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�eBiologistTHE SOCIETY OF BIOLOGY MAGAZINE ■ ISSN 0006-3347 ■ SOCIETYOFBIOLOGY.ORG VOL 60 NO 6 ■ DEC 2013/JAN 2014

Stunning images from our 2013 photo competition

LIFE IN FOCUS

STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY

DNA DISCOVERIES Moving beyond the

double helix

INTERVIEW

POLAR PIONEERJane Francis on

Antarctic exploration

EDUCATION

LABS ONLINECan practical science be

taught remotely?

Shortlisted for BEST BUSINESS

& PROFESSIONAL MAGAZINE

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Essential Cell Biology provides a readily accessibleintroduction to the central concepts of cell biology,and its lively, clear writing and exceptional illustrationsmake it the ideal textbook for a first course in bothcell and molecular biology. The text and figures areeasy-to-follow, accurate, clear, and engaging for theintroductory student. Molecular detail has been keptto a minimum in order to provide the reader with acohesive conceptual framework for the basic sciencethat underlies our current understanding of all ofbiology, including the biomedical sciences.

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�eBiologistTHE SOCIETY OF BIOLOGY MAGAZINE

Volume 60 No 6 December 2013/January 2014

Vol 60 No 6 / THE BIOLOGIST / 1

Contents

14

6 Biology WeekHighlights from seven days of life science events, debates and awards in October.

13 Opinion: Survival of the fittest

Bob Johnston asks why certain life science courses are disappearing.

14 Feeding lifeThe best images from this year’s photography competition.

18 David Goodsell looks at the structural biology of DNA.

Cover photo: Jack Settle

Regulars3 Nelson’s column10 Policy update12 Opinion40 Spotlight50 Reviews53 Biofeedback54 Museum piece55 Crossword56 Final word

News4 Society news42 Members46 Branches

� eBiologistTHE SOCIETY OF BIOLOGY MAGAZINE ■ ISSN 0006-3347 ■ SOCIETYOFBIOLOGY.ORG VOL 60 NO 6 ■ DEC 2013/JAN 2014

Stunning images from our 2013 photo competition

LIFE IN FOCUS

STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY

DNA DISCOVERIESMoving beyond the

double helix

INTERVIEW

POLAR PIONEERJane Francis on

Antarctic exploration

EDUCATION

LABS ONLINECan practical science be

taught remotely?

Shortlisted forBEST BUSINESS

& PROFESSIONALMAGAZINE

00_BIO_60_6_COVER.indd 1 28/11/2013 10:23

24 Keeping it realCan UK scientists deliver the lucrative technology expected of synthetic biology?

28 Breaking the ice Tom Ireland meets the British Antarctic Survey’s Jane Francis.

32 Seeing is believingKevin Cox and Roger Gunn explain how imaging technology is used to develop drugs.

36 A virtual viewRichard Campen on teaching practicals outside the lab.

IN THIS ISSUE

32

28

18

The twists and turns of DNA

A WINDOW ON THE LIFE SCIENCES

12-18 OctoberBIOLOGY WEEK 2013WHAT’S ON

8 / THE BIOLOGIST / Vol 60 No 5


www.societyofbiology.org/biologyweek

This October sees

the Society’s

second Biology

Week. Seven days of events

are designed to reach out to

people of all ages and to

raise the profile and

understanding of biology.

Look out for a rainforest

bus at a local school, catch

part of a 24 hour lecture or

contribute to our debate at

the Royal Institution on

genetics and criminal

responsibility. For those

who want to test their

knowledge, there will be a

quiz night at Charles Darwin

House on Sunday 13th

October, open to all.

Here’s our guide to the main

events around the country,

but please do see the

Society’s regional pages

for other events happening

near you.

For more information or to

attend an event please visit:

www.societyofbiology.org/

biologyweek

To get involved in Biology Week

2014 contact rebeccanesbit@

societyofbiology.org

Organised by our East Anglia

branch, this is a hands-on

biology open day for all

members of the family.

Saturday

12BigBiology Day, Cambridge

To mark UK Fungus Day

(organised by the British

Mycological Society) we are

encouraging people to go

outside and explore their natural

environment. Online resources are

available on our website including ID guides and links

to citizen science projects. There is a competition to

find the largest ‘fairy ring’.

Sunday

13UK Fungus Day

Science presenter Dr Mike Leahy (right) will be touring his

‘rainforest bus’ around UK schools, introducing students to

his animals and to global conservation issues. His first

appearance is on Monday at the

Royal Institution.

Not to be outdone,

entomologist

Professor Adam

Hart will be

attempting a

24 hour lecture about ants and

bees. Professor Hart will explore

the world of the Hymenoptera,

covering topics such as

communication in the colony, what we

can learn from ants and honey tasting,

with live demonstrations. The lecture will run from 18:00 on

Sunday to 18:00 on Monday. The event is open to school

groups and adults, and the Society will be contacting schools

via Skype throughout the night.

Monday

14Biology Week Roadshow

After the success of last year’s

debate on saving the panda, this

year our Biology Week panel debate

tackles genetics. Specifically, how

modern advances in the study of

genetics and behaviour might

influence decisions about criminal

responsibility. Held at The Royal

Institution, London.

Tuesday

15Biology Week debate

The Society of Biology Awards

Thursday

17A celebration for the winners and highly

commended entrants of the Society’s

photography, book and science communication

awards. Prizes for top students from our

accredited degree programmes and our

Animals in Research essay competition.

Held at the King’s Fund, London.

The 2012 winning photograph was ‘Farming

the sea’, right, by Wong Chi Keung.

Following the success of the Flying Ant

Survey, the Society this year launched its

second citizen science project: a survey of the

UK’s house spiders. The large, hairy spiders

commonly seen in UK homes belong to the

Tegenaria genus, and males move indoors at

this time of year to find a mate.

The Society has even developed an

app, ‘Spider in da house’, to help members

identify and record house spiders throughout

the autumn.

See www.societyofbiology.org/spider

House Spider App

An evening reception and

celebration of biology in

parliament, in partnership

with the Biotechnology and

Biological Sciences

Research Council.

Professor Tim Benton from

Global Food Security will be

speaking on the theme of

food waste.

Wednesday

16Parliamentary

reception

2013

Biology Week

in schools

A range of exercises and resources are available to

encourage schools to consider the environmental issues

associated with food production and food waste. We’re also

encouraging schools to show our animated video on the

theme, which you can see online (www.societyofbiology.

org/biologyweek). Schools may also like to organise their

own events or take part in our house spider survey. In some

areas Biology Week coincides with half term, in which case

you may wish to celebrate it the following week!

Friday

18 We have again received thousands of reports of

when and where flying ants have been spotted in

the UK this summer. Last year’s data, from 6,000

reports, helped entomologists study ants’ mating

habits and investigate what conditions might

trigger their annual nuptial flight.

There appeared to be a spike in sightings on the

1st August, but this year’s full data will be presented

by Professor Adam Hart during his 24 hour lecture

attempt (see Monday 14th above).

his animals and to global conservation issues. His first

appearance is on Monday at the

Royal Institution.

08_BIO_60_5_BIOWEEK.indd 8-9

11/11/2013 10:10

Following the success of the Flying Ant

Survey, the Society this year launched its

second citizen science project: a survey of the

House Spider App

modern advances in the study of

genetics and behaviour might

influence decisions about criminal

responsibility. Held at The Royal

Institution, London.

Held at the King’s Fund, London.

The 2012 winning photograph was ‘Farming

the sea’, right, by Wong Chi Keung.

Professor Tim Benton from

Global Food Security will be

speaking on the theme of

food waste.

events around the country,

but please do see the

Society’s regional pages

for other events happening


became his apprentice, surveying across Bedfordshire. Work was not always steady, so Wallace was sent away for a short stint as a watchmaker’s assistant in Leighton Buzzard. Within the year he was back with William travelling the countryside, surveying and eventually settling in Neath, South Wales.

