This is the title of an e-mail by Stefan Grimm sent on 21 October 2014 – less than 19 minutes before midnight.
The full email is published by David Colquhoun’s Improbable Science “as a public service”:
Category: Academic
Stefan Grimm, RIP
Moonlighting proteins. “The idea of one gene—one protein—one function has become too simple because increasing numbers of proteins are found to have two or more different functions.” [Constance J. Jeffery, 1999, Trends in Biochemical Sciences]
A Physicist’s dream
A moment to share, as an outsider observer to a warm celebration of a Polish contributor to the exact sciences with a working base shared between Mexico City and Warsaw during the past 50 years:
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
I first heard about the “zombie fungus” from Robin Maytum when we were working together at Queen Mary. The story captivated my imagination: The fungus infects an ant, eats up most of its interiors, leaving intact a few key neurons and muscles. Once its feast is done, the fungus can still control the ant’s locomotion, which then moves on to a leaf from where the fungus can best spread out its spores.
If you are the ant, you are unlikely to hold Ophiocordyceps unilateralis high in your esteem, even more to befriend it. Robin was the first cell within the infected ant I encountered. Other tissues were quite unprepared for the infection and so our university (the ant) was overtaken by those fungus-like managers. I have not stopped telling that story ever since.
A few reminders of what Restruction is all about.
Restruction is “dESTRUCTION by means of a Restructuring exercise”.
Thoughts on undeperformance at Warwickshire College and/or Warwick University
I read yesterday that Warwick’s “Medical School and School of Life Sciences have been warned that the departments are under-performing financially” and that “bosses at the campus, in Gibbet Hill, Coventry, say if they have to cut staff they aim to find volunteers to leave their jobs in return for redundancy payments“. I then saw an earlier report in BBC suggesting that the situation was such at Warwickshire College. Were both institutions issuing job threats to instill uncertainty?
What caught my attention was the terminology used: bosses at the campus. I could think of other terms, more appropriate for those in positions of responsibility in a bank, a prison or a university…
Three notable conversations
Internet is changing some aspects of the world we live in. Faster and easier verbal communication between individuals with more dialogues appearing intentionally in the public domain. In separate conversations, I engaged today with Richard Ashcroft, Professor of Bioethics in the Department of Law at Queen Mary University of London and with Anne Marie Cunningham, General Practicioner and Clinical Lecturer in Cardiff University, Wales, UK, neither of whom have I met in person. My “good friend and colleague” also blogged over the use of words in misuse of power, in reply to last night’s tweet from Mexico City! The conversations follow below and can be independently accessed via our respective twitter accounts; I have assumed twitter users don’t mind the reproduction.
John F. Allen, Professor of Biochemisty, was dismissed by Simon Gaskell, Principal of QMUL
Reposting published items on John’s dismissal written by others.
“Now they have got around to sacking John as well, on what has all the appearance of being a trumped-up charge (failing to obey an order from the Head of School)… If you appoint independent thinkers (as surely any university worthy of the name must do), you should not be surprised when they think independently.”
The teaching of cell biology in a School of Biological and Chemical Sciences – Part II
Summary – here I continue a previous comment on the same subject with a new twist to the story. Introducing 400 students to a major subject in biology during a full term is a significant task, especially if their education is to be at a higher level. It took me three years of guided preparation before I was asked to teach the full Cell Biology module single-handedly at Queen Mary University of London. I was then sacked because I opposed dubious management practice so someone else (sadly with fewer qualifications) was recruited and asked to perform this teaching instead. The student body protested in their evaluation forms and the newly recruited lecturer didn’t get her contract renewed. Here I summarise what followed her departure.
fanismissirlis 