub-discipline in question, and certainly more knowledgeable than Professor A was in the area. I was so taken aback I said nothing. Nor did anyone else. At my subsequent appraisal I raised the matter, surprised both that no one had defended me nor had any follow-up apology been made. I was told the professor in question was waiting for me to apologise. For what? Again, I was too startled to defend myself. It left me feeling isolated and uncertain. The cause of the outburst was undoubtedly because I wasn’t being supportive of Professor A’s preferred candidate, and so he chose this particular weapon to neutralise my position. It’s easy to deconstruct the remark with hindsight. I’d like to think in later years I’d have been better able to defend myself.

Jealousy can play out in lots of ways, such as an attempt to knock an opponent out of the action, and can be implemented at a structural level, even – as I’m observing from afar – directed against senior and successful folk by other senior but less successful academics. A head of department can facilitate such action, by blocking funding or space to go to the successful professor (let’s call them Professor L) to allow their work to flourish. Why would they want to do this? Jealousy again, or possibly an unwise decision to back the wrong horse.   Professor L can sit there puzzled why their loyal behaviour – perhaps fulfilled by dutifully and brilliantly delivering their teaching load – and excellent grant successes are being penalised. Again, just as for a younger colleague, making a complaint can only cause the behaviour to worsen.

What head of department wants to be reminded of their misjudgements? They can feel guilty and lash out as a result. I was once greeted by one head of department, who undoubtedly had just caved in to a more senior professor to my detriment, with the completely gob-smacking but effective remark of ‘how long do you want to rant at me this time, Athene?’. Yet again, I had no response; he had successfully neutralised my would-be complaint, while making it clear I could let off steam and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Do they teach senior management useful phrases like this to derail complainants? Was that harassment or bullying? It was certainly using a power imbalance to put me in my place and, the source in this case, was undoubtedly and rather visibly that the head of department had felt his own weakness in the face of another senior professor’s no doubt tantrum.

That was but a passing annoyance, with fairly limited damage to me. But a long-running campaign against Professor L can be much more damaging, and yet can occur slowly but steadily over years. When PhD students are distributed, does Professor L get their fair share over the years? When a university sift for a big grant call is carried out, does Professor L’s undoubtedly strong case make the cut? When they are elected to their national academy, does the department celebrate or does it say – as happened to a friend of mine – that it ‘wasn’t their turn’ and therefore they wouldn’t celebrate the success? To take an extreme example, when Christiane Nűsslein-Volhard was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Director of her institute told her ‘Can you please organise the champagne yourself. I’ve no time to take that.’ As she put it ‘some colleagues couldn’t bear I got the prize.’

Our universities are as full of insecure people as anywhere else, indeed it’s probably a worse environment because competition sits at the heart of what we do, the drive to be first, to get that grant, to receive that accolade and so on. So, being flawed human beings, people will use whatever weapons they have to hand, driven by jealousy and anxiety.

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The Desolation of Success

Posted on 3 May 2026 by Athene Donald

Does this phrase strike a chord with you? Apparently, it first appeared in Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, but I came across it quoted in Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s moving memoir Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman. As she puts it, and here she is discussing the feelings of those who get elected to the National Academy of Sciences:

Success and its presumed partner, happiness, are ever-receding.

In other words, however much those who aspire to election feel unhappy each year that passes them by without the desired recognition, yet when it arrives it merely confirms that success doesn’t bring unlimited happiness.  She also recognizes it as a feeling associated with, for instance, the award of tenure (in the US system), that feeling of a loss of meaning when the outcome is actually achieved.

Why struggle onward with new scientific discoveries, when only a few people in the world really care? What do I have to work toward now?

