Confessions of a (former) Lab Rat

blushes

I missed this when I first saw it, but I’m a finalist in the Best Blog — Philosophy, Research, or Scholarship category. The nominated post is my rant on PR.

Vote early; vote often. If you can be arsed, of course.

or what to do if a Dutch Canadian offers you a packet of white powder

I went home early on Friday. I was running a temperature, sneezing unreservedly and feeling more than a little under the weather. The boss took one look at me and said ‘Go!’. On Saturday I felt a little better, although I faded a bit in the evening. Sunday was fine, just a bit stuffy and feeling slightly sorry for myself. Nonetheless, we walked to the pub and back and then I cooked (and enjoyed) a lovely dinner.

Just before bed I decided to try some Canadian cold remedy that Eva gave me, after she heard about my difficulties in obtaining stuff that works. I checked the ingredients, and thought they looked pretty innocuous:

• Acetaminophen 650 mg
• Chlorpheniramine Maleate 4 mg
• Pseudoephedrine hydrochloride 60 mg

• Dextromethorphan hydrobromide 20 mg

I checked the ‘Precautions’. Blah blah, stenosing peptic ulcer, pyloroduodenal obstruction blah blah blah, pregnant women, blah, May cause drowsiness, excitability, nervousness, restlessness, sleeplessness, dizziness and palpitations.

Well, I thought to myself, acetaminophen is paracetamol, and that’s 0.6 of a regular dose. Chlorpheniramine maleate is Piriton, my favourite antihistamine that doesn’t make me drowsy (stonking blood-brain barrier, obviously). Pseudoephedrine, standard dose, and I don’t suffer from its side effects. I’ve taken analgesics and pseudoephedrine together for years, and the antihistamine shouldn’t be a problem, so I’ll be fine. That just leaves the dextromethorphan, which according to Google is a cough suppressant.

Now, I don’t actually see the point of cough suppressants. They don’t cure you of anything; they simply stop you coughing. Which means that you don’t get rid of the stuff making you cough, which makes you sick for longer, although you and/or anyone sharing the bed with you might get to sleep better. Now I didn’t have a cough, and it’s an impressive list of side-effects, sure; but hey, I figured, I have a robust metabolism. What harm can it do? Besides, 20 mg isn’t that much.

How wrong could I be? It says on the packet, ‘Hot Lemon Relief’ and in small caps FOR SYMPTOMS OF COUGH, COLD AND FLU. On the reverse it says something similar in French.

And all I have to say, in French, is Boisson chaude au citron mon cul.

I went almost straight to sleep, but woke about three in the morning. We’d watched Silent Witness on the iPlayer and all I could do was keep going over the plot in my mind (and remembering the brain slices on the slab). I remember thinking “I’m feeling nervous”. I made a cup of tea and laid on the sofa. I may have shook a little. I finally crawled back to bed about 5.30, to be woken by my alarm two hours later. I hid under the pillow and announced I wasn’t going to work.

I called my boss.

‘You sound sick,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ said I.

About 11 I decided I’d steadied myself sufficiently to have some coffee. Two sips in and my pulse rate was stratospheric. I went back to bed and hallucinated a bit more. I thought about dying, but decided it would raise too many questions. The feeling of lucid delirium was a very strange one: around three in the afternoon I decided to take a shower, and the bizarre thing is that I found myself clicking through songs on the iPod, even as I stepped into the shower. I knew this was stupid but I couldn’t stop. Fortunately the iPod survived, and I got dressed and ate half a bar of chocolate.

By evening I was in a state approaching something resembling normality. I was even able to collate all the entries to the #sci140 competition and choose a winner. Today has been better: I went to work; had stuffed sinuses and felt a little light-headed at times, but there was nothing a walk in the fresh air didn’t fix. I even took some Sudafed, with no side-effects.

Canadian cold medicine? You can keep it. Eva reckons I’m wired up wrong. I say they’re trying to kill us.

