Last week, the engine on NASA’s brand new Ares 1-X flamed into life and the oddly thin white tube slowly raised itself from the launchpad. It accelerated impressively quickly and arced into the blue Florida sky. Within about two minutes it was travelling at almost five times the speed of sound.

Aiming high (picture courtesy of NASA).

 

Right on cue, explosive bolts fired to initiate stage separation. But that’s when things began to go wrong. The booster and payload stages unexpectedly started a slow tumble as they lost speed and fell to earth. Then, on its descent, only one of the three parachutes deployed properly and the booster was badly dented as it smacked into the Atlantic ocean.

The bittersweet outcome of this test firing reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s famous saying: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

The scientists and engineers at NASA may draw some consolation from this as they examine their precious but damaged booster and wait, breath bated, for the US government to decide just how committed it is to the Ares program.

But such intimate mixtures of success and failure, it struck me, are part and parcel of a life in science. Our sense of achievement does not endure very long.

Or maybe it’s just me? I recently basked momentarily in the glow of the news that our latest paper had been accepted for publication. It was a great result — a new structure of a viral protease-peptide complex — and one that my group has worked hard to achieve and is justly proud of. But before I had even received the proofs I could already see the dark lineaments of looming deadlines and hear them growling for my attention. They are relentless. I have lectures to prepare, references to compose, accounts to manage, manuscripts to review, grant applications to get sorted, more papers to write. The buzz of our success was quickly dulled, in my mind at least. All I could think of this week were the jobs not done, the targets not met, and the time that I don’t have available to do the things that I usually love about this job. I felt dented, out of shape.

And so, blinded by the minutiae of everyday preoccupations as I was rushing from lecture theatre to undergraduate office last Wednesday, I was arrested briefly by the sight of a poster announcing that 4th November was National Stress Awareness Day.

“Don’t miss out!” trumpeted the cheery but bizarre tagline across the bottom of the notice.

Don’t worry friend, I told myself grimly, I’m getting my share.

But then I thought, why am I subjecting myself to this? Being grumpy about my job is just an attitude of mind. Isn’t it?

This line of thought may have been triggered by a video of a TED talk that I saw recently given by the designer Stefan Sagmeister. Sagmeister seems to have developed a much healthier attitude to work than the one that assaulted me this past week. His presentation is called “The Power of Time Off” and I thought it fascinating. The first 4 mins or so are the highlight and deliver the central message, which is that time away from work can be enormously re-energising. (But if you ’re the least bit interested in design the rest of the video is also worth a look.)

Sagemeiter on stage.

 
Now all I have to do is figure out a way to reach escape velocity.

Yesterday, I had a new experience that tested my scientific mettle to the limit: I got stuck in a lift.

There I was, dropping smoothly from the 7th floor of the Huxley building on my way to a student viva, when the lift suddenly jerked to a halt. The metal box then announced, in soothing female — almost Adamsian — tones, “This lift is out of service.”

She wasn’t wrong. The doors remained clamped shut and the lift did not respond when I jabbed at the buttons. I guessed I’d only got about as far as the 6th floor but clearly I wasn’t going any further.

Time to raise the alarm, I told myself. The instructions beneath the alarm button said, “Press for 3 seconds.”

I pushed the button and flinched as a loud bell clanged in the lobby outside. My natural instinct for not drawing attention to myself kicked in and made me let go.

Ah, silence.

But no assistance. So I gritted my teeth and pressed the button again, holding it for the full three seconds until the little yellow alarm light came on and a voice spoke from the intercom: “Yeah?”

I gave my location and the disembodied voice said, “OK, I’ll send a couple of guys.”

The intercom went dead again.

I looked around and considered my situation. I tried to be rational.

Don’t panic, I told myself.

First off, I put the papers I was carrying on the floor. No sense in needlessly wasting energy.

I briefly considered what would be the best position to adopt should the lift suddenly plunge. I know enough physics to discount the ‘jump up just before impact’ fallacy. In the first place, judging the time of impact would be impossible in a windowless box. And secondly, the relative upward motion would only have taken the the tiniest smidgen off my downward momentum, soon to be imparted to the planet.

I figured the chances of surviving such an impact would be miniscule but wondered if spreading myself on the floor of the lift, head cushioned by my arms, would have brought me closest to surviving the fatal drop.

But in any case, I told myself, that’s ridiculous. These lifts have fail-safe mechanisms. Even if the cable were to be severed, there must be a braking system of some kind. Right? People only plunge to their deaths in lifts in the movies. But this isn’t The Towering Inferno or The Omen or Speed. No wait, in Speed Keanu Reeves and Jeff Daniels turn up to rescue the terrified elevator occupants.

Thinking of movies caused me to look up. Surely there had to be a hatch in the ceiling though which, if push came to shove, I could clamber to safety? In the movies, there’s always such a hatch. Always.

