Edinburgh Culture and Cell Culture

This has been an exciting month, I feel like I've finally found my feet in Scotland and in Roslin. I wrote a small piece for the Institute's newsletter - the Roslin Reporter - and a guest post on the most amazing food blog on the internet (okay, I'm a little biased since it belongs to my girlfriend); still, if you fancy a great veggie chilli recipe or a range of other delicious veggie meals then find it here (I recommend the ginger brownies or her coronation tofu).
I I've done a hell of a lot in the past month including attending a pro-choice rally and several other great events by the Feminist Society; learning to make sushi thanks to the Hearty Squirrel food coop and their raw food workshop; seeing Dolly in the National Museum of Scotland (possibly the best museum I've ever been to!); visiting a gorgeous (and utterly freezing) Edinburgh beach; finally seeing The Big Lebowski (and followed it up with a white Russian at Lebowski's Bar); and speaking to about 40 potential PhD students for the first time without peeing myself (Hi, if you found me through that event!).
In other news, I turned 22. My mum and sister visited and took me and the previously mentioned girlfriend to the finest vegetarian restaurant in the city, David Bann. Go there. Eat. Read the rest of the post later, go eat now! In other birthday news, another student in our lab made an awesome cake (which looks rather like a virus particle with Maltesers for entry receptors) for me:

Because cake.

Moving out of my life and into the lab, I finally got to work on cell culture which is one of my favourite things in the world - seeing cells down a microscope as they float in and out of view helps me grasp how very big, and very small, we all are. To explain what this involves I need to make it clear that the cells in our body are pretty puny, take them away from their comfy little homes inside our skulls or lining our blood vessels and they will usually shrivel up and die. Scientists spent many years failing to get cells growing until the cancerous cells from the cervix of a Black American woman named Henrietta Lacks just kept on growing (that's the big problem with cancer, it just doesn't stop growing). I strongly recommend everyone read the story of "HeLa cells" in this book (also available at your local, tax-paying book shop), it's simply written and manages to explore the science as well as the social context (highlighting the appalling lack of respect doctors had for their patients 60 years ago, particularly if those patients weren't White).
But back to the point, we often use irregular cells like these - grown on the side of a flask containing a solution with all the nutrients the cells need - to test how different conditions (a lack of food, for example) will affect them, from their growth to the signals they give out to how they look. This is very useful for studying viruses as they need to control their host cells in dozens - if not hundreds - of different ways. So by infecting cells with with virus, we can explore how the virus fights or escapes the cellular defence mechanisms, how it manages to control the cell's machinery to copy itself, how it gets in and out of cells, where it goes when it's inside and all manner of other questions.
Still it's important to remember this is just a model, as one of my undergraduate lecturers once said "We are not, in reality, cancerous cells stuck to a plastic dish". Wise words indeed.

For the past two years I've grown a stupid looking 'tache each November to raise money for Movember and as anyone who has seen me in the past month will have guessed, I am cultivating another one this year. However, I recently learnt that Movember promote screening practices that may do more harm than good so I've decided to raise money for another charity instead. I am all in favour of more money going towards research and since the central point of Movember is combating cancer, I decided this years charity should be Cancer Research UK.
I think it's worth covering what Movember are doing in a little more detail (though if you want a pro's voice on the matter, this link will help). They are advising men to get excessive screening for prostate cancer as well as several other conditions. This may not seem immediately dangerous but that's because we tend to think of screening as an entirely harmless exercise, in truth screening can have a range of side-effects resulting exposure to toxic chemicals or radiation (for example, in tests that use X-rays). Beyond that kind of indirect harm, there is the danger of false positives - screening tests aren't perfect, they may miss a problem (false negative) or they may suggest a problem where there is none (false positive); in the latter situation, the result can be a patient needlessly going through procedures that severely reduce their quality of life (removal of the prostate can make sex, and trips to the toilet, considerably more difficult).
This isn't to suggest no-one should get screening for fear of a false positive, there is a point at which the benefits will outweigh the harms and that should be decided between patients, their doctors and the evidence.
To their credit, Movember changed some of the advice on their UK site after the issue was pointed out to them however they kept many of the questionable points so if you'd like to make a donation in honour of my face-caterpillar, go here; and for the NHS advice on prostate cancer screening, go here.
Finally, it should be added that Movember has done a lot of good, using a quirky meme to raise millions and highlighting issues that can be easily overlooked because people think prostates are icky. In the words of Doctor Ben Goldacre (and for the sake of a clumsy segway) "Movember is a great, great thing, but I wish they'd stop promoting harmful screening". 

A moustache slightly hidden by sushi

Now go buy Ben's book, Bad Pharma, it's the most important book you'll read this year. He manages to explain the scandalous situation in the pharmaceutical industry with enough detail to give understanding, but keeping things simple enough for people who struggle with stats and controlled experiments (i.e. everyone) to understand. Buy it for your friends this Christmas. Buy a copy and send it to your MP. You can find it on Amazon, and at all good, tax-paying book shops.

That's all I can fit into this post, if it had been a quieter month, I'd talk about the fantastic Science Grrl campaign which raises the profile of women in science where naive bureaucrats/sexist salespeople fail (Oh how they fail). I would have also talked about how whales can get flu, which I only learnt this month and think is very bizarre!