There has been a lot of talk about the fact that two of the three Nobel winners for Physiology and Medicine were women this year – a state of affairs that seems so astronomically impossible to some commentators that they’ve been speculating that telomeres (the area of research that was honored by the Prize) must somehow be a “girl’s” area.

There’s a nice quote from one of the female laureates, Carol Greider, about why this might be, and it basically boils down to “the Founder effect” – good women getting nurtured and trained at the very beginning of the field, thereby making it a female-friendly place that attracted more women as the field grew larger and more competitive.

That’s not what I want to talk about today, though. I want to talk about the gentleman who approached me after my Skeptics in the Pub talk this past Monday and, in response to some of the feminist-tinged topics in my lecture, tried to goad me into admitting that all of Biology was essentially “women’s science”. His reasons (a bit blurry after the number of pints he’d probably consumed) seemed to be that since Biology has a lot of women in it, unlike other fields, it must by definition be easier, softer, more feminine. My attempts to explain that there can be many reasons besides ability that women can feel comfortable in a field fell on deaf ears. I suspect that if more women felt more welcomed in the ‘harder’ sciences – if they saw a critical mass of other women already there, for example, it could make a big difference to recruitment and retention of female scientists in traditionally male disciplines. That I know dozens of talented and successful female chemists, mathematicians and physicists speaks to the fallacy that women are too feeble to do anything else other than muck about in Biology.

Also, given how incredibly complex and often computational modern biology can be, it’s also an insult to the many men who work in this field to imply that this science is less challenging. And of course, how “womanly” can Biology actually be if the majority of higher positions – and prizes – continue to be won by men?

I had a dream about particle physics last night. I woke up with a large hadron.

Sorry about that, please don’t report me to the comedy police. I’m just excited by the suggestion that the large hadron collider could be sabotaging itself from the future. The idea being that, were it to work, it would produce Higgs bosons. And the universe finds the idea of Higgs bosons so abhorrent that their appearance would send ripples back in time to prevent their coming into being.

I’m no physicist, but I note this is being suggested relatively seriously, by people who are proper physicists, or at least have published it on arXiv. It is fair to say however that it is not a widely accepted theory, especially among people working on the large hadron collider.

But doesn’t it open up a whole new wonderful universe of excuses? You need no longer claim that your dog ate your homework. Instead you can claim that were your homework completed, the universe would have been distressed and so prevented you from doing it. Who is going to argue with the universe (multiverses, of course, are a different matter)?

Just how general is this effect? And how does it relate to the fact that things sometimes just ‘don’t work’, to use the technical term. To put it another way, I have noticed a particular facility in my reference management software for magnificently buggering up my manuscripts. Is this because a future state in which I am calm and satisfied, having just submitted a perfectly referenced paper without inexplicable crashes, is somehow so disgusting that it interferes with the present to stop itself coming into being? Or is it just that I can’t for the life of me get the bloody program to work.

More philosophically, if the future is so powerful, why did it not intervene earlier in the process? I mean, if nobody had ever thought of the Higgs boson, we wouldn’t be building giant colliders to look for it, which makes me wonder if there are secrets that the future doesn’t want us to know.

Think about it; a sort of cosmological superinjunction stopping us from knowing what we don’t know. But in this case, I don’t think Twitter is going to be much help, even if Stephen Fry gets involved.

I’m giving a talk at London Skeptics in the Pub tomorrow about the image problem that scientists face, and am unaccountably nervous. The main reason is not because public speaking frightens me – quite the contrary – but because I’ll be speaking without a slide presentation.

As a scientist, I’ve had 15 years’ experience rattling off a highly technical 50 minute talk with extremely little preparation if I have a PowerPoint presentation to guide me through it. But last year, giving a ten-minute after-dinner speech at a New Scientist awards ceremony, I was severely challenged. I had a page of notes, but the lighting was really dim on the podium and I ended up having to wing it.

So now I’m committed to nearly an hour of slide-free speech, and my talk has all sorts of quotes and facts that I need to keep straight. After careful deliberation, I’ve decided to go with index cards!

If you want to come along on the night to cheer me on, there are still a few tickets left, and you have until 3 PM tomorrow to book – all the details are here:

http://network.nature.com/people/UE19877E8/blog/2009/10/13/in-which-i-get-skeptical

I have wanted to be a scientist almost all my life.

