Category: nostalgia

& memories

Categories
ice shock nostalgia

Physics Department Carol Service and Tomas Luis de Victoria

For me, Christmas always begins with the Physics Department Carol Service in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Organised by atmospheric physicist, my old pal Jim Williamson and the former Secretary of the Bodleian Library, Charles Mould (who played organ at my wedding!), the impromptu choir consists of Jim’s friends from the Christ Church Cathedral Voluntary Choir, people from St Cross College like Becs and I (and indeed, Jim and Charles), and some physicists. We get together at 2.45pm for a very tightly managed rehearsal and the carol concert starts at 4.30pm. Afterwards choir and audience troop upstairs to the wood-panelled upper room and have wine and warm mince pies. It’s very seasonal!

The service is traditional style Lessons and Carols, like at King’s College Cambridge (but we have only two lessons). The Vicar of St. Mary’s takes the service, which always reminds me of my great affection for the Church of England. (I went to very High Church Anglican schools until I was 16.)

Thankfully I’ve been singing in this choir for about 19 years now…since I was a graduate student at St Cross. Only the fact that I’ve sung most of the difficult music before saves me, because as a sight-reader I am terrible!

This year though, Jim managed to pick a bunch of pieces I hadn’t sung before, or not for many years. Including the motet Hodie Christus Natus Est by Poulenc. I think we did it once before and I barely scraped through…

We also sang the motet O Magnum Mysterium by the sublime Spanish renaissance composer, Tomas Luis de Victoria. Victoria is one of my very, very favourites, in my opinion he’s better than Byrd, Tallis and even Palestrina. In fact, when I die, I want Victoria’s Requiem sung, with the deliciously gloomy Taedet, please, thank you very much, and lots of tears from my grieving relatives, okay?

Here’s the Taedet from Victoria’s Requiem sung by the brilliant Gabrieli Consort, including my friend the Chilean tenor Rodrigo del Pozo…who appears as a character in Joshua Book 2! (bringing some important and very surprising news to Josh and his mother…)

And here are the wonderful, sorrowful words in which someone asks of God – “What the heck do you know about our suffering? And who are you to judge?” – a thought that even the most devout believer will have at times of difficulty. I admire the lyric for its brutal honesty.

(translated from the Latin)
My soul is weary of my life;
I will leave my complaint upon myself;
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say unto God, Do not condemn me;
show me wherefore thou contendest with me.
Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress,
that thou shouldest despise the work of thine hands,
and shine upon the counsel of the wicked?
Hast thou eyes of flesh? or seest thou as man seeth?
Are thy days as the days of man?
are thy years as man’s days,
that thou inquirest after mine iniquity,
and searchest after my sin?
Thou knowest that I am not wicked;
and there is none that can deliver out of thine hand.

And for another treat, here’s the O Magnum Mysterium performed by a Spanish choir.

Categories
comics mexico nostalgia

From Mexican masked wrestlers to Batman


On the left: my sister (in the pretty dress) and I (in the Batman costume) dine out with clowns at Mexico City’s Mauna Loa restaurant. I’m probably 7 years old here.

On the right: our six-year old daughter as Mistico, the masked wrestler, taken a few weeks ago by new friend via Flickr, Alejandro.

Our six-year old daughter has a thing for Mexican masked wrestlers. I’ve seen it all before and I know where it leads.

I became fascinated with Batman via a fascination with the masked wrestlers who were and are still such big heroes in Mexico. When I was little it was Blue Demon and El Santo. These days there are others, like Mistico.

Truthfully I had no idea that the costumes I saw being sold all over gaudy stalls in Mexico’s Chapultepec park were anything to do with wrestling. I thought they were caped crusaders. And that was cool. So when our little daughter begged us to buy her a Mistico mask in Playa del Carmen recently, I knew just how she felt.

Somehow that fascination turned into a full-on obsession with Batman (that I’m not really over to be honest…). My Uncle Johny, a childhood pal of my father’s was always crazy for comic books and ‘pulps’. So naturally his boy, my cousin Juan Fernando, had the best batman suit money could buy. How I envied Juan Fernando that suit. I coveted it something rotten, so when Juan grew out of it, my uncle and aunt kindly gave it to me. The true owner! Only I truly loved that suit.

I wore it everywhere and all the time. I wore it to the university where my grandfather worked and the students would ask ‘Hey Batman, where’s Robin?’ until I actually got fed up.

There wasn’t always a Robin, yanno…

I wore it to restaurants. There was no point arguing with me on this. Thank goodness there were no family weddings or christenings that summer or I’d have worn it to them too.