I wonder how common that reaction to tenure – or any other measure of success – really is. I know, when I was promoted to Reader (that obscure and now defunct title in the University of Cambridge that, in my day, was the stepping stone between what was still the career grade of Lecturer and full Professor), my reaction was ‘is that it?’ A reflection of the fact that, having worked flat out to establish myself and try to convince myself that I did indeed deserve to be on the Physics faculty, I suddenly wondered if that level of commitment had really been worth it. In time I adjusted, and did not have the same reaction when, a few years later, I got further promoted to Professor. I was simply overjoyed. Nevertheless, that phrase, the desolation of success, did resonate with me when I read it in the Elkins-Tanton book.

It is just another way of referring to the old idea, that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. A long-wished-for destination may turn out to be, if not dust and ashes, at the very least less than had been hoped for when it finally turns up. It is as true in academia as anywhere else in life. And, academia being the competitive world that it is, it is also so much easier to remember the things that didn’t work out, compared with those that did. To smart from that rejection letter from the editor of Nature twenty years after the event, or to recall a position that had briefly seemed like your dream opportunity, but which went – naturally unfairly in your opinion – to your lab mate. Schadenfreude points out that in fact the project you didn’t get a chance to take on went nowhere and you were well out of it, but it’s the rejection that stings, however long ago this all took place.

Nevertheless, in terms of the opposite of the desolation of success, maybe one should also consider that there are upsides to failure. After all, would one paper in Nature from 20 years ago really transform a lifetime of research, however wounding the rejection felt at the time. Much of the impact, at least internally, will be how one copes with it. Does it spur one on to better things, to work harder or perhaps change field – or even career to somewhere better suiting your strengths? Or does it prompt an extended period of self-loathing and depression? We are all different in how we cope with such setbacks, and context really matters, so that how we cope with one rejection may bear no relation to our reaction to a different one.

As I indicated above, I certainly felt an element of the ‘desolation of success’ when I’d achieved more than I’d ever dreamt of by mid-career. But earlier, I had responded very positively to a kick in the teeth when failing to get the position I thought was in the bag. I’d been somewhat coasting while waiting (for months) for a formal decision and was stunned by my failure. However, I was so annoyed I thought ‘I’d show them’ and reapplied myself with great vigour, transforming myself from being somewhat idle in the lab to an absolutely determined researcher. Those around me must have been startled since I was too embarrassed to explain my reinvention, the cause of which would have been invisible to them. The upshot of all this was that, far from heading back to the USA as a faculty member, I stayed in the UK, working my way up through the system, starting with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship awarded from its first cohort. Staying in the UK is definitely not something I regret, but it’s curious to think what a key turning point that moment was. Rejection can be good for you – but only sometimes.

I guess the ‘moral’ of this post is to say, success – in whatever field – may not necessarily bring joy, nor failure mean disaster. If failure turns you aside into a more healthy direction (perhaps instead of following the dreams of others for you, but finally pursuing your own) it may be the best thing that ever happened. Or it may not. But do not assume anyone who is a ‘success’ is necessarily happy. They may instead be constantly chasing the next trophy and never feeling satisfied, as there is always another target to aim at.

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In which the road forks and the future splinters

Posted on 2 May 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

A lab with bright light coming through the window

The end of a long road

It’s that time of year when prospective undergraduates are considering their various offers to study at university. As the Admissions Tutor for a large BSc programme, I’ve been spending a lot of time fielding hundreds of queries by email. And as a novelist, I am particularly sensitive to the backstory behind all these raw dramas – each a young person, often wanting to become a scientist and struggling with this pivotal decision in the face of a world that seems too big to truly know the right answer. In their minds, this choice is one of the key inflection points of their lives.

I keep my responses helpful and professional, but what I really want them to know is that no decision is right or wrong – that their life will unfurl and bloom no matter what they decide. There is no control twin to take the other path, against which outcomes can be compared. It can all swerve off-script but then eventually, come out right.

This is what I don’t tell them:

Once upon a time in a land far across the sea, a little girl dreamed of becoming a scientist.

