On writing and blogging

I've written about many things on this blog. Bacteria, antibiotics, um, other bacteria. But one thing I haven't really covered is blogging about blogging. There is a good reason for this, lots of other people are doing it so much better and I wouldn't know where to start, apart from floundering around waving my arms about and talking about how much more I've enjoyed blogging now I'm in this whole 'network' thing.

But then Hannah went and wrote a post about it and that post gave me confidence. I might be just a recently-graduated student with limited experience of both science and science writing, but can still write. I can't write about facultys, tenure-track, post-doc-ness, or give much breadth of experience to my topics, but what I can bring, and what I hope I always will bring is a huge amount of occasionally overwhelming enthusiasm for the bacteria I love finding out about.

What's possibly a benefit to that is that I'm always starting from the point of view that I'm probably wrong. Any comments that ask pertinent questions about what I've written have me scuttling back to the literature. This blog has helped me learn, and helped me discover a new things and most importantly has kept my learning broad. I've just graduated, which means if I go on to do a PhD I will continually be narrowing down my field of vision directed towards whatever I happen to be studying. Even during my degree it was starting to happen, and yet by keeping this blog open I can learn about things like modelling virotherapy for cancer and how plants respond to iron stress despite the fact that it's not really a part of my course. It's all interesting, and I want to keep finding out about it.

As well as giving me confidence with her post Hannah also tagged me for the bloggers with substance meme:

1. Sum up your blogging motivation, philosophy and experience in exactly 10 words.

I can do that in two words: I write.

Ten words: I cannot find a way to stop myself writing. Refrigerator.

I write. I have always written. I have whole files full of masses of paper that I scribbled bad sci-fi stories on when I was ten. Any computer I've ever used will have a folder marked "non-fiction" that is usually more crammed full of things than any other folder. I have bits of fantasy story and fanfic scribbled in the margins of my lecture notes. Every time I go on holiday I usually bring some blank paper and a pen with me, rather than (or as well as) a book to read. My A-level chemistry notes have Star Wars essays covering them and I swear I used to have a school shirt with random phrases from a Harry Potter fanfiction scribbled on the cuff.

I can't ever imagine not writing.

Somewhere around second year university I decided that I should probably channel this force for good and, after finding Ed Yong's blog and realizing that it was possible to write about science online, I started writing about science. It seemed to work well, and it's been working better and better ever since. I have bloggy friends now, and a bloggy community. I tweet stuff. The writing has become something great, and I still very much enjoy doing it.

Yes that was slightly more than ten words. This is a blog-post, not a tweet.

2. Pass it on to 10 other bloggers with substance

I think everyone I'd want to pass it onto has already been tagged, but here's ten bloggers that I enjoy reading and most of whom I'm blog-friends with anyway:

Skeptic Wonder - The Protist Person

Lucas Brouwers - who blogs at Thoughtonomics about all sort of interesting stuff

C6-H12-O2 - a blogger I found recently who writes lots of nice mol-bio articles

Angry by Choice - who won me over by writing a post about a fungi that devours worms by making little traps for them

Schooner of Science - the pirate science blogger!

MolBio Research Highlight - who got the MolBio Carnival running and does awesome tweets.

Disease of the Week - A bacteriologist, a virologist, and a lot of diseases (and currently a poll...)

Oscillator - for synthetic biology goodies

Dr Isis - for all the wonderful advice on science, motherhood and other things that I might end up doing in the future

Games with Words - who makes very good points that I sometimes disagree with

(I would have added Culturing Science to the list as well, but she tagged me so I'm not sure it counts...)

That's probably the most linked post I've ever made, and also probably more information than anyone really wanted to know about me. I am a science student who likes writing, and this blog is where it all comes together as one.

Where my bio began...

Sigma is doing a promotion/competition thing at the moment called "Where bio begins" which seems quite interesting. The aim is to get scientists to show, through a variety of media, what sparked their interest in biology, why they decided to study it and why they find it so fascinating. I'm not sure whether I'll enter for the competition (they need my real name unfortunately) but it's a great idea and it sort of got stuck in my head. Why am I doing biology, and where did bio begin for me?

