Life of a Lab Rat

Tigtog points to this week's The Science Show, in which a virologist goes punting.

Damn. The only decent thing on Australian radio and I was sleeping off my jet-lag.

One of my favourite places on the 'Net now has a Facebook (spit) group. Feel free to invite yourselves.

Oh, these movies by Janet Iwasa are rather splendid.

Lots of pretty pictures, too.

(HT: Biocurious)

A post on how students (in general) can not write, and what we should do about it, obviously struck a few chords over at Nature Network. The discussion led Martin Fenner to create a new Nature Network group The Good Paper Journal Club, and inspired Henry Gee (Senior Editor, Biology, at Nature) to write that although Nature does not currently reject a paper solely because it is poorly written, this state of affairs conceivably might change.

It is true to say that most scientists have a difficult job communicating their results (in papers or seminars) to other scientists; their chances of communicating meaningfully with the general public are essentially nil (and even may be actively harmful).

In this context, I'd be interested to know what courses (in, say, writing clearly and giving a good seminar) are available to undergraduates (at USyd and elsewhere), and whether anyone actually found them helpful. We do our best to help our Honours students avoid the worst traps, but this kind of teaching needs to be formalized, needs to start early, and needs to be mandatory.

Members of Joel Sussman's lab at the the Weizmann Institute have developed Proteopedia (direct link), an online tool for making structural biology clearer for chemists and biologists by linking textual content to 3D structures.

Impressive.

For a born-again structural biologist like myself, this looks like an invaluable research and teaching aid. I shall follow its career with interest.

(via Peter MR, who reminds me what great fun BioMOO was, back in the day)

Science is supposed to be pretty. Not a lot of point in doing it, otherwise (for a range of values of 'pretty', at least).

So I was first pleased when I saw that an editorial Nature Cell Biology talked about the visual aspects of our work, and then disappointed when there were no accompanying pictures or movies to illustrate the point. Moreover, the link to 'further reading', which I clicked upon with great glee and haste, is empty.

Muppets.

Anyway, I got an email from Laura at the EMBO Journal last night. They are running a cover art competition;

The editors of The EMBO Journal are pleased to announce a new contest to select the best cover image for 2008.

As in the previous years, one winner will be selected from each of the two categories: Best Scientific Cover and Best Non-Scientific Cover. The prize for both winners will be a free one-year print and online subscription to both The EMBO Journal and EMBO reports.

This is a fantastic opportunity to indulge the artistic side of your scientific temperament. It's a shame that no one outside science will probably ever see your work, and the prize is hardly something that will appeal to someone with institutional access, but that's just quibbling. The closing date is 18 January 2008. Get snapping.

Previously, on Life of a Lab Rat, we've talked about presentations and Powerpoint rather a lot. Ad nauseam, maybe. But it turns out that, maybe, just maybe, the worm is turning. There's an editorial in the current issue of Nature Cell Biology addressing the empty whizzbangingness of Powerpoint-driven talks.

Yes, they say, Powerpoint (and by extension, Keynote) can be fun, but does a visually striking presentation really make your research more accessible or memorable? they ask, obviously inviting the negative.

However, graphics tools ought to be used only when necessary. It is worth reflecting on the frustrating experience of watching a Hollywood movie so overloaded with special effects that it leaves the viewer drained from sensory overload but intellectually and emotionally unsatisfied. Less is more: after a day of back-to-back talks, nothing is more refreshing than a visually clear, logically constructed and well articulated presentation.

The story is told of Daniel A. Haber, who on realizing that he had lost his presentation, gave a fantastic talk completely without slides. Never mind that this smacks of insufficient paranoia (I've been known to travel with 2 sets of glass slides — one for the carry-on luggage, and one for the hold — and a set of overheads), but it demonstrates what all of us should be capable of; giving a talk with no visual aids at all.

The 'lesson', and suggestion,

focus audience attention on the speaker, do not read off the screen and reserve slides to present key data and to summarize a complex body of work. Why not introduce the talk without slides?

resonate with me, and I shall have to experiment next time I give a talk in a more 'formal' setting.

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

When Ricardipus isn't whinging about his inability to manage his time, he's making comments on other people's weblogs.

