4 New Experiences in February

FEBRUARY turned out to be rather eventful, with quite a few novel and exciting opportunities. Of this I am glad, as February is normally a rubbish month. Here are some highlights:

A week of exciting emails
In one week I emailed a radio personality, a TV presenter and a dame. I received replies from all of them. This was all in aid of organising certain events in the year, and I have never worried about wording quite as much. It proved to be a fruitful exercise, and yielded unexpected results.

Receiving a commission
Because of these emails, I have been invited to write for an exciting upcoming project. I can't say anything else here, just in case nothing materialises, but I really hope to make the most of this opportunity.

Being endorsed
I have become one of four doctoral researchers in the College of Life and Environmental sciences to be endorsed by the University of Birmingham on the social media platform Twitter. It's an opportunity to network, to talk about science and research, and to provide a snapshot of life in research at the University. To hear me get excited about fruit flies, please do add me as a friend - I'm @bioSimonUoB. Regular nonsense continues to be posted under @srbishop.

Open mic alone
For the first time ever I performed solo at an Open Mic gig. At the beginning of the year I decided to make the most of the hobbies I enjoy and to make things happen, so I rashly booked a slot at Rowheath Pavilion last Friday. I sang three songs - the first alone and then two with my neighbour Lydia. I'm normally just there for accompaniment, and rather enjoyed the reversal of roles. Feedback was positive, even from my colleagues who (probably against their better judgement) came to support me. I have my colleague Sam to thank for her encouragement to play - ever since hearing the recording I made with The Band in my student days (phase I) she has been desperate to hear me on a stage. I am glad of her persistent requests!

It was the busiest Open Mic they've ever had at the Pavilion, which is encouraging and indicative of a lot of hard work by the staff there to promote the building as a community hub.

Rachel is currently away Down Under for a month, leaving me to man the fort here in Brum. The above are keeping me busy indeed, which is really helping me to get through.

Science in Seatoller

BOOK SIX

is dedicated to those unlovely twins

MY RIGHT LEG and MY LEFT LEG,

staunch supporters that have carried me about

for over half a century,

endured much without complaint,

and never once let me down.

...

Nevertheless, they are unsuitable subjects for illustration.

A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, being an illustrated account of a study and exploration of the mountains of the Lake District. Book Six: The North Western Fells

A. Wainwright, 1964

ONE of the perks of life in our lab is the opportunity to attend a lab retreat, where we go away for a few days with our collaborators for both social time, and to share ideas and hatch plans for the year ahead. It is safe to say that this year I did not want to go.

Such is the way with PhDs that progress rides on a sinuous wave of fortune, soaring high for a fleeting, exhilarating moment before crashing to the ground and swirling, seemingly forever, with the tortuous eddies and vortices of disappointment. Emotions, unnecessarily, get caught up in amongst these movements. With each crash morale takes a hit, but with hard work, a lot of luck and often a change of experimental direction, the wave can begin to build once more. The challenge then is not to go along with the movements of fortune, but to surf atop them, keeping afloat for as long as possible.

By the time of our retreat in November 2011, I was drowning beneath that wave. An optimistic and exciting start to the year had slowly been taken over by failure. I had built many useful tools, but experimentally nothing had been fruitful. There are two kinds of failed experiments — those that yield believable results that say the opposite of what you were expecting; and those that yield no results at all, any conclusion being untrustworthy because the experiment simply did not work. Mine, of course, were the latter. I’d had one modest success, which I was presently trying to add to, but in all other ways the year was a write off. I had one final deadline to meet before the retreat, to build a genetic construct, but with only days to go curious anomalies and problems were creeping in, the likes of which I had never seen before, despite plenty of cloning experience. (When I finally got the correct construct a week later, I discovered a fault in the planning that had slipped past all those who had checked it. I had to start again, all because of a single nucleotide.)

To then spend four days in the middle of nowhere, cut off from all means of communication from my wife, while trying to put on a brave face and admit to a year of nothing, was not how I wanted to end November.

Lend me your hand and we'll conquer them all

As promised, here is evidence of our post-carol service Christmas singalong in the Rowheath Pavilion bar from back in December. We hastily shuffled our equipment after the service into a small corner of a small room, where the three of us - with the addition of Natalie on the cajon (thanks Dad for finding out what it's called) and my old neurobiology lecturer on bass, both of whom offered to play with us at the last minute - provided some alternative worship to round off the evening, if indeed you can count Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles and Mumford & Sons as alternative worship. Our crowd was small but enthusiastic, and we had a lot of fun. Hopefully we can do it again next year.

Meanwhile, next open mic is 24th February... now what to play?

Tribes! Professors! Necklaces!

WITH the news that Alice Roberts, medical doctor and anthropologist, is joining my university as Professor of Public Engagement in Science, I decided to have a look back at a post I once wrote about her programme, The Incredible Human Journey, in order to see how harsh I had been. I wasn't a fan. This is because I don't think it is right for a science programme to state anything as fact without explaining any of the methodology behind that conclusion, and I felt that the programme did this. Furthermore, to avoid an explanation because it is considered too complicated is only evidence for the need for more programmes and further explanation. To be fair, her recent Origins of Us was, I felt, a much better series. My comments on The Incredible Human Journey led some to refer to her as my nemesis, but I'm glad for the university at her appointment and look forward to meeting her if possible. This may take some time, however, as I notice that on her first official day at the university, she was filming in Romania.

In that post from 2009 I questioned the ethics and effect of television crew contact with indigenous tribal peoples. Dr Roberts, as she was then, walked straight into a Nyangatom village in search of a guide, whereas in 2006, Bruce Parry had required extensive permission to live with the Nyangatom for an episode of Tribe. At the same time as The Incredible Human Journey, the flagship BBC series South Pacific featured extensive new footage from the remote island of Anuta, where an indigenous community live in isolation and in harmony with the sea. Different footage showing precisely the same thing - the trials of island life and isolation, and further cultural observations - already existed from a different episode of Tribe. To quote myself (what a strange feeling):