The dream came from literally nowhere: no family member had ever expressed an interest in science, and she knew no role models personally that might have ignited this spark. She watched documentaries on public television, and devoured books about science from the library, including a fictional series about a boy who solved scientific mysteries with a supportive (though disappointingly submissive) female sidekick and a nutty old professor. One of her first memories was a flickering black-and-white square with faraway voices talking about small steps and giant leaps.

She collected fireflies in jars, swooped butterflies into her net and looked at planets and moons through her father’s telescope. She studied hard and did well at school, suffering the small cruelties doled out to students who enjoyed learning. She gained a liberal arts degree at a prestigious undergraduate institution in the Midwest, majoring in Biology but broadening her viewpoint with a wide variety of other courses, from archeology, geology and literature to Ancient Greek, linguistics and ethnomusicology. She waved placards at demonstrations, played tenor pans in the school’s steel drum band and – living in the shadow of a massive government loan – was able to afford food and toiletries only by working multiple odd jobs on and off campus: drawing advertising posters for the college catering company; doing admin at a local art museum; scrubbing the excrement from mouse cages in the science building. Each afternoon she parked her rusty bicycle outside the massive concrete cube of the main library and spent more than eight hours a day studying.

In her final summer of university she spent a few months in Bethesda, doing research at the National Cancer Institute. The viral papilloma genes she studied made no sense to anyone, a vast black box of mystery. Today it all seems obvious, but then, she felt like no one would ever understand – and that was exciting, but it also made her a little wistful. She cultured cervical cancer cells, treated them with cytokines and chemotherapeutics, and did flow cytometry with a middle-aged tech who liked to slurp icy soft drinks from a straw as she operated the machine. During one bomb threat evacuation, she looked up from the lawn and through a window high above, saw firemen trying unsuccessfully to pull a resisting white-coated researcher from his experiments.

The summer was long, and hot in more than one way; during one lab mishap, she spilled radioactive iodine-125 (half-life, 59.49 days) onto her favorite boots and some grim-faced white-coated men came to take them away. (“When can I have them back?” she asked. “In about 150 years,” came the terse reply.) She doesn’t remember how she got home in stockinged feet, but does recall that the postdoc in charge of her got a bad telling off from the department head. This wasn’t the same post-doc who sneeringly told her that girls made terrible scientists, so why was she even bothering, and convinced the department head allow him to use her as a slave, photocopying hundreds of articles from heavy journal compendiums in the dim NIH library stacks.

There was never any question that she would earn her PhD and become a jobbing scientist. The path was as well-lit as a motorway, pointing in only one direction. She got into her first-choice graduate program in the Pacific Northwest and finished six years later with half a dozen papers and several postdoctoral job offers – one made on the spot at a poster session at a high-profile East Coast conference. The future seemed bright.

The postdoc in London started out well, but somewhere along the way it all began to unravel. The lab head decided to move his lab to America eighteen months in, and she didn’t want to go back. She moved to the Netherlands for love and joined an exciting start-up company. Four years later the venture went bankrupt and the dream seemed over. Unemployed, the novels started pouring out of her as if she was possessed, but she couldn’t find any lab willing to gamble on someone on the dole. Eventually she accepted that the road had ended, and went into scientific publishing back in London, the only place that still felt like home. Many years later she found her way back to academia, and after a few false starts, found the line of research that finally clicked.

Fast-forward to now, and she is well-established, enjoying the culmination of all her dreams. Maybe she has never been happier, caught in the confluence of having the right team, sufficient funding, the perfect experimental system, the ride-or-die friends and collaborators, the international standing, the few years’ distance from a toxic situation that nearly broke her and – after two decades at the university – the proleptic appointment that has finally given her career security.

So many infection points, so many agonising decisions – but in the end it all came out right.

If only somehow had told her, early on, that it would. That no decision is the wrong one, that an infinite number of paths lead to happiness.

She probably wouldn’t have believed it.

