Category: raves

& faves

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Joshua Files science zero moment

Report from my sick-bed

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I should be in bed in bed but I’ve been there most of the day fighting off dengue fever. Okay it probably isn’t dengue fever but it’s plenty unpleasant enough and I brought it from Brazil. It’s my fifth day so I’m feeling a bit pathetic.

“How come you aren’t better yet, Mummy,” my six-year old asked. And then paused before adding, “Cos Daddy’s better. He got better right away. He’s been doin’ shoppin’ and cookin’ and other good things.”

It’s always got to be a competition, hasn’t it…?

I managed to rouse myself to beginning Joshua Book 3 today. Hurray! Only other writers can appreciate how big an achievement that is. I haven’t written for six months, astonishingly lazy underachiever that I am.

And before you cry ‘false modesty’ – University academic friends of mine are expected to write scholarly tomes whilst holding down a full-time college fellowship and University lectureships. Last year one of these friends, with four kids mind, published a book and also ended up delivering a speech at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. Another – who has two kids – was voted Woman Of the Year.

So – I know what I am. Lightweight and proud of it!

Gosh my head hurts. I only started this post really to alert you a recent issue of New Scientist, which I have been trying to read between bouts of languishing feebly. It could have been written for me! Articles about the possible collapse of civilisation, the real-life possible existence of time-travel and telepathy and a groovy little thing about an upcoming innovation in social networking Websites that neatly solves a plot problem for me.

Anyway. I’ve tried non-pharmaceutical remedies all day – cold compresses, cooling gel patches, Tiger Balm. Nothing. So I’m going to cave and take some proper medicine.

Ah. Sweet oblivion of an anti-histamine mild sedative combined with OTC analgesics.

That’s me out for at least 12 hours.

Categories
fangirling nostalgia

With Deep Anger And Resentment

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I’ve only once been to a booksigning. My favourite authors hardly ever visit Oxford (two of them, never, what with being deceased). When they do it’s probably as an honoured High Table guest at one of the colleges rather than a humble book signing session.

But once, I did have a chance to meet a literary hero, none other than Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”.

I may have mentioned before what a total fangirl I am and always have been. I was actually a member of ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the HHGTTG fan club, once… (John Lloyd, producer of the original radio show and later, via QI.com, a customer of my IT company, gave me a hug when I told him that!). So when I had my chance to have Douglas Adams (or as he’s known to the fan community, ‘Bop Ad’) actually sign his latest book, I of course included some obscure reference to the BBC radio show. And asked him to sign my copy of ‘So Long And Thanks For All The Fish’ with the words:

With deep anger and resentment.

Well, it won a smile from dear old Bop, who was kept busy all afternoon that day in Blackwell’s.

Categories
nostalgia science

Bioscience Nostalgia

Every so often I get all nostalgic for molecular biology. Ah, they were good days, so much work to do that you hardly had time to think about anything but science.

I found some videos on YouTube which made me smile. This has got nothing to do with Joshua Files, btw, but if you’ve half an interest in science geek humour, and the nostalgic musings of a former scientist then read on…


Here’s the PCR song. It’s from BIO-RAD, the manufacturer of the thermal recycling machine which makes the Polymerase Chain Reaction possible (at least optimal). Lucky BioRad, they had a bright employee named Kary Mullis who when faced with the dilemma that piqued many scientists in the 1980s, didn’t stop thinking. No; he took a long drive up to Marin County (or from…) and thought long and hard about it.

This was the dilemma: We were all using purified enzymes like DNA polymerase to amplify DNA ‘in vitro’ (as in, not in a cell but in a test-tube), but only on a small scale. We weren’t making enough DNA to use in DNA subcloning work or enough to see on a gel with the naked eye. It wasn’t possible.

We all knew that DNA can be replicated simply by melting the two strands, using DNA polymerase to fill in each strand. In theory, if you kept repeating the process 1 molecule would become 2, then 4, 8,16,32,64 etc. But the process of melting the DNA each time would destroy the enzyme. And it was a big hassle to keep swapping the DNA from water baths to ice baths to cycle the process of melting/annealing.