Kids. Just say ‘No’.

*UPDATE 2: We have a winner!*

*UPDATE: ENTRIES SO FAR*

Twitter, what is it good for? Hunh.

There’s been rather an interesting couple of posts over at the Scholarly Kitchen, recently. What am I saying? They’re all interesting. Anyway, Kent Anderson says that blogs are for fogies and David Crotty talks about ‘talking’ vs ‘doing’. Elsewhere on Nature Network we’re re-visiting the meme of why do we blog anyway (to which I’m not going to contribute, myself having decided to do rather than talk about). You can look up the links yourself if you can be bothered.

Anyway, in the middle of a rather long and involved conversation, someone made a throwaway comment on David Crotty’s post. Then I thought it might be fun to see if I could write a scientific paper in 140 characters.

"Clned gene _cancer_. KO in Ms. Ms dead. Cure cancer."

But why stop there? Here’s a challenge for you.

Your task is to re-write a scientific paper, a real, peer-reviewed and published one, in 140 characters. Twitter it with the hashtag #sci140 so we can track them (OK, so that’s 7 characters you’ve just lost but no one said it would be easy). You can do this as many times as you like, as many papers as you like, and it would be nice if they were your own, but they don’t have to be. I’ll see if I can get some f1000 swag for what I deem to be the best entry.

Go for it.

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Via David Bradley, I came across the Valentine for a Scientist meme. This started on Kat Arney’s Facebook page, apparently, and is now taking over Twitter.

What you have to do is substitute a scientist’s name into the lyrics of a song. Such as

• Diamond and Streisand: “You don’t [Simon] Singh me love songs…”
• Jackie Wilson: “[Lord] Rees petite, the finest…”
• Stylistics: “Einstein in love with you…”
• Roxette: “Newturn me on…”

• ZZ Top: “Every girl’s crazy for a [Barry] Sharpless man”

I know how much the NN folk love a good pun, so here’s your opportunity to stretch the funny synapses a little. The sillier and the cornier the better. (I did extend the meme slightly, but that’s because I’m supposed to be working cough. Still, only 5 days until Friday afternoon.)

Have at it.

PS. Feel free to cross-post to Twitter, using the hashtag #scientistlyrics. If you don’t/can’t, I’ll post them appropriately credited.

Remember Eureka? Bora’s been trying to get hold of it. But the word on the street is that he’s going to really really try to come to Science Online London this year (um, Victor, we really need to change the date on that site), and would love to look at it.

I’m going to start collecting copies henceforth (if only so we can rag on it in the LabLit podcast); but if anyone has any back issues they’d be willing to part with, if you can get them to me I’ll pass them onto the big BZ in summer.

Thanks!

What technologies are so ubiquitous, so familiar, that we barely recognize them as technologies any more?

I went to the Libraries of the Future workshop today. This is an initiative set up to explore what academic libraries might look like in, well, the future. Today we examined various global drivers, and thought about the effect they might have on the Higher Education sector more generally (specifically in the UK).

One of the comments made was that in a few years time, the current technologies that we’re using are going to become more or less invisible. Not that they go away, but that they will be so commonplace that nobody will think them worth mentioning.

This reminded me of an exchange I had while I worked for (that’s much better than “”, which is how I tweeted it from the work account last night. Oops). I had rescued a Mac from Accounts: the company mostly ran Windows but the CSO was a Mac-head (which I think might be why he hired me) and this particular machine was said to be ‘crap’. I worked some magic on it and ran it perfectly happily for two years, much to the amazement of all, not least the muppet of an IT manager that was there.

So, this IT manager came up to me one day in 1998, and asked, “Do Macs do TCP/IP?”

I looked up from my email and my web browser, and said “—”.

Then I tried again, and managed a “Um, yes?”

(Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as a dumb question.)

When I related the tale to my friend Nigel the email came back almost immediately, “My sandwiches do TCP/IP.”

