Gonna build a house

Posted on 10 April 2012 by rpg

Let’s pretend.

Say you came to me and said that your family wanted a new house. And that you were contracting me and my firm of experienced architects and house-builders to do the job.

And oh, you say, could we have it ready before the first week in December? Uncle Albert has a touch of the ague and the cold weather sets it off. Make sure the central heating’s working!

Fair enough, I’d say, I’ll have some sketches next week. You and your family can look them over, and when you’re happy, we’ll order the bricks and whatnot and build your house. That deadline’s a bit tight, but we’re confident we can do it in time.

So next Tuesday comes around and I show you our sketches. I show you the four bedrooms (master bedroom with en suite), the dining room, the living room, the two (count ’em!) bathrooms, the hallway with the especially designed rack for hanging raincoats and wicking away the water so you don’t get mould growing in your fitted kitchen (I have to admit, I’m particularly proud of the kitchen), the kennel for Rex, and of course a state-of-the art central heating and hot water system that is powered by a mix of solar energy and household waste. We’re forward-thinking like that, see.

Great! you say. Love it. Let me show the rest of the family and get back to you.

Weeks pass, and finally you get back to me. Awesome, you say. Everybody loves it. But can we have a garage, too?

Sure, I say. No problem. But we’re going to be a bit pushed to complete on time now. I’ll get you the plans we’ll work to next week, but we’ll need you to sign off on them within a couple of days, otherwise it’s going to hold us up and Uncle Albert is going to suffer unnecessarily. We’re already thinking that we might have to hold off on the garden shed and the swings for the kiddies until after winter, if you want everything else doing.

Fine, show me the blueprints on… Monday? Great!

Next Thursday I call you up. Hey, I say, we’re still waiting to hear from you. I got you the plans Friday night, and I understand if you weren’t checking your email over the weekend, but we really do need to get a move on here.

Sorry Richard. Got a bit tied up. Had to take Rex to the vet’s. All sorted now. Yes, the plans are fine. Awesome, actually. You can start digging, or building, or whatever it is you guys do.

I get back to the office and tell my expert team of experienced team of architects and builders that we can get this job done.

A month later you call me. Richard, you say. We just bought a new car. Lovely car. Shame for it to get wet. Best make it a double garage.

Okay, I say. Anything else?

Well, you say, we were wondering if we could stick a granny flat on at the back…?

I look at my watch.

Hmm. To be honest, we could, but we wouldn’t make the first week in December. How about we build to the specs we’ve got—

With the double garage?

—with the double garage, certainly, and come the new year we’ll negotiate a new price for building you a granny flat.

Actually, you say…

Yes?

Actually, I was thinking we don’t really need the shed. Can we hold off on that and put the money saved towards the granny flat?

Yes, I say, you could. But you won’t get either of them by Christmas at this rate.

Okay, okay. Never mind. Hold off on the shed, we’ll talk about the granny flat after December.

Another couple of months pass. I’m just looking at paint swatches with my chief decorator.

Hey, Richard! Long time no see. How’s it going?

Brilliant, I say. Was just about to call you. We were thinking that you could go for the duck egg blue, but given the style of the façade and the furniture you already have, Georgian red would work really well.

Oh. Oh, I don’t know if Auntie Mabel would like that. I’ll have to check. But talking of Auntie Mabel, could you make sure that there’s wheelchair access from the street to the dining room, and a stairlift to her room?

A stairlift? We didn’t talk about a stairlift. I don’t think there’s money in the budget for that.

Ye-es, I’d thought of that. Use the money for the shed for it.

For the shed? You’re certain you don’t want the shed?

Right. Use the money to install a stairlift instead.

Which is, you realize, going to involve rebuilding the entire staircase?

Why?

Well, structural integrity for one thing. Getting all the parts in through the doors for another. This is really the sort of thing you should have thought about when we showed you the blueprints, if not the preliminary sketches.

Yeah, well, we didn’t check with Auntie Mabel.

You didn’t show the blueprints to Auntie Mabel?

Not ‘show’ as such. No.

And she’s going to live in the house…

Yes…

…and you didn’t show her the blueprints.

