Life of a Lab Rat

From The Australian:

ALL students at [Macquarie University] will have to undertake volunteer work

Well, it made me laugh.

Told you it was in a box of old papers and memorabilia:

And November, not summer. But I remember it well.

If anything is worthy of the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's this video of Earth-rise from moon orbit, captured by KAGUYA (more).

Dum dumm DADUMM! DUMDUMDUMDUMDUM.

Via Eva, a great slideshow on the abuse of PowerPoint (and indeed any presentation software).

This ties in nicely with my previous rants (passim), and Henry's comments are, as usual, spot on.

I'm guessing there's going to be a lot of talk on weblogs around the world about the primate cloning news. I forecast a lot of uninformed blather from a lot of people, from all over the moral, religious, political and scientific spectra. The fires will only be fueled further by the news that Ian Wilmut has decided that converting adult cells back to a pluripotent form is 'better' (in a technical, not ethical sense) than using 'cloned' human embryos.

My own concern is not with the status of human embryos, but with the increasing selfishness of our society, its unthinking dash into complete utilitarianism. I'm not going to say what I think about this, because my own ideas are not fully-formed, but I am concerned that all scientists, even those not involved in such obviously 'ethical' areas, think about what they can do, and more importantly what they should.

You see, this is why I hate the internets.

Just got back from a performance at the Pawns' school (Elder Pawn was first clarinet in a fantastic rendition of Pirates of the Caribbean) and am now supposed to be washing up, but I happened to stumble across Emma PeelTigtog's rant on paradigm shifts:

I’m not the only person to be annoyed over the years by the egregious overuse of the term “paradigm shift”. I knew people were misusing the term, but not having actually read Kuhn’s seminal work wherein he coined the term, I never had the properly grounded basis to articulate why.

"Paradigm shift" gets nearly fourteen hundred hits in PubMed. That's a lot of paradigms being overthrown. I really can't be arsed going through and thinking about which ones are really paradigms, but much like my own bugbear, "quantum leap" (111 hits in PubMed) — why people get so excited about the smallest possible discrete advance is beyond me —, I suspect that even (especially?) in the proper sciences the term is much abused.

I'd say more, but the suds are getting cold.

I have refrained from commenting on the Craig Venter 'artificial life' brouhaha because, well, to be honest I couldn't think of anything sensible to say and this safety audit bollocks has been winding me up (having said that, the Head knocked on my door this morning and said "Are we still friends?" and we had a good chat, so I'm feeling less het up about it).

But in a far corner of the Internets, Bill Hanage explains just why Craig Venter's pronouncement is really all fur coat and no knickers. And it's worth the read:

I sure as hell recognise the advantage of a good PR machine. Clearly [Venter] does too.

It's all gone a bit George Smiley.

Peter is concerned about the American Chemical Society (ACS), as well as PRISM, Open Access, and stuff like that. I left a comment on his weblog recently, and from there I think someone at the ACS must have stumbled across the Labrats, because I have a received a second spam email from them, with yours truly in the 'Bcc:' — but this time 'To:' is someone at the NOAA.

My mystery correspondent begins

Dear Colleague and Friend,

Several of you contacted me
about a memo from Judith L. Benham which claimed that the American
Chemical Society is not protesting Open
Access in order to preserve profits and bonuses for the Society's executives.

S/he kindly attached the memo, and continues (I should make explicit that I am quoting from an email. These are the mystery author's opinion and claims, not mine),

Let me assure that I was not involved with last week's memo which is riddled with multiple misdirections typical of a slick political commercial. The most obvious falsehood is this passage: "Our Society's position is also represented by the Association of American Publishers, a non-profit organization whose membership encompasses the major commercial and non-profit scholarly publishers, including ourselves. ACS is not alone among scholarly publishers in reaching out to...."

The statement comes apart once you know the names of the players involved.
The position of the AAP was developed by Brian Crawford, who is chairman of
their scholarly division . Brian Crawford is also head of publishing at ACS. Big surprise.

So what we have are two organizations speaking from the same mouth.

This allows for clever gamesmanship by ACS executives..
Just last year, Rudy Baum wrote his second editorial in Chemical & Engineering
News where he called Open Access "socialized science."[1]

To buttress his argument, Rudy cited--who would have ever guessed!?--the Professional
and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American
Publishers, which "has taken a strong stand" against the Open Access bill.

Rudy also wrote that the AAP's scholarly division had written letters to
senators opposing the bill.. What Rudy forgot to disclose to his
readers is that the letters were signed by the chairman of the AAP's
scholarly division, who is Brian Crawford, also head of publishing at
ACS.[2] Crawford is now apparently Rudy's boss.