I think I must have been seven, or thereabouts, when I announced to my parents that I wanted to be a ‘naturist’ when I grew up. Their hilarity was understandable. But what they didn’t initially grasp was that I had been trying to say ‘naturalist’. It was a word I had seen in the Willard Price books I was then addicted to, and my pronunciation of it just happened to sound like, well, like someone who enjoys walking around naked. Unfortunate that.

They gave me a Thomas Salter chemistry set for my seventh birthday. These were available in ‘levels’ which were gauged to age and supposed responsibility. To my delight, they had bought me one which was recommended for older children. In my recollection, somewhere during Thatcher’s first term I am sitting in front of John Craven’s Newsround on a wet afternoon, taking a match to a tube of hydrogen and delighting in the resulting <<pop!>>. I had a lot of fun with those tubes of copper sulphate, tartaric acid and the like.

In contrast the microscope I was given the next year never grabbed me until I was much older, and realised that the pathetic little mirror was never going to reflect enough light to see much, especially at the higher magnifications. Once this had been sorted out with a desk lamp I spent hours looking at Daphnia, mosquito larvae and the like. Eventually, an even geekier friend introduced me to rotifers, those gorgeous little living jewels that look like they run on some clockwork mechanism, and which are to be found in the tiniest drop of water. It was not until much later I learned and appreciated the word ‘animalcule’.

“Science isn’t what you think it is,” warned my Father, sat in front of the deep red seventies curtains which ran in front of the sliding doors in the living room “it’s not all making discoveries. When you come down to it, it’s much like any other job.” Again, in my unreliable memory, the news in the background is talking about the university cuts of the 80s, bringing his next words into sharp relief “You could work all your life and not discover anything. And it’s not easy to get a job in science, and if you do you won’t get paid much for it. Accountants, on the other hand, people will always need accountants.”

He was right. And he was also wrong.

Science is not well paid. For most of us, it is an insecure lifestyle. We are prey to the vicissitudes of the reviewers of our papers and our grants, or the grants of the people who employ us. And yes, most days it has a lot in common with other jobs; writing reports, meetings, sending emails, doing expenses, getting along with the people you are thrown together with, I could go on. And yes, people will always need accountants.

But then there is the way it isn’t like other jobs. You have to find time to look at the world. Really look at it. And then find in the great edifice of our knowledge, some small space everyone else has missed that you can shine a light into. Whether you will reveal a tiny detail or some vast roomy space to explore, ah, that’s the fun.

My Father was right: discoveries do not come every day. And yet I have been lucky enough, once or twice, to feel like I am catching a glimpse of something fascinating and unknown. It doesn’t happen all at once. Some of my best work has lain unexamined on my desk for the best part of a year before I got around to doing something with it, and then I of course kicked myself for having not seen it before. Other times I have felt almost bowled over by the surge of insight, which has then proven to be so far of the mark as to be completely unfounded, or near as dammit.

There’s a line from Beckett “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

I think I might have noticed something earlier today. I can’t wait to try again.

This is why I love science, love it so much that I couldn’t leave it for long.

Last night, late for my date and fretting in the dark room, the hot breath of the x-omat developer wafting over the stink of chemicals, I had absolutely no hope: I was trying to make an antibody work that everyone else had deemed a dud. I’d already tried a number of conditions to no avail, and this last one was just a punt because I’d had an extra strip that I hadn’t yet tested and I thought it was a shame to throw it away. So I bumped up the concentration and tried a different temperature, but feeding the film into the machine was just a formality.

Damned if the blot didn’t sport the most beautiful band I’ve seen for the past year, clean as the proverbial whistle.

Result.

I just can’t hide it. Vicariously, but the excitement is tangible.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan shares the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This is for his super work on the ribosome structure. I’m excited because Venki is joint Head of Division at the MRC-LMB, where I spent what were probably the six happiest years of my scientific career.

The staff of the otherwise excellent Cafe Macchiato didn’t seem to appreciate my joy, just now. This is the thing about science, isn’t it? Something big, something really, really important (to us) is nothing to the general public, until it directly affects their life. But I can’t keep quiet about it.

Whenever I hear about publication by press conference I get worried. It’s a back door to get your results noticed. And when the actual results are not fully reported, it is potentially misleading.

So I am a bit annoyed with myself at my excitement on hearing that a Thai study had found a significant 31.2% efficacy for an HIV vaccine. True, it wasn’t fully reported, but there was a full and open discussion scheduled on the 20^th October at a meeting in Paris.