But there wasn’t one. The ceiling was composed of two sections joined by a metal strip. It looked fairly immovable. If I needed to, I figured, I could try to climb onto the hand rail to see if I could dislodge it. But what then? I have no head for heights and wouldn’t want to ruin my jacket on an oily cable.

“Hello? Hello?”

The voice came from outside. Slowly the doors were prised open revealing the floor of level 6 at about one metre above my feet. I tossed my papers through the gap and clambered out to the two engineers who had come to my rescue. Neither of them looked remotely like Keanu Reeves or Jeff Daniels.

But I guess that was a relief. The real world is more prosaic but also more lawful than in the movies.

I’m beginning to recognise the signs. Have you seen them too? The mercury is holding steady but there’s a sudden and unexpected stiffening of the breeze. And a darkening tint to the clouded sky. Yes — there can be no doubt — there’s a storm coming.

A Twitter-storm.

We’ve not had much of this kind of thing in the past but these squalls seem to be becoming more frequent. They are a very interesting phenomenon; the kind of climate change that I might welcome.

I don’t think anyone expected this sort of impact from Twitter. Maybe it’s illusory? The past two weeks have been so blustery that my head is still reeling. But things are calmer today so I have a moment to take stock.

I first noticed a change in the air when, on the night of Monday 12th October, Jack of Kent wrote a carefully worded post about an equally “carefully worded” article in The Guardian revealing that the paper had been prevented on legal grounds from reporting an item of parliamentary business. Within a few minutes news of the Guardian’s gag had spread around Twitter and the involvement of Trafigura and their attempts to keep secret their report on the dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast came tumbling out. At the end of his post, Jack of Kent raised a quizzical eyebrow and wondered if the newspaper might have acted in a calculated fashion by placing enough cryptic clues in its article to let the twitterati solve the puzzle.

On Wednesday of that the week Twitter, or at least that tiny segment that I choose to keep an eye on, was alive with the unexpected news that Simon Singh had been granted leave to appeal Justice Eady’s ruling on the meaning of the word ‘bogus’ in the libel suit being brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA). At the Wesminster Skeptics in the Pub meeting the previous night where Singh and others had spoken out against the dis-empowering effect of the English libel laws, the mood had been feisty but resigned. So there was an eruption of delight buzzing across the net as soon as those attending the appeal hearing had managed to rush outside and reconnect with it.

The news of the appeal, and perhaps also the effusive response from Singh’s supporters, elicited a hasty press release from the BCA. The organisation affirmed it would continue to press its case because it felt it had been “maliciously attacked by Dr Singh in the Guardian newspaper” (my italics).

That careless adverb was seized upon immediately. Word went out on Twitter asking people to download or cache the BCA statement because it represented a serious mis-step by the organisation. They appeared to realise this themselves since the press release was quickly reworded to remove the offending term. But that was of course too late. As Jack of Kent explained in a post that evening, in attributing malice to Singh, the BCA had defamed him and the author may now be in a position to counter-sue. Whether he will do so remains to be seen but it was a moment of delightful irony. One that was shared by hundreds, probably thousands of witnesses, on Twitter.

The Trafigura and Singh cases came together on Wednesday of this past week in a parliamentary debate organised by Evan Harris (Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon). Thanks to notification on Twitter I discovered it was being shown live on the web and managed to catch Harris’s impressive speech outlining the threats posed to open debate in this country by our laws on injunctions and libel. (You can watch it here or read the Hansard Report).

Evan Harris waxes lyrical

 

I suspect the audience for this debate was one of the largest they’ve had in a long time on Parliament TV. For me, who had never tuned in to a debate before, the revelation of this level of access was an impressive demonstration of the transparency of our parliamentary procedures, a window across which Trafigura had sought to draw a heavy curtain. I have them, and Carter-Ruck and all the good folk on Twitter to thank for bringing it to my attention.

But that’s not all. On Friday 17th October, just a couple of days after Singh’s success in the court of appeal, another storm thundered and flashed across Twitter as people reacted to Jan Moir’s now infamous Daily Mail article on the death of the Boyzone singer Stephen Gately. Without bringing any new information to bear on the case Ms Moir felt able to flatly contradict the cornoner’s finding of “death by natural causes”, link Gately’s death to the recent unrelated demise of Matt Lucas’s former partner and wax unlyrically about this being “another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.” The article was grossly insensitive and struck many, including myself, as tapping into a homophobic vein. To add further insult, it appeared in the paper the day before Gately’s family were due to bury their beloved son. The reaction on Twitter was exponential; a few drops of rain in the morning turned into a crashing downpour by lunchtime.

Later that day Charlie Brooker fired off a characteristically caustic Comment is Free article in The Guardian that gave voice to many people’s anger at the insensitivity of Moir’s article. Helpfully, he detailed which aspects of the press code of conduct might have been breached. He also provided links to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), information that was rapidly disseminated, 140 characters at a time.

