Christopher White: August 2008 Archives

I'm in the process of updating some case studies that the Institute has been asked to do for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills on the (usually unintended) benefits of pure research, in this case cancer treatments and DNA.

One of the best thinsg about doing this is being able to find out a bit about some quite impressive research. If you'll forgive the cliche, here one really does learn something new every day...

One instance is this work by Oxford's Jonathan Bath and Andrew Turberfield on DNA Nanomachines (it's a year old, but I'd not seen it before):

"We are learning to build synthetic molecular machinery from DNA. This research is inspired by biological systems in which individual molecules act, singly and in concert, as specialized machines: our ambition is to create new technologies to perform tasks that are currently beyond our reach. DNA nanomachines are made by self-assembly, using techniques that rely on the sequence-specific interactions that bind complementary oligonucleotides together in a double helix. They can be activated by interactions with specifi c signalling molecules or by changes in their environment. Devices that change state in response to an external trigger might be used for molecular sensing, intelligent
drug delivery or programmable chemical synthesis. Biological molecular motors that carry cargoes within cells have inspired the construction of rudimentary DNA walkers that run along sef-assembled tracks. It has even proved possible to create DNA motors that move autonomously, obtaining energy by catalysing the reaction of DNA or RNA fuels."

If that's not a clear case for getting more government money for reseach, I don't know what is. (Though I suspect Prince Charles may something to say about it, having spoken out against  both nanotechnology and genetic tinkering.)

Comedian Helen Keen

On Friday I visited Edinburgh to see a space-themed comedy gig at the Fringe: It is rocket science!, by Helen Keen, a former winner of Channel 4's New Comedy Writing Initiative Award. It'll feature on the back page of next month's Interactions, so I don't want to give too much away.

It tracks the development of spaceflight, and the characters involved, from German rockets to the near future, using costumes and shadow puppets to help explain some of the science involved -- all accurate, which you'd expect from a show given an Institute outreach grant and ably assisted by a real-life rocket-scientist, Chris Welch of Kingston University.

One thing that Helen said that I particularly picked up on was that she'd first become interested in astronomy, as a child, simply by looking at the sky, and added that growing up in East Yorkshire, with the nearest town being Hull, in the days before the internet, there was very little else to do. Probably thousands of children became interested in space in exactly the same way: I certainly did, growing up in similarly dull Durham.

But does this happen anymore? Just as Pro Evo Soccer on the Playstation means fewer kids actually play football, are children going to be too busy using MySpace to ever look upwards? Or, to put it another way: How can we utilise the internet as a substitute? There are a few interesting sites to get the public involved in real astronomy -- remote-control telescope "Slooh" and the recently completed Galaxy Zoo spring to mind -- but none aimed specifically at young people.