Our intrepid reporters Kathleen and Edyta also managed to track down one of our Faculty Members at the EMBO Meeting in Barcelona. Fred Wittinghofer is head of the Department of Structural Biology at the Max Planck Institute in Dortmund. For 25 years he has worked on GTP-binding proteins. Here he talks about ciliary transport and…
Are 20-30% of children really not the biological offspring of their legal fathers? In this final installment, Etienne Joly talks about his interest in speciation and inbreeding, and how this led him to discover the truth behind the myth of misattributed paternity. I basically closed my door and started downloading loads and loads and loads…
Etienne Joly talks about his career, from being a postdoc at Scripps, through to working at the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, to landing a position at INSERM in Toulouse. He discusses the problems he had getting tenure in Britain, how difficult it is to get money to do the research you want, and just what…
Etienne Joly is one of our Faculty Members, based in Toulouse, France. He created a stir with his evaluation of a paper published back in 2005, debunking the urban myth of high rates of misattributed paternity. Here’s Etienne, talking to me over Skype, about the paper and how he came to find it. I’m always…
Renato Dulbecco (of DMEM fame) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975, for demonstrating that DNA from oncoviruses can incorporate into normal cells, causing some forms of cancer. He shared the Prize with two former students, Howard Temin and David Baltimore, who were recognized for their work on the enzyme that…
The scientific utility of a project is not always positively correlated with political or social will; Pavlovsk is nothing new. Here’s the chemist and author Carl Djerassi talking about his work on Pygmy Chimps in Zaire: This work on Pygmy Chimps didn
Over on the main site, we have an Immunology Top 7. To accompany this, here’s the immunologist Avrion Mitchison talking about the ‘World Holiday Organization’, and ‘the best scientists I’ve ever known’. Avrion Mitchison, the British zoologist, is currently Professor Emeritus at University College London and is best known for his work demonstrating the role…
Here too are the dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses, tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters who lay down their lives for a song. Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear the murmuring, the revolt of immense estates.
I always have been against big science. I think it’s mostly a waste of money and all the history of science shows us that it never leads to the attempted goal. Jan Klein, the Czech-American immunologist, co-founded the modern science of immunogenetics. He is the author or co-author of over 560 scientific publications and of…
From Web of Stories, Sir Aaron Klug (Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1982) talks about the background to Cambridge Antibody Technology and describes how the first humanized antibodies were made: More information, and a transcript, are available from Web of Stories. (Web of Stories, along with F1000 and The Scientist, is part of the Science Navigation…