As so, because I was appalled at the article and — crucially — had ready access to the means to do so, I logged on to the PCC web-site and, for the first time in my life, complained about a newspaper article. It took a little while to get connected; I think they were having trouble with the volume of traffic. Once I got through I saw that the PCC had obligingly put up a special link for those wishing to complain about Moir’s article.

Moir saw in all this an “orchestrated campaign”. I suspect that is probably what it feels like when over 20,000 people complain about your obnoxious journalism but there was nothing terribly orchestrated about it. Nobody told me what to do and I like to think that, in common with most other people, I have a mind of my own. But — as with Trafigura and the reports on the Singh-BCA case — there was instant access to information on Twitter and elsewhere on the web and to modes of action. And it was exciting be be able to be involved.

Finally in this past week great interest was excited by the appearance of Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, on the BBC’s Question Time program. Griffin, an odious little-Englander racist who has denied the holocaust, faced a largely hostile audience in the studio. But there was an even larger audience watching at home and many of them were simultaneously bombarding Twitter with comments. It was a strange new experience to be watching TV in the company of this vociferous online audience. Thrilling even.

So I joined in.

I’m not sure if anything so very insightful was said in these comments. It felt much like shouting at the screen as you might do while watching football. But not entirely the same. Occasionally, because our society is thankfully not as homogenous as some might like it to be, there would be a dissenting or sparky view. One person wondered about the true value of all the self-righteous Griffin bashing. The comedian Peter Serafinowicz, observing those in the studio audience with their arms raised to catch the Chairman’s attention, made me laugh out loud by commenting “Surprising amount of people ‘sieg-heiling’ between questions.”

There have been lengthy and knowledgeable debates elsewhere on the rights and wrongs of the BBC’s invitation to the BNP’s elected representative. I won’t rehearse them here except to say that I favoured allowing Griffin to appear on Question Time. If freedom of speech is to mean anything, it must include allowing those whose views we despise to be heard. Anyone wishing to oppose Griffin and the BNP should have enough respect for the electorate to try to win the argument with facts and logic and a sense of natural justice (resources that Griffin so clearly lacks). We need to have some faith in our democratic institutions.

In Twitter, especially in these past two weeks, I think I detect the emergence of a new pillar to support our democracy, simply because it has provided a new way of bolstering of our freedoms of speech and information.

Now I have no doubt that there’s a mob element to much of the activity on Twitter. The re-tweet (RT), which simply re-broadcasts a comment that you have seen to all your followers probably makes it too easy for news to travel without the intervention of thought (though Ian Hopkinson suggested aninteresting possible counter-measure). And there’s certainly something primal about being part of the crowd – even when you’re not in close physical proximity to those baying around you.

But I would contend that it isn’t simply mobbishness. Perhaps it’s just from the people that I happen to follow on Twitter but there is a reflective thread running through all this commentary and activity. In the aftermath of the Moir shitstorm and his own foot-in-mouth episode with the people of Poland, Stephen Fry wrote a wonderfully thoughtful piece musing his own foibles, the accusation that he has a disproportionate influence as a result of his prominence on Twitter (at the time of writing he has nearly 900,000 followers) and, most interestingly, on the possible broader role of this new medium.

Of course I re-tweeted it as soon as I’d finished reading. (It is well worth a look.)

I get the sense that tools like Twitter are switching people on. It has certainly affected me. I noticed it first when Twitter became my primary source for news of the protests that erupted in Iran in the aftermath of their presidential election in June. In that case I was able to keep informed and to pass on information, reports of attacks by the security forces and links to photos and videos. It didn’t, I have to say, lead to much action beyond that on my part.

But these latest episodes — more home-grown — have been different. I have never felt more engaged in society than in these past two weeks. This has happened because I have better, faster access to the information about what is going on and because I have tools at my disposal, either through blogging or tweeting or writing to the PCC, to do something, even if it is just to make my voice heard.

I know just enough about human history not to get too carried away with the promise of a bright new future. But I cannot help being at least slightly optimistic that some of the energy humming around the internet might, just might, do some good.

Then again, perhaps it is just a local shower and will pass.

The twitterverse has been alive this morning with the wonderful news that Simon Singh has been granted leave to appeal Justice Eady’s ruling in the libel case that the British Chiropractic Association had brought against the popular science author. See here and here for some background to the case.

The news is all the more wonderful because it was so unexpected. The first synopsis of this morning’s court ruling has appeared on arch-skeptic Crispian Jago’s excellent blog. He has done a great job of rendering the very brief legal proceedings in lay terms!

The news will also be a great boost for the Sense About Science campaign to Keep the Libel Laws out of Science

That’s all for now (work beckons). To keep abreast of developments and further blogs on this issue, follow the hashtag #singhBCA on Twitter.

When it comes to language, I am a lover and a fighter. I’m no great expert but I know what I like and do try to take a bit of care every time I lay out my little handkerchief of prose here on Nature Network.