Posted in academia, careers, Nostalgia, Research, The profession of science, Women in science | Comments Off on In which the road forks and the future splinters

Women in Tech: A Call for Action

Posted on 27 April 2026 by Athene Donald

283 years! That was the figure the DSIT Secretary of State stated would be the length of time it would take, at current rates of progress, for women to make up 50% of the Tech workforce at a reception at Number 10 last week, to celebrate the work of the Women in Tech taskforce. She spoke with great passion about the need to ensure full involvement of women in this sector. As she said, it’s not just the moral case, but the imperative of making sure women’s concerns are addressed, be it in healthcare, femtech or any of the other spheres in which AI and its like are blossoming yet women are not.

Beside her stood Anne-Marie Imafidon, the taskforce’s co-chair, whose work with young girls through Stemettes has been so influential, for both the individual girls and the community. Her work is part of the effort to make sure the pipeline of female talent is healthy, that young girls are not deterred because of societal attitudes (including of their peers) but flourish in those subjects that feed into the tech arena in later years. Children are very susceptible to the views of the adults around them, or that they see on a screen. There is plenty of evidence to this effect, such as the long-running ASPIRES project, led by Louise Archer, one of the task force members. The Institute of Physics has likewise investigated the wider problems for girls in the classroom over many years, and suggested initiatives to reduce the obvious gender biases. Yet, little seems to be changing. I’m not sure where the precise figure of 283 years that Liz Kendall mentioned came from, but a glacial speed of change seems about right.

At the moment, the taskforce is focussing on women already in the workforce, making sure they thrive there and that they move into leadership roles without bias and outdated attitudes thwarting their progression. Work on the talent pipeline will come later this summer.  One hopes that work coming out of the Curriculum and Assessment Review will feed into that, making Computing GCSE, for instance, more appealing. That is one of the subjects set for a major refresh, so there should be lots of scope to make the content both relevant to the world of today (and not the world of ten plus years ago) and not just designed for the type of kid who sees building kit as the be all and end all of computing, or have Steve Jobs or Bill Gates as their heroes. The world of tech has changed and the sorts of people moving into it need to change too. Diversity of thought and approach will only become increasingly important; they are also badly needed, if we are to create AI systems, for instance, which are representative of all of society.

Liz KendallSecretary of State, Liz Kendall, at the reception

But it isn’t just the content of the curriculum that needs a refresh, but also the way the gender stereotypes are handled, both in course materials and in the language (and actions) in the classroom. If teachers, or peers, imply girls don’t belong in the world of tech, in maths, physics of engineering, many girls will take that to heart. To give a couple of recent examples that have come my way, a female primary class teacher who admits she struggles with maths may lead the girls to assume they are likely to struggle too, and the boys to internalise the idea that girls/women are just useless at the subject. Both may carry those ideas forward into later life, neither of which will be healthy views to hold.

And in a different, but parallel example, showing how early on girls internalise messages I could cite a 6 year old family member who wanted to play football. The first club she joined was allegedly mixed, but she was the only girl and consequently miserable. A girls only club was located; a definite improvement until a girl in her class stated baldly that ‘girls don’t play football’, after which she gave up. Replace football with computing or coding and it is all too easy to see why the current pipeline of girls is so poor. Even when surrounded by other girls at the club, a single negative view can be enough to act as a deterrent. One would hope in a classroom that a teacher might quash such statements, but that requires both that a teacher heard the remark and that they felt it was inappropriate. It is that latter requirement that I fear may not always be fulfilled, and why I would like to see more attention paid to the topic of gender stereotyping across every school, as well as in teacher training.

outside no 10 for women in tech reception Outside the famous door of No 10.

In the room at No 10 last week, there was a palpable buzz. Many like-minded women (and almost entirely women, perhaps not surprisingly although that does trouble me a little), all of us committed to the ‘cause’ and active in one way or another. It was a stimulating day – quite apart from the interest that I, for one, felt in stepping through that famous black door – and much food for thought, as well as a metaphorical call for further action from everyone in the room.