Yes, Baum is that ridiculous. But it must be hard for a man to fully inform
readers when his wallet tugs at his conscience. Oh...it gets better.

Brian Crawford holds up his end of the bargain by penning letters against
Open Access on behalf of the AAP, such as the letter last year to the Los Angeles
Times. Brian wrote, "government bureaucracy continues to impede
participation and undermines the successful expansion of information access."
Crawford's byline was credited: "The writer chairs the executive council of the
professional and scholarly publishing division of the Assn. of American Publishers..[3]

I guess that Brian forgot to mention to the Los Angeles Times
that he is also a publishing executive at the American Chemical
Society. He might also have troubled editors with the minor fact that
his bonuses will plummet if ACS publishing profits drop..

So now you see how their political campaign against Open Access works.
First, Crawford creates the policy position at AAP's scholarly division; ACS
executives then point to AAP policy for cover with their members. But it is all a shell game that
quickly falls apart once anyone spends five minutes on Google. Links to the
appropriate information can be found [embedded by BK]. Look for yourself and have a giggle.

And just to prove that we're on the same team, a cheery wave goodbye

I hope everyone has a smashing week! Please keep sending in your emails with links and other bits of information that you find on the internet. And see the wiki for further information. It is only by demanding that ACS leadership becomes more accountable to members that we will see change.

Sincerely,
ACS Insider

No doubt the emails are flying today, because the US is, as I write this, about five hours from waking up, and it's a big day for Open Access over there:

URGENT CALL TO ACTION: Tell your Senator to OPPOSE amendments that strike or change the NIH public access provision in the FY08 Labor/HHS appropriations bill

not that we in the boonies can do anything about it, except maybe tell our friends.

Oh, and naturally, I will continue to report any further developments.

As Monday morning spam goes, this one's pretty interesting. I reproduce it here, unaltered (except for some formatting):

Hello,

I've been an ACS employee for many, many years, but I've
grown concerned with the direction of the organization. I'm sending
this email to alert you that ACS has grown increasingly corporate in
its structure and focus. Management is much more concerned with getting
bonuses and growing their salaries rather than doing what is best for
membership. For instance, Madeleine Jacobs is now pulling in almost
$1 million in salary and bonuses... That's almost 3X what Alan Leshner makes
over at AAAS, and almost double what Drew Gilpin Faust makes to lead Harvard.

I think Madeleine is smart, but I'm not quite sure if she's in the same
category as Dr. Faust. She doesn't even have a PhD!

What really concerns me is a move by ACS management to undermine the open-access
movement. Rudy Baum has been leading the fight with several humorous
editorials -- one in which he referred to open-access in the pages of
C&EN as "socialized science." ACS has also spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars in membership money to hire a company to lobby against
open-access.

What troubles me the most is when ACS management decided to
hire Dezenhall Resources to fight open-access. Nature got hold of some
internal ACS emails written by Brian Crawford that discussed how Dezenhall could
help us undermine open-access. Dezenhall later created a group called
Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM),
which has this silly argument that open-access means "no more peer-review."

If you're wondering why ACS is fighting this, it's because people like Rudy Baum,
Brian Crawford and other ACS managers receive bonuses based on how much
money the publishing division generates. Hurt the publishing revenue;
you hurt their bonuses.

I'm hoping that sending out this email will get people to force ACS
executives to become more transparent in how they act and spend
membership money. Not to mention their crazy need for fatter salaries.

It's time for some change. If you want to check out the
sources for this information, there is a wiki site that has all the
articles and documents outlining what I've just written..

You can find it here:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Chemical_Society

Those of us inside ACS know that it's time for things to change. But
management won't alter their behavior. The money is just too good.

Sincerely,

ACS Insider

I'd be fascinated to hear from anyone else who has received similar, and whether they know if the person in the 'To:' field is actually the author?

Blink, and you miss it. A few minutes ago I saw this from my office window:

Peter has been getting rather agitated about Open Access and a publishing industry response — which demonstrates that it really is all about the money for the publishers.

I was going to weigh in and be scathing and witty, but I have a headache and I see that Alethea has beaten me to it, by linking to a wonderfully surreal piss-take.

Just a quick one:

Alethea links to a page of linky goodness about gender (in)equality in the sciences. There's a whole heap of stuff there that is relevant to over half the human race.

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?

Just over a month ago I wrote about Elsevier Reed funding arms fairs. On my return from the lab retreat (very nice, thank you for asking) I find an email saying

Reed Elsevier announced today that it is to exit the defence exhibitions sector. This portfolio of five shows is part of Reed Elsevier’s global Business division and represents around 0.5% of group annual turnover.