So today, when I spotted that The Guardian’s report on the award of the Nobel prize for Chemistry to the three crystallographers who determined the structure of the ‘rhibosome’ (I kid you not), I fired off a tweet of correction. This weird mis-spelling of ‘ribosome’ didn’t look like a forgivable typo. No, the deformity rankled as a bad guess.

But last week I was myself pulled up for offences against the English language. This occurred when I received an email from an editor at the Journal of Molecular Biology inviting me to revise our recently submitted manuscript (on the structure of a protease-peptide complex) “in the light of the referees’ comments”.

Now my first reaction was one of delight since, if past experience is anything to go by, this circumlocution means the paper should be accepted subject to minor revisions. I was also pleased because this means we will probably have a paper in JMB in the year that this venerable publication celebrates its 50th anniversary.

Then I turned my attention to the requested revisions, three of which referred to my use of language.

To the first charge, the use of ‘apoenzyme’ to refer to the unliganded form of an enzyme, I have to plead guilty. That was sloppy of me. An aopenzyme is, of course, a protein catalyst without its co-factor.

In the case of the other two charges, however, I think I will fight my corner. The referee claims that ‘complex’ is not a verb in English. But it seems to me to be in common parlance, at least among crystallographers. We had written ‘prior to crystallisation we complexed the peptide with the protease’. I was relieved to find that ‘complex’ is indeed defined as a verb in the dictionary on my computer, and one of my co-authors found it in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. Case closed, I think.

Finally, and most surprisingly of all to me, we were taken to task for using the term ‘protein expression’ to refer to the synthesis of our protein in bacteria. The reviewer pointed out that genes may be expressed but not proteins (!) and went on to bemoan the deterioration of accuracy in scientific language. Well that was a first for me. I can see where the reviewer is coming from but is there really any ambiguity in ‘protein expression’? It is a phrase I have used and heard used without confusion for nigh on 20 years.

Now I don’t want to row with the reviewer. (By which I mean don’t want to argue, not that I am averse to taking a trip with him or her in a boat equipped with oars. My goodness, this English language is a slippery thing. Look at the stacks of alternative meanings building up for just one little word, row upon row… but I digress). After all, this person has done me a great service by reading our manuscript very closely and politely suggesting improvements. But I have to dissent from their rather static view of language.

When it comes to the ways that we create meaning with words I am bound to say that I am firmly in Stephen Fry’s camp. Language is a living, breathing thing. It grows and develops. And, as long as meaning is not obscured, anything goes.

That’s what makes writing fun. Innit?

At the Diamond synchrotron last week, Jamie Oliver would have been proud of us.

Amar and I pitched up last Thursday afternoon at the great gleaming doughnut in the Oxfordshire countryside with the latest batch of Amar’s crystals, packed carefully into a dry nitrogen dewar to keep the little jewels frozen at a chilly 80K. Because we were sharing the beamtime with other users from Imperial our slot didn’t start until about 8.30 in the evening. Amar had plenty of time to transfer the crystals — under liquid nitrogen — to the pucks that would eventually be loaded into the mounting robot. There was even time to stroll over to the cafeteria for a leisurely dinner.

But as soon as we got going with our experiments it was clear that something was not quite right with the samples. Each crystal was mounted in a tiny nylon loop stuck on the end of a thin metal pin. Plucked from liquid nitrogen by the robotic arm, they were kept frozen on the X-ray camera by a steady stream of nitrogen gas at about 100K. But rather than glinting in the fluorescent lights, the crystals looked opaque and rather ragged in outline.

That could mean only one thing: ice.

The diagnosis was confirmed as soon as the crystal was exposed to just half a second of the intense X-ray beam:

The concentric circular rings on the diffraction pattern, partially and annoyingly obscuring the lattice of spots that we needed to measure, were due to the presence of randomly oriented ice crystals, either within or on the surface of our protein crystal. Before freezing, protein crystals are usually soaked in a solution containing a cryo-protectant — or anti-freeze — such as glycerol. The cryo-protectant prevents the water within the solvent channels of the protein crystal from turning into crystalline ice. Instead it should form a glassy solid that only scatters X-rays diffusely and doesn’t seriously interfere with the diffraction pattern.

When you see ice rings it sometimes helps to “re-anneal” the crystal. You do this by blocking the cooling nitrogen stream for a few seconds, usually with a handy credit card, to allow the liquid surrounding the crystal to thaw and then quickly re-freeze it again.

Well we tried that. It didn’t work.

And then Jeremy, a colleague from Imperial, popped into the station and mentioned that Juan, the Diamond beamline scientist, had suggested ‘washing’ crystals with liquid nitrogen to get rid of ice.

By this time we’d been through several samples and were certainly open to suggestions. So with a long 25 mL plastic pipette dipped briefly into liquid nitrogen we quickly drizzled a few drops of the slick colourless fluid over the crystal mounted on the camera.

The effect was immediate. Already on the video screen the appearance of the crystal changed considerably. Gone were the ragged edges and out of the obscurity emerged a gleam of shining light.

Better still, when the crystal was exposed to X-rays the rings were gone. Completely.