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In which I come home

Posted on 26 April 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

Jenny at the podium about to give a talk
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been caught in the flurry of the early-spring conference season, crisscrossing continents to take part in that most ritualistic of scientific pastimes: networking, giving talks, sliding through poster sessions, drinking bad coffee from steel containers, frequenting foreign bars, fighting jetlag and never quite getting enough sleep in a series of anonymous hotels. Business travel, something that I used to love, has now become a chore whose ending I anticipate.

Conferences were much more exciting as a young, early-career researcher, when every contact felt like an instant friend and every new city, a gift. Travel memories as a PhD student and postdoc are branded into my mind, sporadic but intense: a smoky basement bar in Kyoto. Eating street food in the sulphur-yellow air of Beijing. The leafy greenness of Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. An ocean-side bar in San Diego, a wine cellar in Berkeley, a snow-heaped square in Boston. A boat on Bingen am Rhein, or on the Seine under a flashy Eiffel Tower. A monastery in Sicily, where the Franciscan friars rode mopeds around the estate and made morning bowls of perfect lattes and decent red wine with dinner, clay tiles flying off the roof and smashing on the courtyard during a windstorm heavy with Saharan dust. A chilly afternoon in Philadelphia with snowflakes spiralling down when, still unbeknownst to me, I carried a child that I lost a few months later. Swimming in the hot air and cool sea with other delegates in Sorrento. Stifling summers in Washington DC, in Columbus, Ohio, drugged crickets whirring in breathless hot nights. A ferry to Bainbridge Island off Seattle; a cliffside venue in Portugal; a winter restaurant with flickering candles in Copenhagen. How privileged my life has been, and how strange to now feel the same privileges to be burdensome.

When you are young, everything feels like an adventure, and your fellow travellers, like comrades in arms. When you are older, you retire to the bar with the other aging principal investigators to enjoy academic gossip and a quiet drink before tucking yourself into bed by 10 – but wake to WhatsApp messages on the lab channel, full of videos of your team riding a mechanical bull under disco lights at 1.30 AM in Nashville. And you wonder when that transition happened, and feel a little pang of loss.

But it is the domestic situation that holds my heart in thrall. When I leave my garden, I feel like I’m saying goodbye to a close friend, and when I return home, I mourn having missed the peak of this tulip variety or of that bluebell, and marvel at the three-inch layer of goosegrass that has overwhelmed everything else in my absence. My son, aged 12, going on 40, has somehow grown two inches and become twice as articulate. Time pushes forward, relentless and inevitable, whether I am there to witness the transition or not.

In the abstract, I know that scientific travel is irreplaceable. No hybrid lurking can replace the flesh-and-blood interactions of a few intense days of scientific exchange; no publication can substitute for a senior author up on the podium, publicising its highlights, and no email exchange can supersede the warm, spontaneous dialogue that happens when two or more academics put their heads together and scientific sparks fly. I’ve returned from my travels with a list of new ideas and a half a dozen potential collaborations under discussion, and I look forward to seeing how those pan out.

And yet…as I sit here on my back patio in the fading afternoon light of the weekend, I am weary of my travels and relieved to be home, the quiet center where all of my fervent ideas can rest.

Posted in academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, Nostalgia, Research, The ageing process, The profession of science, work-life balance | Comments Off on In which I come home

Persistence, Obstinacy and Red Lines

Posted on 18 April 2026 by Athene Donald

Persistence: such a positive word, nicely aligned with others such as resilience and self-confidence. All positives. But what do you think when you hear the word obstinacy? It conveys an edgy, tiresome quality. Perhaps someone who stops others doing what they want or ignoring what is good for them. Yet, in reality, they are two sides of the same coin.