My Uncle Johny had a library that was to me, basically like a temple. It was full of book shelves and cases of precious sci-fi books, adventure stories, comic books and collectibles. He used to lend me his Ellery Queen books and his Batman paperback versions of the comics. It was in Johny’s library that I first read the Batman origin story, the most impressive one, I believe, for any caped crusader. A rich, privileged boy sees his beloved parents murdered in an alleyway by some thug, all for a string of pearls. And that’s it: over. His life of privilege and all his riches can never replace what he loses right there – his childhood. Bruce Wayne spends his whole life trying to put back something that can never be fixed. And he’s never content – how can he be? No bereavement counselling for Bruce – just a premonition in a bat cave and a life of violence and vendetta against the breed of scumbag who destroyed his life.

Gosh it’s cool.

Categories
nostalgia

Back to the Eggli

Eggli mountain

Here’s a photo of the Eggli mountain in Saanen, Switzerland. It’s taken from the hospital where I broke my leg. In fact I had this great view of the slope from my window while I was there, and could watch clouds of billowing snow shot from cannons in the evening and early morning, saw the snow-cats preparing the piste for skiers, and then the carefree skiers sashaying down the slope.

It really made me want to ski again. I promised myself I would too, until I understood the nature and tedium of the physiotherapy that would have been required to restore my hamstring even to it’s formerly feeble state.

And then I thought…meh. Skiing – it’s not that great.

I’m sitting here in my brother and sister-in-law’s gorgeous chalet in a tiny mountain village near Gstaad, watching their twin babies while their parents finally grab a chance to ski. The babies are scrumptious! One pink and one blue. The village sits at the end of the valley, smack up against the Spitzhorn mountain, of which I have a terrific view, also of the nearby glacier (where there’s a roller coaster at 3000m!!!).

And it’s around -10 degrees celsius outside – not even December yet!

Maybe my brother will shut up about global warming for a bit now.

Well I can’t sit here blogging all day. I’ve bottles to prepare and nappies to change!

And a manuscript for ‘Jaguar’s Realm’ that needs looking at…

Categories
nostalgia science

Intimidated

I looked at my site stats for the first time ever. Intimidating! Not that there are that many site visits, but apart from the four or five people who comment here, I didn’t really believe anyone read my blog.

It’s better to imagine that no-one reads it except for a tiny few. Now I feel all intimidated and inhibited in what I might write!

I spent yesterday evening with my brother-in-law Paul. We ate Szechuan food and he talked to me about scary stuff; scary because of just how serious it is – his biotech company, the share price, investors, pitching to big-shot stock brokers, mergers and aquisitions, clinical trials.

And not for the first time recently it struck me how all my friends from my science days are now reaching quite elevated positions in their work, where the fortunes of quite a few people rest on their shoulders. Magda making full Professor at Monash University, my Spanish friend Ana considering a job as Country Manager for a clinical research organisation, Paul as Vice-President for Drug Discovery at his super-cool biotech outfit Phylogica.

Meanwhile I make up stories about conspiracy theories and actually get paid for it…

When I listen to Paul and Magda talk, I can’t help but wonder what I’d be doing now if I hadn’t left science. It’s not regret as such but curiosity because you know what…science is so, so, SO cool, especially biological science. It’s world-changing, awesome, totally mesmerizing.

Why would anyone study anything else?

Which I guess shows just how much I’ve been rehabilitated. Because when I left science I was tired and jaded, fed up of running gels and spending my weekends looking after tissue culture cells and worrying about funding.

Meanwhile Paul is as hilarious as ever. It was freezing as we walked to the restaurant, and Paul remarked that he wished global warming would properly kick in if it’s going to, cos all this cold was pretty rubbish. He’d just come back from Davos, Switzerland where they’ve had some nice deep, early snow. We talked about carbon footprints and people’s guilt over that. “The only people I’ve got time for,” he said, “the people with the tiniest footprint are people like my Dad. He consumes almost nothing, cycles everywhere and recycles as much as possible. And he doesn’t give a damn about the environment – he does it out of thrift! Good Scottish thrift. He’d reuse a nail! That’s why people shouldn’t waste stuff.”

I’m very fond of Ted (Paul’s Dad) too. When we go to Perth we stay in a flat built by Ted, on top of his own house. (He’s not a builder by trade, actually he was a Professor of Philosophy…but why hire builders, a real man should be able to do that himself!) It has terrific views towards a meadow and a pond which is almost dried out when we are there. Palm trees grow at the side of the house, which has a verandah all the way around the top. The trees are and nourished by waste water and the septic tank under the house. When a breeze blows the palm fronds rustle against the roof. Ted pre-stocks the fridge for us with a stack of Aussie beers, a huge slab of cheddar cheese, bread and industrial quantities of ice-cream. And because he knows I’m terrified of spiders he always does a special check for huntsmen and redbacks, scourge of Western Australia.