And we could see that the crystals diffracted to about 1.5 Å. I’ve mentioned before what a rich treasure-tove of structural detail such data can reveal. Thanks to that timely tip-off from Jeremy and Juan, we were able to get stuck into several hours of solid, rewarding work. We were cooking, if you’ll pardon the pun.

When I got back to Imperial there was the usual round of inquiries as to how the trip had gone. It’s always good to be able to report that you got some data. But this time I was more interested in recounting the impressive effect of the liquid nitrogen wash – to spread the good news, so to speak. And I found plenty of eager ears.

And that’s what I’m doing here I guess. The title of this blog is Reciprocal Space, after all. Every so often I feel duty-bound to make some mention of X-ray crystallography and the joy it can bring.

Thanks to the very good offices of Matt Brown, who knows everything about everything happening in London, I found myself at the Smithfield Gallery last night. Jenny, Richard and myself joined Matt there to gaze at Luke Jerram’s artful glassy virus sculptures.

Matt has already blogged about the evening so I will leave it to him to tell you more about the exhibition (which may also get a mention on Lablit before too long). I want to go in a slightly different direction.

You will also see some beautiful photos on Matt’s post, but when I dug out my iPhone to snap a picture of one of the sculptures displayed on a light table, this is what I got:

Strip-lit sculpture?

Jenny asked me why the background was ribbed in the photo since no stripes were evident to our eyes – or in Matt’s or Richard’s pictures, taken on ‘real’ cameras. I had to confess that, despite being in possession of a degree in physics, I was stumped.

However, I guess the question must have been gnawing away at me in the background because this afternoon, whilst traipsing back-and-forth between my office and the laser printer, I stumbled across a solution. Or, at least, I think I did.

But before we get to that – would anyone else care to puzzle it out?

Flags are potent and emotive symbols for many people but when my daughter plonked her new school-bag on the kitchen counter at the beginning of this week I cracked a wry smile.

 

Love that Union flag?

My reaction to the garish decoration of her bag made me realise what a long way I had travelled from my own childhood, a journey that has been at least partly influenced by science.

The details are a bit fuzzy but one summer when I was about five or six years of age, the colours and curious geometric arrangements of little Union Jacks on sale in my local sweet-shop must have caught my eye because I sacrificed my sweet money to buy one — no more than a bit of plastic glued to a stick — and taped it to the handlebars of my bike. But when my father came home from work and saw me doing laps of the yard, there was no wry smile.

“Where did you get that?”

I was immediately banned from parading my purchase in the street.

It’s not that my father was angry. Rather, he was concerned for my safety because, as a Catholic growing up Northern Ireland in the Trouble-wracked sixties and seventies, the decoration of my bike was likely to attract dangerous interest from both sides of that divided community. Other Catholics (our republican friends, so to speak) would wonder what the hell I was doing, whereas Protestants (unionists – God Save the Queen and all that) would have unmasked me with a couple of questions (“What’s your name?”, “What school do you go to?”) and soon divined that my affinity for the flag was not nearly as thick as blood.

As I got older I learned there was more to a flag that the pretty patterns. Though it was by no means universal, many of the streets and housing estates in Northern Ireland were branded with Union Jacks or Irish tricolours, to signal the affiliation of the local residents. One lot would tolerate you, the other was ‘the enemy’. So despite my initial infatuation with the red, white and blue, the British flag became an intimidating stranger.

My aversion to the Union Jack wasn’t sufficient to prevent me heading to university in London to study physics. This was a big change of scene for a lad from Ballymena. London was a lot to cope with but I revelled in the refreshing new mix of people, none of whom seemed too preoccupied with religious or community affiliation. But there were still odd effects of my upbringing. Every so often I would trip over my Northern Irish roots.

I settled in England, having met my wife at university. Admirable assimilation you might think, but although she is English — her Essex origins had not escaped me during our courting — when she was expecting our first child I started to fret about what it would be like to have a son who spoke with an English accent. Estuary English, to be precise. I was worried that his linking R’s and dropped H’s might be a barrier between us*.

Of course, in the event nothing could have been further from the truth. My son speaks the way he speaks and that is part of who he is. It’s the same with my two daughters. But it took the experience to teach me the lesson. Nowdays we just laugh about our different accents. By which I mean, they laugh at mine.

“Say ‘fruit’ Dad”
“Frute.”
“Go on, say ‘eight’.”
“Eee-it.”

The move to England was good for my education in diversity, but the lesson was solidly reinforced by forging a career in science. Life in a modern lab is fantastically enriched by international contacts. As a postdoc I was lucky to do stints in France and the USA (our second child is American, but didn’t stay long enough to pick up a Boston accent). And a whole string of foreign students and postdocs have passed through my lab at Imperial, from as far afield as Argentina, Russia, Israel, Greece, Hungary, France, Ireland, Indonesia, and China.

