Archive for the ‘science’ Category

Posted on November 23, 2009 - by MG

A Night in the British Museum

Those lucky Young Friends of the British Museum get the bonus treat of being allowed to attend up to 4 sleeppvers a year. Last weekend was a special Moctezuma-themed event, featuring storytelling about the Mexican Day of the Dead, warrior head-dress making, Mexican folklore from Mexicolore…and then some Mayan hieroglyph deciphering with me.

Meanwhile publicist Alex from Scholastic and I enjoyed being set free in the British Museum at night. We saw some strange stuff up in the Mesopotamian gallery, near the remains of the Temple of Ninhursag… but I won’t say any more.

What a great wheeze though! Picnic and sleep amongst one of the greatest (perhaps THE greatest) collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts outside of Cairo. All this an education too.

Thanks to Claire Johnstone from the British Museum for inviting me, to Sky and Alex for helping with all four events, and to the very kind Simon Martin of Penn Museum for giving us his translation of the inscription.

Posted on July 13, 2009 - by MG

General Biochemistry Fabulousness

Well the good old Oxford Biochemistry department got a shiny new building (virtual 3D tour here) and invited all the alumni back for a party. Jazz, wine and nibbles, a speech by Chancellor Chris Patten and the department’s 2nd Nobel Laureate, Paul Nurse, FRS. Is is Sir Paul yet? Can’t be too far away, if not.

Paul Nurse pointed out that the staircases look like the moving ones at Hogwarts (see below, they kinda do!), Chris Patten asked us to give the University some cash. He has become our Bob Geldof. It’s a thing in Oxford now, everyone is fighting for alumni cash. The colleges, the libraries, the museums, the research departments.  Oxford graduates are relatively useless at coughing up for the alma mater. Compared with Princeton, that is. Not even in absolute terms; that would be unlikely. Even simply in % of students who give, in participation.

I chatted with some of my fellow graduates, it seems they’d prefer to spend their money on poor people in the developing world.

I stand somewhere in-between. I was one of the poor students when I was at Uni, very much aware of being surrounded by kids whose parents had plenty of money to help them pay for housing costs and post Uni debts. Not everyone who goes to Oxford is rich. And I do think that there should be money to help such students, especially postgraduate research students.

So yay Africa but also remember the students.

Meanwhile, a fabulous evening meeting up with long lost pals. I was delighted to see fellow Catz biochemists, as well as my former tutors Iain Campbell and Tony Watts. Now both v distinguished Professors of course.

Everyone I studied with is going to end up as a distinguished Professor, eventually. So please keep buying my books. ‘Best-selling children’s author’ makes a lovely occasional contrast when it’s time for introductions. professor, Professor, Professor, Nobel Prize winner, best-selling children’s author. Oh really?!!!

D’you see?

Photos by Dr. Jeremy Rowntree of the Oxford Biochemistry Department, fellow Catz biochemist too!

Posted on November 28, 2008 - by MG

A visit to the ol’ lab…

I dropped in on my former DPhil supervisor, Nick Proudfoot at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology yesterday. I don’t visit that much, even though we’re good friends now. The lab is a busy place, after all. You shouldn’t delay the progress of science.

I was there to take a photo of some lab equipment for the ARG we’re developing. Yes – there’s a clue. Part of the game will feature a virtual lab facility, where DNA experiments can be ordered over the Web and the results sent by email. It’s all part of the story…

Nick and I chatted – as we always do on these occasions – about recent progress in the field. Or not-so-recent progress, since I actually left molecular biology in 1992 and went into cell biology (the former is mainly about genes, the latter is mainly about proteins and cells). So my knowledge is fairly vague and out of date as it is…

Anyway, OMG! So may cool new techniques have been invented since I left! Eeee, kids today, they dun’t know how easy they’ve got it…in my day you really had to suffer for your science, with home-made apparatus and enzymes and techniques that barely worked…

The march of progress. And yet molecular biology labs are still fairly grungy, messy places to be. As the photo above proves!

