December 2011
1 post
Be grateful for MDMA
Sasha Shulgin is a legendary chemist and psychonaut and inventor of hundreds of psychedelics. In 1991, he and his wife, Ann, published a book. Part-novel and part-cookbook, PiHKAL—Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved—told his story and the stories of the compounds he and his friends had ingested, a process he ironically termed ‘LAB’, or Large Animal Bioassay.
It’s a gorgeous...
November 2011
1 post
Don't confuse consuming and producing
I’m trying to figure out what to do with my life. Give me your thoughts.
Michael Idov writes in his piece Bitter Brew in Slate:
I never realized how ubiquitous the dream of opening a small coffeehouse was until I fell under its spell myself. It seemed that just about every boho-professional couple had indulged in this fantasy at some point or another.
The dream of running a small cafe...
October 2011
2 posts
What's the point of OpenPCR?
For those not in the know, PCR is a standard biological technique that lets you make lots of copies of a piece of template DNA. It’s crucial because a lot of molecular biology relies on having a large amount of a particular DNA, so it makes possible everything from DNA fingerprinting to genomics to forensics to getting bacteria to express a gene of interest. Its invention changed the face of...
Shortcuts for supercentenarians
First posted on Nature Student Voices. It’s a long and relatively technical piece on ageing and how there might be shortcuts to slowing it down without knowing much about its molecular mechanism.
The aging process is complex and multifaceted, but slowing it may be easier than we thought—and in biogerontology, there might be such a thing as a free lunch.
In the 1930s, biogerontologist Clive...
March 2011
1 post
Ambitious psychology
This month’s Lates night at the Science Museum—described as an evening of ‘free adults-only entertainment’—put the spotlight on the study of happiness. One event, a talk by Glenn Wilson, touched on a number of aspects of happiness research. In its modern form, positive psychology is a relatively young field, and it focuses specifically on evidence-based methods for improving...
November 2010
1 post
The youth of synthetic biology
In May 2010, Craig Venter produced the world’s first ‘synthetic organism’, dealing vitalism a final death blow in the process. Created from a bacterium with its nucleus removed, he inserted an entirely synthetic chromosome bearing DNA famously ‘watermarked’ with quotes from James Joyce and Richard Feynman. The cell promptly took on the identity written into its new...
October 2010
1 post
Learning to learn
The approach usually taken to learning is to repeat. A good revision timetable will allow lots of time for reviewing material several times; a bad one will allow less time. With each repetition, each review of a list of bullet points or a slide in a lecture, you learn a little bit more, and the memory sticks a little better. A simple linear relationship between the number of repetitions and the...
January 2010
1 post
Pause
Queen Square, London.
It seems strange that, though this square is almost totally silent—not a car and barely a person in sight—I am metres away from hundreds of people, mostly very unwell, lying or sleeping silently in their beds. Most of humanity, and most phases of our lives, are so loud and violent that it seems eerie that so many people could so resign themselves to silence.
December 2009
1 post
Fashionable pharmaceuticals
The pharmaceuticals industry has an obsession with novelty. We want better drugs with fewer side-effects, but too often newness is correlated (wrongly) with an improvement in quality. One new drug that is twice as good at treating an illness as its predecessor is better than five drugs each offering a one per cent improvement on the first. ‘New’ drugs which appear on the market often seem to be...
November 2009
1 post
The immortality brigade
A fifty-seat room was never going to be big enough. People fill the aisles, sit on the ground and peer around the door. A man comes in a little late clutching a box bearing the LifeExtension ‘nutriceutical’ brand. Sunlight glints through the windows, dappling the trademark grey-speckled beard and ponytail of today’s speaker, the somewhat notorious Aubrey de Grey. For the next two hours, this room...
August 2009
2 posts
Thinking of the children
I was given the task of writing a piece on the primary school science club I help run which is to appear in UCL’s Volunteering Services Unit (VSU) annual review as a showcase of the work the Unit funds. This is what I came up with—comments and suggestions are much appreciated.
The scant paragraph in the VSU’s weekly email asked simply for ‘two or three enthusiastic scientists to...
Pharmacotherapy
I like to think I’m quite good at picking birthday presents. A loaded Oyster card for an aspiring Londoner, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy for a soon-to-be medic, and those trinkets, of little monetary value and which without context would be meaningless but, given to the right person, invoke a fond memory—mementoes of events shared.
For some years I’ve been interested in the...
July 2009
1 post
Hello, world.
So, here it is. The very first in what will hopefully become a long line of posts.
Ultimately, I want this to become a corner of the internet I can call my own—part stream of consciousness, part formal essays. The idea that this domain has been unused for years surprises me a little when I think of it, as I classically enjoyed tinkering with my website and showing off my work. Some frisson of...