A naturalist is bornWhile William travelled to drum up surveying work, Wallace spent a lot of time with nothing to do. As well as practising his surveying skills (good training for his later fi eldwork), he wandered the countryside and, using Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Plants, identifi ed and learned the characteristics of the chief orders. There is no doubt that his ramblings in the mountainous Welsh countryside taught him more about natural history than he would have gained in any formal educational setting. In his autobiography, he was moved to write that his time in Neath was “the turning point of my life, the tide that carried me on, not to fortune, but to whatever reputation I have acquired.”3


A lfred Russel Wallace (January 1823–November 1913) was a complex man from a humble background. Yet this son of a failed, bankrupt solicitor developed – independently of Charles Darwin – a theory so central to the science of biology that Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote an essay in 1973 entitled: Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution1.In common with Darwin, Wallace collected beetles and spent his formative years as a scientist discovering the natural history of Wales. Unlike Darwin, and despite his work on evolution, the public profi le of Wallace receded almost to complete obscurity after his death.Wallace was born on the 8th January 1823 at Kensington Cottage on the border of the village of Llanbadoc and the market town of Usk in Monmouthshire (now Gwent). He was the eighth of nine children. When Wallace was fi ve, money problems forced the family to move to Hertford, where he attended Hertford Grammar School. The headmaster, Clement Henry Crutwell (an ‘irascible little man’2), kept order through regular fl oggings of the boys for any misdemeanours. Wallace learned arithmetic, algebra, English and Latin grammar, geography, French and classics. Although destined to travel far and wide, he recalled that next to Latin grammar, the most painful subject he learned was geography. It should, he said, have been the most interesting, but was reduced to learning the names of the chief towns, rivers and mountains of various countries.

After having to leave school in March 1837 due to the family’s fi nancial hardship, he went to lodge in London with his older brother, John, an apprentice carpenter. Meeting ‘mechanics’ (civil and mechanical engineers) and artisans informed his early socialist views. Reading the works of Robert Owen and attending lectures based on Owen’s doctrines in a ‘Hall of Science’, an early type of mechanics’ institute, also infl uenced his political outlook.By mid-1837, Wallace joined his surveyor brother William and

In late 1843, and with little surveying work, Wallace was again in need of a job, and he successfully applied for a position as a master at Leicester Collegiate School. There, in 1844, he met the naturalist and explorer Henry Walter Bates and the two became good friends, but the sudden death of his brother William in 1845 made Wallace return to Neath to take over the business. Rather than stay alone, he persuaded

BIOGRAPHYALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

WHO WAS...ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACEAs the 100th anniversary of Wallace’s death approaches, James Williams explores the life and legacy of one of the world’s most important Victorian scientists

Wallace, photographed at the age of 46

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Wallace spent several years in Malaysia producing his landmark work The Malay Archipelago, above, recording wildlife such as the rhinoceros hornbill, below

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22_BIO_60_5_WHO_WAS.indd 22-23

11/11/2013 10:09

THE BIOLOGISTVol 60 No 6 December 2013/January 2014

Contacts

�eBiologist

�e Biologist is a bi-monthly magazine (published six times a year) that covers the full richness and diversity of biology. Science is brought to life with stimulating and authoritative features, while topical pieces discuss science policy, new developments or controversial issues. Aimed at biologists everywhere, its straightforward style also makes it ideal for educators and students at all levels, as well as the interested amateur.

Submissions of interesting and timely articles, short opinion pieces and letters are welcome. Articles should be aimed at a non-specialist audience and convey your enthusiasm and expertise. Instructions for authors are available on the Society’s website or on request from the editorial office. Contact [email protected]

EDITORIAL STAFFDirector of Membership, Marketing and CommunicationsJon KudlickEditor Sue NelsonManaging Editor Tom Ireland MSB [email protected] Assistant Karen Patel AMSB [email protected]

For membership enquiries call 0844 858 9316 [email protected]

For subscription enquiries call 020 7685 2556 [email protected]

EDITORIAL BOARDJ Ian Blenkharn MSB FRSPH

Phil Collier MSc PhD CBiol FSB FLS FHE

Cameron S Crook BSc MPhil CBiol MSB MIEEM FLS

Rajith Dissanayake MSc PhD FZS AMSB

Catherine Duigan BSc PhD FSB FLS

John Heritage BA DPhil CBiol FSB

Sue Howarth BSc PhD CBiol FSB

Allan Jamieson BSc PhD CBiol FSB

Catherine Jopling BSc PhD MSB

Susan Omar BSc PGCE CBiol CSci MSB MRSPH FRGS

Leslie Rose BSc CBiol FSB FICR MAPM

ADVISORY PANELIan Clarke, Horticulture Research International, UK

Clive Cornford, Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand

Sharon Grimster, BioPark, UK

Marios Kyriazis, Biogerontologist and anti-ageing physician, UK

Alan Lansdown, Imperial College London, UK

Walter Leal Filho, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Don McManus, Bancroft Centre, Australia

Peter Moore, King’s College London, UK

Brian Osborne, Australia

John Scott, University of Leicester, UK

Robert Spooner-Hart, University of Western Sydney, Australia

Kathleen Weathers, Institute of Ecosystem Studies, USA

Steve Wilson, Pfizer Animal Health

� eBiologistTHE SOCIETY OF BIOLOGY MAGAZINE ■ ISSN 0006-3347 ■ SOCIETYOFBIOLOGY.ORG VOL 60 NO 2 ■ APR/MAY 2013

TV's Alice Roberts talks anatomy and archaeology

DIGGINGDEEP

INTERVIEW

BIOPHYSICS

QUANTUM BIOLOGYCutting-edge physics for

biological problems

RESEARCH

BUILDER BIRDSFactors aff ecting

nest sizes

GENETICS

CRACKING THE CODE A decade on from the

human genome project

00_BIO_60_2_COVER.indd 1

26/03/2013 10:01

was moved to write that his time in Neath was “the turning point of my life, the tide that carried me on, not to fortune, but to whatever

� eBiologistTHE SOCIETY OF BIOLOGY MAGAZINE ■ ISSN 0006-3347 ■ SOCIETYOFBIOLOGY.ORG VOL 60 NO 4 ■ AUG/SEP 2013

INTERVIEW

IMRAN KHANMeet the rising star

of British science

MICROBIOLOGY

EXTREME SPECIESOrganisms that change

the way we view life

IMRAN KHANMeet the rising star

of British scienceEXTREME SPECIES

Organisms that change the way we view life

TAXIDERMY

STILL LIFE e resurgence of a forgotten craft

CREATING A BUZZ� e trend for city hives and what it means for our bees

00_BIO_60_4_COVER_AMENDED.indd 1

28/08/2013 15:17


Buzzard. Within the year he was back with William travelling the countryside, surveying and eventually settling in Neath, South Wales.

A naturalist is bornWhile William travelled to drum up surveying work, Wallace spent a lot of time with nothing to do. As well as practising his surveying skills (good training for his later fi eldwork), he wandered the countryside and, using Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Plantsand learned the characteristics of the chief orders. There is no doubt that his ramblings in the mountainous Welsh countryside taught him more about natural history than he would have gained in any formal educational setting. In his autobiography, he was moved to write that his time

learned arithmetic, algebra, English and Latin grammar, geography, French and classics. Although destined to travel far and wide, he recalled that next to Latin grammar, the most painful subject he learned was geography. It should, he said, have been the most interesting, but was reduced to learning the names of the chief towns, rivers and mountains of various countries. After having to leave school in March 1837 due to the family’s fi nancial hardship, he went to lodge in London with his older brother, John, an apprentice carpenter. Meeting ‘mechanics’ (civil and mechanical engineers) and artisans informed his early socialist views. Reading the works of Robert Owen and attending lectures based on Owen’s doctrines in a ‘Hall of Science’, an early type of mechanics’ institute, also infl uenced

Wallace, photographed at the age of 46 ©

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was moved to write that his time in Neath was “the turning point of my life, the tide that carried me on, not to fortune, but to whatever

mechanics’ institute, also infl uenced his political outlook.By mid-1837, Wallace joined his surveyor brother William and

© G

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� eBiologist■ ISSN 0006-3347

Biologist ISSN 0006-3347

Biologist

CREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZCREATING A BUZZ� e trend for city hives and what it means for our bees� e trend for city hives and what it means for our bees� e trend for city hives and what it means for our bees

� eBiologistTHE SOCIETY OF BIOLOGY MAGAZINE ■ ISSN 0006-3347 ■ SOCIETYOFBIOLOGY.ORG VOL 60 NO 5 ■ OCT/NOV 2013

How disease from domestic animals could wipe out iconic endangered species

WILDLIFEWARNING

RESEARCH

FACT AND FISSIONUsing neutrons to

study biomaterials

BIOGRAPHY

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE� e legacy of a great

Victorian scientist

MYCOLOGY

RICH PICKINGSExploring treasures

in the fungal kingdom

EVENTSCALENDARINSIDE

2013

FACT AND FISSION

study biomaterials


Victorian scientist

00_BIO_60_5_COVERS_V2.indd 119/09/2013 10:28

Society of BiologyCharles Darwin House,12 Roger Street,London WC1N 2JUTel: 020 7685 2550Fax: 020 3514 [email protected]

Views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the Editorial Board or the Society of Biology.