There are a lot of answers to that. Something about my childhood probably, about how I found everything exciting and was encouraged to explore a lot. Something about my schooling, which was quite science oriented. Something about my personality and the traits which allow me to love lab-work, even when it hates me in return, and probably something about science itself, which is so amazing and beautiful.

I think the biggest moment for me though was when I first saw a picture of the inside of a cell, containing all the details of the organelles. I was sixteen at the time, and cells up until then had just been drawn as blobs, with maybe a little blob inside labelled 'nucleus'. To suddenly see the whole crowded, busy and breathtakingly complex cellular interior was a bit of a revelation because basically what my mind saw was something like this:
It was another world in there. And I've been hooked on that world ever since.

---

Map is (c) Me. It was fun to draw and I am very proud of the trees and the boat. My favourite bit is the dragon sitting on top of the cell, because it's a dragon sitting on top of a cell.

Follow me on Twitter!

Reflections on Lab Work

I've just come to the end of my project for this year. Last week was the usual flurry of tidying, organising the freezer, and making sure all my stuff is on the Lab Computer so that anyone else who wants it can use it. I tried very hard to feel some sort of nostalgia about leaving, but to be honest all I managed was a sense of supreme exhaustion and slight relief. Besides, I'll probably be nipping in an out of there to collect results pictures, protocols, etc. for my write-up.

So I thought I'd just do a quick run-through, for anyone who's interested, about my lab experiences. I've done four lab projects to date, and enjoyed every one of them. I can't even say which one I enjoyed the most, they're all special in different ways.

1) My First Project Ever was working on bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). It was fairly heavily supervised, I was working with a PhD student and helping her on her project. It was probably the most fun I've ever had in a lab; there was no pressure for a big write-up (just a small report for the funding body) or excessive pressure for me to get results, and I felt very useful being able to help. It was also the first time I'd been paid for lab work, and got that amazing rush of "woah....people will give me actual money for this!"

I started this blog during that project. The entries from back then make me laugh now. :)

2) Second project was for my course, where I switched to working on Streptomyces. Again, I was working quite closely with a PhD student, but she had kids and used to have to leave the lab about midday to take care of them. By the time the first week was up we'd worked out a system; in the morning we'd go over all the work I needed to get done, and in the afternoon she'd leave and I'd get on with it. It was quite a nice step up, as I was still being supervised, but I was doing the work all by myself.

The blog kind of died in that period, because it was insanely busy and I hadn't found out about research blogging yet.

3) The third project was the synthetic biology one, which wins the award for Most Stressful Project so far. As it was meant to be student-based we (there were seven of us, only four of whom were biological scientists) were pretty much dumped in the lab and left to get on with it. We had meetings with the supervisors once a week, and we had a PhD student to help us out (for which we were incredibly grateful) but other than that it was all down to us.

Considering I was the only one in the lab who'd ever done a project before it's amazing we managed anything really! I've got a lot of blog posts from that time, mostly because I spent about four weeks in the middle of it failing to make two point mutations. This involved lots of waiting around for gels to run, PCRs to happen, and ligations to fail, during which I would happily type away at my computer. Also at some point around then I discovered researchblogging.org and completely took off with the research side of things.

4) The project I'm currently writing up. This one has been the first project I've really thought of as my own (which makes the lack of conclusive results a bit harder to take). The lab is quite small, and as the PI and post-doc were quite busy last term, I was organising experiments and procedures pretty much on my own. I'm looking forward to the write-up, especially now I've drafted it and discovered that I actually do enough to write up. I feel more personally attached to this project than any one I've ever done before. The knowledge that my little samples are going to be sitting in the freezer for a long while before anyone bothers to dig them out actually does hurt a little. The next three weeks of write-up are going to be fun though :)

I'm quite surprised and proud that I've managed to keep up regular blogging throughout the course of the project.

5) I've already organised a summer project! As usual, there will probably be only the vaguest details of what I'm actually doing on the blog, especially as this project really should lead to a paper. But stay tuned for more bacteria-related posts. I'm sort of hooked on blogging now, and it'll probably take a lot to get me to stop.