These observations will be familiar to most people who work in science. The internationalism of the profession may even have come to seem ordinary, but our daily immersion in the world-wide ebb and flow of people is an extraordinary pleasure and privilege. And of course it is hugely beneficial to our shared scientific enterprise.

But international engagement is not such a commonplace for everyone. When my daughter’s bag landed on the worktop, the bright array of red, white and blue also brought to mind the British National Party (BNP), who have blended the union flag into their logo, smearing it with their stunted, whites-only mindset and making it for many a symbol to be feared. There has been a bit of a to-do recently (as we say in England) about the BBC’s plan to allow BNP members to appear on Question Time, a long-running TV show where the studio audience gets to quiz politicians of the day. In my opinion the BNP are an excremental bunch of little Englanders, who espouse loathsomely violent methods of immigration control, but I think the BBC would be right to put them on the show. The exposure to the diversity of the British public might just do them some good (or, at least, some electoral harm). There’s nothing like mixing it with strangers to teach you something new about the world.

 

Pomp, in the right circumstances (from the BBC)

However, that battle can wait for another day. This evening on BBC-TV there are no politicians because the Last Night of the Proms is being broadcast, the last of a series of summer concerts (held in the Royal Albert Hall) that is famed for the standing-room-only promenade in front of the orchestra. As is traditional, at the end of tonight’s concert there will be Elgar’s rousing Pomp and Circumstance and there will be much joyous waving of the Union Jack. I’m quite partial to a bit of Elgar and, even if I still can’t connect with the flag-waving, I’m completely relaxed about others enjoying it.

I’ve got my roots, you know, but I’m branching out.

 

---

*I realised my son’s accented fate was sealed one Friday morning when he was about three years old. We were living in Essex and he was starting to learn the days of the week.
“What day is it today,” I asked.
“Um, Monday?”
“No. I’ll give you a clue – tomorrow’s Saturday. So what is it today?”
“Um, Wednesday?”
“No, that was two days ago. Tomorrow is Saturday,” I prompted, “so today is Fffff… Fffff…”
His eyes lit up with the delight of recognition.
“Fursday!” he exclaimed proudly.

I am determined to finish the third and final installment of the posts about my vacation reading before the holiday season comes to an end — which I think is tonight. I want to tell you about the biography of Huxley and Eric Ambler’s Uncommon Danger.

Truth be told I have been struggling with this post. Like an over-stimulated tourist, I have bought too many shiny souvenirs and am having trouble stuffing them all into my little suitcase. As with all packing, the problem is basically one of size.

The first two books of my holiday selection were quick and easy reads;  even a dullard such as myself managed to polish them off in two days apiece. But Adrian Desmond’s Huxley, weighing in at about 640 pages of a miniscule, close-packed font, was truly monumental. 

Or perhaps mountainous is the word because the ascent up the story of Thomas Henry Huxley’s life is fairly demanding. By the time I reached the teary end, watching as the scientific giants of the late 19th Century gathered sorrowfully around his grave, I was exhausted, wrung out. But the view was spectacular and my head was dizzy with new facts and connections and questions.

Born into a modest family in 1825, the bright young Huxley initially trained as a medic, spending much of his time developing his skills as an anatomist. At the age of 21 he sailed as the Assistant Surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake‘s four-year surveying voyage of the waters around north-eastern Australia. Trawling the seas as they sailed, Huxley dissected the invertebrates of the southern oceans and his original observations on their unusual anatomy helped to make his name back in England. Though his career stuttered for a few years on his return to London — Huxley lacked the finances that lubricated Darwin’s rise — he eventually established himself not just as a formidable scientist, but as one of the foremost men of his age. 

Today Huxley is chiefly remembered as ’Darwin’s Bulldog’, the man who carried the battle for evolution to Ecclesiastical England. Huxley would have acknowledged that moniker but Desmond delves into the complex strata underneath. Not only does he paint the broader, richer canvas of Huxley’s combative role in Victorian society, but he also picks apart Huxley’s surprisingly complex attitude to Darwin’s famous theory.

Although there are evident parallels between the lives of Darwin and Huxley, who were to become such close friends, they were very different characters, and Desmond does an excellent job of delineating the distinctions between them. Each was gifted academically and undertook a career-defining sea voyage in his formative early twenties, but the reaction of these elements produced very different results in the two men. Whereas Darwin had spent much of his education combing the shorelines of Scotland, beetling in Cambridgeshire or learning geology in Wales, Huxley was the more assiduous student at medical school, devoting all his spare time to reading and microscopic dissections. He had even published his first paper before sailing on HMS Rattlesnake — on the discovery of a new membrane in hair cells. Darwin’s equivalent claim at the same age was to have found a new species of beetle.

The difference in the nature of the discoveries is telling and may go some way to explaining the fact that Huxley returned from his voyage in 1850 with no notion pertaining to the speciation of life on earth, even though he had been absorbed in efforts to group and classify the morphologies of the invertebrates he netted from the sea. Desmond makes a convincing case that Huxley’s medical fixation on anatomy and structure, coupled with the lack of exposure to the flora and fauna of the countryside in his metropolitain youth, may have limited his vision of the processes that formed the natural world.