© 2013 Society of Biology(Registered charity no. 277981)

ªe Society permits single copying of individual articles for private study or research, irrespective of where the copying is done. Multiple copying of individual articles for teaching purposes is also permitted without specific permission. For copying or reproduction for any other purpose, written permission must be sought from the Society. Exceptions to the above are those institutions and non-publishing organisations that have an agreement or licence with the UK Copyright Licensing Agency or the US Copyright Clearance Center. Access to the magazine is available online; please see the Society’s website for further details.

�e Biologist is produced on behalf of the Society of Biology byªink Publishing Ltd.124-128 Barlby RoadLondon W10 6BLwww.thinkpublishing.co.uk020 8962 3020

DesignAlistair McGownProduction editor Clare HarrisSub editorsSam Bartlett, Sian CampbellPublisherJohn [email protected]

Non-member rates: £120.00

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Advertising in �e Biologist represents an unparalleled opportunity to reach a large community of professional biologists.

For advertising information contactTom Ireland [email protected] 020 7685 2556


Only non-scientists are ever surprised when science is described as creative. But, no matter what the arts world

might think, artists and musicians do not own creativity. Neither do biologists, of course, as the use of imagination or original ideas can be applied to any discipline as well as our everyday lives.

Creativity thrives within all of us. A few months ago, many will have embraced their inner Picasso carving pumpkins for Halloween. With Christmas approaching, the enormous popularity of food programmes means it is no longer unusual to make sloe gin, cranberry chutney or chilli vodka. The most appreciated cards are often the handmade ones, and why buy a bird box if you can make one?

Today’s technology aids creativity by allowing us to blog, self publish or create our own images. One of the Society’s most popular events is the annual photography competition. Photos such as The Fight for Life Cycle, a beautiful study of red ants killing a fly, are biology as art (see page 15).

Our cover image, of a jumping spider and its prey, also shows life and death. It was taken by the winner of the young photographer award, 13 year old Jack Settle from Oklahoma (page 17), who began collecting insects when he was four. His mentors include a herpetologist and zookeeper, a National Geographic photographer, and a professor of biological sciences at Eastern Illinois University who let Jack join a student field excursion to examine reptiles and amphibians. Jack, who also plays guitar and

drums, is currently considering majoring in biology with a minor in photography. Whatever his decision, I suspect he’s going to do well.

Researchers at the University of Michigan recently found a statistically relevant link between engaging with creative arts early in life and STEM subjects. They concluded “that a very strong case can be made that arts and crafts training correlates significantly with success as a scientist or an engineer and that this success can be measured in economically valuable products such as patentable inventions and founding new companies.”

Associate professor David Goodsell, from the Scripps Research Institute, is a case in point. When submitting his article on biology at the molecular level (page 18), he included his own beautiful illustrations – some watercolours, and others created by computer art. Synthetic biology is also a perfect example of how creativity and science go hand in hand (page 24).

It has long been known that exposure to music and art during early life enhances brain development. As someone who took up the piano a few years ago, I’m also of the opinion that it’s never too late. So if your New Year’s resolution is to spend more time playing the clarinet or finally doing that pottery class, take action. It may also be good for your science.

Nelson’s Column


Sue Nelson, Editor

A strong case can be made that arts and crafts training correlates with success as a scientist or an engineer

Professor Donald Lewis Lee 1931-2013

Members will be sad to learn of the death of Emeritus Professor

Donald Lee after a long illness. Donald had a distinguished career in the biological sciences and made a significant contribution to teaching and research in medical and veterinary parasitology and nematology.

He was born and educated in Blaydon, County Durham, and studied at Durham University (King’s College), followed by a PhD at Cambridge. He went on to hold appointments at Cambridge, the Houghton Poultry Research Station and Brunel University. He was awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 1971 and in the same year was appointed professor of agricultural zoology at the University of Leeds, where he remained until his retirement in 1996.

He also held positions at the University of Hong Kong, the

University of Malaysia in Sarawak, and was president of the British Society of Parasitology from 1979-80. He published many papers and books on parasites and nematodes including The Physiology of Nematodes (1965), and he edited The Biology of Nematodes (2002).

On retirement, Donald returned to the north east. He

was a parish councillor and served as a Council member of the Institute of Biology. He became a member of the

Institute’s Northern branch committee in 1998, serving as

branch chairman from 2000–04. Donald made a notable

contribution to the biological sciences and gave considerable service to the work of the Society in the Northern region. In recognition of his considerable contribution, he was elected honorary president of the branch and in 2011 was awarded the President’s Medal. He will be remembered as an energetic, knowledgeable and congenial colleague and will be greatly missed.


work has now been included in a patent application with the potential to help prevent the spread of disease from Africa to Asia.

“I’m overjoyed to have won,” said Michelle. “I’ve been interested in plant pathology for a long time. I believe crop science is really important for the future. We really need to protect our crops.” She has now started a PhD at the East Malling Research Centre and the University of Reading.

The other finalists were Nevena Karapavlovic from Newcastle University and Eleanor Paish from Aberystwyth University. Nevena’s project looked at why ageing naked mole rats maintain cellular function despite mitochondrial DNA deletions, while Eleanor’s investigated speed, accuracy and success in foraging fish.

M ichelle Hulin, from the University of Bath, was named Best Biology Student

2013 in the Europe-wide Science, Engineering & Technology (SET) Student of the Year Awards in London. It tops a great year for Michelle after she also won the Society of Biology Top Student Award 2013.

The three SET Award finalists presented research from their undergraduate final year project and were interviewed by a judging panel at Charles Darwin House, London. Michelle impressed with her project, which aimed to prevent global disease spread in oil palm, a major commodity crop. She had developed a rapid and robust molecular method to detect the fungus Fusarium oxysporum, which causes vascular wilt in the crop. Her

4 / THE BIOLOGIST / Vol 60 No 6 www.societyofbiology.org/news www.societyofbiology.org/news

ACCREDITATION APPLICATIONS EXCEED EXPECTATIONSªe Society received applications to accredit 23 bioscience degree programmes from 10 UK universities in the latest round of its Degree Accreditation Programme. ªe previous round, in January, accredited three times the anticipated number of degrees. ªe universities of Manchester, Liverpool and York, and the Royal Veterinary College, have all had degrees accredited recently.

FUNDING BOOST FOR UNIVERSITY SCIENCE Science and engineering teaching at English universities will receive a £400m funding boost. Competition for the funding, announced by universities and science minister David Willetts, will encourage the aim of getting more women into science and engineering at degree level by requiring evidence of a commitment to equality and diversity.

SOCIETY CLARIFIES ANIMAL RESEARCH FACTS ªe Society has responded to inaccurate claims about animal research in a letter published by �e Observer. Following an article about the use of marmosets in the development of Parkinson’s disease treatments, the campaign group Animal Aid wrote a letter stating that, “most successful treatments for Parkinson’s were pioneered in human trials”.

ªe drugs were actually fully tested in animals prior to human trials and it is a legal requirement to do so. ªe Society’s letter was co-signed by the Association of Medical Research Charities, the Academy of Medical Sciences and Parkinson’s UK, and was published on the 27th October.

Society News

Double win for biology student

NEWS IN BRIEF

Her work has now been included in a patent application

For many people, flying ant day is one of summer’s most

striking events. But this year Britain had a flying ant month.