He makes the very good point that the general public is never going to read science weblogs, but is tied to 'conventional' (as opposed to nuclear? I think we should be told) media. My thesis is that 'conventional' journalists probably are not going to have the time nor the inclination to use material from those same weblogs, so it all seems a bit pointless. However, I prefer e. e. cummings over Susan Musgrave and am more optimistic than Ricardipus, both when it comes to time management and the effects of science weblogs.

Journalists who report on science generally have to make do with press releases and interviews with heads of labs, from which they need to distill pithy soundbites. These are frequently misrepresented (deliberately or accidentally) and devoid of important context. We know that the scientific literature is impenetrable and execrably written and that this makes it difficult for scientists themselves, let alone the educated layman, to understand published work. Believe me, this week I am editing undergraduate theses and I know, I just know there must exist a compulsory Pompous and Ineffectual Writing 101 course.

What hope, then? What hope for the layman or the trained writer crafting a press release to understand the primary literature? What hope for editors of school textbooks to get the science right? What hope for seeing balanced and accurate science writing in the papers?

Weblogs.

Hang on a minute BK, what are you smoking? you might well ask. Bear with me.

Dr Ludbrook says

It seems to me that there are two components to writing well in science and medicine. The first, and most fundamental, is the need for a solid grounding in English grammar, usage and style.

This obviously starts at school, and we might in a moment of heady optimism imagine that universities offer writing courses that actually are effective. But this involves time and money, and is probably too late for most of us.

Ludbrook suggests that we should make use of freelance editors. This is obviously a marketing ploy and I shall pay it no further attention. But here's the crux:

The second is constant practice in writing, especially in the format required by biomedical journals.

"Constant practice in writing". Now we see how weblogs can be useful. Not necessarily as a means of direct or indirect (via traditional media) communication with 'the public', but as a tool for improving writing.

If practice makes perfect, then write to get better at writing. I don't know if he does it with this aim in mind, but Ian's weblog is a fantastic example of writing about science constantly, with no hope of reaching the 'general public'. But Ian has succeeded in making immunology more accessible to me, and I bet his writing has improved because he does it.

I'll be the first to proclaimadmit that a lot of the 'science' weblogs out there are terrible, and that the authors would rather take cheap shots at people who disagree with them than actually tackle anything with substance. But the beauty of the weblog format is the opportunity for feedback, for instant peer review. Which means that you and me, the readers, have the chance to point out that someone is being unintelligible, or overly verbose, or stupid, or narrow-minded. And maybe, when they learn to write betterer as a result, when they write their papers or their summaries for the PR office, they'll thank you.

In the meantime (because this won't happen overnight), if you're writing a weblog, or a paper, or a school newsletter, then check out this little Flesch-Kincaid readability gadget. I should run it on these theses and see if I can break it.

Pithy soundbite: Just because it's a blog doesn't mean it has to be crap.

Georg kindly sent me a link this morning, and although it is interesting, I've been wondering ever since about how to frame it.

I remember quite clearly the first time I realized that what you read in the newspapers (and by extension, what you see on news bulletins) is not necessarily what actually is. I had recently completed my thesis defence, and one Sunday morning my ex-supervisor rang me up to tell me that a member of my old lab had been murdered; shot at through his kitchen window. Come Monday, and the news had made the national dailies (and continued to do so).

And it wasn't that the incident itself had been misreported; it was the background, the little bitty details that made the victim a real person that were wrong.

That was just the start, of course. Soon I began to see details that were wrong all over the place. And yes, sometimes the stories were wrong too, or even non-existent (HT).

So when Georg says, hey, look at this:

Journalists and scientists at Monday's Scientific American sponsored panel discussion, "Does Science Get a Fair Shake in the Media?," hosted at USC Annenberg, unanimously agreed that while the public is consuming more science reporting now than ever before, mainstream journalism is doing a lousier job of covering the field

my inner cynic asks "Isn't all reporting like that? What's so special about Science journalism?"

I don't want to attack good journalism, or journalists. But there is a failure to realize, on the part of people like you and me, just how difficult it is to report factually, accurately and relevantly. I'm a hobbyist; it takes me as long as I want to write this, and I might still think 'to hell with it' and hit delete. But your professional journalist is trying to create a story, not write a scientific article, so that means she has to put in some 'human interest', to create a controversy or mystery if possible because within the looming deadline (that's redundant. All deadlines loom. It is in their very nature to loom. 'Loom': It rhymes with 'doom') she also has to get it past the editor who doesn't care about telling the truth but who does care about increasing circulation, or advertising revenue at least.