Meanwhile, I also took a shot of my thesis, which is on a shelf in Nick’s office along with those of all the other students he’s shepherded through the process of becoming Dr. Scientist. Well done Nick! You’re a STAR. (Really – publishing eight scientific papers this year, in great journals too…)

(and so nice to see my first  ‘book’ in the company of those by my brother-in-law Paul and my good friend Becs!)

And spot the girl in the nerdy jumper, my official department photo from 1991 now displayed in one of the corridors of the labs.

Roll on the NJP Lab Reunion dinner in December!

(Photo above shows me, Alex Moreira, Joan Monks and Nick.)

Posted on July 11, 2008 - by MG

Lab Rats – I so wanted it to be good

They finally set a sitcom in a research lab.

The idea is hardly original – I myself submitted a script for a lab sitcom (WHITECOATS) to the BBC and Channel 4 in 2004 only to have it a) rejected and b) ignored, respectively. A German TV producer got excited about it and pitched it to some German TV channel. I never heard from her again…

Well, if the brilliant Richard Herring gets his sitcom ideas rejected by the BBC then a total unknown writer who hasn’t even done the requisite ten years on the comedy circuit is NOT going to get taken seriously. I get that, I even agree. (And of course my script was the work of a screenwriting and comedy novice…)

I wrote WHITECOATS because I wanted to see a sitcom set in a lab. There wasn’t one, so I took a DIY attitude. Luckily for me it didn’t get taken up; I moved on to writing thrillers for children and wound up being paid what I’m guessing is more than a novice TV writer.

So LAB RATS – should have worked for me. I love Chris Addison in “The Thick of It”. He’s sweet and he’s a Manc, like me. I loved Geoffrey Perkins as Ford Prefect in the radio version of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”. I watched both the clips released prior to the show’s airing and laughed out loud.

But I’m afraid I watched with dismay yesterday. I’m not going to tear it apart – too many TV reviewers are doing that. I AM going to keep watching, but from such a beginning I don’t see that it ever reach any decent height. Unless they rejig the formula radically as was done with “Men Behaving Badly”.

The best thing I can say is that it’s sort of Goodies humour, but the Goodies has dated too. And the other thing I can say is that some of their conversations, sad and geeky though they were, are not far from the stupid kinds of things I remember we did talk about when I worked in a lab. The two clips of LAB RATS that made me laugh are here.

Okay, I’ve criticised another writer. Now I’ll offer myself up for the same treatment. Here is a snifter of my pilot script for WHITECOATS – the four-scene sample I entered in the BBC New Talent contest. Obviously I didn’t get anywhere or else I would never have written The Joshua Files.

Posted on April 25, 2008 - by MG

The immune system kicks a**

Antigen presentation – the central tenet of immunology. Didn’t make any sense to me until I saw the crystal structures of MHC I, and the T-Cell receptor.

I emerged into the outside world today full the kind of renewed energy that only a post-viral recovery gives you.

The immune system is an amazing thing. Even moreso when you have some knowledge of how it works. I remember when they published the crystal structure of the Major Histocompatibility Complex I protein bound to a peptide antigen. Luckily for me this was the year that I took biochemistry finals at Oxford. I’d never understood the scientific evidence for molecular immunology properly until I actually saw those molecules interacting.

I’m just not good enough of an abstract thinker. The cellular evidence just befuddled me. I had to see something in 3D before I could catch on.

Immune system, amazing, hence I have made a whole load of antibodies and cytotoxic T-cells and other cell and molecular weapons and totally kicked that viruses ass and cleared it out of my system. And if anything like that comes round again, my B-cells will give it what for…

Oxford was warm and filled with shoppers, students and tourists. I heard some Brazilians speaking Portuguese and it cheered the part of me that still wants to be in Sao Miguel do Gostoso. I dropped into Waterstones and was relieved to see that ‘Invisible City’ survived the recent cull of children’s books on display in the window. Still on display and in the 3-for-2! Lots of books for older readers have been put aside to make way for picture books and other things for younger kiddies. Finally I share a window display with the wonderful Axel Scheffler!