The Flying Ant Survey, a collaboration between the Society and the University of Gloucestershire, originally set out to investigate how synchronised the emergence of flying ants is around the UK, and whether there truly is one single ‘flying ant day’ every year. The project involved over 4,500 sightings from around the UK and found that from late July to late August there were four peaks in flying ant appearances, instead of the expected one, with smaller peaks in between.

The four peaks were 22 July, 26 July, 1 August and 20-22 August. The biggest was at the beginning of August, half way between the peaks in 2012 (24 July, 8 August). The peak time at which flying ants were sighted was at 18:00 in 2012 and 2013.

“This gives them just enough time to find somewhere to hide,” said Professor Adam Hart, from the University of Gloucestershire, “but not too much time for exposure to predators. They can’t risk flying at night because they can’t see and it’s too cold.”

Dr Rebecca Nesbit, who coordinated the survey, thanked everyone who submitted data and asked them to contribute next year. “This shows the importance of collecting data over a number of years,” she said. “It seems likely that 2014 will show yet another pattern of ant emergences.”

The next stage in data analysis is to look for patterns associated with weather conditions.

Survey says ‘flying ant day’ a myth

OBITUARIES

Michelle Hulin receiving her award from SET Awards president Malcolm Turner

Simon Ashley Cox1958-2013

S imon was the eldest son of Isobel Terry Cox

(née Pepper) and Robert Ashley Cox. Educated at Aldenham School and Hatfield Polytechnic (now University of Hertfordshire), he graduated after studying a four year ‘sandwich’ course in applied biology. During his industrial year he spent time in Dr Robin Holliday’s Laboratory at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, which

consolidated his interest in genetics.After graduation in 1980, Simon

went to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund’s Laboratory at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he began his career by studying prostate cancer. Later he was transferred to Clare Hall to join a group mapping human chromosomes. He was a co-author of 29 research publications. Ill health led to his early retirement in 1996 and he showed great courage as his health declined.

Simon had a passion for dinghy sailing which, with the aid of the RYA charity Sailability, he continued until shortly before his death.

Professor Lee had a distinguished career in the biological sciences

Simon Cox co-authored 29 research publications

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Members encouraged to branch out

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Check out our new website: thebiologist.societyofbiology.org

■ Politicians, scientists, journalists, members and guests attended the Society’s second parliamentary event to celebrate Biology Week. The night was hosted by Andrew Miller, Labour MP and chair of the Science and Technology select committee, Stephen Metcalfe, Conservative MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock, and Dr Julian Huppert, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge. Tim Benton, a professor of population ecology at Leeds University and also the UK champion for food security, gave a thought-provoking speech about food resources, our responsibilities as consumers and the future of food provision for the global community.■ This year’s Big Biology Day in Cambridge attracted more than 1,000 people, with attendance double that of last year. For the second year running a variety

of hands on activities filled Hills Road Sixth Form College. The 17 stands around the hall ranged from species identification by the Linnean Society to Stamford High School’s student projects, to blood oxygen monitoring with staff from Addenbrooke’s hospital. ■ The last day of Biology Week came soon after World Food Day (16th October), and schools across the UK held assemblies about food waste. The Society produced an

animated video and teaching notes in partnership

with the Global Food Security programme.

UK households throw away 20% of the food they buy, and the teaching materials are aimed

at helping pupils consider the effects

of waste and how to reduce it.


competition continues to grow, with over 600 entries received this year. Putu Sudiarta, from Indonesia, won the main prize for his picture of a honey bee. The winner of the Young Photographer of the Year award, 13 year old Jack Settle, travelled from Oklahoma to receive his £500 prize for his amazing picture of a jumping spider eating an ant. For a full gallery of images see page 14.

COMMUNICATION AWARDSIn the Science Communication Awards, Rebecca Williams, from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Matrix Research, won the New Researcher category. Alongside working on her PhD, she runs biology workshops for local schools and encourages students from under-represented backgrounds to consider a university education.

M ore than 120 people attended the annual Biology Week awards to

celebrate the winners and highly commended entrants from the Society’s various competitions.

BOOK AWARDSIn its first year, the Society’s Book Awards attracted over 70 entries across three categories. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by the American author David Quammen, was named best general biology book and The Bodley Head’s publishing director, Stuart Williams, collected the award on his behalf. For more on the Book Awards see page 8.

PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITIONThe Society’s photography


The excitement of Biology Week and the culmination of our

various citizen science projects generated a crop of articles in the media in September and October. The Telegraph, The Independent Online, the Mail Online and the Metro featured the images from the Society’s photography competition, while the House Spider Survey and Flying Ant Survey attracted media attention from the The Times, BBC Nature, The Telegraph, BBC Wildlife magazine, several blogs and local newspapers, and led to 30 radio interviews. Professor Adam Hart’s epic 24 hour lecture was also featured in Time Out.

Biology Week

Celebrating success

IN THE NEWS

B iology Week 2013 got off to an exciting start with the 24

hour lecturethon, an epic talk on ants and bees by ecologist and science communicator Professor Adam Hart from the University of Gloucestershire.

Professor Hart began at 18:00 on Sunday 13th October and continued until 18:00 the following day, with

OTHER EVENTS

2013

Above: The Society’s Mark Downs pictured with Science Communication Awards winners, Rebecca Williams (centre) and Dr Sheena Cruickshank (right)

Biology around the clock

lectures being broadcast around the world via webcast and Skype. He covered a range of topics, including stings, parasitism, colony formation, and the social structures bees and insects can form.

His endeavour also included a pub quiz, honey tasting, and displays of a live colony of leafcutter ants and a working bee hive. The mathematics of genetic relatedness within a colony, which he tackled just after midnight, was a particularly gruelling session.

Throughout the night students in schools in Singapore, Shanghai and South Korea watched the lecture via Skype as part of their Monday morning lessons. Professor Hart also revealed the results of this year’s Flying Ant Survey (see the story on page 4).

As morning arrived, UK schools watched a Diet Coke and coffee-fuelled Professor Hart lecture on the structure of the hive, how ants forage and solve problems, and pollination and feeding.

In the Established Researcher category, Dr Sheena Cruickshank from the University of Manchester was named overall winner for her ‘Worm Wagon’ scheme, which fuses art and interactive activities to improve understanding and awareness of global health issues. She also works with ‘Inspired Sisters’, a community group of immigrant women, to raise awareness of the causes and impacts of worm infection. Both winners will be writing about their science communication projects in the next issue of The Biologist.

ESSAY COMPETITIONThe 2013 essay competition was based around the theme of the use of animals in research. Judge Tim Jameson, from drug research group Covance, announced the four winners: Carmel Edwards, Emily Robertson, Jan Botthof and James Iremonger.

DEGREE PROGRAMMESThe top graduates from the Society’s accredited degree programmes were also announced. Sam Menzies, University of Bristol; Alice Pollard, Royal Veterinary College and Robin Willows, University of York, were rewarded for outstanding performance during their courses.

Adam Hart

Right: David Quammen’s winning book

Next year…Biology Week 2014 will run from 11–17 October. We would be very pleased to hear from organisations and individuals who are keen to take part. For more information please contact Rebecca Nesbit (on 0207 685 2553; [email protected]) whether you are a scientist, a teacher or someone who is passionate about biology.Thank you very much to everyone who made Biology Week 2013 such a success.

Food waste was a hot topic in Biology Week and was debated at a Society event in parliament (above) and in schools across the UK

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Professor Thomas Baldwin teaches at the University of York’s Department of Philosophy and is deputy chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority: ‘Genetics doesn’t threaten the attribution of responsibility.’

Professor Robin Mackenzie is at Kent Law School, University of Kent, and has researched forensic,

medical and ethical aspects of

neuroscience: ‘People blaming their genes is something we will

increasingly see in courts.’

Jonathan Pettitt lectures in genetics at the Institute of Medical Sciences at the University of Aberdeen, and researches the cadherin-catenin complex, which plays a role in learning and memory: ‘We are not dealing with something precise.’

Entitled ‘The good, the bad and the genetically predetermined’, experts

discussed behavioural genetics and its implications for criminal justice at The Royal Institution in London. Introducing the speakers, The Daily Telegraph’s Ian Douglas said it was a subject “as close as you can get to the interface between science and society… a live subject that is being discussed in prisons and courtrooms across the country every day.”