To approach science reporting with a traditional journalistic judgment of newsworthiness and objectivity is fundamentally incompatible with how science works

Our struggling journalist will, because she's good at her job, interview the locals, who range from the uselessly intellectual telling her that a modification in changing the dementia praecox concept to the more inclusive one of schizophrenia does nothing to weaken the fundamental dichotomy to the self-important constable who was proceeding to the Town Hall when the alleged miscreant did allegedly accost the alleged victim with what appeared to be a blunt instrument, allegedly, and finally sees the chance to get his name in the Scunthorpe Courier.

Which all means that it's a damned sight easier just to unthinkingly regurgitate the press release — which itself is expertly spun by someone with far more time to spare, if not just plain wrong.

Enough ranting. Even with good journalists and sympathetic editors, I think that science probably is worse off than, say, cricket coverage, because it is harder, LBW decisions and Duckworth-Lewis notwithstanding.

The media isn't doing its job to educate the public – most journalists have little to no background in science and statistics [...] Furthermore, due to traditional media's budget considerations, a science reporter is often responsible for several scientific disciplines, and that inevitably leads to a lack of intelligent, dependable coverage, or worse, over-coverage of wacky, pseudoscientific studies such as Jessica Alba's score in an index of female desirability.

Scientists must take some of the blame, too. When was the last time you read a scientific article that your mother, or even your sister, could understand?

On the other hand, many scientists cannot talk in layman's terms about what they do. Neither are they trained to do so. "No effort has been made to help us reach out or learn to talk to the media and to the public," Quick said

Which is one way of saying that you shouldn't be surprised when you discover that most science weblogs are about politics or badly written, or both. It's all a little bit pants, really.

The question remains,
"Can science blogs save science journalism?"
and I very much suspect that the answer is "No. But spending more on public education, especially in science, might".

There. Politics. Hope you're happy now.

I am uncomfortable with the distinction between 'scientists' and 'the public' when it comes to science communication. I maintain that 'scientists' are a subset of 'public', and that until we grasp that we're not going to get anywhere with increasing scientific literacy.

You see, there has been this movement of trying to increase the public's scientific understanding, approached as if scientists were Victorian missionaries forging into the Dark Continent to bring light and understanding. And this is completely wrong-headed. Not only does it immediately create an unequal and unhelpful authority/subject relationship but it ignores something fundamental about human nature.

Your average person, I think, views the pursuit of science and scientific thinking as something beyond their ken. It's something clever (and probably quite unusual) people are, and do. There's this feeling that Science is inaccessible to the 'ordinary public'. And as long as we keep talking about 'engaging with the public' or whatever we perpetuate that dichotomy.

But really, anyone can think scientifically. Anyone can do science. The youngest children do it — infinitely curious about the natural world and asking 'why' all the time, and indeed, formulating hypotheses and doing experiments 'what happens if I do this' — until that wonderful, insatiable curiosity is beaten out of them (at school? Who knows?). An informal scientific process is an integral part of our human nature, until we get older and see that years of training and bookwork and sitting around in white coats while a mad professor drones at us ad tedium is required.

So then we give up, and blindly accept the orgone salesmen and the crystals and the MMR-autism link and the homeopathy freaks and everything else because we are not good enough to know about these things.

Which is tragic.

Anyone can do science. Anyone can think scientifically. I am not saying that what I do for my day job is not hard. It is. It requires hard work, the grasping of difficult concepts, infinite patience and sheer bloody-mindedness. But the essentials, the seeking of answers to questions and the understanding of cause and effect, turning why into how; they're trivial.

And those of us who have not lost our childhood wonder at the natural world have a duty to go back into our communities and our families and say "Look! This is really cool! We can do this".

I have been whining about Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia where you can write any old rubbish.

The major problem I have with the project is its assumed authority. It is treated as a reliable source by, I guess, most of the population. The problem is that if you're looking something up in an encyclopedia then the chances are you don't actually know much about the subject, and therefore can not tell if your source is correct.

Those of us who have some knowledge about some things are shocked to find that Wikipedia is often wrong about our speciality. And then we become very worried because we have no idea if this failing extends to things we know little, or nothing, about. But it is safe to assume that it does so extend. This is not just restricted to Wikipedia of course: I have read a few stories in newspapers (national and local) where I have had insider knowledge about the reported event. And approximately half of the statements of fact in those stories are just plain wrong.

