Excellent news this week that an item of lab automation equipment has been shortlisted for the MacRobert Award, the UK’s premier engineering prize. Polar, a robotic sample retrieval system which can find and return any of ten million human blood and urine samples from a -80C storage facility at the UK Biobank, is one of four projects to make it through to the final judging. Biobank is said to be the world’s largest single genetic resource, storing samples from half a million individuals in order to facilitate study of the link between disease, environment and genetic factors. The Polar system is designed and installed by the Automation Partnership. Read the rest of this entry »
Remember when ’science’ meant the systematic pursuit of knowledge in order to increase humankind’s understanding of the universe? I’m not sure what today’s definition should be (answers on a postcard, please) but I have to agree with the recent rant on Wired complaining about the lack of actual science in Google News’s Sci/Tech section. But the problem is hardly restricted to this one news aggregator - plenty of high-profile websites, newspapers, and television channels seem to think that they can get away with calling any old drivel ’science’.
So, while Google News fills its screens with reviews of WiiStation 360 games and the latest colours of iMac laptops, the venerable BBC obsesses with hand-wringing over climate change and bird flu. Check out almost any news channel and the same is true: Fox News thinks that a software company’s takeover of a search engine (or not) is a science story, and regularly delights its audience with stories of cars running on tap water. Across the media, business news involving a dotcom is paraded as a science story, the consumer wars over disk formats are labelled as sci-tech, and stories on the popularity of social networking are used to pad the otherwise inconsequential content of the science channels.
At least these outlets have a science section - unlike so many others which treat entertainment as news and report on soap opera plot twists as if they were actual events, or for whom the tribulations of overpaid sports stars take precedence over any story that might encourage viewers to actually think for themselves for a change.
The malaise is widespread. The UK TV channel Film4 has just finished a two-week season of sci-fi movies (I have previously admitted my weakness for bad sci-fi), in which at least half of the output was horror and fantasy (vampires and sorcery and other hocus-pocus), rather than any fi involving any sci. Who are these people, who mislabel everything from the iPod to Facebook to Indiana Jones as ’science’?
I’ll tell you who they are. Arts graduates, every last one of them.
You may have seen these before - I know I certainly have - but I make no excuse for airing them again here. In science, as in any walk of life, language is heavily coded (and often loaded) with hidden meaning. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the discussion part of a scientific paper, where the authors attempt to put their work into context. As scientists, we work in an ordered world where mathematical precision and experimental reproducibility are king. The subtleties of language, the power of nuance, and the potential for ambiguity that is presented in the world of descriptive text are not our natural playground. But sometimes an equation just won’t do - and that’s where the secret codes come in. Read on for our guide to the real meaning of common phrases found in scientific papers. Read the rest of this entry »
I think I finally understand why science funding is in such a parlous state here in the UK, and for once the politicians and bureaucrats really are working in our best interests. Regular readers may recall that a rearrangement of British government agencies last year led to a significant hole in funding for ‘big physics’, threatening participation in a number of high profile national and international projects. Even the world-famous Jodrell Bank radio telescope came under threat. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s nothing like a new experiment to get the pulse racing. I’m not talking about the routine slog of lab bench drudgery, or the blistering pace of zillions of mostly-insignificant high-throughput reactions in a robotic system. I’m talking about doing something for the first time, just to see what will happen, just because you can. Experiments where there is no ’success’ or ‘failure’, perhaps barely even a reportable outcome. Experiments where the result is nothing more than “Oh, that’s what happens…” This, surely, is what draws most of us into science in the first place.
This is the spirit in which, this week, we launched Laboratorytalk Television. OK, so that may be a slightly grandiose name for what is, so far, only a single three-minute video report, but at least it got your attention. Our first programme is a guerilla-style report from Analytica, the giant German trade fair, showing some of the action from Munich intercut with a half-dozen product news snippets. I’m the first to admit that we haven’t ironed-out all the kinks yet, but - as I said - it’s an experiment.
Laboratorytalk at Analytica can be viewed via the Laboratorytalk homepage, or directly on this Special Report page - which also has text links to the specific product stories highlighted. It can be seen on our YouTube channel homepage and on our Facebook page. Or just look below.
Feedback and criticism is both welcomed and expected, using any of the various mechanisms available. I would be particularly interested to have suggestions for future video reports, as well as your nominations of the most useful work-related videos you have seen. Laboratorytalk Television: not available on cable or satellite.
A tale of two trade shows: Pittcon and Analytica. Now that the dust is settling on the spring season of exhibitions and conferences, we can begin to take stock. The season’s two major events were separated by just a month, and an ocean, but which can claim to be (as they both do) the leading event for the laboratory sector? Read the rest of this entry »
The world is spiralling towards economic meltdown, banks are going bankrupt, property values are evaporating, and recession (if not full-blown depression) is just around the corner. This is the picture that anybody could draw from a few minutes watching a news broadcast or reading a newspaper. Read the rest of this entry »
Nasa is finally calling time on its hugely successful Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which have outperformed anybody’s expectations by continuing to function well beyond their original warranty period. Landing on the Red Planet in early 2004, the twin golf-buggy sized robots were initially expected to explore their landing sites for just three months. Over four years later, they continue to amaze by continuing to deliver precious information and imagery.
Now, after five separate extensions to the rovers’ mission, the cash-strapped US space agency has finally had enough. With the approach of Martian winter, the devices are to be switched off instead of simply being put into hibernation. The move is portrayed as a purely financial one, and has - predictably - attracted much hostility within the astronomy blogosphere. This apparent need to save cash appears rather desperate, even misguided, but I suspect there is rather more to this decision.