Sir Crispin Davis says

[I]t has become increasingly clear that growing numbers of important customers and authors have very real concerns about our involvement in [arms fairs. They] are no longer compatible with Reed Elsevier's position as a leading publisher of scientific, medical, legal and business content

Question: Why is the sky blue?
Answer: Because that's what it looks like.

Philip has been exercised by this question. It turns out that the standard response, to do with the dependence of scattering intensity on wavelength, actually comes up with the answer "It isn't; it's purple".

But interestingly, our eyes are more sensitive to blue light than purple, and so the sky only appears blue. This fascinates me in much the same way that no two people ever perceive the same rainbow (for certain values of 'same'). Our reality is indeed influenced if not determined by our perception.

One of my readers (Hi Boris!) kindly took some photos of the cycle path that I spoke about on Sunday. Mad props.

(click through for larger images)

Ian seems to be having his midlife crisis a little early.

Being visited by my ex-boss brought similar questions in my mind to a focus a couple of weeks ago. I too have had an 'eclectic' career — not that it's bad, just unconventional. Being the eternal postdoc might be fun, but it's unsupportable for much longer. I need to be finding a real job, with some degree of security, whether in academic science or out of it. That thought does exercise me somewhat.

And by making that thought public I might be breaking ranks with the essence of postdoc-hood. Ian raises questions that we all should be facing, yet there seems to be very little discussion of them. The unspoken rule is that you get your PhD, you publish lots during one or two postdoc positions, and you get tenure. That's the career track for this trade, and many people, good people are failing to achieve this.

Lots of people go into publishing or pharma or whatever, but the feeling from this side of the fence is that they have somehow failed. That is patently unfair. But for a postdoc to admit that s/he is not happy with science, is seriously considering a change , is seen as an admission of failure (if this happens after a reasonably successful career to date — it's expected that a newly-minted PhD will go through this).

Add to this the shark-like instincts of the turbo-nutter gunners to sense weakness and to hunt and destroy anyone going through a 'difficult' patch and it would not surprise me if there are a lot of scientists out there wondering just what the hell they are doing, and not being able to talk to anyone.

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark, and it's not the curry I had for tea.

There is a rather smug editorial in the current Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (full text requires subscription). The editor bemoans the inconsistency of individual publishers with regards to their open access policies. Nature, naturally, is beyond reproach:

By comparison, all journals published by the Nature Publishing
Group [. . .] encourage deposition of
the authors' versions of accepted papers (the unedited
manuscripts) in PubMed Central, in institutional repositories and
on authors' personal websites, six months after publication.

In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, who funds you can determine when your articles become freely available, and how much money the publisher makes out of you. For example, come September the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will pay Elsevier up to US$1,500 for the privilege of making each piece of publicly-funded research freely available six months after publication. If you are fortunate to hold a Wellcome grant, you are required to make your published articles freely available immediately upon publication (fair enough; after all, the public paid for it in the first place). But if you are publishing in any of the ten Cell Press journals (all owned by Elsevier), it will cost the Wellcome US$5,000 per article.

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.

Funny thing, science. Most of us do experiments to show that something is so, but in reality we're excluding other possibilities. What we're doing, if we think about it, is trying to disprove hypotheses so that a theory is strengthened. Now that sounds a little odd, but it is the basis of the scientific method.

An observation leads to a hypothesis explaining that observation. We test that hypothesis by doing an experiment. We think of another hypothesis, and test that one. And we keep doing this, until we run out of testable hypotheses, to formulate a theory that is not contradicted by evidence, one that we say is 'supported' by experiment. Philosophically, it is difficult to be certain that any explanation of a phenomenon really represents reality, that is it is difficult to prove anything This is because someone with a good imagination can always come up with an explanation that fits the evidence but does not agree with your pet theory. It is much easier to disprove something.

We have Ockham, of course, but that is a philosophical concept and it although it might say something is likely or not, it does not tell us that something is. This is why good experiment design is important.

And yes, this is also why proponents of Intelligent Design do not make good scientists and and why it is bloody difficult to reason with them. They do not have any hypotheses in support of their position that are falsifiable. You can not prove them wrong, because everytime they are in a corner, puff of smoke! Dear old William can just go whistle.

But I did not want to argue about that today. I want to talk about proof, and faith.

A lot of people, and especially scientists and other rationalists, get very confused when talking about faith, and indeed proof. Is faith really a belief in the the improbable, the illogical or even the irrational? If you have evidence, does it stop being faith? If you have evidence is it necesarily proof? Surely you can only have faith in things that can not be proved, or that you know are not true? A few weeks ago someone opined that anyone who could have faith in the intangible was stupid. I wondered aloud where that left scientists, because let's face it friends, we all have faith in things we can not prove. Our experiments, our theories; we can only support from evidence, we can only prove, so much.

