From an obituary of Paul Boyer.

“Paul Boyer was approaching the finish line of his career when he risked everything with a jaw-dropping proposal. He addressed one of the most important, as-then-unanswered questions in biochemistry”

“We were attending a UCLA seminar in 1972 when I noticed that he wasn’t paying attention to the speaker. Afterwards, Paul approached us in a very excited state. This was surprising because he was known for his calm demeanour. He confessed that he had spent the hour thinking about old unexplained data. He asked: “What would you say if I told you that it doesn’t take energy to make ATP at the catalytic site of ATP synthase,” (as was universally held at the time) “but rather that it takes energy to get ATP off the catalytic site?” This was a eureka moment.

As is often the case with transformational ideas, early reactions were negative. When the Journal of Biological Chemistry rejected our manuscript containing data supporting this concept, Boyer told me without animosity that he could see why they would do that — “It was a very striking claim.”

Well, I have never had an idea to compare with this. But sitting through talks that do not light my fire, I have always found conducive to thinking creatively about something else. Its similar to the way that some writers practice their craft better in a coffee shop than in a silent office. Intellectual white noise.

Remember: the best ideas are not in the literature. If they were…..

Those who rent seek on biomedical knowledge wish to seek to define the norms of what is foundational. What is foundational for the practice of medicine should be contested more. Anatomy for surgeons is an easy case to make. But for most non-surgeons, the case for much anatomy is far from simple.

In any historical account of the ascent of modern medicine, Versalius looms large. But this Nature article (Sex, religion and a towering treatise on anatomy) intrigues me for a not so obvious reason: the counterpoint between how such knowledge was represented and understood.

Even Vesalius realized that his images could be confusing, and devised an ingenious method to explain them. A letter or number was printed onto the image of each body part, with a separate key. Unfortunately, the characters were often too small to pick out against the swirling background….

Faced by such challenges, many medics might have given up on the images. Indeed, when we reconstructed what early modern readers and scholars found fascinating about the Fabrica, it was evidently the text. The clear majority of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers who annotated the book focused on that and left no traces of having engaged with the illustrations. Sixteenth-century reviews of the Fabrica confirm this impression, because they tended to discuss only the text.

This is no surprise. The Fabrica’s scholarly readership was trained in the traditions of Renaissance humanism, which put a strong emphasis on textual analysis. Even if they found it difficult to interpret visual information, medical practitioners were expert at making sense of long Latin texts.

June, July are the busiest time of year for. It is when I update all my teaching material, and I always underestimate how long it will take me. Here is a guide to some of it. But still I need to catch up with some more, as the new students have already started.

 

Navigating the online resources from jonathan rees on Vimeo.

Points on a distribution, make for fun numbers.

Fifty years ago Japan had just 327 centenarians; in 2017 it had 67,824, and the largest per capita ratio of them in the world.

Link

As the FT reported Monday, the Middle Eastern kingdom expelled the Canadian ambassador, reacting against Ottawa’s support for jailed human rights activists.

Saudi Arabia also said on Monday that it would suspend all its educational exchange programmes with Canada. An official told state television there are more than 12,000 students and their families currently in Canada. They will be transferred to universities and schools in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, he said.

In English-speaking countries, higher education sectors have become highly reliant on flows of international students. China, which provides over 60,000 new students to the UK each year, is the most commonly cited example. The Saudi Arabian episode serves as a reminder that the trend extends further afield.

Link

I also know of examples where (despotic) foreign regimes, seek to use their collective bargaining to influence how a particular university behaves. Money doesn’t talk — it swears.

A day in court for Kit Kat. The European Court of Justice will deliver a verdict on Nestlé’s long-running attempt to trademark the chocolate bar’s shape—”four trapezoidal bars aligned on a rectangular base.” Competitors like Mondelez, Cadbury, and Milka cried foul at Nestlé’s move.

Link

Which is not as obscene as the attempt to patent the space within a shape of a defined size.

The title above and quotes below are from this article by Lincoln Allison. To create teaching machines, you need to make teaching so bad that even the machines can do it. We are almost there.

The most particular annoyance for me was the doubling of seminar size from nine to 18 – allegedly to free up time for research. As if anyone is going to develop the capacity for original thought because they have two or three more hours available in the week! To some of my colleagues, this was merely a technical change, but to me it was the abolition of the real seminar, the thing we should have been most proud of in the English university system.

….

It was part of a general deprioritising of teaching. I remember a colleague looking at her extremely poor ratings on student “feedback” and remarking gaily: “I’m really not very good at this, am I?” She had just had a book published that was extremely well received, and she couldn’t care less that she was failing in her core duties to communicate her ideas within an academic community. Her remark stiffened my resolve to leave – especially once students picked up the vibe about the level of staff interest in teaching and became less challenging and more instrumental.

Much of what I have seen and heard of UK universities in the 14 years since I retired seems to relate to what I would consider proper university teaching about as much as “value” tinned food relates to fresh food. And I think that just as there are people who have never tasted fresh food, there are people who have not experienced real lectures and seminars.

This looks even more alarming if you factor in humidity. Human beings can tolerate heat with sweat, which evaporates and cools the skin. That is why a dry 50°C can feel less stifling than a muggy 30°C. If the wet-bulb temperature (equivalent to that recorded by a thermometer wrapped in a moist towel) exceeds 35°C, even a fit, healthy youngster lounging naked in the shade next to a fan could die in six hours.

At present, wet-bulb temperatures seldom exceed 31°C.

Link

The first paper I ever published was on sweating. It was my entry as a medical student into dermatology, and the product of meeting Sam Shuster (the rest, as they say, is history). Sweat glands don’t get a lot of attention, but the ~3 million mini-kidneys are full of fascinating biology. Did you know you can shift more fluid through your sweat glands that you can pass urine (quite a thought, considering how many pints of beer some people can manage — and no, I do not have a reference for this factoid so readers beware……).

Anyway I think I get the idea of the wet-bulb temperature, but the above (from the Economist) should give cause for thought. Isn’t skin biology and the environment so endlessly fascinating?

Talking Politics: Strike

This is one of the best accounts of what has happened to Higher Ed in the UK. The host is David Runciman, and the guest is Stephen Toope, VC of Cambridge. Helen Thompson and Chris Brooke, feature.

It is about much more than the strike, and I have not heard any better account of the recent politics of Higher Ed in the UK. To me at least, whatever the forces lined up against them, the universities have been caught sleeping and are going to be punished for their fall from grace. Locally, I do not think the message has got through.

The link for the series of podcasts is here.

Leading the pack was the University of Sydney, which increased its overseas enrolments from about 15,530 in 2014 to 30,943 in 2017.

“Secret report reveals snowballing international student numbers” THE.

This will end not in tears but in devaluation. The same is true over here too, and you can understand why the ‘multiversity’ is going to take the ‘university’ down with it. See: UK universities’ research funding deficit soars to £3.9 billion.

* JBS Haldane