This does not seem to concern the editors of Wikipedia. They are more worried about due process than truth. So if you are looking up something on Wikipedia, your assumption that the author of the article and the editors know anything about what they are talking about is false. All you know is that the article has been written and edited in accordance with some rather arbitrary principles. These arbitrary principles, rather than verifiable truths, are the authority upon which Wikipedia is based.

Now, this would not be a problem, except that increasingly, students and professional scientists are turning to Wikipedia for answers. And people are writing their own websites based on Wikipedia articles. It is a house built upon sand, and we, as publicly-funded scientists, are failing the public if we do nothing about it. Ian points out that it is not worthwhile to write or correct articles, because in some frenzied pomo notion of fairness and equality facts and evidence count for nothing, and the 'wikizombies' (thanks Ian!), with their 'citation needed's and 'balance' and due process 'liberate' (which my thesaurus has as an alternative for 'pillage') scholarship from antiquated notions of 'truth' and 'verifiability'.

Evil triumphs if good people do nothing. So what do we do?

The problem with, say , a 'professional' wiki-type encyclopedia is that the people who we would want to contribute are those who are probably the busiest in their field, doing experiments and writing papers and raising grants and teaching students (who contributes most to Wikipedia? Those with most time on their hands. Hmm). So what we need is some kind of payback to entice scholars to write scholarly articles. Scientists are attracted by the prospect of cold, hard cash, or publications they can put on their CV. The former would mean that any such project would have to cost money to use (let's not even think about advertising revenue), which defeats the purpose of a free resource. We do have something close to this, in HowStuffWorks.com, but again, where is the authority?

So what about a peer-reviewed WikiScipedia? Jenny suggested that contributors should have "a PhD from an accredited university and a current and credible scientific affiliation". That would be a nightmare to organize, and does not get around the quis custodiet ipsos custodes?[0] problem. Peer review works (mostly) for scientific journals, and is where textbooks (eventually) get their authority. Any scientist could contribute; all would be invited to write articles aimed at a reasonably educated (but pre-Bachelor's) adult, but all articles are reviewed by experts in the field. Articles could fall under 'Cutting edge' or 'Established dogma' categories. Maybe there should be two sections; a 'pending review' area where anyone could write/edit and an 'authoritative', peer-reviewed section. And while we're at it, let's at least have pseudonymous if not completely nonymous peer review, so that there is accountability and partisan conflicts can be avoided. And did I say it would be free access?

It would be invaluable to school children, and could also go a long way to increasing the level of scientific literacy in the general population (hey, if you're going to dream, aim high).

It would be hard work to get going, but no more so than any other learned journal. Contributors would be able to cite articles on their CVs, and funding agencies, who are increasingly waking up to the whole communicating with the public idea, should also be happy. We'd need a sponsor to get going, ideally a publishing house already committed to the principle of Open Access, with a competent editorial team that has marketing oomph and a sufficiently large and diverse scientific address book.

Oh, hullo Nature. Doing anything tonight?

Bit of a furore.

Unfortunately it's not in real life, but in the so-called 'blogosphere'. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that while I am not opposed to neologisms in general, the class of them that starts with 'blog-' is monstrously barbarous and should be avoided whenever possible. Sometimes, sickeningly, this is not possible. I apologize to my more discerning readers, both of you.

I have been wondering, myself, about the purpose of this weblog and sciencey weblogs in general. I am not totally sure on why I wanted to do this, except that 'it seemed a good idea at the time'. I know I had some noble notion that I could attempt to make science and the scientific way of thinking accessible to Bruce and Sheila Public, and some completely selfish motives that were to do with channelling my creative instincts. But I never thought that it was just about me, by me and for me — an exercise in self-gratification.

A while ago a friend of mine and myself were debating whether a certain news item from Fox News had any truth in it. The story was quite incredible, and given that both of us have seen stories reported in the media and known the truth behind those stories, we were quite cynical about its veracity. We hoped that our cynicism was well-founded, because if the story was true it was truly terrible.

And my friend, who works in local government, wrote back to me, something that I'd like to share this New Year's Day, in the hope that maybe you will begin to trust the media less readily, that maybe one of you will question what you hear, be less accepting of what the government and the news agencies tell us, be more independently-minded.