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the iPad and other devices, and EPub and E-Ink and whatnot, and we all, not just geeks, want to know about USB and 802b.11g and 3G and all that balls. The technology is still new and mostly not generally accepted. Not like, say, cars (it’s only the über-geeks who get excited about engine technology) or tennis racquets or even DNA sequencing. Heck, we’ve been talking here about MT4 or WordPress or whatever. It’s certainly not a transparent layer.

We’ll only be able to say that the digital world has truly arrived, that we are completely digitized, when we use all this iStuff to get things done, without paying a second thought to the technology itself. Rather like we do with books, in fact.

I wonder how long it will take.

Q. How many bloggers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. YOU’RE CLEANING YOUR TEETH THE WRONG WAY! EVERYONE KNOWS YOU SHOULD GO FROM LEFT TO RIGHT YOU MORON!

That’s the kind of surrealism I’ve been encountering the last few days. There is a lot I could say. Maybe I should say it—after all, I’ve found myself being insulted and (willfully? I can’t tell) misunderstood—but you know, science blogging is a very small niche in a very small ecosystem in a great big world. And frankly, it’s not worth it.

Instead, I would like to say thank you to Cath and Bob and Eva for some nice things they’ve said elsewhere. And I would like to say a word about Bora Zivkovic.

I said that I didn’t read certain blogs. I said this was because of the comments that are made. Bora pointed out, quite rightly, that there are many of these blogs, and it wasn’t fair to use such a large brush. But the thing is that a little bad does tend to go a long, long way, and Bora has found this out first-hand.

Bora, as you probably know if you’re reading this, co-organizes the Science Online unconference in North Carolina each year. By all accounts the one this year was as amazing as the previous ones—I had the opportunity to go but decided not to for reasons that don’t concern you. A colleague went instead, and had a fantastic and useful time. Unfortunately, a single session at that event has become something of a monster, gaining more and more ugly with each re-telling (and version of re-telling). To such an extent that the entire event is in danger of being overshadowed. Rather like how a small number of commenters can stop me reading what might be very interesting.

This is doubly frustrating because in the recent Scienceblogs/Nature Network spat, I’ve noticed that Bora has tried very hard to be the voice of reason. Yet I’ve heard things that make me cold: people pissing on these very small carpets are having real effects in the real word. We might be a small part of a small part of something huge, but what we say here affects people. Pettiness, bullying, outright aggression—what place do they have anywhere, virtual or corporeal? There are people with hopes and aspirations and relationships at the other end of the long damp piece of internet string. We tend to forget that, I think. And Bora, I, for one, am sorry it’s been so smelly of late.

I had lunch with Sarah Greene, the new editor of The Scientist today (so new, the yolk’s still glistening). It’s not name-dropping if I work with her (and anyway, I wrote the press release).

Where was I? Oh yes.

We got to talking about how we want to bring Faculty of 1000 and The Scientist closer together; what each can bring to the table and where, in fact, I fit in. One of the things we considered was videos. Now, I might be a little old-fashioned in many ways, but I’m pretty hip and happening when it comes to the new meeja (thinks: can I persuade Vitek to buy me an iPad?). At least, that’s what it says on my job description. However, I’m feeling more than a little ambivalent about video—at least for scientists and the stuff that they we like to do during daylight hours (once the lights go out, you’re on your own, boys and girls).

You see, when I was in the lab—and even now that I fly a desk—I feel very itchy about watching work-related videos on the firm’s time. If the video is longer than about 2’53” then I’ll either jump to near the end, if it’s like to be important; or (more usually) skip it altogether. I’ve not even watched the f1000 videos I’m supposedly responsible for. Podcasts? Fine! I’ll stick on the headphones and listen to a podcast, or preferably stick it on my iPod and listen to it on the Tube going to or from work (I’ve tried doing the same with videos, but I find watching out for tourists at Green Park a better use of my optical faculties.) I tend not to watch longer internetty videos at home either, because I usually have better things to do (films etc. is a tad different); and besides, it’s work. And the other side of the coin is that if I were a PI I’d probably have a complete benny if my post-docs were sitting round watching telly when they should be winning me a Nobel Prize.