Jonathan Pettitt, a lecturer in genetics at the Institute of Medical Sciences, University of Aberdeen, opened by explaining the “best example found so far” of a gene


Louis, who also chairs the Association of British Science Writers.

The winners were announced during Biology Week. Best undergraduate text book was the second edition of Physical Biology of the Cell (Garland Science), written by Rob Phillips, Hernan Garcia, Julie Theriot and Jane Kondev. Judge Dr William Marshall, from The London Clinic, called it “an outstanding book bringing concepts of physical chemistry to an understanding of cell biology with a quirkiness and turn of phrase that engages the reader”.

Lawrence R Walker and Aaron B Shiels won the postgraduate textbook category with Landslide Ecology (Cambridge University Press). Judge Ian Carter described it as “scholarly yet readable and written in a fluent style” while fellow judge Sue Howarth, senior lecturer in secondary science education at the University of Worcester, said: “This novel topic has worldwide application, and this book should encourage others into this developing discipline. Inspiring.”

Despite strong competition, the best popular biology book award went to David Quammen’s Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next

Let no one tell you that judging a book award is easy. If you love reading science books it may

sound like an ideal task. But when those heavy boxes start arriving on your doorstep it’s an entirely different and extremely daunting matter.

The criteria for a winning book about biology, biosciences or the life sciences are deceptively simple. It must engage, educate and – above all – be readable and at the right level for an informed general reader. All too often popular science books are written for degree level scientists or assume that everyone knows the latest jargon and history of the subject. A good author not only includes all of this information seamlessly and in a palatable fashion, but does so in a way that is inspiring and a joy to read too.

There was no shortage of good authors, which made even producing the longlist a formidable task.The judging panel read continuously for five months. My brain felt like exploding at several points and meticulous note taking was essential. My category’s fellow judges were science author and former BBC radio science producer Martin Redfern, and director of City University London’s science journalism MA course Connie St


BIOLOGY WEEK DEBATE

David Quammen’s Spillover won Best Popular Biology Book. His award was collected by his publisher at The Bodley Head, Stuart Williams (below, with the Society’s William Marshall FSB)

Human Pandemic (Bodley Head). It is a fantastically enjoyable book, comparable to a thriller at times, with beautiful writing and a great mix of science and story. “I couldn’t put it down,” said Redfern. “It was meticulously researched, up to date and with a message.”

It was a reading marathon and the Society would like to thank all the judges for their time and expertise. It was also an incredibly rewarding experience. Check out the shortlisted entries below.

BEST UNDERGRADUATE TEXTBOOK ■ Physical Biology of the Cell by Rob Phillips, Jane Kondev, Julie Theriot & Hernan G Garcia, illustrated by Nigel Orme (Garland Science)■ Introduction to Cancer Biology by Robin Hesketh (Cambridge)■ Essential Developmental Biology by Jonathan M W Slack (Wiley-Blackwell)■ Introduction to Bioorganic Chemistry and Chemical Biology by David Van Vranken & Gregory Weiss (Garland Science)

BEST POSTGRADUATE TEXTBOOK ■ Landslide Ecology by Lawrence R Walker & Aaron B Shiels (Cambridge)■ Evolutionary Perspectives on Pregnancy by John C Avise (Columbia University Press) (highly commended)■ Principles of Plant Genetics and Breeding by George Acquaah (Wiley-Blackwell)■ Host Manipulation by Parasites edited by David P Hughes, Jacques Brodeur & Frédéric Thomas (Oxford)

BEST GENERAL BIOLOGY BOOK ■ Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen (The Bodley Head)■ Anatomies by Hugh Aldersey-Williams (Viking)■ Secret Chambers: the inside story of cells and complex life by Martin Brasier (Oxford)■ Pieces of Light by Charles Fernyhough (Profile)■ My Beautiful Genome by Lone Frank (Oneworld)■ The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson (University of Chicago Press)

If you are interested in judging or entering the 2014 book awards contact Karen Patel [email protected]

Landslide Ecology (top) and Physical Biology of the Cell (above) were also winners

BIOLOGY WEEK ROUND-UPBOOK AWARDS/BIG DEBATE

Read all about itThe Biologist’s editor Sue Nelson on judging the Society’s inaugural Book Awards

This year’s Biology Week Debate tackled a fascinating and difficult subject that encompasses not only biology and neuroscience but law, politics and the philosophy of free will

No holds barred

definition of criminal responsibility used in courts is not sophisticated enough. “A folk psychology underpins the law which says the body and mind are separate. You have to prove the body did it and the mind intended to,” said Mackenzie. “So the law has problems when there is something in the body that affects the mind. People blaming their genes, saying they had no free choice in the matter, is something we will increasingly see in the courts.”

She added that young people could be screened to see if they are genetically predisposed to violence or crime. For example, children suffering “callous non-emotional conduct disorder” are often seen as fledgling psychopaths, and the condition may be hereditary. Mackenzie said they should be offered treatment “in a non-judgmental way” to normalise their behaviour – but should not be assumed to be future criminals.

Finally Thomas Baldwin, a professor of philosophy, tackled the definition of free will itself and the legal argument that those who have a predisposition to violence are not fully responsible for their behaviour.

“Free will is not a supernatural force that allows you to project yourself beyond your nature. We are not supernatural beings, we are great apes, albeit ones with a great capacity for understanding and planning,” said Baldwin. “Given our genetics give us these capacities that underpin free will, genetics doesn’t threaten the attribution of responsibility. It may help us understand it, but it doesn’t undermine it.”

After questions from the audience, the panellists concluded that the link between specific gene variation and behaviour is weak and too heavily influenced by environment to be of much use in court. The panellists all warned against its use in the criminal justice system at this stage.

variant that could be linked to criminal behaviour, and one which has already been used to reduce the sentences of defendants found to have it. Studies of an extremely violent family in the Netherlands led to the discovery of a correlation between the monoamine oxidase-A gene and violent behaviour. Yet even that evidence is “not that great”, said Pettitt, adding: “The problem is we are not dealing with something precise – genetics doesn’t work that way – we can’t split it from the environment. For that reason we can’t use genetic determinism in the courts.”

Robin Mackenzie, a professor of law, University of Kent, said the

OUR PANEL

We are not dealing with something precise – genetics doesn’t work that way

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uncertain drug discovery landscape, research into new antibiotics is often not prioritised. To make progress, it will be important for industry and academia to work together to accelerate development through initiatives such as precompetitive data sharing.

The Government also has a key role to play. The Department of Health recently issued a UK Five Year Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy that sets out actions to slow the development and spread of antimicrobial resistance. This new cross Government strategy identifies three strategic aims: improving the knowledge and understanding of antimicrobial resistance; conserving the effectiveness of existing treatments and stimulating the development of new antibiotics, diagnostics and novel therapies. In addition, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee recently ordered an inquiry into antimicrobial resistance, which the Society and a number of our Member Organisations responded to.

It is vital that medical professionals, those who work with animals, and the general public are aware of the threat and knowledgeable about best practice. People’s expectations that they will automatically receive antibiotics should also be reduced. Awareness-raising activities, like the annual European Antibiotic Awareness Day, held on the 18th November, help to communicate appropriate antibiotic use and drive further improvements in prescribing.

Professional bodies and learned societies can help enhance understanding and knowledge sharing between academics, researchers and clinicians. Such organisations, including the Society of Biology, are well placed to champion best practice with their members and other professional stakeholders. It is crucial to the health of all nations that effective antibiotics remain the mainstay of modern medicine and are available to all who need them.

www.societyofbiology.org/policy www.societyofbiology.org/policy10 / THE BIOLOGIST / Vol 60 No 6 Vol 60 No 6 / THE BIOLOGIST / 11

W hen the chief medical officer for England, Dame Sally Davies,

described antibiotic resistance as a “catastrophic threat” akin to terrorism and climate change, the statement was designed to make people sit up and take notice. It worked.

Backed by the chief medical officer’s annual report, antibiotic resistance was soon added to the national risk register and was high on the agenda of the science ministers’ meeting in advance of the G8 summit in Northern Ireland. As well as the obvious health effects, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) estimates that antibiotic resistance costs the EU approximately €1.5bn in healthcare expenses and lost productivity each year.