A while back, while our honours students were in the throes of writing up and preparing for their thesis defences, I distributed a number of links that described how to give a scientific talk. One of the points that I emphasized was that Powerpoint (spit) should be used as a tool to put your slides in front of people, not as an end in itself with pretty but distracting purple fades and those bloody annoying transitions. Leave that crap, I said, to the corporate busybodies.

It seems that I may have misjudged the corporate SS. Badly.

My spy upstairs is on his way to a Collaboration Technologies Workshop on Friday. Lucky fellow. He distributed a Powerpoint (spit) file, that claims to be

intended to support the attendees of the collaboration technologies workshop on Friday 15th December 2006.
The pack contains slides and information from various IT research services – Gartner, The Burton Group and Ovum and aims to provide a common unbiased perspective on collaboration and associated technologies.

Corporate identity-wise, I was disappointed. There's a rather tasteful rendition of the University's logo in the top left hand corner of each slide, which are framed by a thin, blue line. Nice.

The Myers-Briggs (personality) type indicator has a reasonable reputation in the psychological profession. It is an attempt to make C. G. Jung's theory of psychological typing accessible, that is to use psychological markers to understand real people in real situations. Essentially there are four scales - you can call them dichotomies or preferences if you prefer - on which people can be measured. I prefer 'scales' to 'dichotomies' or 'preferences' because they are each a continuum, rather than binary.

The four scales assess a person's 'favourite world' (internal or external), how they handle information, how they handle making decisions, and how they deal with other people. See http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/index.asp. You do score in a binary fashion for each of these four 'tests', but any counsellor worth their salt will bear in mind where you are along each scale. So, crudely, 2^4 = 16 basic personality 'types', although of course there is overlap (and you have to read between the fuzzy lines to find out which types are "this guy is a nasty piece of work"). The assessments should be performed by people who have been trained, and who can help interpret the results to the subject and counsel them as necessary. Knowing someone else's personality type can help you understand them - and knowing your own helps you understand yourself (#inc confucious).

I'm not sure whether I should be pleased that the use of non-emotive language (i.e. not using the words 'clone' or 'embryo') results in such a change in public opinion or whether to be disgusted at the malleability of the Great Unwashed.

I do find the conclusion . . . people are more likely to approve of something if they don't really know what it is somewhat startling, to be honest.

This email captured my attention:

Science Faculty is requesting content for their November Issue of Science Alliance, their schools outreach newsletter (more info on Science Alliance at: http://www.science.usyd.edu.au/school/index.shtml). If you have anything suitable, please let me know.

I resisted the urge to laugh maniacally (schools? Young, malleable minds! Mwah hah hah hah!!), and instead peered over my steepled fingers at the screen,

"Ex-cellent."

Funnily enough, twice in the last couple of weeks — once in Canberra and once in Sydders — I've paid for something with my credit card, and both times the personable young, um, person has noted the 'Dr' bit in front of my name and said something like,

"Oh, you're a doctor. Is that a PhD?"

I guess I don't much look like a medic. Perhaps medics do not buy bottles of chilli wine or strimmers and spray paint (what do you think, Georg?). But of course they weren't, either of them, satisfied just to discover that I am a real doctor, but both wanted to know what I did.

I know there's one or two professional wordsmiths read this 'blog, and I've been having a great time over at Pavlov's Cat just recently. I am going to try to get that part of my readership to consider something.

Alex links to a piece in the NY Times, that raises an interesting point;

Molecular biology is the science of this century. We should be able to build some great clichés on it. But the language of this science doesn’t even give us a toehold. It’s like trying to climb a beaver slide after you’ve been walking through a bog. Perhaps scientists can understand each other when they speak of mRNA’s[sic], and sequencing, and so on. Genomic science needs better words.

If you're as old as me, you might remember sometime in the early '90s being completely blown away by Tim Springer's wonderful videos of leucocyte extravasation. For some reason I seem to have a lot of non-science types reading these ramblings and I reckon I've probably just lost half my readership, so I'll step back a bit and put things into plain(er) English.

If you happened to pick up, say Jandl's Blood: Pathophysiology, you might find an opening paragraph that reads something like

Blood is a complex suspension in plasma of nondividing differentiated cells which continuously perfuses the vasculature. It contains a mixture of several very different kinds of cells, all of which stem from an oligarchy of progenitors that originate in marrow or lymph follicles.