Last week, before the home game against Olympiacos, I was having a beer with a fellow Arsenal fan who works in an HIV lab. He was complaining that the TV cameras had come to film the lab, as background for a news report on the discovery, and he had been edited out of the footage. “Anyway,” he said “it’s all bollocks. The numbers are really small. It’s seventy something infected versus fifty something.”

This was the cue for me to patronisingly point out that it’s the number of people vaccinated that matters, which was 8000 in both arms of the trial. My friend grumbled and moved onto an entertaining rant about HPV and perianal warts. But I’ve now got to hold my hands up and say it looks like he had a point. About the HIV vaccine trial that is.

According to reports of private briefings, if we exclude people who did not exactly follow the protocols from the trial, then the estimate of efficacy reduces, and statistical significance disappears. This is not altogether surprising, as the significance was borderline anyway and along with those trial participants we lose statistical power.  Given that significance is only arbitrarily defined at the 95% level, this is not necessarily as bad as it might sound, and the data remain interesting. But it does raise the question of why these more equivocal results were not reported. Indeed, given that the results are still not published, why was there any publicity at all? There is, apparently, a paper under review at the NEJM. I guess we just have to hope for rapid review.

Anyway, I bet the Paris meeting will be fun…

They’re wandering around the corridors and quads like wide-eyed lost lambs. Rather sweetly, they haven’t yet worked out that *both* sets of the university’s many double doors actually open, obviating the need for extensive queues. And they’re still at that precarious stage when they all go to the refectory at precisely the same time (thus making it impossible for everyone else to eat).

I’ve discovered a scientific solution to the latter problem at least, by working out exactly  how expensive an average lunch meal has to be in the various cafés in the area before an average student decides they can’t afford it. After a number of empirical tests, I’ve worked it out: £4.50.

Problem solved.

Vaccine scares are here again. This time it is the tragic news that a 14 year old girl died after receiving her HPV vaccination, with a predictable response from some quarters…

On this occasion, I’m going to take the road less travelled. Numerous scientific commentators will be sure to point out that there is not necessarily any connection between the events, and that even if there were, the risks of vaccination remain tiny in comparison to the lifetime risk of developing cervical cancer.

But it would be wrong to only consider this story as a case report. It’s also a story, and many, even most people hearing about it on the news will interpret it as a narrative: they will be struck by the irony of parents wanting to protect their daughter, through a vaccine which is voluntary in the UK, only for her to succumb far sooner than they could have ever expected. Whether or not there is any connection, this single tragedy will resonate far more than the thousands of lives which will be saved. Those saved lives are an absence of death, even of illness, and we tend not to perceive such things in the same way.

A classic ethical dilemma asks whether subjects would be willing to save bystanders on a railway platform from a runaway train, by changing the points to divert the train onto another platform where it will kill only one person. Most people say that they would divert the train and kill the lone commuter. But when the question is recast such that there is a crowded train headed out of control towards a precipice, and to prevent it plummeting over the edge we have to push a single large gentleman off an overlooking bridge onto the track to derail the train before the crash, most people balk.

I think something similar can apply when we talk about vaccination. It should not be a great surprise if, when vaccinating millions, we observe events which have a one in a million chance of occurring. But even though the risk is small, minuscule, we are deliberately exposing vaccinees to it. Hence the vaccine is held responsible, whereas the depredations of disease can somehow be viewed as natural. To put it another way, if somebody dies of a disease it is nobody’s fault, but if they die following vaccination, then it is the fault of the dastardly government, big pharma, whoever.

It is interesting to note that following the 9/11 terrorist attacks there were serious discussions about whether smallpox vaccination should be recommenced in the US, to protect against any future bioterrorist incident. Such a vaccination programme would be expected to be at the cost of some lives, through adverse reactions, and this may explain why the plan was shelved.

According to reports, in the case of HPV the vaccine cannot be held to be responsible. However, I suspect that this will be insufficient to prevent a panic. Suspicious parents will be quick to suggest a cover up, even those who should know better. But really, it’s as safe as can be reasonably expected, and it will save lives. It probably has already saved the lives of women who would have been exposed to HPV in coming years, and then suffered the consequences. But heck, maybe I’m wrong. A poll on the Daily Mail’s website reveals a majority, at present, against suspension of the vaccination campaign. When saner voices prevail even at the Daily Mail, there is hope for us all.

“Often sensible hypotheses turn out to be wrong.”

So says the Spanish biologist Ginés Morata, who was just giving a seminar round these parts. It seems common for scientists of a certain temperament to assume that they don’t need to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s because they are “likely” to be right about the details, so it’s refreshing to hear such voices of wisdom.