Blast from the past

I have just come across this blog while poking around on Feedly. Given that most of the posts were written only 7 or so years ago, it has been like opening a time capsule. Things have changed so much. For once not only the things to do with cycling. My comments on group leaders now seems to be a little naive, since nowadays I have a PA as well as research groups on more than one continent. This might be worth coming back to, but I cannot imagine who has read this blog as it has lain fallow between 2016 and 2009. It would be good to come back and do more on this, but I doubt I will have the time, and certainly the zeitgeist has moved away from the blog and into the podcast. I certainly don't have time for that.
In order to provide some information for all the people who never read this blog, here is a list of the podcasts currently on my phone:

Distraction Pieces Podcast (Scroobius Pip)
In Our Time (Melvyn Bragg, BBC)
The Adam Buxton Podcast (Adam Buxton)
The DC Rainmaker Podcast (Ray Maker)
The Kickabout with Johnny Vaughan (Radio X)
The Cycling Tips Podcast (James Huang)
The Cycling Podcast (Richard Moore et al)
The Flammecast (John Galloway)
The Velocast (John Galloway and Scott O'Raw)
Ask a Cycling Coach - TrainerRoad Podcast (TrainerRoad)
No Such Thing as a Fish (QI)
Thinking Allowed (Laurie Taylor, BBC)

The lives of group leaders

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to have a small army of students and postdocs around you. I've got a small number of students working for me now, but even then I can't imagine what it must be like to have so many that I might need a PA just to keep on top of my appointments.

About six weeks ago I invited a US academic who obviously has a large group to speak at this conference I keep banging on about. I've emailed him three times, spoken by phone to his PA, sent him all the details of the conference and the expenses he can claim back. I'm a bit taken aback that this person has chosen to ignore all my communication completely. I can take "no" and even the unreasonable demands for extra expenses that some speakers have asked me for. But ignoring me? How rude.

How the other half live

Advances in nucleic acid detection and quantification

In a previous incarnation working for a well-known but now defunct government department, it was my misfortune to have to organise small meetings and conferences. Getting the right venue and more importantly coffee and tea to a number of people is difficult... Yesterday I went to see the proposed venue for the meeting (Hinxton Hall at the Sanger Centre, just outside Cambridge). Very impressive and it seems like a good place for a conference. More importantly, the catering is part of the package.
I'm a bit concerned that there might be a "Noordwijkerhout" effect*. The Sanger Centre is isolated, and although I have found conferences in London to be disappointing in that the delegates disappear into the city as soon as the talks are over, perhaps the hot-housing effect might be a bit much for some.
Anyway, a full page advert for the conference should appear in Nature soon, so we should get one or two people attending.

*The Netherlands Research Council, TNO, has/had a conference facility near the sea at Noordwijkerhoudt. While there have been many fine meetings there, most non-Dutch attendees find the isolation of the place disconcerting. On the map it doesn't look that far from Amsterdam, but once you are there it gives a very good impression of being on the edge of the world.

Back to it...

I seem to have spent nearly the whole day after a week of holiday catching up with email. I now see that I still have 712 items to get through on Google Reader. One day I shall go home feeling as though I've done some real work. On the plus side, I had a good meeting today with Dave from Electrolab, the only company in the UK who still believe fermenters should be modular... Plus I've had some interest from a cycling coach who may be able to sort my life out!

The scientific programme for a conference I'm organising (see the homepage here) is going well, with some prominent names such as Prof. Ed Southern and Prof. Roger Lasken taking part. I couldn't have done this without the help of ThermoFisher Scientific in Epsom, who are co-funding this with the Biochemical Society. Registration opens soon...