---

Follow me on Twitter!

International Women's Day

"What does “equal rights for all” mean to you?"

It means being able to look at any other person in the world and being able to think: Yes...I would be not be significantly more unhappy if I had been born you. I would not be any more ashamed, I would not be any more afraid, I would not be any more unable to be happy. I might have a different lifestyle, different thoughts, different feelings, maybe even a different set of values than I do now, but I would be no less able to enjoy my life.

It means watching what I say, examining what I think, trying to see inside my head from other peoples point of view. If I were you, would I laugh at that joke? If you were me, would you say it? It means making myself listen to other people, listening for clues as to how they see their world, why they act how they do, making myself imagine thinking like that, acting like that.

It means accepting that just because two views are different, doesn't mean that one of them is 'Right' and the other 'Wrong'. Finding more dimensions to see the world in, more colours to paint thoughts with, more ways of being. Not to laugh when someone does something I find odd, but to watch, to understand, and to accept. To be able to feel differently to you, in the knowledge that neither of us considers our point of view superior, just different.

It means being able to look at You, and seing someone that could be Me.

Other participating blogs can be found here.

Plastic from bacteria

I'm on holiday at the moment, so today's post is another section from my long essay last year, about the potential uses of biorefineries. It was written for a more scientific-based audience so might be a little harder to decipher than my usual posts.

Bioplastics

Bioplastics are polyesters that accumulate intracellularly in microorganisms in storage granules. They are usually built up from hydroxyl-acyl CoA derivatives through a range of different pathways in different microorganisms. As they are both biodegradable and biocompatible they have found numerous applications within medical and surgical fields, as well as having a greater environmental advantage over petroleum based plastics. The main disadvantages of bioplastics for commercial use are their high production and recovery costs.

The most widely produced bioplastics are poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) and poly(hydroxyalkanoic acid), referred to as PHB and PHA respectively. These both contain different β-oxidation intermediates as monomers, which are enzymatically polymerised through a condensation reaction. The structure of PHA is shown below (the 'n' indicates that the section show below is repeated multiple times):The first bioplastic to be described was PHB, found in Bacillus megaterium in 1926 by Lemoigne. It is stored in polymer form in granules within the cell.In order to decrease the recovery costs of the PHB granules, several attempts have been made to produce the secreted monomers, for polymerization outside the bacterial system. This has been achieved by expressing recombinant genes in E. coli

There are a large number of PHA polymers, ninety-one of which have been fully characterised. They are produced by both Gram negative and Gram positive bacteria via at least five different metabolic pathways. The main enzyme involved in polymer formation is PHA synthase (of the α/β hydrolase family), which polymerizes the monomers by connecting the coenzyme A thioesters of one monomer to the hydroxyl groups at positions 3, 4, 5 or 6 of the acyl moiety of the second monomer. There are four classes of PHA synthase, which are distinguished by their primary structures, substrate specificity and subunit composition. PHA synthases are found on the surface of the PHA storage granules, along with other proteins, and phospholipids.

(The structure of a PHA granule is shown above, image taken from Rehm 2003)

Engineering of recombinant bacteria that are capable of producing bioplastics requires both the transfer of a functional PHA synthase enzyme (there is no evidence as yet to suggest that any post-translational modifications of the enzyme are important for its function), and the engineering of suitable substrates that provide the enzyme with suitable substrates and sufficient concentrations. While the enzyme has been successfully transferred into model organisms such as E. coli, S. cerevisiae and even some transgenic plants, the provision of substrates is a more difficult problem as it involves dealing with large numbers of interlinked metabolic pathways. Metabolic flux analysis, carried out in transgenic E. coli, has substantially increased the carbon flux towards the production of PHB without detriment to the health of the bacteria, however this form of analysis has not yet been carried out on more complex PHA polymers.

