Just got an email from a colleague about a paper on dinosaur evolution published in another journal. I won’t embarrass my colleague by naming names, but the tone of my colleague’s email was that dinosaurs appealed to their inner child.

I retorted rudely asked why it was that people always assume that dinosaurs are for kids, with the implication that molecular biology is serious stuff for grown-ups?

My colleague’s reply was rather astute -

1. there aren’t any bedtime stories about glycolysis.

On receiving this my mind went into overdrive. What good’s a paper involving microarrays, thought Alice, if they’re not in MIAME format?

On the other hand, once upon a time there were four little rabbits graduate students, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-Tail and Peter. They worked with their supervisor in a laboratory in the basement of a very big teaching hospital.

‘Now, my dears,’ said old Mrs. PhD Supervisor one morning, ‘you may go to the darkroom or down to the tissue culture suite, but don’t go to Professor McGregor’s Weekly Evolutionary Developmental Biology Seminar. Your Father My predecessor had an ‘accident’ there; he was so caught up by Professor McGregor’s unfalsifiable speculations about morphology that he never got round to writing his paper on the release of calcium from intracellular stores, was scooped by Benjamin Bunny, and ran off to be a vertebrate palaeontologist instead, and hasn’t been heard of since. Now run along, and don’t get into mischief. I am going to an Important Conference on Laboratory Management in Maui.’

Then old Mrs. PhD Supervisor took her best Louis Vuitton roll-along suitcase and her MacBook Air, and went through the wood to the airport. She bought a tube of Factor 50 sun-tan lotion and a pair of sunglasses.

Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail, who were good little graduate students, went to the lab and worked another ten-hour stint pipetting very small volumes of clear liquid from one set of very small tubes to another set of very small tubes, although without any clear idea why.

But Peter, who was very naughty, ran straight away to Professor McGregor’s weekly seminar, and sat in the very front row!