In cash terms, the original missions were budgeted at about US$820 million - or $270 per month for the pair. Ongoing operations are of course much cheaper, but still quite cash hungry, at $20million per year or $1.6million per month. In terms of bang-per-buck, this is extraordinary value - less than one percent of the original cost for what is essentially the same result. Surely even Nasa could afford to keep up these payments?
Of course it could. Nasa may be in financial difficulties, but they cannot be so bad that it must resort to this ‘nickel-and-diming’ approach. The simple fact is that the Mars rovers have completed their missions, several times over, and have nothing left to do. They have found the evidence of ancient water which was their primary goal, and they have taken many thousands of photographs. They have traversed plains, climbed hills, scraped the soil, and watched the weather. They have found no evidence of past or present life - but then, they were never designed to do that (this was of course a big mistake). And now, frankly, we are finished with them. I hold no truck with the more sentimental expressions of outrage that are percolating the internet, which all too frequently seem to imply that these machines are sentient beings. Nasa is practically being accused of murder, when in reality it is simply drawing a line under what has become one of its most spectacularly successful missions ever.
And I suspect that one unofficial lesson Nasa will learn is to make its future robots somewhat less robust. Any device that performs 16 times its design function is demonstrably over-engineered, and therefore demonstrably overpriced. The agency can save cash, and embarrassment, by making future exporation robots out of less sturdy stuff.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, you will certainly have heard something about the coming era of ‘personalised medicine’ in which we will all have customised cures tailored for our specific maladies and appropriate to our individual physiologies. These cures (which don’t necessarily have to be applied by Dr Beverly Crusher, although obviously it would be so much better if they were) will be formulated based on our increasing knowledge of medicines and of the individual’s unique genes - so that the remedy is truly personalised.
Obviously there are a number of hurdles to overcome before this science-fiction scenario can become reality. One of those is to catalogue the many millions of potential active ingredients in drugs, particularly in the fashionable area of small molecule drugs. Another is to catalogue the exponentially-bigger list of potential metabolites of those ingredients generated from the range of human metabolisms. Yet a third is the not-inconsiderable issue of determining an individual’s genome in the first place, in order to begin narrowing-down the range of possible treatments to those which would work and which would not have adverse side-effects. It’s a huge challenge.
But it is one that came a little closer to reality this week, with the announcement from Applied Biosystems that it has reduced the cost of sequencing an individual’s genome. And the reduction made is truly extraordinary: the Human Genome Project sequenced the first human genome by 2003 for a cost widely reported at US$3bn (although Applied Biosystems uses a much more conservative estimate of $300m). Five years later, the cost has fallen to just $60,000.
Late last year I wrote about the drive to reduce the cost of a genome towards a target of $1000, and reported that the cost then (four months ago) was about $5m. And yet we learn this week (see No 1 in our Top Ten, below) that the price today is barely one percent of that amount. This is simply extraordinary.
Put it into context: the sequencing of the genome is an achievement sometimes compared to that of the Apollo programme which, in 1969, put the first people on the moon. Apollo cost, in modern money, something like $140 billion. Had Nasa been able to reduce its costs this fast, a moon trip would have cost under $3m (in today’s value - $600,000 in contemporary money) by the mid-1970s, and would today be no more expensive than a business class flight across the Atlantic.
That thousand-dollar genome is no longer looking quite so fanciful, and the promise of personalised medicine has, this week, come a large step closer to reality.
There are many things in the universe that I wish I understood better, including string theory, the offside rule, and tax forms. Poetry isn’t high on that list, but when I come across a work which ties the art into the sciences, naturally I want to know more. Such is the case with Poems on the Book of Life, by Gillian Ferguson.
This four-volume, thousand-page work has taken four years to write - aided by £25,000 grant from Creative Scotland - and is so far available only online. The thing strikes me as being somewhat pretentious in places - the four volumes are called ’sequences’, for instance - and its style is a little avant-garde for my tastes, but pretentiousness and avant-gardiness are probably the hot things in poetry circles these days. Like I said, it’s not something I profess to know much about.
More irritating are the structural flaws in the work - the poor linking on the website which makes makes it feel like you’re wearing heavy gloves trying to turn the pages of a book, and the author’s perverse technique of hiding her work beneath screeds of clippings from other sources. If I wanted to read the random thoughts of everybody from Charles Darwin to Genesis (the biblical one, not the prog-rock band) I would browse Wikipedia or just bang words into a search engine. I can’t help but wonder how many of those thousand pages are accounted for by the blatherings of others, rather than the poet - what is this, an original work or a collection of newspaper clippings?
Having got past the too-numerous obstacles, I actually found the verse rather engaging. If the intention of poetry is to transport the reader away from the immediate and towards a different understanding… well, try it for yourself.
Yes, it’s trite in places and ignorant in others, and yes poetry is an art form ill-suited on this scale to the medium of the internet, but I have found myself dipping in and out and - well, thinking about it. So I guess that means Ferguson has succeeded.
Laboratorytalk and this Editor's Blog are edited by Russ Swan
Russ has edited Laboratorytalk since its launch in 2001. After an early career in civil engineering, he joined the trade journal Concrete as technical editor, later freelancing for a variety of trade and consumer magazines and newspapers. In the 1990s he co-founded a publishing company which launched three successful magazines covering highways, transportation networks, and structural engineering, and later joined the Institution of Chemical Engineers to edit The Chemical Engineer. He was among the first dozen employees of VerticalNet Europe, the spectacularly disastrous poster child of the first wave of internet publishing, in 2000. He has written for Private Eye, the Financial Times, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is a member of the Association of British Science Writers (ABSW), and in his spare time rides a 1200cc Suzuki.
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