Amidst all this, my team members are generating large amounts of data and seek me out for ideas, advice, and my blessing – some days are so intense that I return home with an aching, over-exercised ...

This means that I don’t have much time to write this blog, in particular to update my list of books read in the preceding ...

It was for a concert of Handel’s Messiah and I’m pretty sure that I sang in it.  It was memorable as both the first concert I ...

This means that I don’t have much time to write this blog, in particular to update my list of books read in the preceding month, which is becoming every two months. So here is what I read (or, mostly, ...

I’m having a big clearout at home and have been discarding most of my collection of old concert programmes. These are a mix of concerts that I’ve sung in and concerts that I’ve attended, going back to ...

Just before Christmas I was asked to talk to our molecular biologists about multivariate analyses. I was reminded of this on Thursday afternoon, when I saw that I had to talk to them on Friday. “Ah, ...

I am sick of impact factors and so is science. The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s as a useful tool for ...

The preachers and the scientists got soaked just the same I cannot point to a moment when I knew I was called to serve God like this. The image is more like a watercolour, built up in layers, or a ...

Recent changes in US scientific research are very worrying. The ‘anti-science movement’ is being spearheaded by Robert F Kennedy – a leading figure of the modern anti-vaccine movement for many years.

My annual selection of favourites from the photographs I took in the past year is now available on Flickr. Do people still use Flickr? I have broken my usual rule of not including family photos ...

When I first moved to London in 1997, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Long hours in the lab would spill into the evening streets and underground tunnels of a city so large that you could ...

A combination of life’s distractions, ill discipline and slow reading mean that I have only managed to finish 11 books this year. I am almost embarrassed to admit to such a paltry tally. There are ...