Categories
raves

Gorgeous Things

Jane Sehmi of Sehmi Precious Jewels

Out on the town with my BlackBerry again, I dropped in on my good pal Jane Sehmi (pictured above). We’ve been friends for ages, since learning how to do drug-free childbirth down at the local NCT. Well, giggling and drinking coffee more like…

Jane went and splashed out one day on some gorgeous gorgeous beads and her high-powered IT executive husband took one look at the (allegedly extravagant) haul and shrewdly suggested she start a business making and selling handmade jewellery…

So she did! It’s called Sehmi Precious Jewellry and if you’re one of Jane’s mates you get the occasional invite to her lovely home, treated to tea or coffee and a viewing of the jewels.

I went over to inspect the goods and catch up with Jane, with whom I like to compare and contrast adventures of our too-fabulous-for-their-own-good teenage daughters.

The news is that they are both still far too fabulous and not quite the earnest, studious girls we hoped to raise, being far too glamorous to be seen in the company of their sad old parents, at least that’s my daughter. Jane’s may be more merciful than mine…

Meanwhile Jane displayed her jewellery in some truly imaginative and stylish ways – see photos below. I was going to buy presents for friends, but couldn’t resist. I’m keeping every single thing I bought for myself.

Lookee here…

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
mexico raves

Reasons to visit Mexico #1 Breakfast

mexican breakfastOriginally uploaded by mgharris


Here’s one of the things I really miss about Mexico; food!

Yesterday cousin Rodrigo explained how come he left Manchester so suddenly last year.

“I missed my Mexican food, and my mum. I’d had enough of sandwiches, pizzas and kebabs. So I bought a ticket and surprised everyone.”

The photo shows chilaquiles (fried corn tortillas cooked in stock and green tomato and chili sauce, with onions and optional sour cream), refried beans and fried potatoes and peppers.

The relief of eating this after 3 years…

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.

Categories
raves

A Night with Imps

My good pal DB yesterday dragged us out blinking to discover that the world has more to offer by way of entertainment than salsa music and dancing, a fact that we’ve neglected for ooh, years.

“Maybe you’ll finally mention me on your blog” DB remarked. I pointed out that I recently devoted an entire post to her, with a photo and everything, that her comment showed just how little she reads it. “Well I’m very busy,” DB said carefully. But her tone said: I have responsibilities, people to see, places to go, millions of pounds to raise for Keble College, and I can’t be sitting on the Web all day fiffing and faffing.

Quite right too…

So on DB’s insistence we saw the University’s improvisational comedy troupe, known as the Oxford Imps. They play every Monday night in term-time, at the Wheatsheaf pub in Oxford. They improvise sketches and songs based on daft and random audience shout-outs.

For example, yesterday featured a rap set in the underworld of the Bodleian library stacks, a musical about ghostbusters (ending in a harmonised quartet), a musical about hats (including a murderous milliner who rhymed ‘milliner’ with ‘killin’ ‘er’), a really impressive feat of memory in which dialogue is improvised and then delivered forwards, backwards, inside out…and more; two hours worth of entertainment for £3! Bargain!

The troupe are amazingly professional, they know how to get laughs and impress the audience, how to get the whole room joining in, willing them along to succeed. The show is like the TV show “Whose Line Is It Anyway” with three times the energy and goodwill.

Improvisation comedy is a real test of acting and wit, in my opinion. The Oxford Imps are natural born entertainers and comedians.