But it is a disservice to Huxley to speak of him only in relation to Darwin. Desmond brings the man fully to life, in all his dimensions (though I fear I can only sketch a monochrome outline here). Established as a celebrated anatomist, Huxley then taught himself paleontology and was the first to identify the link between dinosaurs and birds. His fossil interests brought him into direct conflict with Richard Owen with whom he had a long and bitter feud about the links between primate and human skulls and brains. The implications of the similarities that Huxley demonstrated horrified Owen, who chose to see the natural world as the ongoing work of the divine author who had fixed a special place for man. Huxley would have none of it and delighted in the battle. His most famous book Man’s Place in Nature (1863) underscored the evolutionary links between man and primates in a way that Darwin, famously, had not dared to do.

But such courage and fire were the mark of Huxley. His lasting legacy is to have imprinted science on Victorian Britain. Not only did he excite the working men of the day — 600 at a time — with his public lectures on the latest developments in the emerging science of biology (Huxley was to become that subject’s first professor), but his tireless campaigning for science to be taught in schools and universities, where the bible and the classics had long prevailed, changed education forever. Indeed I was surprised to learn that the emergence of London as an vibrant centre for science — in large part due to Huxley’s stimulus — eventually prodded the ancient Anglican giants of Oxford and Cambridge to make space for the subject on their curricula.

These educational gains were just one of the fruits of Huxley’s wider fight to establish a place in society for science and its secular outlook. His gospel message was clear: the learned ‘seek for truth not among words but among things’, he declared. Huxley preached the ‘sin of faith’; for him science showed ‘that the ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment, and not authority’.

Sketched by his tragic, beloved daughter, Marian Huxley (from the NPG)

Huxley lived and breathed science and nowhere was this better demonstrated than in his willingness to swallow errors when proved wrong. There are two delightful episodes of this recounted in the book, the first when reports from the survey ship HMS Challenge fail to find a single Bathybius, an enucleate jelly that he considered to be a very primitive form of life. Huxley had to concede that his own specimen was a laboratory artefact (a precipitate in alcohol?) and took responsibility for shepherding the negative result into Nature, the journal that he helped to found. ‘I shall eat my leek handsomely’, he told Wyille Thomson, the naturalist who had conveyed the disappointing report.

The second incident occurred when Patrick Geddes, student dissecting a whelk under Huxley’s tutelage, showed a detail of the tongue that was different to his earlier description. ‘Pon my word, you’re right! You’ve got me!" Huxley told him "I was wrong! Capital! I must publish this for you.’

With such excitement at a new finding, even when it is in contradiction to his own observations, you can’t help but warm to the man. His belief in observation and experiment drove him repeatedly into argument with the bishops (it wasn’t just Wilberforce who felt the lash of his tongue) and those scientists such as Owen who clung to the divine hand when simpler mechanisms were in evidence. On one memorable occasion Huxley castigated Owen for his elliptical enunciation of a divinely-controlled evolution: ‘the first duty of a hypothesis [is] to be intelligible,… this may be read backwards, or forwards, or sideways, with exactly the same amount of signification.’ One can only imagine what he would have made of the unscientific nonsense spouted by many of today’s alternative medicine community.

But Huxley’s gift with words, evident even in the letters from his youth, was not just deployed in battle. During the arduous voyage on the cramped HMS Rattlesnake there were numerous deaths among the crew who were soon dispatched overboard. ‘There is hardly room for the living on board a ship, so that no wonder that the dead find no resting place in it.’ And later, when he is pining for his long-awaited fiancée, Netty, he writes of imagining her ‘bright smile — a kiss — one of the thousand nothings that make life something’.

Desmond’s book, in its turn, feels like the sum of a thousand somethings. In contrast to my disappointment at Buzz Aldrin remaining caged and distant within the pages of Magnificent Desolation, I was delighted to see TH Huxley leap, full of colour and complexity from this wonderful biography. There is a curious parallel between the two men since both suffered breakdowns through depression, but even here Huxley’s plight is more vivid. Alarmed by the havoc wrought on his health by his enormous workload, a large chunk of it unpaid, his wealthy friends club together to make him a gift of £2100. They are concerned that his pride may prevent him from accepting such a large sum, but he does so graciously, honestly and revealingly. His letter of acknowledgement to Darwin is full of pathos.

‘I accept this splendid gift… for the first time in my life I have been fairly beaten. I mean morally beaten. Through all sorts of troubles & difficulties poverty illness, bedevilments of all sorts have I steered these thirty years, and never lost heart or failed to buffer the waves as stoutly as they buffeted me… [But] I have for months been without energy & without hope and haunted by the constant presence of hypochondriacal apprehensions which my reason told me were absurd but which I could not get rid of — for I was breaking down; sliding into the meanest of difficulties, the would be climber of heights, mired in a mere bog…
Have I said a word of appreciation for your own letter? I shall keep it for my children that their children may know what manner of a man their father’s friend was & why he loved him.’

