I am not in the office today because it id half-term for my children and I am on revision enforcement duties. This allowed me to listen to the Today Programme over breakfast and listen to a story on the opening of the new target station at ISIS. Andrew taylor, Director of ISIS, was interviewed and did a reasonable job at explaining things until he tried to explain that the machine was being used to probe the action of surfactants. Prompted by the interviewer, he unfortunately failed to explain what a surfactant was to a lay audience but instead used the method of quoting lots of examples as to where they are important but didn’t really have a go at explianing the term. As the examples were as diverse as hair care and baby’s lungs that didn’t really help either.
Nonetheless it was good to see that real science does make it into the news and that the Today programme is bringing it o the public.
Nice post, Brian. And, by the way, I hope you will consider signing up to ScienceOnline 09, in a forum somewhere near you on Nature Network as I write.
I know what you mean about revision enforcement duties! Owing to the ages of my children, one of them is thankfully done with it (she’s in year 9, so had to get her exams out of the way before the GCSE, AS and A2s….for space reasons!), and the other is older than me so I cannot tell her anything let alone do any enforcement ;-)
Good to hear about the ISIS. I spent a year working in the lab of Alec Bangham at Babraham, so I got to know a lot about surfactant (and bloat!) while I was there, even though I was not working on that problem at the time. I like it when the “unglamorous” science gets a look-in, even if the explanation was a bit of a chicken-out. (If it was “my era”, they could have used the then-handsomish matinee idol Alan Bates and his turn as Gabriel Oak as a popular “hook” to explain the concept.)
@Maxine – Alas the date for ScienceOnline 09 clashes with taking aforementioned revisees on a summer jaunt.
What a pity, Brian. I am not sure how available I’ll be, either…..maybe next time they will be able to organise it outside the school hols.