As my last post indicated, my most recent talk has been on the subject of my ‘leadership journey’. It’s not the first time I’ve talked about how my career panned out, although the audiences vary. I well recall being asked – in Sydney to, somewhat bizarrely, a group of women lawyers – what had got me through the tough times. And, without thinking very hard about my choice of word, I described myself as obstinate. I felt that, at a time when good friends as well as those less supportive, were questioning either (or both) of my choice of research topic and university, it was obstinacy that got me through. I was determined not to let others choose what or where I did my rather unconventional research. (I was researching food physics and the interface with biology at a time when that was regarded as beyond the pale by my more conventional colleagues in Physics, who were inclined to stick with less messy materials that they thought were appropriate for a physicist). I stuck to my guns and am amused to see that these days, for instance, the Institute of Physics has a Food Physics group – so it must be respectable now. I flatter myself by thinking that I was just ahead of the game.

However, to call that persistence feels not quite right, although I clearly was persistent. I think obstinate is the more appropriate word, because I was ignoring all those wise heads around me who could either not see the point of what I was doing (the more hostile ones) or felt that I was hurting myself – and possibly my PhD students – by sticking with something that was causing me grief (my friends who knew I was finding the going tough).

Nevertheless, persistence is a virtue, whether or not you consider obstinacy is. The challenge is knowing when just a little bit more persistence will pay off, and when you should cut your losses if an experiment is not working or you can’t get the accuracy you need or…any of the hundred other things that can go wrong in the lab. There is no simple answer to that.

What about red lines? When should you feel this is a point beyond which you will not go, versus when should you persist (and we needn’t consider Theresa May’s red lines in this context)? You can set red lines in advance: perhaps to say I won’t spend more than six more months doing experiments before I write up my PhD or I won’t spend more than an additional sum of £X on reagents before I give up this approach. But the time I most remember setting red lines in advance was before a meeting with the head of department and a professor who was trying to lay claim to space (essentially both mental and literal) that impacted on what I was doing. I was no junior researcher by this point, but already an FRS, but the other professor was the new ‘kid’ on the block (also an FRS) and people were falling over themselves to accommodate him. I knew this would be a hard battle to win and being obstinate in this situation would not lead to a good outcome. So, I worked out very clearly in advance what I would concede, so that I could hold on to what was most precious to me. I also made sure I took a bottle of water with me so that, when my mouth turned dry as sawdust, as I knew it would, I was prepared.

Those red lines were very useful to me, and probably allowed me to come out of the meeting with the best outcome I could have hoped for under the trying circumstances. It taught me the importance of not going in feet first. This latter is a phrase I have used to describe an earlier style of ‘leadership’ of mine, which I learned to shed: when someone or some system is awry, just going in all guns blazing will likely get you enemies and not the desired change. It pays to think about framing of your arguments, and – as in my example above – what you imagine to be other people’s red lines or viable concessions, as well as your own. Playing the long game of persuasion is generally much more successful than a short, sharp blaze of righteous indignation.

I am reminded of this, not just because of the ‘leadership journey’ talk, but because of ongoing situations I’m involved with beyond academia, where it is clear to me how much taking your time to bring people around is more likely to be fruitful than just getting cross with any protagonist. I may not rigidly be setting red lines, but I am definitely consciously thinking where I am not prepared to go/lose ground/ or give up on. This looks much more like persistence than obstinacy to me, and I hope to the protagonists with whom I am engaging. Mentally I know the difference, and it probably behoves others to do so too.

Posted in leadership, persuasion, Science Culture | Comments Off on Persistence, Obstinacy and Red Lines

Fish Worship – Is It Wrong?

Posted on 14 April 2026 by Henry Gee

‘Why don’t you go into Angel Aquatics and get some more angel fish?’ said Mrs Gee, thinking that our very large (136-litre) tank was down to just two fish – one Plecostoma, and one large angel fish, so was looking rather bare. I needed no encouragement and soon found myself in the Fish Room but there were rather few angel fish, all rather small. Perhaps small enough to be snaffled by the Plecostoma, which goes round the tank like a Roomba, snarling up anything small enough to fit into its mouth. But then I saw this:

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This. Recently.

