The Biochemist Blog

July 28, 2017 Education & careers / Policy / Student-focused

Overcoming the so-called ‘male, pale and stale’ world of STEM

By Nabila Juhi, Urmston Grammar School

I was going to find a cure for cancer, seven-year-old me decided. From a young age I’ve always been interested in science. It was perhaps one subject where I felt I’d found my niche: it was logical, I was good at it and it provided me with answers to questions I’d yet to even consider. Coming from an immigrant family, with parents who didn’t continue onto higher education, I was encouraged to stick to it.

July 26, 2017 Science communication & public engagement

A novel use for CRISPR – use of narratives in public engagement

By James Brown, Education and Public Engagement Manager, Biochemical Society

To Hoover. To Google. To CRISPR. As Jennifer Doudna pointed out at the launch of her new book, A Crack in Creation, once your invention has become a verb, you know you’re onto something big. And CRISPR (or CRISPR-Cas9) is certainly big; it doesn’t seem like hyperbole to describe it as a ‘game-changer’ in molecular bioscience.

July 24, 2017 Research

Frontier forensics: the rise of environmental DNA analysis

By Alexander Evans, University of Leeds

The natural world is under threat from many anthropogenic sources, such as the spread of harmful invasive species and the decline of native populations due to habitat loss and climate change. Finding new technologies and methods to assess and tackle these increasingly global problems is crucial. However, in order to tackle big problems, sometimes you need small solutions. One such emerging tiny tool is the sequencing of environmental DNA (eDNA)!

July 21, 2017 Events

The View From Nowhere

By Helen Albert, Editor

The story of a brilliant biochemist ‘Prez’ and his discovery that the fictional weedkiller and endocrine disruptor ‘atraphosphate’ is dangerous to human health, as well as the subsequent professional and emotional fallout from this finding, is the focus of The View From Nowhere at the Park 90 theatre in Finsbury Park, London.

July 20, 2017 Research

The darker side to global warming?

By Sabrina Hossain, University of Birmingham

Global warming is undeniably one of the greatest issues of our day and age. From the ‘fake news’ nay-sayers to the cohort of scientists at the forefront of the battle; global warming is the hot topic on everyone’s lips. Now a majority of you reading may be concerned that this will be just another blog post on the mechanics of global warming accompanied with the obligatory all so familiar fearful statistics of the consequences.

July 13, 2017 Policy / Research

Will better toxicity testing sound death knell for animal experimentation?

By Wayne Carter, University of Nottingham

Well it won’t, completely, but it may go some way to reduce the number of animals used in drug development. Drugs need to undergo extensive safety and toxicity testing before being made available to the public on the shelves of a pharmacy.

July 11, 2017 Research / Student-focused

A day in the life of a cardiovascular biology PhD student

By Tom Keeley, King’s College London, UK

I’ve spent the last three years looking for a better way to recreate and observe cell responses in the laboratory. This has been the focus for my PhD, ‘Defining an in vitro model of normoxia and its implications for nitric oxide signalling’, which I’ve been researching in the Vascular Biology Lab in the British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence at King’s College London.