That’s about it, yep!

Okay. Is there anybody else you didn’t show them to?

Um… No, I don’t think so.

All right. Here’s the deal. I can’t promise a stairlift. It’s at the absolute bottom of my list, and we’ll do it if we can. Okay?

Okay! And… I’ll go and talk to Auntie Mabel and Uncle Albert and the rest about the colour, shall I?

You do that.

All too soon, it’s the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. We’re putting in the wiring and choosing curtains. You come round to see me.

Hey, Richard! Thanks for doing the stairlift. And sorry about Auntie Mabel and the colour. Between you and me, the rest of us were rooting for the red, but you know how it is.

Sure. What have you got for me?

Well, we love what you’ve done. Awesome work. Everybody’s really happy.

Good. But… ?

Well, we’d like a cat-flap for Fluffy. And Ricky and Sharon are moving in with us. So we need a fifth bedroom. With an en suite on bedroom number three.

Sure. We can do that.

You can? I was worried it was too late!

No problem. It’ll be ready June next year.

June? But we need to move Uncle Albert in next month!

Well, it’s your choice, really. We can build the house to the designs we agreed to by next month. Or we can tear down half of it and have it ready for June with these new features.

Oh.

I can probably do you the cat-flap, though.

It is now the 21st November. Auntie Mabel, Uncle Albert, and Ricky and Sharon and everybody all want to come and see and approve their new home tomorrow. And I won’t be able to make any changes after they’ve seen it.

Welcome, as they say, to my life.

Posted in War stories, Work | Tagged | 9 Comments

One step beyond

Posted on 30 March 2012 by rpg

What did I really think when I made the decision to leave the lab and pursue a career using my other skills?

To be honest, I don’t really know. I don’t really remember. “It seemed a good idea at the time,” is probably closest. But then, every step on my career path has had that rider. That, or “I couldn’t think of anything better.”

Coming to my current gig, perhaps more than any other choice I’ve made in my professional life, was a more positive step than any other I’ve made—that is, I wasn’t reacting to circumstance, or trying something new for the sake of it, or leaving somewhere else in a huff or trying something on the off-chance it might turn out all right.

I am working very hard—perhaps harder than when I was doing some reviewer-requested experiments for a Nature Structural Biology paper a decade ago. In the five months I’ve been here I have been dumped in the shit, had to deal with post-last minute panics on a regular basis, thrown a strop at a client and warned them their third of a million dollars project was in jeopardy, smoothed ruffled feathers, stressed beyond imagining and snatched from the snarling maws of defeat victories that would have made Henry V proud.

And to be completely honest, I’m having a whale of a time. I have learned more science than in any comparable period since I did my doctorate and met some amazing people. I have managed projects that started with a few lines in an email and gone to something real and exciting that has my client contact saying things like “extremely impressed” and “everyone loves [it]” and “one person even wanted to take [it] home” (and I’ve promised the creative team who have made this particular project real some serious drinks…).

So that’s where I am. For various reasons I can’t give you much in the way of details, but soon I hope (probably June) to be able to share some of this work with you.

Come on in. The water’s lovely.

Posted in Friday afternoon, Me, Work | Tagged | 3 Comments

On why

Posted on 12 March 2012 by rpg

The other morning, between about 7.30 and 8.45, I had a long, involved and very realistic dream. In it, I visited the MRC LMB in Cambridge, to discover that it had been partly rebuilt into a modern, if not downright space-age, version of a boarding school I once attended. Where my real-world lab had been, however, hadn’t been refurbished and so I made my way through the twisty maze of passages that linked the gleaming whiteness of the new bit to the old bit to say hello to my erstwhile boss. He wasn’t there however, so I sat down at one of the Macs and started writing a blog post.

Way to go, subconscious mind.

As you might imagine, I was reasonably disappointed to wake up and realize I hadn’t written the post (or, if I had, I hadn’t saved it anywhere accessible). But I remember quite clearly the subject of the post, so here you go.

A few years ago, when I was thinking about getting more into writing, I learned that a certain editor of a certain magazine for scientists wasn’t interested in articles from ‘whiny postdocs’. I thought that was a bit rich, but you know what? He had a point. Maybe not so much here at OT, but certainly in other places and in a lot of cartoons (hello Nik!) there is a lot of whining going on.