---

Madison LL, & Huisman GW (1999). Metabolic engineering of poly(3-hydroxyalkanoates): from DNA to plastic. Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR, 63 (1), 21-53 PMID: 10066830

Steinbuchel, A., & Valentin, H. (1995). Diversity of bacterial polyhydroxyalkanoic acids FEMS Microbiology Letters, 128 (3), 219-228 DOI: 10.1111/j.1574-6968.1995.tb07528.x

Rehm BH (2003). Polyester synthases: natural catalysts for plastics. The Biochemical journal, 376 (Pt 1), 15-33 PMID: 12954080

Second Generation Biofuels

As part of my course last year, I wrote an extended long essay concerning the use of bacteria in biorefineries. As I've had a very lazy weekend (and to celebrate crossing the hundred post mark) I've decided to reproduce some of it here. More may be forthcoming at some point, depending on the laziness of my weekends.

Second Generation Biofuels

Second generation biofuels consist of lignocellulose material, which is broken down into simple sugars via enzymatic reactions and then fermented to produce ethanol. As lignocelluloses can be found in inedible plant matter (e.g corn husks, rice stems, and wheat stalks) they have the advantage that, unlike first generation biofuels, their utilisation does not compete with food production.

The three main components of lignocelluloses material are celluloses, hemicelluloses and lignin. These cannot be fermented directly and must therefore be broken down:The pre-treatment of the biomass is necessary both to remove lignin (although effective ligninases have been found in white-rot fungi, their rate of product turnover in bacteria is still too slow to be commercially successful) and to partially break down the cellulose to allow easier digestion by microbial processes. As the pre-treatment consists of harsh chemical processes, it would be advantageous within a biorefinery to use microbes which are able to withstand high temperatures and low pHs. For example, the cloning of thermostable cellulases into Trichoderma reesei allows a higher hydrolysis temperature compared to commercial Trichoderma enzyme, reducing the energy needed to cool the system after pretreatment with steam. The ability to save energy in this way could have a large economic impact, making the biorefinery more commercially feasible.

Currently one of the most popular microorganisms for use in lignocellulose biofuel production is Clostridium thermocellum which has an optimum temperature of around 60°C and also contains a cellulosome; a multi-protein cellulose-degrading complex attached to the bacterial cell wall. Cellulosomes are found in several bacteria, both Gram negative and positive, although they can differ in their structure and organisation (particularly of the cohesins and dockerins).
As potentially the entire process of ethanol production from lignocelluloses could be carried out by the microbes within a fermentor, the use of second generation biofuels in biorefineries has generated a lot of interest. The three main economic obstacles are the high processing costs, the narrow margin between biomass and fuel prices, and the large capital investment needed to initiate a cellulosic biorefinery. This could however, be overcome by increasing the potential for the production of high-value goods alongside the biofuel, either by adding pathways for the production of oleochemicals or bioplastics to the fermenting bacteria, or by utilising the lignin. This would provide the biorefinery with a greater capital return.

---

Gilbert, H. (2007). Cellulosomes: microbial nanomachines that display plasticity in quaternary structure Molecular Microbiology, 63 (6), 1568-1576 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2958.2007.05640.x

Blumer-Schuette, S., Kataeva, I., Westpheling, J., Adams, M., & Kelly, R. (2008). Extremely thermophilic microorganisms for biomass conversion: status and prospects Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 19 (3), 210-217 DOI: 10.1016/j.copbio.2008.04.007

Zhang, Y. (2005). Cellulose utilization by Clostridium thermocellum: Bioenergetics and hydrolysis product assimilation Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102 (20), 7321-7325 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0408734102

The Importance of Fairy Stories

I was reading around the posts at ScienceBlogs, when I came across this one by Bioephemera which, while talking about a recent google-doodle took a quick jokey look at the respective merits of Hans Christian Ørsted and Hans Christian Andersen. The following quote from The Guardian about the issue was produced: "while there's nothing wrong with fairy stories, they haven't contributed much to the development of electric motors."

I couldn't resist it. Put "Discuss" on the end and it's practically an HPS (history and philosophy of science) essay. (I won't answer it in essay form, because I haven't got the time to plan out a nice long essay right now, but I will damn well be discussing it)

"While there's nothing wrong with fairy stories, they haven't contributed much to the development of electric motors." Discuss.

