Monthly Archives: April 2018

A cautionary tale from a lone researcher

2 Comments

It’s been a pretty frenzied week, finishing off writing a major grant application, a busy schedule here at Newcastle then a series of talks on Thursday and Friday. One of Thursday’s events was particularly interesting – the Annual Linnean Debate at Burlington House. This year it was on synthetic biology and it was a striking experience being in a place that was such a cradle of biological research.   I was impressed, not only by the setting (if you’ve been to Burlington House you’ll know it’s pretty grand with busts of Darwin, Wallace et al looking down) but by the organisation of the event.  It was held jointly with the London Evolutionary Research Network which is run by London postgraduate students and this event was organised and moderated by post grads from UCL. They were impressive in their efficiency and enthusiasm throughout the harrowing experience of chariring the debate. I was reminded of my own post grad days at St Mary’s Medical School, round the corner in Paddington, and the terrors of my own first rpublic speaking and research presentation.  It can be a defining moment of any career and we tend to forget quite how intimidating the moment can be in those early years.

Looking back, I’m reminded what a productive time that was for me and I certainly published quite a few papers. The work was intense but it was very satisfying being able to focus so closely on a particular piece of research.  Publication and communicating the results was an important part of the job and that ethos has stayed with me over the years.  Long hours were spent in the lab and there was a great camaraderie among the researchers who worked and socialised together.

But there was one evening when I was alone but could have done with someone else in the lab and I look back on it as a lesson in health and safety. I was working as a CASE student at a particular company in Kent – it had better remain nameless – and I had decided to spend a couple of extra hours one evening on some lab work.  I started labelling up an experiment but the marker pen seemed to be running out – or so I thought until I gave it a good shake.  Ink spurted out all over a brand new computer terminal.  Annoying but not disastrous, I thought.  Using my knowledge of chemistry I got out some solvent to clean off the ink.  What I hadn’t known was how acetone acts on plastic keyboards.  Worse was to follow. As I was examining the melting keys with growing alarm, I suddenly remembered the experiment I had running in the lab next door where water was being pumped from an aquarium through a glass column.  That wouldn’t have been a problem except for the gunk in the bottom of the aquarium that had, by this time, blocked the filter. I rushed back into the room just in time to see the growing embolism in the pipe as the pressure built up, and the ensuing explosion of water.  Which was actually radioactive.  It went everywhere.

Consequently I spent the rest of the evening mopping and decontaminating the lab. The computer keyboard was more of a lost cause.  My couple of extra hours of work turned into eight hours of clearing up and trying to put things right

Is there a moral to this story? Not really, I thought it would just amuse you all. If I had had my time again I would still have run that experiment, but the outcome does make a case for the rules we now have in place that outlaw lone working in the lab.  I guess my point is, we all learn and grow from our experiences and mistakes and that for many acacemics begins in those heady postgraduate years.

Visions of 1964

Image Leave a comment

I hope you all had a relaxing Easter break, in spite of the rather grim weather. As you may have realised, I’m not very good at relaxing and like to keep on the move, so I did manage to get out to chop down a tree in the garden and helped a friend to sail their boat from Newcastle up to Amble.  But eventually even I was driven inside by the rain and I was collecting together some documents from an old file in preparation for writing a grant, when I came across a copy of the ‘Northern Architect’ from 1964.  I was intrigued to see that it included an article on the newly opened Agriculture Building at Newcastle University.  Looking at the photos of those earnest young men (and I’m afraid they were all men) with their brylcreemed hair and tweed jackets made me think about what has changed and what has come back to haunt us.  As a school boy in 1964 I can recall the cold war and tensions with Russia – so some parallels with the present day seem all too clear.

But it was also a time of great ambition, only a year after Prime Minister Harold Wilson gave his famous “white heat of technology” speech, and there were the first stirrings of the IT revolution to come. This was a brave new world in both science and business.  We had the first great Green Revolution in direct response to global food shortages, with producers achieving up to 10 per cent increases in yield, year on year, as a direct result of research being carried out at places like Newcastle.

It was particularly interesting that, in some respects, the vision being enacted in 1964 in Newcastle University’s Agriculture Building was very similar to our own thinking now. It was clear from the article that they were looking for ways in which bringing different disciplines together – engineering, chemistry, genetics and the latest business thinking – could increase productivity to feed the world.  Already they understood the need for multidisciplinary approaches to problem-solving.

Of course we have moved on, but looking around our new School of Natural and Environmental Sciences in 2018, I see the same kind of vision being applied much more widely, bringing disciplines together to address challenges not only in agriculture but across the wider global environment on land and at sea, and solving human problems as varied as energy storage and developing new pharmaceutical products.

We may not have the resources to invest in new buildings at the present time but we do have the building blocks to create a truly successful and creative interdisciplinary School that will be in the vanguard of a modern scientific era.

I wonder what those earnest young men from 1964 would think if they could time travel into this new era? I think they would be struck by how much more diverse we are – they would soon notice the numbers of very able women and colleagues of both sexes from all over the world among our staff.  This diversity is probably the greatest advantage we have over those 1964 predecessors.  It is an important strength that helps us to succeed in the modern world and continue to play a significant role in addressing global challenges.