Which is a rather complicated way of describing the red stuff that leaks out when you get a real bad paper cut. Essentially, blood is made up of red cells, white cells and little bitty things called platelets, all floating round in a kind of white wine sauce. And it gets everywhere. The red cells are the little fellas that carry oxygen and nutrients around, platelets help stop the red stuff leaking out, and white cells, like knights of old on armour'd chargers, fight infection. Depending on the sort of white cell you are, you can throw chemicals or antibodies at nasties, or actually muscle up and eat invading bacteria and other bits and pieces. Yummy.

An interesting piece in the Grauniad last week (I know, I know, I'm sorry - I go to work, see an interesting article, try to remember it and the witticisms that spring to mind, finally come home on the mind-numbingly over-crowded Inner West line, have some dinner, the Younger Pawn is running around with a duvet cover on her head and making 'woo woo' noises and by then I've completely forgotten what I wanted to say) about the whole 'we're all doomed' thing.

(One reason I'm linking to it now is because I'm honestly not sure if any of my Australian readership read the Grauniard, possibly the last bastion of halfway decent professional reporting in the UK.)

You may have seen the report that schools in the UK are 'producing too few scientists',a conclusion reached by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). It is worth remembering that the CBI has an agenda, and that is to make money. Presumably they think that more scientists means more money for their member businesses country.

A little thought will show then that the CBI is not interested in science at all, rather technology; the appliance of science. The thing is that you do not get that technology unless you have first done basic research. And you need a hell of a lot of basic research to get a single money-spinning technology (if it were otherwise, research scientists would get richer a lot quicker).

Aside: There's a nice example of how politicians lie in that article. The CBI claims that the number of students taking 'A' Levels - the UK's 18+ exam/university entrance exam - in 'hard' sciences has decreased drastically in the last 20 years. One might think that this woould have an obvious knock-on effect on the number of hard science graduates. However, the Schools Minister says that school funding for physics and chemistry has increased, along with the number of science graduates, since 1997 - when the current mob got in. But if we take a look at the numbers it appears that most of that increase is accounted for by computer science and medical graduates, neither of which are famed for basic research (and computer science barely existed as a degree in 1994. No wonder there is such a large percentage increase.). The 110% increase for students taking 'biological sciences' seems hopeful, until you start to ask exactly what that means (I have no idea. I do know that there has not been a doubling in the number of biochemistry graduates). Lord Sainsbury keeps suspiciously quiet about social 'scientists', I note. I wonder if they are included in the statistics?

I am sure that most people in my lab could pass as perfectly normal members of society. I know that some of them even have real lives, and seem to be able to maintain relationships outside the lab.

Therefore I have been somewhat taken aback by the response to the Axygen 'eppendorf' tubes. A fair proportion of the lab rats have come up to me in the last week and raved - there is no other word for it - about these tubes. All right, they are good, but I never expected such an emotional excess.

It's dropped off the front page now, so I'd like to bring your attention to Georg's comment, in which she brings my attention to an article written from a journalist's point of view that, to my simple mind at least, is right on the money.

Non-biologists look away for a couple of lines.

For some reason I got distracted by left-handed DNA earlier. It's a bit of a science geek joke, with a serious point.

Okay, you can look back now.

I then wanted to see what else Tom had to say and came across his Errata & Corrigenda page. And he makes the point very nicely that scientific research progresses through the identification of mistakes and falsification of hypotheses. Additionally, most research claims are false and are corrected by further experiment. There is nothing wrong with this; the observation-hypothesis-experiment cycle is how we do science, and some of those hypotheses will be wrong.

There's a misconception around that research — especially scientific research — is performed with a specific aim in mind. Ghassan makes this mistake:

Research is any project undertaken to reveal new knowledge. Research can be scientific; such as, testing to find cures for illnesses or improve medical treatments.

Dear Reader, this entry is a bit of a rant. I started writing about one thing, and finished up on a different road. But I think the final destination is the same. There are more things I want to say than I've said below, but I shall save them for another time. love, Black Knight

Something the more socially-aware scientists (ouch! Industrialists can look away now) sometimes think about is our responsibility to the society that pays our salaries and funds our research. When I used to work at the Council for Biomedical Research (names have been changed to protect the guilty) I got involved with one of these 'Communicating with the Public' initiatives. They had a guy with an office and training days and stuff and people started taking it seriously, which was good.