“Always do what scares you” has been my mantra for most of my adult life, although to be honest I do have some exemption clauses relating to not wanting to break bones, die, or go anywhere near a snake. Intellectually though, it’s a decent rule to live by, as getting stuck in a comfortable rut […]

The Personal Development Record, or PDR, is a document guaranteed to induce extreme scepticism in anyone doing bench science. Whilst enumeration of one’s expected achievements over the next year is realistic in some jobs, it is distinctly daft when it comes to doing experiments. I have a vision of Max Perutz filling out a PDR […]

Here, just as the summer conference season begins once again, is my infallible guide to Scientific Conference Etiquette. 1. First, pick a good conference. Try not to be too swayed by where it is, although obviously, all other things being equal, if you have a choice of, say, Acapulco or a hotel at Heathrow Terminal […]

We are churning out far too many PhDs in the life sciences: a recent article by Harold Varmus and colleagues entitled “Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws” describes a situation that has been all to obvious for a number of years to those a little lower down the pecking order. There aren’t enough […]

It’s a truism that blue skies research, pursuing questions merely because they’re interesting, often leads to major advances in medical knowledge; many of the stories in Blue Skies and Bench Space attest to this, and they’re just a small sample of the accrued scientific wisdom on the subject. There’s an obvious reason for the strong […]

During my career as a practising scientist, I was always pretty rubbish at collaborating with other labs. Despite knowing that existing in a scientific vacuum was highly unsatisfactory, a mixture of insecurity, poverty of ideas and a pronounced lack of networking instincts led to my ploughing a mostly lonely furrow until, unsurprisingly, the furrow vanished […]