My main problem with this statement is that it seems to see science (and technological development, which I am lumping in the same field here) as an isolated process, remote and aloof from the rest of human life and development. Science, according to the guardian, progresses by scientific-minded people doing scientifically relating things and coming up with greater and better ways of achieving useful things, such as the electric motor. These scientists would be important and serious men (well...lets face it they probably were thinking of men) working away through detailed experimentation on serious topics, a far distance away from the whimsical and childish world of little stories.

Scientists, whatever Hollywood tries to insist, are people too. They grow up as children, hearing the same stories and tales and getting the same cultural and emotional baggage from the society around them. And science itself develops within that society, affected by it, changed by it and to a certain extent controlled by it as well. Ørsted grew up listening to the same kind of stories as Anderson, the only difference was that he didn't write them down.

In fact Hans Christian Andersen and fairy stories is a particularly bad example of things-that-do-not-affect-science, because Anderson wasn't just making these stories up. He was taking stories that were already being told. Folk-tales rather than fairy-tales, and folk-tales are crucial to human development. In a way, they are cultural development, especially in small communities where not very much writing occurs. They're how you teach your children, how you pass messages across, how you define what is acceptable and what isn't. How, in fact, you lay down the very rules and laws by which your society develops by, rules from which science is not exempt.

A few hundred years ago we had the Magician's Apprentice, adapted from a fairy-tale that makes it clear what happens if you mess with things you don't understand. The Victorian era brought forth the gothic novel Frankenstein, with a fairly similar message (among others). And now, in England, people protest against GM crops, for pretty much the same reason. I'm pretty sure there was at least one headline with the words "Frankenstein Fruit" in it. People have the stories in their heads, and stories are very powerful things to get rid of.

They told me when I was writing up my presentation for my project "make it a story". People understand stories, they understand things through stories. They develop, change, and form cultures, mostly based around stories. And science cannot be separated from the culture that surrounds it. Nor can it even remain strictly "scientific". Kekulé 'discovered' the ring structure of benzene after falling asleep and dreaming about a snake eating it's own tail. Science progresses through humans and humans progress through stories.

And, well, there's a reason the 'geeky-scientist' exists as a stereotype. We *like* fantasy, and science fiction, and other stories of other worlds. If you bring a child up telling them stories of fantastic places, and then bring them up slightly further by showing them the inside of a cell, they'll be hooked. It's a magical place, with magical rules, where everything moves and acts differently and, best of all, it really exists and you can get paid for exploring it.

On the face of it science may seem a long way from 'The Princess and the Pea' (although maybe not too far away from 'The Emperor's New Clothes'...) But these are the stories that western scientists and western science have grown up on, taking them, using them, being influenced by them. Without the stories, without the cultural background and development, the electric motor would have been a lot longer in arriving, and the rest of science would have been far, far slower. You cannot separate development into "that achieved by surrounding culture" and "that achieved by scientific and technological development", they're all far too tangled up in each other for that too be possible.

[There's even a book about physics and philosophy called 'The Emperor's New Mind'. You can't take the stories out of people.]

Either dull or revolutionary, no middle ground...

I decided to have a go at some proper 'research blogging' today; taking an article and turning it, figures and all, from highly scientific language into understandable English. But I got as far as looking at the current issue of Nature, when I saw this quote, in a short piece down the side (about whether scientists are dull or not):

"Because, it seems to me, most working scientists have either long since accepted that they are not of the ‘revolutionary’ type exemplified by greats such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, or never strived to be."

I'm sorry, striving to be revolutionary? Darwin? The conservative family man who always vaguely reminds me of Dickens? Although if 'revolutionary' means 'a bit of a bastard' then Newton certainly fits the bill. Their ideas were revolutionary, true, at least in the world of science, but the author here seems to be using revolutionary as an antonym for dull, which in my mind does both words an injustice.