And maybe it’s because the sun is shining and the spring bulbs are turning their faces to the sky and the birds are coughing in the trees, but I feel like looking on the bright side. I used to say that the day I stopped enjoying doing science, specifically the day I stopped seeing the beauty of immunofluorescent stained cells or failed to be wowed by looking down a microscope at cells in culture would be the day it was time to quit science. As it happens, I got out of the doing of science (professionally, at least) while I was still enjoying it, so I never suffered that kind of disillusionment.

But the thought remains: if so many of us–of you, perhaps–whine so much about science, why do you still do it?

After all, there are many good reasons not to continue–the pay, the conditions, the antisocial hours, the sheer drudging tedium of some of it and the huge amounts of disappointment. What keeps you going?

Why do you stay at the bench?

Extra credit will be given for examples.

Posted in Lab ratting, Science, War stories, Work, you | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

What’s yours called?

Posted on 15 February 2012 by rpg

(This is a repost from the GranularIT Blog.)

I couldn’t stand it no more.

After my latest timelapse experiment (a frame every minute for three days; over 3 GB of photos), not to mention mucking around with stop-motion, I decided to bite the bullet and get myself a non-laptop based storage system.

In the end I went for two Seagate 2 TB drives, sitting on their own surge-protection board, with a cute little 4-gang USB hub into which I could also plug my SD card reader (and still have a slot free for the USB cable to my camera).

Four terabytes of magnetic goodness

The full Monty was mine for under 250 quid, thanks to an offer at Maplin’s (and that included a Cat6 patch cable. Geeks give the strangest Valentine’s presents). One drive to dump all of the camera files, and the other to back it up.

The naming of parts

But then I had a problem. As any geek will tell you, one of the most important things to get right with new kit is naming it. What should I call my new drives? What convention should I follow?

Given that one was to be the primary and the other a backup, I thought something like ‘Batman and Robin’ would be appropriate. That wasn’t doing it for me, really, so-because I’m a biology geek, first and foremost-I toyed with the idea of something like 5′ and 3′ (“five prime” and “three prime”), followed by ‘GEF’ and ‘GAP’, and then ‘Rac’ and ‘Rho’. ‘DNA’ and ‘RNA’ didn’t sound quite right, but I did think ‘coding’ and ‘complementary’, ‘sense’ and ‘antisense’, and then ‘Crick’ and ‘Watson’.

Then again, if I were to nod to Crick and Watson, then why not ‘Crowfoot‘ and ‘Franklin‘? Or perhaps ‘Rosalind’ and ‘Dorothy’?

It wasn’t until then that I remembered that I already had a naming convention: my laptop’s drive is ‘Guinevere’, my Time Capsule is ‘Galahad’, and my printer is ‘Gawain’ (which all started back in Sydney when I had the only Mac in the lab-it was white, and therefore had to be ‘Gandalf’). Steering away from the ambiguity of ‘Lancelot’, I first considered ‘Arthur’ and ‘Merlin’, but finally it hit.

Copying files...

Merlin and Morgana.

Magic.

Magic drives

Posted in Don't try this at home, Photography, Work | Tagged | 10 Comments

It has not escaped our notice

Posted on 31 January 2012 by rpg

Cock flavour soup mix

And this, boys and girls, is why a good copywriter is worth their weight in cock. I mean, gold.

Posted in Silliness | Tagged | 2 Comments

On ghostwriting

Posted on 28 January 2012 by rpg

A long time ago, when the world was young, I did a research project towards my Biochemistry Part II exam. Three months in a lab, learning how to do cell culture, how not to kill myself with iodine-125, and making hundreds of very pretty immunofluorescence photographs. It was a nice little project, and I got some publishable results. So publishable in fact, that when the head of department said he’d be able to find me some money to come and work in the lab over summer—after my exams and before I started my DPhil—I leapt at the chance.