Question: If you can ask if you're delirious, does that automatically mean you're not?

It's all right, I've cut the analgesic dosage (mmm codeine) so I should be reasonably coherent now.

Went to the quack's on Friday, and fortunately did not get to see the muppet who managed to miss the pneumal party when I crawled into his office last Thursday, barely able to breathe and unable to stand. Instead I saw a nice lady doctor who continued my roxithromycin prescription and also prescribed a cephalosporin. That is because I said I did not want a penicillin, as we use beta-lactamases in the lab all the time and I did not want to take the risk that anything pathological in me had managed to acquire resistance. Unlikely I know, but always a worry.

I don't actually think she knew what I was talking about, but tried her best. She had never prescribed cephalosporins before, and knew nothing about them, but spent a good few minutes looking in various books before deciding what to do. She didn't even know who Ed Abraham was, which is a shame, because I did my DPhil in The Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, where the whole antibiotic story took off.

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).

A colleague the other day was a wee bit angry.

She had to get a photograph or something counter-signed for something official; you know the drill, "I certify that this is a true likeness of Minne Mouse" blah. And there's a reasonably lengthy list of professions whose signatures are somehow worthy of trust in this matter. JPs. GPs. Ministers of Religion. Solicitors.
Dentists.

Accountants.

The problem with not writing at work is that I do not get to be topical. So, this is a couple of days late.

The SMH reported a 'well-worn sting' that the Department is perpetrating. Apparently some of the papers in the undergraduate courses are multiple choice. In any one exam sitting there are four versions of the paper, in an effort to combat cheating. And it appears that the 'sting' is working well, as cheats are getting caught. Moreover, the cheats go on to display further evidence of their stupidity by challenging the (rather poor) marks they get. This is like . . . well, let's use this example:

My father works for a certain county police force in the UK. One of the favourite stings that this particular force carries out is to have someone drive a car and park it in an area where car thieves are known to operate, leave it and observe from a distance. Then when the scrote gets in to pinch it he gets nicked. But suppose a particularly dim scrote got into the car, then drove it to the nearest policeman and said "Oi, copper, me headlight's knackered, whaddya goin to do about it?". That would be pretty thick, no?

I walked into the office the other day to grab a notebook, with a pile of shiny, new tissue culture plastics under my arm.

CK accused me of hoarding the flasks and wotnot like a squirrel. I countered by saying that I intended to be the only person capable of carrying out cell culture in a post-apocalyptic world, cornering the market as it were. Think of me as a pre-alcoholic Mel Gibson.

W00t! Via Eva, we have the full length version of the teaser cell movie. Narrated in a very 1970s public hygiene announcement voice, but worth a look anyways.

Flash, unfortunately. . . sorry Nix.

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.

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.

The video I mentioned yesterday reminded me of what I really want to see come out of all this sciencey stuff. There are vast quantities of data coming out of labs around the world, both 'big science' and 'little science'. The trick is to tie it all together, so that it makes some kind of sense. The second trick is to present it.

It is going to take a while, and some serious thinking about interdisciplinary communication, but I hope that within the next twenty five years or so we will have a working in silico cell. A program that models in exquisite detail the complete (OK, maybe 90% — 'first draft') secret life of any given cell type. Computing power will not be a problem, we will in all likelihood have something smaller than a handheld that can cope with it. But imagine, taking a computer model of a leucocyte, giving it some P-selectin and letting the program run. Or changing random proteins to see if they behave as oncogenes. In time we would catalogue all this information but being able to predict cellular behaviour from a rigorous theoretical background would be incredible.

Imagine it as a teaching tool, too. Build — or use holographic technology to project — a 10 metre spheroid, crowded and swarming with life; walk inside it and follow individual pathways and processes. (Take Australia. Scale it down until it fits across the length of your hand. That scale — inverted of course — is the same order of magnitude as your typical animal cell blown up to 10 metres across).

By 2030? Possibly. I'm not making a prediction, I'm trying to inspire. I think we could do it by then, given the phenomenal increases in both biological knowledge and computing power over recent years.

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.

Hello? This is a technical approach to a social problem!

It's bad enough that 'comfortable' middle class parents in the West waste taxpayer's money (oh yes they do - certain treatment is available in some NHS Trust regions) on IVF, but in a region where unplanned pregnancies and STDs are rife, do we really want to treat a sociological failing by diverting money and scientists' time from more pressing needs?

Changing age-old prejudice is going to take a while.

Indeed, but does anyone really think that attitudes will change once IVF/ART is freely available? Of course not — you've just removed one of the environmental pressures that might help bring that change about.

Bah. I need a walk in the fresh air, and it's raining.