Best of all, the flat houses the collection of books with which my brother-in-law and his six siblings grew up. Including an entire collection of E.Nesbit books, which I settle down to re-read with enormous pleasure.

Categories
nostalgia science

Yay Smithies et al, the Nobel prize is yours…!

And the prize goes to…the gene targeting guys!

There’ll be a few more scientists I used to know gnashing their teeth this week as more of their friends win the Nobel prize and they don’t.

(I once heard of one guy who would get wildly depressed with jealousy every year that one of his friends and not him joined the Nobel prize-winners club. I wrote a short story about it…which shall remain unpublished or because I named actual real scientists I know, to make it funnier… This story is handwritten in a drawer and I show it to me special science friends once in a while, for a giggle. The coda to this tale is that the guy in question finally did win. Obviously I can’t name any names…)

This year the Nobel Prize for Medicine went to the Sir Martin Evans, Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, the guys who developed the technologies for creating a mouse with a gene ‘knocked out’. This means that you could look at the effect, in theory, of a single gene in a mouse, by creating a mouse that was normal in every way except that it lacked, say, the haemoglobin gene.
The early days of any new technique are always fraught with difficulties. I came into the gene targeting game in 1993, early-ish, but quite a few mouse knockouts had already been done. It still wasn’t easy though. Nowadays I bet rich labs just order a knockout mouse via the Web…

I was put on a project to knockout a gene called the FGFR3 – fibroblast growth factor receptor 3. It’s an interesting gene because a single mutation – one tiny change in the DNA code – results in the condition known as achondroplasia – aka dwarfism.

The first thing I had to do was to ‘restriction map’ the DNA in the chromosome – i.e. make a map of all the sites where ‘restriction’ enzymes could specifically cut into the DNA. Since DNA is too tiny to cut with scissors, molecular biologists use these naturally occuring enzymes to snip DNA into pieces. It’s just a matter of knowing which enzymes cut where and then picking your tools; the enzymes which will cut you out a nice chunk of precisely tailored DNA.

The mouse FGFR3 gene was spread over quite a large region of DNA so I used this delish and elegant new method that I’d read about. It worked like you wouldn’t believe, first time too!

I’d just mapped the FGFR3 gene and got partway into making the ‘knockout construct’ – the DNA molecule that you use to inject into mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells – a first stage towards the knockout mouse (the stage that Smithies contributed to the whole process).

And then a Big Hot Lab in the USA published the FGFR3 knockout mouse in a Damn Hot Journal.

Bah. So that was several months of my work down the drain! I went to see my boss. Did he know that Big Hot Lab had a couple of postdocs and a techie or two on the same project as little me?Hmmm, he said and peered hard at his computer screen, as if something rather canny had just occurred to him. “I may have heard a rumour or two…”

And that’s why I didn’t develop the FGFR3 knockout mouse and get a Cell paper and why I ultimately gave up science and had to do other things. Yes, but for that I might never have written a single novel.

Meanwhile, Oliver Smithies. I heard him talk once. What a character! He’s a Brit – a Yorkshireman I think (I may have remembered that wrong). but lives in North Carolina now. He flew in to talk at the Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford when I was a grad student. I mean that quite literally – Smithies has a pilot’s license and like John Travolta, flies himself to all his engagements.

This is rare for a scientist.

Smithies gave a fascinating talk, one of the best I ever saw in my whole time as a scientist. It featured lots of photos of his lab and his makeshift equipment. This guy is one of those rare, rare things – a scientist who is also a natural engineer.


Check out Smithies’ homemade electroporator – known by scientists as a ‘zapper’ for hitting cells with an electric current so that DNA goes in.

Years before Perkin-Elmer had patented the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and made a machine which allowed people to amplify DNA molecules by basically just sticking some DNA and Taq polymerase enzyme in a test tube and putting it into a Perkin-Elmer thermal cycler, Smithies was doing early ground-breaking PCR using bits of washing machine timers to do the thermal cycling. He showed us photos of stuff that you wouldn’t believe could be used to do proper science, equipment literally cobbled together from bits and bobs and stuck together with sticky tape. He was an elderly man even then but brimming with enthusiasm. I remember being quite inspired.

I’m chuffed he’s won. Best Nobel Prize news since Paul Nurse won for the yeast cell cycle genes.