This is a Senegal bichir (Polypterus senegalus), a freshwater fish from western and central Africa, and I fell in love. Why? Because, as a palaeontologist (recovering), I appreciate extant signs of a lost world. The bichir is a member of an ancient lineage (it includes sturgeons and paddlefish) that extends right back to the Palaeozoic Era. Like all fish once did, it has functional lungs (in most fish this has since evolved into a swim bladder) and the pectoral fins are like stumpy little legs. Bichirs can even survive and move around quite well out of water. Mrs Gee, on being told this, wondered if Steve (it is called Steve) might make a break for freedom and will be seen scuttling down the garden path to the pond.

Here is Steve from the front, showing a rather smiley face like an axolotl (we used to keep axolotls a long time ago, they are now exolotls), and the resemblance is not a coincidence. All fish once had faces like this, before the highly evolved jaw mechanisms found in more recent fish — the teleosts, a group that evolved much later and which mow includes virtually all fish you can name, from swordfish to seahorses, from trout to turbot). Tetrapods – a group of fish that came ashore, have faces rather like this, though this does not reflect close relationship, more that tetrapods have retained the ancestral fishy face that most extant fish have now lost.

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Steve. Front view.

Despite its seemingly happy demeanour, a bichir is a fierce predator and would soon denude a tank of all other fish unless I gave it, as protection money, a fresh (defrosted) mussel each day. At the same time I bought three golden cichlid-like fish as its backing group. They all came from the same community tank as Steve, so I hope it’s learned more peaceable ways than its fellows in the wilds.

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Taking the Chair (for the first time)

Posted on 12 April 2026 by Athene Donald

Sometimes things bring you up short in ways you weren’t expecting, and that happened this past week as I was trying to prepare for a talk. I’ve been asked to discuss my ‘leadership journey’ with a group of mid-career academics who may be facing up to the challenges of moving beyond research to, for instance, chairing committees for the first time. Now, over the years I’ve written a lot on this blog about the ups and downs of committee work and the characters one encounters.  You might have thought I’d find it easy to do such a talk. Instead, I found myself reacting badly to the whole concept initially: I’ve never been a leader was my initial thought, stoked by the fact I failed both to become a head of department or a PVC, for all I tried. (What went wrong on both occasions is perhaps a story for another day.)  But, not only was I Master of Churchill College for ten years – undoubtedly a leadership role – but I have chaired more committees over the years than I could possibly count. My first reaction was simply imposter syndrome getting loose again. For younger readers (probably just about everyone, given I’ve been retired for some time) suffice it to say imposter syndrome – at least in my case – doesn’t go away, one just gets better at managing it.

As I say I’ve written a lot about chairing committees but over the years I’ve also learned that every committee is different and one has to flex tactics to suit. When asked, by the facilitator for the upcoming talk, what my style was I can come up with some overarching themes regardless of the nature of the group, but beyond a handful of phrases one has to adapt one’s style according to what the nature of the desired outcomes is (sometimes much clearer than other times as for instance when a ranked list of grant applications is required) and whether the committee is made up of well-known colleagues or a bunch of strangers meeting for the first time. The dynamics will vary, particularly if everyone knows everyone else and has strong views about their colleagues. More on that below.

The first, and I think most important word I used to describe my style of chairing in this preliminary chat with the facilitator was ‘inclusive’. This is a word currently much bandied about; some years ago, I would have used a less definitive statement, such as ‘make sure everyone’s voice is heard’, caveated with ‘and don’t let anyone dominate’. The latter is easier said than done. Some people like to take over any discussion, regardless of their depth of knowledge or what anyone else might want to say. Practicing phrases for how to shut such people up without being downright rude can be helpful. Things like ‘that’s very interesting, now can we hear from other people round the table’ tending to the more blunt ‘I think we’ve heard your thoughts, but not everyone agrees’ if needed. At meetings where hands are raised (electronically or otherwise) it is possible simply to ignore the dominant voice for as long as possible. Sadly, on hybrid calls I have had people say ‘since I’m online I’m just going to jump in here…’ which is a tough one to control. Hybrid meetings are, in my view, the hardest to keep in good order.