Infrequent posting

I was prompted by the controversy surrounding the gagging of an anonymous civil servant (Civil Serf, now sadly offline, see this link for details) to actually make use of my blog. I was further shamed by MicrobiologyBytes (Prof Alan McCann from the University of Leicester) with his excellent post on Bacillus subtilis... And of course Neil at What You're Doing is Rather Desperate continues to entertain me. Jeff Jones even manages to write quite well about training and crinking Belgian beer. It makes this infrequently read, poorly populated blog seem rather sad in comparison. So a new week's resolution. Except it's Wednesday. I'll try and write something on here once every couple of days, dividing it into Science or Cycling and possible Music. Starting today. Aim is to get a comment, one day, when I write something worth reading

Confirmation at last

Misconceptions in microbiology #1

In a vain attempt to inject some science into this blog, I thought I might consider some popular "facts" about bacteria which appear in some science textbooks and are thus perpetuated as urban myths within the scientific community. The most popular one, which I'll start with is:

Bacteria have a singular, circular chromosome

Many bacteria, including the "model" bacterium Escherichia coli, that do have only one chromosome. However, there are numerically more bacteria in the world that have not one, or two, but many chromosomes. For example, Rhodobacter sphaeroides has two circular chromosomes, and Paracoccus pantotrophus has at least 4, one of which is linear. The possession of a linear chromosome isn't unusual. One of the most important organisms in biotechnology, Streptomyces coelicolor, has a single linear chromosome too.

Term has well and truly started

The term at Oxford Brookes has started, and I have a flock of M.Sc. Biotechnology students to tend to. I thought the type of student might be different from the M.Sc. Microbiology course I helped run at Birkbeck, University of London. However, we have the same sort of mix of students.

The beginning of the university term also means that for me, its the end of the time trialling season, which has been quite successful on the whole. I was pleased that I managed to get my name in the local paper most weeks, with consistent top-ten placings throughout the year meaning that I can look forward to receiving one or two prizes at the club dinner. However, my highlight of the year was going "under the hour" during an open time trial two weekends ago. The quest to cycle at 25 miles an hour for one hour is delightfully pointless, and if you are going to do it, why not cycle 25 miles in 58 minutes and 14 seconds? Thanks to Hounslow & District Wheelers for organising the event, but could they please send out the results sheets soon?

More ground-breaking news is that the book I co-authored last year (Instant Notes in Microbiology) is now number 99,357 in the amazon.co.uk bestseller list, and 1,652,746th in the equivalent amazon.com list. Surely I can expect the offers of interviews on daytime TV to start flooding in? The pleasing thing is that on the whole the book has been well-received, with quite a few positive reviews in journals as well as on Amazon. The one fly in the ointment is that one reader felt that this was more of a GCSE book than a university-level one. This disturbs me a little as my part of the book was based on a series of lectures I gave to postgraduate students. Which sort of brings me around, circularly, to the subject of the first paragraph of this post...

Playing catch up

I've not had much time to keep up with this blog of late, what with acting as promoter for a large cycle race (the Bicester Millennium 4up team time trial), trying to write lectures, organise my growing research group (working on surfactin production and biosurfactants) and... and... and...

To catch up a bit on things I've posted about before, the Tour de France has come and gone. Probably gone for good, what with the reputations Vinokourov, Moreni, Rasmussen and now Mayo tarnished by missed drugs tests or positive ones. It's not really a surprise that such things happen (a quick reread of Paul Kimmage's book is enough to put anyone off the "glory" of Pro cycling) which says quite a lot about my attitude to the whole thing. I hope that the witch hunt that is going through cycling at the moment is extended to other sports. I can't believe that the footballers, tennis players, track athletes and swimmers of this world are somehow whiter than white, particularly given their larger disposable incomes compared to most cyclists.

In the end what bothers me most about the drugs in sport issue is that it reflects on me. I might only be a club cyclist who races five times a year in time trials, but on the odd occasion I win, do the others in the field suspect that I have doped to do it? Would I be that shallow that I would?

PCR primer design

Must remember about this site "PCR Primer Design" at the University of Capetown in Zuid Africa. Its a little outdated, but gives some of the basics of PCR primer design in a compact and manageable form. It would be nice to do a similar thing somewhere somehow sometime...