And that’s where most of us stopped thinking.

Kay Mullis, however, remembered that some bacteria exist at high temperatures (e.g. near volcanic vents under the sea), and have heat-stable enzymes. If he could use the DNA polymerase from such a bacteria, it should be possible to invent a machine that would heat-and-cool tubes for the optimum times so that small amounts of DNA could be melted and annealed 20,30,40 times.

And that would seriously amplify the molecules. That would make it possible to eventually detect teeny weeny amounts of DNA.

And so PCR was invented. As an employee Mullis didn’t get rich but he did invent a process that made the lives of all molecular biologists much easier, revolutionised forensic science and paternity suits.

For some reason I only once had a chance to use PCR. In my early days it wasn’t around and later it just wasn’t applicable to what I was researching, until the last month or so. And then I used it to detect a subcloned DNA molecule I’d made the day before. It was the fastest subcloning I ever did and the PCR worked first time, like a dream…and I thought Jeeeez…why wasn’t this around 6 years ago?!

Categories
raves

The World According to LD

I am so enjoying the new series of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ on More4.

The premise for the series is as gloriously ridiculous as ever, some of the story concepts so featherweight as to be wholly insubstantial and yet still I laugh louder than at any other current comedy show (and it’s not like I’m not trying, I have started watching three other new comedy series this year).

Here’s Larry David (LD) doing his trademark ‘hard stare’. It puts me in mind of Paddington bear, who also had a famous hard stare.

It takes huge skill to make comedy out of ‘nothing’, but Seinfeld and 5 series of Curb don’t seem yet to have exhausted this guy. Mind you that’s not what some people are saying…some think that this 6th series shows signs of tiring. Well maybe series 6 hasn’t yet come up with anything as roll-on-the-floor-laughingly funny as ‘The Doll’ or ‘The Grand Opening’, but when the notion of comedy based on nothing-or-not-much has taken hold in lots of new comedy shows, CYE proves that Larry David is still…The Master.

All hail. Larry, you are untouchable! We’re not worthy, etc, etc.

Categories
raves

Raving Stage Mom

Who me?

Argghhh, but I just can’t help myself, our daughter was just so darn GREAT in her Stagecoach performance of “We Will Rock You”!

Now’s the time to confess that in my time I have taken my daughter along to an audition for ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ (and listened from behind the door with tears in my eyes to my little 10-year old belting ut the Shoop-shoop song…), driven her back and forth from theatres to be in the chorus for the Bill Kenwright productions of ‘Joseph’, dabbed a hanky to my eyes watching her in the Ellen Kent production of ‘Turandot’.

I even started writing in hope that maybe I could make enough extra cash to send her to an independent stage school…but now she doesn’t want to go.

So it was with immense pride that we watched her finally blowing an audience away with the talent we’d seen at home but never seemed to quite find the right role. As Scaramouche she sang “Somebody to Love”, “I Want To Break Free”, “Under Pressure” and “Who Wants to Live Forever” (the last two as duets). And she totally ROCKED. A crowd of twenty friends from school showed up to support her, and practically carried her out of the theatre…!

We weren’t allowed to go to the Fan Club After Party, of course. We are Old and Sad and must make a Graceful Exit after the appropriately cordial congratulations.

Here’s a photo of our daughter as ‘Scaramouche’ with her co-star – ‘Galileo Figaro’. No video sadly, no photos or recording was allowed.

Plus – another way in which the 15-year old daughter has already surpassed her old mum; her blog has attracted several readers who have no connection to her except the blog (as serafina67 crows in ‘Big Woo’, Susie Day’s LOLarious forthcoming novel about a teen blogger – “I have INTERNET friends!”)

I’m not allowed to disclose the blog address though. It’s anonymous…and a bit scandalous. She’s no Peaches Geldof, still goes to church but…it’s a close thing.