But to be inclusive, it is important not just to shut the vociferous people up, but to make sure the quieter voices are heard. In Churchill, the governance arrangements at the time (since modified) meant that both students and staff were equal Trustees on the College Council. Both groups were often, I suspect, daunted by the louder voices and I tried to make sure I always brought them into the debate, particularly on matters specifically relevant to them. In general, turning formally to them meant they were happy to express their views but might have been reluctant to jump in without that invitation.

A College Council is an example of a meeting where many of the individuals know each other and may have done so for twenty or more years. That can bring its own challenges as old rivalries or tensions get played out for the nth time. As an example of how not to handle this situation, I am reminded of a search committee I sat on (not as chair) in my department many years ago. One of the other members was someone who I had a fractious relationship with, and I went into the meeting apprehensive about this. When push came to shove the two of us, in discussing one particular candidate, ended up in the unhelpful situation of claiming that ‘yes he would’ versus ‘oh no he wouldn’t’ about someone well known to both of us. As the external on the committee said to me afterwards, that was not a very constructive discussion but was definitely fuelled by past antagonism and present anxiety (at least on my part).

All that is about inclusivity, which I believe has to sit at the heart of good committee work. There are lots of other tactics I use to make sure that people remain engaged: a bit of light humour, coffee breaks in long meetings and keeping to time, for instance. I can remember one committee – again not one I was chairing, but one where the chair seemed to have no regard for time – which turned into farce as one after another of the members left for other meetings as the meeting dragged on about an hour past its scheduled end point. It is a trick to manage to keep to the allotted time without making anyone feel a decision was rushed or that they didn’t get a chance to speak. For sure, no one objects to a meeting finishing a few minutes early, but everyone can get peeved with an overrunning meeting. Once more, an example of how not to do this comes to mind, again not when I was chairing. The chair of this committee allowed the group to go round and round in circles about a particular candidate until the then Vice Chancellor stepped in and essentially said ‘enough’ and broke the loop. The chair should have done that at least half an hour earlier.

As will be apparent, I have learned a lot from watching other chairs make what, to my eyes at least, are a mess of things. That is certainly a key piece of advice I will be passing on to the mid-career academics later this week. Know what works and what does not from watching others succeed or fail. Chairing is a skill that improves with practice (and confidence). I copy below a list I made in a previous post on this subject that includes what I think are some crucial essentials (to be read in conjunction with how to be a better committee member):

  • Do your homework, read the paperwork and think about where the sticking points are likely to arise;
  •  If necessary and appropriate (and it often may not be) talk to people in advance if you know that they hold strong but opposing views;
  • Know who everyone is and what their backgrounds are; remember names;
  •  Concentrate so that you know when to wind up a particular discussion point;
  • Take the time necessary to reach a consensus, or at least let those whose views are being over-ridden feel that they have been heard;
  • Try to ensure anyone who wants to speak gets their chance – in particular do not let a couple of vociferous and possibly arrogant people dominate. It is the chair’s job to see this does not happen and that the timid get their moment;
  • Do not let tempers flare and use humour if you can to keep the meeting light (self-deprecating humour is fine and is often described as typically British);
  • Use breaks as time-outs if necessary, but also to allow legs to stretch, comfort to be restored and caffeine and sugar levels to be banked up as desired.

Finally, it is probably good to be aware of what not to do. I had fun many years ago describing all those chairs you do not want to be or meet. Sadly, I have met all of them, but I sincerely hope I cannot be pigeonholed into any of the categories myself.

Posted in careers, committees, inclusive, mid-career, Science Culture, time-keeping | Comments Off on Taking the Chair (for the first time)