In Actual Fact

Okay, that’s the first project of the day finished (actually I started at 11 last night - there are some people who work better under presure and others who are just plain lazy). I’d been making a powerpoint presentation using some of the very old work I did for my Ph.D. It was meant to be for people who don’t know the first thing about science and I figured that there were two ways I could play it - 1. “This work is an important step towards finding a cure for cancer within our lifetime” or 2. “I inject fly genes into frog embryos and they develop into tadpoles with two heads, and what’s really cool is that I can make one or both of the heads glow in the dark too”. Obviously I went with the second option - it fits to the worst nightmares of every anti-animal experiment protester and only at the end do I point out that these genes are present in almost all larger organisms - frogs, flies, fish, mice…… humans and that normally they’re used once when the embryo is very young, then turned off forever. However, in some kinds of cancer cells they get turned on again. If scientists can work out how to turn the genes on or off at will in very young fly, frog or mouse embryos and that the control mechanisms work in a very similar way in all these organisms, maybe we can turn the genes off in human cancer cells too. For 99% of the people I explain it to, the penny then drops that this very basic research of understanding how organisms work, which might seem unimportant, has led to medical trials which hopefully will really be able to help people - and I also get a platform to talk about how important it is that science is explained properly. Of course there’s always someone who says “but the life of a tadpole is just as valuable as that of a human”, so I always take a large, blunt instrument with me, to beat them over the head.
German Word For Today: “Kaulquappe” - Tadpole
Song playing as this was published: Michelle Branch - “Paper Pieces”