If I have a gripe it is mainly that I was too thrilled to read the book more slowly so as to absorb a greater part of the detail. But one of the remaining puzzles for me is that, despite Huxley’s vigorous defence of Darwin and his theory (at least in his popular lectures and writing), evolution did not become more closely enmeshed in his own research work beyond 1860. Desmond contends that Huxley’s reticence on the details of evolution, which sometimes frustrated Darwin himself, was due to the tenuous and fragmentary nature of the evidence supporting the phylogenetic trees. But I cannot yet square this with Huxley’s honest and sophisticated appreciation of the sometimes erratic development of scientific hypotheses. I guess I will just have to read some more, no great hardship since I been here before and will probably willingly return to the subject.

By the end of the book I was stuffed, replete as after a huge but hugely satisfying meal. The switch, finally, to Eric Ambler’s Uncommon Danger with its taut, lean prose came as a welcome digestif. This slim thriller provided a lively jaunt through pre-war Austria and Czechoslovakia as Soviet and Romanian agents — the former aided by a hapless English journalist and the latter in the pay of a brutish British oil company — manoeuvre and out-manoeuvre one another on the trail of stolen military plans. It was breezy, quick, barely plausible and wonderfully absorbing.

I’m done now.

I attended last year’s Science Blogging conference very much as an outsider. I’d signed on at Nature Network and passed a few comments, but was not a blogger. However, the event was a turning point for me and in the warm flush of excitement that emanated from the conference, I finally decided to jump into the strange reality known as the blogosphere.

This year I came back to Science Online London 2009 (which took place yesterday) from a rather different position. For me the conference actually kicked of at the Friday evening bash organised largely by Jenny, Richard and Matt and hosted by Mendeley. This loosely-run event was held on a roof-top terrace somewhere in the Farringdon area and attracted forty-odd interested souls. The first session, led by Jenny and myself, gave me a chance to offer a few basic observations on the value of online media, blogs in particular, for getting across the narrative that is so often lost from textbook and journalistic presentations of science.

Spouting on the rooftop (Richard’s pic)

There followed a very interesting discussion, with vigorous participation from many members of the audience, as was the case in the subsequent sessions on Blogging as a tool for persuasion (led by Richard and Cameron) and the two more spontaneous sessions on blogging genres (Eva Amsen’s suggestion) and on PR, the latter generating some trenchant remarks from the redoubtable David Colquhoun. Suffice to say he’s not a fan.

But more than anything the event was about getting together — lubricated by free drink — and making more of a connection with people that many of us only knew ‘online’. Whatever kind of knowing that is.

The late night on Friday was not too much of an impediment to the early start at the Royal Institution on Saturday. The conference was launched with great verve and intelligence by Petra Boynton and David Allen Green (Jack of Kent) who laid out the proper ethical and legal framework for bloggers. It’s all so very clear now. Ahem.

We then moved on to cover topics as diverse as Blogging for Impact, Citizen Science, Online communication for institutions, real time metrics for assessing scientific contributions and Google wave, which is apparently about to crest.

There were some great contributions, from the panellists and the floor, though I was somehow content to sit back and let it flow over me. Much of the material seemed a bit diffuse or perhaps too specialist for an ordinary scientist such as myself. I have yet to be touched by any of the excitement swirling around Google wave, for example; it still seems too much like a geek toy. Some tidbits did nevertheless end up lodged in my head. I very much liked the sound of the Ask a biologist site that Paolo Viscardi talked about and it was good to hear that the editing tools at Wikipedia are to become simpler.

But more than anything and, as I had discovered last year, the greatest joy of this event is meeting the people who are the reality behind the virtual world that we inhabit online. Not only did I manage to put faces to people that I already knew (delighted to have finally met you Steffi, Eva and Maria, to name but a few), but I also met people I hadn’t known before in any medium.

Over lunch I enjoyed debating the merits of electronic lab notebook with Rory Macneil of Axiope. I’m going to need some more convincing on that one, but I’ll certainly be investigating.

I bumped into Northern Doctor on the balcony at the end of the lunch break. Down in the street we could see the smokers clustered around the front door of the institution. What’s the collective noun for smokers standing outside a building, I wondered. “A carcinoma,” he suggested, “or a wheeze?”

It is agreeably ironic that the richest experience for me was meeting these online folk in the flesh. It was a particular thrill to come across many of the community (bloggers including Jack of Kent , Dr Aust, Gimpy, Zeno and the Quackometer), who have been doing such fine work both in supporting Simon Singh and in taking rationality to the alternative medicine community.

Meeting these guys and all the other people I chatted to during the conference, and in the pub afterwards, brought home just how much joining in online has enriched my life with new connections. But it still strange to realise that these connections are best savoured in the real world.

Or maybe it was the effect of the drink.