That story, and of how he didn’t pay me for that summer, and how he muscled in on the author list and conspired with my supervisor to push me off the coveted first author position, are for another day. What concerns me now is that I didn’t write the paper. Naturally—I was studying for exams, about to go and work for someone else, and thought it entirely natural that my supervisor (with so much more paper-writing experience than me) should write up my results. Of course I read it, of course I commented—I may even have written up some of the methods—but there’s no way I could be said to have written that paper.

Similarly, even when I was the lead author, having done the intellectual lifting and most of the lab work, I didn’t write my next couple of papers (it could be argued that I was under the anally retentive thumb of certain lab heads, but I couldn’t possibly comment). In fact, my name has appeared on a couple of papers where I wasn’t even in the same lab.

Shocking?

Well, Martin Raff once described the way I was screwed over by that head of department and supervisor as ‘shocking’, but the fact that I didn’t write papers with my name on them isn’t abnormal, is it? In fact, I’ve seen papers in PubMed where it would have been impossible for all the authors to say they had ‘written’ the paper. You know the ones I mean: generally genetics or physics papers with over a hundred co-authors. In those cases it is highly unlikely that the person who actually wrote the paper did any lab work at all (and their intellectual contribution might not have been that great, either).

Equally, I have contributed to many papers where I have not been listed as an author. I have helped foreigners with their English, made comments on style and grammar; even suggested extra figures or experiments. Sometimes I’ve been acknowledged, sometimes I haven’t.

So why does everybody get upset when papers appear that are ‘written’ by someone who isn’t listed as an author?

Dr Vallance, of Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, wrote to Eye (published by NPG, by the way), saying that publication of a particular article (Preclinical aspects of anti-VEGF agents for the treatment of wet AMD: ranibizumab and bevacizumab) is “a matter for the Editor.” Why? Of the review article, Dr Vallance says, “My main concern is that the authors did not write it.” He adds, “The subject of ‘medical ghostwriting’ and the potential effects on healthcare delivery is a controversial area.”

There is a robust response from the credited authors of the article in question, accusing Dr Vallance of libel. There is an equally robust response from the medcomms agency that was tasked with the actual writing of the article.

Medical communications and publishing, and the pharmaceutical industry itself, are among the most heavily regulated industries on the planet. And writing of articles by people who do not appear in the authorship list goes on all the time—in an orderly and heavily regulated fashion.

Pharmaceutical companies fund a great deal of research, and they publish that research in peer-reviewed journals. They also publish the results of clinical trials (admittedly there is a problem with which results get published, but that’s a separate argument). When a study, pre-clinical or otherwise (or, as in this case, a review), is published as a peer-reviewed article then the financial involvement of that pharmaceutical company is disclosed—as are the financial interests of any and all of the authors under whose names the article appears. When anybody performs research, and wishes to publish the results of that research, why should they not retain the services of professional writers? Especially when they have big pharma to pay for those services? Each author takes responsibility for their contribution to the research and the manuscript as a whole (and please, do read the response by Meyer and Holz).

If the person who actually typed the words into Word in the first place happens to be a professional writer, and this contribution is acknowledged, then why is there a problem? Wouldn’t you rather see data published quickly, knowing that the brains behind the research are continuing to contribute to advancing healthcare? Or would you rather wade through execrable prose? Why is this any different from helping a colleague edit their manuscript? (Except that money changes hands. In which case there is a paper trail.)

This isn’t making up results, this isn’t cherry-picking data, this isn’t creating fake medical journals; this certainly isn’t writing about a drug and then putting top docs’ names to it.

Let’s turn this around slightly. If you, as an author, enlisted a colleague’s assistance in editing or writing your manuscript, and remunerated them in some way, would you put them as an author? Wouldn’t you rather acknowledge their help at the bottom of the manuscript? And you would even dare say they were, or how they were, remunerated?

Not to mention that if this practice was banned, all these highly skilled writers would be out of a job, and instead likely competing for the same grants you’re after.

Conflict of interest: rpg works in the med comms & publishing industry.

Posted in Rants | Tagged , | 11 Comments

I will never buy a ‘Big Issue’…

Posted on 20 January 2012 by rpg

… because a Big Issue seller came into the pub, and stole my wallet and phone.