The rest of the piece also seems to suggest that there are two types of scientist: the 'revolutionary' who is vibrant, exciting and unhindered by paperwork, and the 'dull' who just wants to get on with a normal life, seeing research as work rather than vocation. The tone veers wildly between apologetic, defensive, and trying to allot blame. Paperwork and bureaucracy are mainly blamed for the dullness, because apparently none neither of them existed in sixteenth century Cambridge, or Second World War Germany. Apparently geniuses (because the revolutionaries are now geniuses, which should come as news to the Les Mis boys on the barricade) must have "the requisite levels of selfishness and creativity" which fits Newton, certainly, and James Watson as well, but falls short of being fair to Einstein and Darwin. They are also described as "the ‘clever crazy’ type that might belong in an institution" which kind of fits Einstein slightly (or at least fits his hair), Newton maybe, but again, does nothing for Darwin or Watson.

My problem here is that the author is dealing with a stereotype. Why aren't scientists all crazy and enthusiastic geniuses? Because they never were! Some were, true, but that doesn't mean everyone else was dull by comparison. Science is not limited to research drudgery working tirelessly to support and uphold the occasional flash of brilliance; rather the whole process is brilliant, occasionally flashing up bright in the public perception when it produces a particularly intelligent person (Einstein etc), or a particularly good idea (vaccination, antibiotics, etc). It is these flashes which get remembered, and worked into stories, and pointed out years later as stark events that existed on their own.

I resent the fact that I am meant to believe my work is dull but necessary just because I'm never going to reach the dizzy heights of selective fame. I also resent that I am told I should be dull but necessary. Maybe I should dye the front of my hair orange again...

You can read the full article here if your library or institution will let you in. Otherwise, here is a quick summary:

• There used to be great scientists, revolutionaries, geniuses
• Nowadays all is dull and boring
• Well obviously, because there's lots of paperwork and bureaucracy
• And you need some dull people, to support the ones who make the big discoveries
• Acutally it's better to be dull
  
• The revolutionaries are a bit odd anyway.

Underlying subtext: No I am not envious or unfulfilled, not at all, of course not, why should I be?

Scanner Woes

How many times have I heard it on deviantart.com? The continual cry of "Oh noes! The scanner ate my picture!" And now I'm making the same complaints about mine.

Actually, my plate pictures haven't been too bad. Although a couple of them are somewhat ... darker and fuzzier than they could be. As there are no labels for anyone to pinch my results with, I think I am justified on posting a few on here:

That one's alright. A bit dark though. At least the contrast can be seen. In case anyone was wondering, what you are seeing is bacteria streaked across the plate and left to grow (marked by the black line across the plate) and the another bacteria grown on top of it, which has subsequently been killed.

But as this may turn into a paper (oh please! *crosses fingers and hopes*) I can't be any more specific.



This one (on the right) hasn't really come out at all. meh. There's not much I can do except tell people what they should be seeing and hope it all works out alright. So what you should be seeing is a patch of dead overlay (the light bit) that follows the line of the mould (crosshatched black pen), but is not actually present under most of the mould.


I have a dissertation to write up based on these! *panic*

On the plus side, my scanner seems to have also created some results of its own. Take a look at this bioassay:

See the white lines around the circles on the first two rows? They were not at all obvious in the photo. Although when I squint at the photo now I can kind of see them.

Yes, that is my handwriting at the bottom of the photo. Which was taken by yours truly in the (very old) lightbox, narrowly avoiding getting an accidental blast of UV light as well (UV light is used to take pictures of gels, and nobody bothers to switch the switch back to 'white light' when they've finished; noticed just in time)

I am very proud of all my results :) Which has probably confirmed for a Certain Special Someone that they are indeed going out with a very nerdy little thing.

=D

Antibiotic resistance

So, in the interest of actually doing something about the John Rose Essay (as I haven't done anything yet). I thought I'd take a quick look to try and determine what information was generally out there about antibiotics. First stop wikipedia:

• 1 Causes and risk factors
• 2 Mechanisms
• 3 Resistant pathogens
  • 3.1 Pseudomonas
• 4 Role of animals
• 5 Alternatives
  • 5.1 Prevention
  • 5.2 Phage therapy
• 6 Development of new drugs
• 7 Applications

It's not bad. They spend a lot less time on the mechanisms than I'd like too, and far more time listing the main Bad Guys of the resistance world. There's also a lot more they could put under 'applications', but I can't write too much about that because that's what I'm researching at the moment :)

Next stop, the website of the department of health. They are currently running a new 'awareness campaign' (who knew that?) to try and discourage people from using antibiotics when they don't need to, i.e for colds and things. They had a previous campaign featuring a little talking drug which unsurprisingly seems to have petered out. You can download the leaflet here, but I wouldn't get too excited. It very closely resembles old WW2 posters, the kind telling you to eat more carrots or put up blackout curtains.