So how do the rest of you feel about science-type videos and podcasts? What do you listen to or watch if you do? Is there room in the busy scientist’s schedule for either or both of these?

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Eva Amsen, the UK welcomes you!

(I was going to post a picture of Eva, but she gets upset at that. So here’s a snowman instead)

More and more frequently the edges
of me dissolve and I become
a wish to assimilate the world, including
you, if possible through the skin
like a cool plant’s tricks with oxygen
and live by a harmless green burning

(Margaret Atwood, More and more)

As you may or may not have realized, I tend not to talk about published science here. Frankly, wittering about research isn’t exactly thrilling, and by the time I get around to it lots of nice people have already covered it anyway. Besides, these days I get paid to do it, which actually is rather nice. No, I’d much rather talk about the human side of being a scientist, or sciencey stuff as it affects me or other people. I tend to waffle a bit.

But I saw a paper today that is begging to be blogged. It’s not peer-reviewed research though so don’t run away screaming just yet.

‘Not peer-reviewed?’ I hear you gasp, ‘What manner of madness is this?’ Settle down. We’re talking Nature Precedings: which as far as I can tell is somewhere you can publish any old preliminary crap and not worry about it affecting your chances of publishing in Science. So, on to

Artificial Photosynthesis Would Unify the Electricity-Carbohydrate-Hydrogen Cycle for Sustainability .

Dr Yi-Heng Percival Zhang proposes linking electricity, carbohydrate and hydrogen in a cycle that would simultaneously solve the CO₂ and energy resource problems. And world hunger, too. Essentially it’s synthetic photosynthesis, fixing CO₂ using electricity from whatever source we care to name:

8 CO₂ (g) + 8 H₂O (l) + electricity -> C₆H₁₀O₅ (s) + C₂H₆O (l) + 9 O₂ (g)

Or, more poetically,

like an insect caught by a spider, it is separated from its oxygen, combined with hydrogen and […] inserted in a chain
(Primo Levi, The Periodic Table)

Nailed there, not by a flashing form of a packet of light, but by man-made engines of electrosynthesis.

Pretty cool, if it’ll work. It reminds me of an idea I had for making biodiesel from any suitable green plant. You see, the problem with biodiesel is you’re still cutting down rainforest to grow it. So, I reasoned, why not convert off-shore oil platforms into rapeseed or palm plantations, thus freeing up valuable land in developed countries, saving the rainforest and simultaneously converting everyone to biodiesel (just don’t get me started about ethanol fuels in cars. Brr). There are of course problems with this approach, but I reckon you might make a worse start than using those same platforms for the good Dr Yi-Heng’s idea.

This does remind me of another thought I had, related to the one about letting Jenny tattoo me with GFP. While photosynthesizing ex-oil platforms might be impractical, I reckon crowd-sourcing has much more potential. Theoretically we should be able to engineer skin cells to convert the sun’s energy and all that excess CO₂ we have knocking around into sugar. I mean, we know the process, right?

Even as we speak, BlackKnight Industries scientists are toiling in their labs to produce prototype skin grafts, after which they will transfect adult stem cells with appropriate genes. Our plan is to give volunteers in sunny climes (which, coincidentally, tend to be the poorest nations of the world) one, maybe even two, photosynthetic arms. While these lucky individuals go about their daily business, these Synth-O-Arms (r) will silently convert CO₂ into carbohydrate, which will be fed directly into the bloodstream. After the initial trials we’ll start modifying entire populations.

Imagine: solving global warming and world hunger at a stroke. I’m just wishing I thought of publishing the idea in Precedings.

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