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Morning has broken

Posted on 16 January 2012 by rpg

There’ll be more on this little project… later.

Posted in London, Photography | Tagged , | Comments Off on Morning has broken

On writing

Posted on 14 January 2012 by rpg

I’ve heard it said there’s no such thing as ‘bricklayer’s block’.

The argument goes that bricklayers lay bricks, that pilots (say) fly, and that writers write. For those of us lucky enough to be paid to put one word after another to create something that makes sense (in the same way, perhaps, that a bricklayer puts bricks one after the other to build a house), the curse of writer’s block looms over our lives like an oppressive low pressure system moving up through Fastnet and Lundy.

Actually, no it doesn’t.

Just as a bricklayer can’t get away with not building a house because she lacks inspiration, or exactly the right size brick for a particular corner, so a writer can’t get away with not filing copy because he can’t find the right word or phrase or opening sentence.

To be fair, however, I can appreciate that when you’re not writing for money sometimes projects fall into an insidious limbo because you just don’t have the energy to get over the particular wall you’ve come up against. But when your career depends on being able to mortar those words together (my metaphor is failing here. Help me out. Mortar equals punctuation?) then you’d bloody well better find a way through. Even if the topic is far outwith your knowledge, or your editor hates you, or the subject is simply tedious in the extreme (and believe me, I’ve had enough of the latter to last me a lifetime).

You know this already. So why am I telling you?

As you may not know—because I didn’t make a great song and dance about it—I started a new job in November. And while my previous gig came with multiple titles, none of which explained adequately what I ended up doing, the new one has the simple and (apparently) understandable title: ‘Senior Writer’.

Which is a little bit funny, because in the two months I’ve been here I haven’t done anything like what I’d call proper writing. Sure, I’ve done a heap of editing, literature research, website design, on-site support, storyboard editing, animation direction and even some information architecture, but not actual, honest to goodness writing.

So on Monday evening when the scientific director asked me if I was interested in working on a proposal for a mini-symposium I leapt at the chance. He wanted 1000 words on rheumatoid arthritis treatments—past, current and future—fully referenced and targeted to an audience of clinical rheumatologists. Sure, I said. How long can I spend on it? Well, he said, it needs to go off on Thursday: so a day and a half.

I spent Tuesday Googling and PubMedding everything I could find on the subject—something of which, by the way, I had no clinical knowledge whatsoever. I ended up with 50 papers (mostly open access, but I actually bought a scientific paper for the first time in my life), and on Wednesday I turned some half-baked notes into 1094 words on the subject, with 17 references.

The editor liked it, and the director liked it, and the proposal went off on time. And for the rest of the week I haven’t been able to get these words out of my head:

I am a writer.

Posted in Me, Personal, Work | Tagged , | 13 Comments

On condoms

Posted on 4 January 2012 by rpg

“Why,” I thought as I pulled a cucumber from the salad drawer this morning, “is it that cucumbers always wear condoms?”

Tears 2

This is something that’s puzzled me for about twenty years now, ever since one Saturday morning about twenty years ago. I’d gone to the farmshop round the corner from my parents’ house to pick up some eggs and other goodies, including a cucumber. The farmer giggled as he rang up the cucumber, “It’s wearing a condom.”

Sure, other fruit and vegetables come shrink-wrapped, but you can also get them without plastic; bare-backed if you like. I can see that it wouldn’t make a great deal of sense to individually wrap each banana in a bunch. But I have never seen, for example, courgettes similarly clad. And, since that fateful Saturday morning, I have never seen a cucumber on sale without its plastic protection.

This morning, I tweeted it:

Of all the fruit and veg you can buy, why is it that only cucumbers wear condoms?

So far, I’ve had three answers:

  • @IanRobinson: It’s boasting to make the bananas feel inadequate.
  • @SmallCasserole: they drew the short straw in the “who’s going to be the standard demo vegetable for putting on a condom?” trial
  • @Alex_Davenport: You dont want lots of baby cucumbers because unlike baby carrots and baby sweetcorn, they dont go well in a stir fry

Which means I have to ask: can you do any better?

Posted in wibbling | Tagged , | 11 Comments