The current campaign seems to involve brightly coloured posters with simple messages on the front such as "Unfortunately, no amount of antibiotics will get rid of your cold". Less...snappy than a little talking drug shouting 'don't wear me out!' but a lot more adult somehow.

The Health Protection Agency's website I am a lot less impressed with. It's very...orange. And doesn't actually have very much written about what is quite an important topic. It does have a 'recent updates' thingy but this is pretty much the entirety of what it says about antibiotic resistance:

"Antimicrobial resistance describes the ability of a micro-organism to resist the action of antimicrobial drugs. This is important as it can make the treatment of infections more difficult and increase hospital costs. Undertaking laboratory testing of organisms causing infections can play a role in deciding the most effective treatment options."

wtf is with that last sentence?

So, having taken a brief look at the competition (I have to go pour 72 plates now!) I think I'll concentrate mainly on mechanisms with my essay. How antibiotic resistance arises, with probably a brief once-over of why somewhere near the conclusion.

hehe I have an Epic experiment planned. Hence the 72 plates.

Random thoughts

When I was young I used to keep a diary. Or a journal, whatever. I used to write in it most nights, usually about twice a week. I think I kept it up for a while, with some sort of wistful idea that spacemen, or future generations of humans, would some day find it and use it for scientific purposes, and in doing so make my life slightly more useful.

And in the manner of most people who write journals when they're younger I took a look at them over the holiday last winter and collapsed into a fit of laughter and the rather embarrassing hope that aliens or future generations wouldn't find it, or if they did would decently burnt it very quickly. I read through, fascinated at the fact that I'd spent so many evenings carefully and methodically writing down the exact same thoughts night after night.

Each day went something like this:

• Went to school today
• Came back and did some work
• I'm not working hard enough!
• I need good results!
• I don't really know if anyone likes me
• An amazing new book/film/lord-of-the-rings-associated-product just came out!
• I have so many story ideas in my head and no time to write them all...
  

Most of it was the fairly standard teenage mindset preoccupied with death, sex and the occasional foray into religion. At one point I even made up my own religion because I wanted to Believe in something but didn't like any of the mainstream ones. And inordinate amount of time was spent worrying about biology IGCSE's and (yes I did keep it up that long) A-levels.

All fairly standard, all fairly normal. Only one thing, in fact, was scary.

These are still the same sort of thoughts I'm thinking now.

Although with slightly less emphasis on Lord of the Rings.

It's scary and it's spooky just how little my internal monologue seems to have changed. There's less of the death and sex, true, and slightly more of the I'm-not-working-hard-enough but overall my deep internal monologue seems to have survived the experience of growing-up relatively unscathed. Deep down, I am the same sad nerdy little person I always was :(

On the plus side though I am working with tiny little plates! Petri-dishes five centimeters across. They look very small especially next to the giant petri-dishes which are 14 centimeters diameter and therefore awesome.

Lab Rat Writing

Having missed a couple of the other deadlines for Science Writing Prizes, I am determined to manage to get something to submit for the John Rose Prize which (in it's own words) gives an award for:

"The best explanation of a scientific principle of general interest"

Anyone have any ideas about what I should write about? At the moment, I'm leaning towards antibiotic resistance because a) it's in my course and b) it's useful.

Or maybe I could write about Biorefineries, and just reuse bits of my essay? Phage therapy? Although that isn't exactly general interest at the moment unfortunately.

At the very least, writing this in my blog should give me enough commitment too it to actually write the damn thing instead of just waving at the deadline as it passes.