Indiscriminate or inappropriate use of antibiotics plays a key role in the spread of antibiotic resistance. GPs prescribe 35 million courses of antibiotics in England alone each year and the vast majority of surgical procedures involve them too. Antibiotics are also common in farming and are routinely given

All systems go

Systems biology is an increasingly important discipline in the life sciences.

As of June 2013, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council had committed £85m to research, training and infrastructure for an approach that attempts to explain the behaviour of a biological entity (cell, organ, or organism) from the perspective of the connections in a network of individual components in a system.

This approach often requires computational modelling tools to represent the relationships between all the components. Traditionally, many areas of biological research, particularly in molecular biology, have used a predominantly reductionist approach to identify

Systems biology could be the key to future medical and technological advances

to animals to prevent infection. Action must be taken to ensure that antibiotics are used only when absolutely necessary, including curtailment of use where there is no bacterial infection – particularly prevalent in animal health management – and restricting the purchase of antibiotics by the general public, which is widespread in some countries.

Antibiotic resistance cannot be eradicated, but it can be managed to limit the threat to human and animal health. This requires a multi-faceted approach, including improved infection prevention and control measures, optimising prescribing practices and prioritising research needs.

Research into new treatments is also vital – no new classes of antibiotic have been discovered since 1987. However, a financial disincentive exists for the pharmaceutical industry as any new antibiotic developed is likely to be shelved for as long as possible to avoid the build-up of resistance. Even if a drug is used, it would be prescribed only for short periods of treatment rather than for months or years. In this

and characterise the properties of network components. At the level of a cell, such components would include DNA, mRNA, proteins and metabolites, which were often studied in isolation. Cellular behaviour, however, is not always governed by the properties of an individual component, but ultimately emerges from the biological networks these components create. Our brains contain close to 100 billion neurons which create a complex network of around 100 trillion connections. However, no single neuron is responsible for the phenomena of thought – thought emerges due to the specific structure of the neural network.

Not all biological behaviours can be attributed to the property of an

individual protein or cell, and this is also true for diseases. A systems level understanding will give us a deeper insight into disease processes and help us understand, treat or prevent complex diseases. Furthermore, a systems level understanding will put us in a position to engineer cells and even organisms to perform useful tasks, a discipline known as synthetic biology.

Thanks to technological advances in biological research, and knowledge acquired from the reductionist approach, the time is right to build a strong research base for systems biology and bring all of this information together. This can be achieved through investment in training and infrastructure and an appropriate education system that encourages cross discipline collaboration, and equips biologists with the necessary maths and computing skills.

Policy update

Lewis Tomalin, BBSRC policy Fellow

Dr Catherine Ball, science policy officer

A global, multi-faceted approach is required to manage the growing threat of antibacterial resistance

Careful cures

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12 / THE BIOLOGIST / Vol 60 No 6 Vol 60 No 6 / THE BIOLOGIST / 13

Bob Johnston FSB is head of science at St Mary’s College and a member of the Journal of Biological Education’s editorial board.

In the June/July issue of The Biologist, Sarah Whild lamented the loss of botany from the list

of available degree courses in the UK (Where have all the botanists gone? The Biologist, Vol 60 (3)). As a biology teacher with 39 years’ experience, I want to know if botany is unique, how it happened and if it matters.

Before polytechnics became universities in 1992, science degrees were in two separate camps. The universities largely taught the traditional, ‘purely academic’ subjects – in biology, the list would include botany, zoology, genetics, bacteriology and biochemistry. Most courses were modular, allowing students to choose a range of subjects, with the honours year devoted to one speciality. Meanwhile, the polytechnics taught the applied subjects, which relied rather less on subject knowledge and more on practical applications.

This was not unique to biological sciences. The same was true for chemistry, physics, geology, engineering, and indeed any subject with a ‘practical’ element. There was therefore a considerable degree

of snobbery – highly academic students were encouraged to apply to universities while the less gifted followed the polytechnic route. This was also reflected in the A level offers each type of institution would make.

However, post-1992, the distinction became blurred. While the ‘old polytechnics’ became more academically attractive, the ‘old universities’ started to lose out on good candidates. To make their courses more attractive, they had to reorganise and modernise their courses. Those seen as contemporary would appeal to the most candidates, and by natural selection, the least popular courses would wither and eventually become extinct.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple. Teachers of A level subjects and parents of students have considerable influence over which degree courses students choose to follow. Unlike me, many A level biology teachers graduated in the 1990s or later when the ‘old’ courses were already waning. Therefore, since like begets like, fewer and fewer students applied for the traditional subjects.

Money also plays an important part in student choice, especially now that they will be saddled with debts of over £30,000 on graduation. Gone are the days when 18 year olds set off for university to learn more about their favourite school subject. Today, all they ask is, “what job or career will this degree lead to?” Who can then blame them if they choose ‘molecular biology with industrial/professional experience’ rather than biochemistry (both available at one leading university)? If a university department wants to retain a course that is becoming less popular, it has to sell it hard, something I rarely encounter.

Finally, does it actually matter if some ‘traditional’ subjects disappear? As Sarah Whild pointed out, botanists are still out there but are in the field rather than teaching in the lecture theatre or lab. The old subjects still exist but with different names. The worry is, of course, that without fresh blood coming through, there will be no one to assume the mantle in coming years.

Personally, I’m not worried. Wherever there are gaps in scientific knowledge, there will always be those trying to fill them, whatever field it may be. Knowledge once attained cannot be lost. And all modern biological degrees produce well-rounded scientists. We need specialists but we also need a public that understands the big questions in biology.

I’m sure the future will still be in safe hands when the sixth formers of today become the citizens of tomorrow.

Bob Johnston questions why certain life science subjects are disappearing – and whether it really matters

Opinion

A recent search on BBC Online for ‘climate change’ produced 16,269 results.

A search for ‘ocean acidification’, however, produced just 116. The public, it appears, is receiving an unbalanced understanding of the important ecological implications of increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Data (from the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, for example) show that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is increasing all the time – not surprising as an increasing human population burns fossil fuels and chops down trees. Presumably the rate of carbon dioxide emissions will eventually slow, but we have been expecting to run out of fossil fuels since the 1970s. Every time a fuel crisis is predicted, further supplies are found.

Increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have ecological consequences, including climate change and ocean acidification, the latter due to carbon dioxide dissolving in seawater to make carbonic acid. Seawater has changed from a pre-industrial value of pH 8.2 to a present day value of pH 8.1 and by the year 2100 could be between pH 7.6 and 7.8. The rate of seawater acidification is now faster than at any time in the last 300 million years.

The response of marine organisms to acidification is complex and varied. Sensitivity to pH can vary between life history stages – with gametes, embryos and larvae being especially vulnerable. Increased acidity reduces the concentration of carbonate ions, resulting in lower concentrations of aragonite – a form of calcium

Angus Westgarth-Smith says more attention must be given to the effect of ocean acidification

Angus Westgarth-Smith is a zoologist with a PhD in insect ecology. He has been a biology lecturer for over 20 years and currently works at Birkbeck, University of London.

REFERENCES

IPSO. �e State of the Ocean 2013 (2013). www.stateoftheocean.org

Kawaguchi, S. et al. Will krill fare well under Southern Ocean acidification? Biology Letters 7, 288-291 (2011).

Parker, L.M. et al. Predicting the response of molluscs to the impact of ocean acidification. Biology 2, 651-692 (2013).

Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Ocean Acidification. Postnote 343 (2009).

Raven, J. Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Policy document, ªe Royal Society (2005).

carbonate found in invertebrate exoskeletons and mollusc shells. These chemical changes can disrupt the growth of exoskeletons, in some cases causing them to dissolve, and increase vulnerability to storm damage.

Predicting a time period when ocean acidification might have a detectable ecological effect is difficult, but could be useful to policymakers. Ecological effects may be detectable around 2030-50, but as seawater pH has already decreased from pre-industrial levels, these effects might already have started. There is a time lag of several decades between increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and carbon dioxide in the sea, so pH will continue to decrease even if carbon dioxide emissions are controlled. This time lag could mean politically agreed emissions targets are ineffective in saving things like coral reefs.

