Blog fail, but life successes

While I doubt there are many regular readers of this blog (not least because there isn't a regular output of posts!) I thought I'd make an update here, to explain the sparsity of content and continue the general narrative.

Essentially, I've not written nearly as often or as much here as I might wish. There are a variety of reasons for this, but it basically comes down to the twin demons of being too busy and falling out of the habit.

It's hard for me to feel too bad about it, because it has indeed been a pretty eventful year or two for me. I finished my PhD and went to a couple of very exciting international conferences. I also got out my first crop of PhD papers*, which were slightly longer in the making than I might have wished, and have been working on a number of other papers since with various labmates.

I've also still been doing the odd bit of writing for BioNews every now and then, and responding to lab and scientific questions, problems and discussions on Reddit (which I think makes for a great discussion platform for scientists, given its large user base and easy interface). This often scratches the itch that blogging does but in a more schedule-friendly (and less inspiration-necessary) manner, so I can see why it might be syphoning off some what's left of my writing enthusiasm after working on whatever the current paper is.

But life is more than work, and I have a number of life events this year that have kept the rest of my free time pretty well booked up. In addition to some of the bigger, more time-consuming life events that exist (including the biggest!) I'm also very happy to report that I've accepted an invitation to go Boston for a post-doc, where I'll be exploring TCR sequences in the context of cancer rather then infection. While I am hugely excited for all of these developments, they take time and effort to happen, and so other pursuits (e.g. blogging) can suffer.

Hopefully, once I've got the next big paper finished and have successfully made it to the other side of the pond, I can start getting the ball rolling here again. Little and often is the plan; I've got a few particular posts in mind, but I think things like a TCRseq publication alert roundup might be a nice place to start. So if you do take something from these posts (and I'm very surprised but happy to find that there are people that claim to!) take heart, as more is definitely on the cards.


*An application of the TCRseq tech we'd worked on during my thesis characterising HIV+ patient repertoires and a review of the history DNA sequencing methods.

Delays in communication

I know I know, I have been entirely slovenly with my upkeep of this blog. At first it was justified - I undertook my PhD upgrade at the end of May, before a wealth of conferences, colloquia and symposia in June.

I've also taken on a great role as a volunteer writer for BioNews, a London based charity involved in disseminating accurate and balanced genetics/stem cell/IVF related news (my stories here), which has been soaking up a lot of the writing brain cells that ordinarily might be aimed here.

However, excuses are excuses, and I promise to try harder. My BioNews commitment should be slightly less regular, and for a change I don't have any upcoming posters or presentations to prepare, so I can get back on the blog-horse! Little and often is my goal - although I do have a couple of long posts in the works with which I hope to redeem myself - watch this space!

T-Cell Receptors, Part Zero: The introduction (to the introduction)

I sat down this weekend with the idea to write a short blog piece about cells other than T-cells that seem to express T-cell receptors (TCRs), as it's a bit of a background-reading interest for me, and other people might find it interesting too. I was genuinely aiming at maybe five or six paragraphs, quickly skimming over my favourite examples.

As I went along I realised that, despite having made frequent reference to them, I've never explained exactly what a TCR is in this blog. While I expect anyone finding their way here probably either has pretty good background immunology knowledge, or the means to find out on their own, it is something I've been meaning to get around to.

So I started drafting a little introduction to TCRs themselves, which reminded me that I also meant to write a little history of TCR discovery sooner or later, as it's sometimes nice to learn how it is we came to know the stuff that modern immunology now takes as a given.

As it stands now I haven't even finished the original topic I started out on, and the document's getting a bit unwieldy, so I'm going to break it up into (hopefully) more digestable chunks and release them one a day over the course of the next week until either they run out or my fingers fall off...

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OK, so here are the finished articles, in order.

Part 1: The Immtroduction

Part 2: A History Of TCR Discovery

Part 3: TCRs Where They Shouldn't Be

Part 4: More Odd TCR Transcripts

Part 5: A Receptor For All Cells?

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A little note for the following pages that probably applies to the rest of my blog as well; I'm writing these on the assumption that people reading them either have a little knowledge of the topics I'm talking about, or an intention of getting some.

I may drift into jargon (which makes all the 'science engagement' people cry tears of blood) but as I'm dealing with the actual technical science this is pretty much unavoidable. We have a lot of specific words to describe esoteric things because the devil is in the details, which science has a lot of. Plus I find this  movement to use 'non-scientific' language a bit paternalistic; the assumption that complicated words excludes everyone else is pretty insulting - people are clever things, and if they're interested they'll look things up. That said, if there is a word or concept that you don't think I've explained well and can't find out on your own, why not ask me in a comment or a tweet and I'll try an clarify.

As I go I try to include links to the original publications, some of which I'm afraid are behind pay-walls; unfortunately as I access a lot of this material at one academic institution or another I usually forget to note which, so it's a bit of a mixed bag. If there are any interested non-scientists reading this, and you find a paper you'd like to read that you can't access, the best thing to try is to email the authors, they're usually keen to share their work.

UCL blog posts

In case anyone is so interested, here's a curated list of links to the aricles I write for my university's Events blog, detailing some of the fun and interesting stuff it's possible to get up to in and around UCL. So be warned, they just might not have anything to do with science - and almost certainly won't have anything to do with immunology, but by and large they're on a diverse range of interesting topics.

Most recent at the top:

Genomics and Medicine, with Aroon Hingorani

Gravity and Continuum, with Christian Böhmer

Sex work today: myths, morals and health

Can’t take, won’t take: why patients do not take their medicines, with Nick Barber

The Politics of Coalition

It Came From The Stores at the Grant Museum

A book by any other name would still smell as sweet

Beyond Social Exclusion: Emerging Logics of Expulsion with Saskia Sassen

‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’ On the Big Screen

3D imaging: nanotechnology and the quest for better medical sensors

A Hands On History of Hands at the Grant Museum

‘Under the Caribbean’ On The Big Screen, Film Night at The Grant Museum

‘The Blob’ On The Big Screen, Film Night at The Grant Museum

The History of Collecting at the Petrie Museum

UCL 2011 Prize Lecture in Clinical Science with Roger Tsien

Goodbye Cheltenham

X-Men vs. Bionic Women

Biology Wednesday at the Fest

The Science of Cannabis

Chemistry and Architecture - Chemarchitecture?

Cheltenham, here we come