More publicity and awareness of ocean acidification might increase political support for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. But if the human desire for more energy proves irresistible, we may ultimately have to accept the extinction of a considerable range of marine species. It is predicted that acidification will severely impact corals by 2050 and Antarctic krill by the next century. The consequences of the extinction of corals and krill are immense as coral reefs support a diverse number of organisms and Antarctic krill are a major food source for marine mammals.

There is little evidence from the Mauna Loa data that our moves toward low carbon technologies are making any material difference to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The underlying cause of most environmental problems is human population size yet articles on human population control strategies are rare in ecology and conservation publications. Ocean acidification is a big and imminent environmental problem. Extra publicity is needed to provide the political impetus to start mitigating this problem.

All at sea


The demise of botany as a subject is well known (Jones, 2010 and Drea, 2011) and

in 2013 one can no longer study a botany degree in the UK. This could, however, be a matter of semantics: plant science is arguably a more appealing name, and there are plenty of plant science degrees in the UK.

Yet several of the institutions commonly associated with botanical excellence do not offer any plant-based degree titles at all (but do offer zoology). And there does not appear to be much plant biology even in a plant-based degree. Take the BSc in biological sciences (plant biology) at one Russell Group university, for example: specialisation is allowed in the second and third years with options such as animal biology, ecology or genetics, and field modules studying Barbary macaques or zoology in the US.

Jones (ibid.) described the disproportionate number of animal researchers to plant researchers at Oxford, and it is true in most major research universities, as well as at teaching institutions such as my

Where have all the botanists gone?

own. It appears to be harder to get funding for plant-based research even though crop science is vitally important.

Rise of the amateurBiochemistry, genetics, and molecular ecology can all feed into plant science without their practitioners labelling themselves as botanists. Harberd (2006) laments the loss of connectivity between laboratory-based researchers and the natural world – but does the science suffer as a result, and does this mean all ‘traditional’ botanical activities are in decline?

If this is so, who will document changes in distribution and abundance of species to assess biodiversity? Who can confirm that it is in fact Arabidopsis thaliana having its genes sequenced and not Capsella bursa-pastoris?

Thankfully, amateur naturalist activity is on the increase. The Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) has 3,000 members, many active as field botanists making

botanical records. The British Bryological

Society (BBS) has had an increase in membership in the

last 10 years,

Sarah Whild looks at why a once cherished subject seems to be disappearing

Sarah Whild is senior lecturer in plant ecology at Manchester Metropolitan University and chair of the Training and Education Committee, Botanical Society of the British Isles.

REFERENCES

Drea, S. �e End of the Botany Degree in the UK. Bioscience Education, 17 (2011).

Harberd, N. Seed to Seed – �e secret life of plants (Bloomsbury, 2006).

Jones, S. Where have all the British botanists gone, just when we need them? �e Daily Telegraph, 14 September, 2010.

particularly among the under-40s.While undergraduate degrees in

botany or plant science have all but disappeared, part-time courses in field botany, biological recording or vegetation science are flourishing. This year an online botany course sponsored by the BSBI and the Field Studies Council was fully subscribed and could have been filled at least twice over. Short courses and day schools are offered at a number of higher education (HE) institutions and through wildlife trusts, records centres and professional organisations.

Funding shortfallIn 2008 the House of Lords Select Committee on Taxonomy reported that the need for botanists and other field taxonomists, in order to audit biodiversity change, was part of our responsibilities under the Rio Convention.

The Joint Nature Conservation Committee has a European obligation to monitor for change in biodiversity, delivered mainly through voluntary recording schemes and societies such as the BSBI and the BBS. Forward thinking HE institutions are providing continuing professional development training in field taxonomy via postgraduate programmes or short courses, but funding is virtually nonexistent, with student loans only available for undergraduate degrees.

If we are to sustain our supply of botanists, one of the biggest impediments is funding for this training, requiring a serious commitment by Government.

So where have all the botanists gone? There may be few botanists in the lab, but the good news is they are being trained and seem to have migrated out into the field. Hopefully, if the sun is shining, they are out there botanising.Turn to page 12 for our feature on how arboreta safeguard our forests.

A liverwort from Ernst Haeckel’s Artforms of Nature, 1904.

08_BIO_60_3_OPINION.indd 9 22/05/2013 14:50

Sarah Whild’s original article lamented the demise of botany degrees

Biology degrees: Survival of the fittest

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COMPETITIONPHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS 2013

FEEDINGLIFE


Paddy RyanBad Day, Good DayA great blue heron eating fish.“Herons have to survive. By definition something has to die for this to happen. This unfortunate minnow was the victim.”

Kim Chong KeatFeeding YoungA mother bird feeding her young.“The baby bird needs food, the mother bird needs food – all predators need food.”

Khalid Rayhan ShawonRain: �e Source of Drinking WaterA girl collects rainwater from the drought-hit soil of an open field where rainwater gathers.“In Gabura, after cyclone Aila, the whole area was submerged by seawater. Local people collect the rainwater from the open fields and preserve it for drinking.”

W e’re delighted to present the full shortlist for our 2013 Photography

Competition, ‘Feeding Life’.We received 600 images from

nearly 300 entrants, featuring all sorts of organisms (including humans) eating, drinking, hunting, harvesting, pollinating, feeding their young and growing.

The overall winner was Putu Sudiarta from Denpasar in Indonesia, with his stunning

picture of a bee feeding at a flower. The winner in the under 18s category was Jack Settle from Oklahoma, who impressed the judges with an amazing shot that captures a jumping spider attacking a fly.

The winners were presented with their prizes as part of the Biology Week award ceremony in central London in October. Putu received the top prize of £1,000 while Jack flew over from the US to receive his £500 prize and a copy of Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom software.

Catherine Draycott, head of Wellcome Images and chair of the judging panel, said of Putu Sudiarta’s winning image: “The judges were really bowled over by

the quality of the image. It is an absolutely perfect shot – not just of the bee itself but of the part of the plant the bee is aiming for.”

Of Jack Settle’s winning image in the Young Photographer of

the Year category, Draycott said: “Close up you can

see the bright red of the male spider’s face, but also the photographer’s reflection

in the spider’s eyes, which really made us all laugh. It is

an amazing image.”The number of entrants to the

competition is growing every year, with 20% more participants than last year. Some of the images from the shortlist also featured in The Telegraph, The Independent, the Metro and on the CBBC website.

1st

Putu SudiartaHunting NectarA bee hunting the nectar of a sunflower.“In nature bees hunt for nectar to feed on, without intending to help pollination.”

the Year category, Draycott said: “Close up you can

really made us all laugh. It is

SOCIETY PHOTO

COMPETITION2013

Bambang SetyawanFight for Life CircleRed ants killing a fly for food in the circle of a small root.“The image clearly shows how the ants are struggling to live by eating the fly. They’re feeding for life.”

Kristhian Castro ValenciaDinner PlateAn ant feeding from a plant.“In this scene a plant feeds ants through a kind of plate called an extrafloral nectary.”


COMPETITIONPHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS 2013

Partha Pratim SahaDe-stoningFemale farmers drying, cleaning and de-stoning the paddy in a rice mill yard.“Rice is the staple food for 65% of the population in India. Paddy in its raw form cannot be consumed by human beings. It needs to be suitably processed for obtaining rice.”

Rebecca CondrutiSquirrel FeastA squirrel from the Grand Canyon (pictured in the background) nibbling on a piece of apple.“This picture of a squirrel from the Grand Canyon shows the struggle of life in the animal kingdom and how a crumb on the ground or an apple in the trash can make a difference in an animal’s life. We all depend on each other.”

Jack SettleJumping Spider Eats InsectA Habronattus coecatus jumping spider preying on a winged insect.“This image shows a jumping spider feasting on an insect. Jumping spiders use their keen vision to calculate the exact distance between themselves and their prey. At just the right moment, they will pounce on the prey item, and inject venom to turn the insides of the prey into mush.”

Gabija VyšniauskaitėGenetic EngineeringExperiment – growing a seed in a little bubble of gel.“People are trying to grow plants as cheaply and as conveniently as possible, regardless of their healthiness.”

João Alexandre Porto da Rocha CoutinhoFeeding NatureA fisherman relaxes after finishing work and watches the seagulls discover the discarded fish. This is a rare moment of beauty in his daily activities.“The fisherman gives food to the seagulls, showing how nature can live in harmony with humans in the same space.”

YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHER

OF THE YEAR CATEGORY

Debdatta Chakraborty�e FishermenFishermen casting their nets in a body of water.“Water bodies are created in the drought prone districts of West Bengal to combat dry spells. But these water bodies also serve as food suppliers to the local villages.”

be consumed by human

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18 / THE BIOLOGIST / Vol 60 No 6 THE BIOLOGIST / 19

MOLECULAR BIOLOGYDNA’S ATOMIC STRUCTURE

The ability to look at the structure of DNA at the atomic level has been key to understanding this miraculous molecule, as scientist and illustrator

David Goodsell discovers

In 1953, Watson and Crick presented their model for the DNA double helix, revealing the

way genetic information is held in a cell. In the years since, DNA has proven to be a lively molecule that is looped, unwound, copied, repaired, edited, chemically modified, and more recently, engineered. A closer look at DNA’s atomic structures (and its related cellular partners) has since revealed much more about the complex workings of this amazing molecule.

Early work on DNA structure used DNA that had been isolated from cells. Fibres of this natural DNA diffract x-rays into a characteristic pattern – the classic helical structure proposed by Watson and Crick, known as a B-helix. A truly atomic glimpse at DNA, however, had to wait for several decades. Techniques for the chemical synthesis of small pieces of DNA, with exact nucleotide sequences, made this possible. These well-defined pieces of DNA can be coaxed to form single crystals, which provide much more detailed x-ray diffraction patterns (as shown in Fig. 2 overleaf), which can be analysed to determine the location of each atom in the molecule.

Since then protein and DNA sequencing technology has improved rapidly, and the amount of structural data on DNA and other molecular machines has grown enormously. The Protein Data Bank has become the primary archive of atomic structures for biological molecules and now contains almost 95,000 entries, 1,500 of which include DNA,

Fig. 1. The DNA polymerase from the hot spring bacterium Thermus aquaticus is widely used in the lab for the polymerase chain reaction

either on its own or complexed with proteins or drugs.

Here is just a little of the structural biology of DNA that has been discovered thanks to our ability to view its atomic structure.

DEPICTING DNAAS WELL AS HIS WORK as a molecular biologist, David Goodsell employs various artistic techniques to visualise biological macromolecules. Here he uses watercolour to show the shapes and sizes of molecules,

based on information gathered from x-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy and electron microscopy.

ªe illustration shows DNA in the nucleus stored as chromatin, a compact form with DNA (shown here in turquoise) wrapped around histone proteins (blue) to form a long chain of nucleosomes. When DNA replicates,

it is unwound from nucleosomes, the two strands are separated, and the enzyme DNA polymerase (large complex in magenta at the centre) builds new strands (shown in white) to complement the original strands.

David also develops graphics programmes to visualise individual molecules, as seen in figures 2 and 4.

THE TWISTS AND TURNS

OF DNA


MOLECULAR BIOLOGYDNA’S ATOMIC STRUCTURE

The machinery of replicationThe hallmark of the DNA helix is its ability to replicate, copying all of the genetic information into a new strand. Structures of various polymerases, such as the taq polymerase (Fig. 1, previous page) have revealed how these enzymes unwind DNA and build complementary DNA strands.

The enzymes are often shaped like a hand that grips the unwound DNA, performing the polymerisation reaction in the ‘palm’. These polymerases often also include a second active site that tests the new strand and, if the wrong nucleotide is added, it chops it off. This ‘proofreading’ means the process is incredibly accurate. In addition, the large polymerase complexes that duplicate DNA in our cells include a ring-shaped clamp that locks the enzyme on the DNA, allowing it to copy vast stretches of DNA without falling off.

Repairing errors and restricting accessDNA is constantly under attack from chemicals and radiation in the environment. For instance, for every minute you are in the sun, UV radiation damages 50-100 bases in each skin cell, sometimes by causing neighbouring bases to bond together (Fig. 4 overleaf). A host of enzymes are continually scanning DNA looking for damaged bases, snipping them out or repairing them on site. For more extensive damage, whole stretches of DNA are removed and rebuilt based on the information held in duplicate strands. Even with these many mechanisms for repair, however, errors build up over the life of an organism.

When viruses infect a cell, they hijack the cell’s molecular machinery and force it to build new viruses. But many bacteria have developed an effective process to protect themselves from infection by viral DNA. As they are replicating their DNA, they add methyl groups to nucleotides on the new strand, which act as tags to mark the DNA as their own. Then, a set of ‘restriction enzymes’ look for untagged DNA and break it into pieces.

This would remain just a curiosity if it hadn’t proved so useful for biotechnology: restriction enzymes are base-specific DNA scissors that may be used to edit and

Fig. 3. Idealised models of three forms of the DNA double helix were discovered based on early experiments with fibres of DNA. Left, A-DNA found in high-salt conditions; middle, the typical B-DNA found in cells; right, left-handed Z-DNA

ªe structures in the Protein Data Bank are freely available for use in research and education, as are many tools for analysis and visualisation

at sites such as the RCSB PDB (www.rcsb.org) and the Nucleic Acid Database (ndbserver.rutgers.edu).

Several structures from the archive are included in this article: taq polymerase in

entry 1tau, DNA with a thymine dimer in entry 1ttd, EcoRI with DNA in entry 1eri, a short piece of B-DNA in entry 196d, and the large DNA origami object is split into five entries: 2ymf, 2ymg, 2ymh, 2ymi, and 2ymr.

DNA IN 3D

Fig. 2. X-ray diffraction of fibres of purified cellular DNA (top left) allowed Watson and Crick to model the overall structure of DNA, and today, x-ray diffraction of crystals of small pieces of DNA (bottom left) allows us to determine the position of every atom


MOLECULAR BIOLOGYDNA IMAGING

reassemble DNA genomes to engineer them according to our needs (see Fig. 5).

The double helix The B-helix is by far the most common conformation found in living cells, but DNA actually adopts a variety of conformations (see Fig. 3, previous page). If you dry out DNA with lots of salt, it forms a chunkier helix, termed an A-helix. This structure is more commonly seen in RNA, which can’t form a B-helix because of the crowding of the extra hydroxyl groups.

DNA can also form more exotic structures. Sequences with alternating cytosine and guanine nucleotides can form a left-handed helix, the opposite of the normal right-handed B-helix. Four strands can also come together to form a symmetrical ‘quadriplex’. The biological significance of these interesting forms is still a matter of debate.

DNA nanotechnologyMore recently, researchers in nanotechnology have looked to DNA as a raw material for molecular design. Because the rules of base pairing are well understood, they can synthesise DNA strands that will fold into a custom nanosized object (Fig. 6). This approach has been termed ‘DNA origami’.

It starts with one long DNA strand. Then, a collection of small staple strands are synthesised and force the long strand to fold up. All manner of 3-D shapes have been created by this technique, building on the perfect double helix provided by nature.

Research into the structural biology of DNA has revealed the basic genetic mechanisms that allow cells to grow and reproduce, and modern medicine is using this knowledge to treat people when things go wrong.

Anticancer therapy, in particular, relies strongly on our understanding of DNA structure and function. Cells become cancerous when they lose their controls on growth and reproduction, so cancer chemotherapy often targets cells that are growing too quickly. Unfortunately, these drugs also target other normal cells that are actively growing, leading to severe side effects. Researchers are currently using our understanding of DNA to improve these drugs, to design new therapies that will selectively attack only the cancer cells.

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Fig. 4.

Fig. 6.

Fig. 4. Ultraviolet radiation can damage DNA by causing bases to bond together (shown in magenta)Fig. 5. The restriction enzyme EcoRI (blue) has made a staggered cut in the DNA, creating two “sticky ends” on the piecesFig. 6. This custom nanoscale object is composed of one long strand of DNA held together with many short ‘staple’ strands (two are shown in green)

Fig. 5.

David S Goodsell is associate professor of molecular biology at the Scripps Research Institute, and author and illustrator of The Machinery of Life. He divides his time between research into computer-aided drug design and science outreach with the RCSB Protein Data Bank.

BIOGRAPHY


SYNTHETIC BIOLOGYINDUSTRY VIEW

Belinda Clarke reports on whether UK synthetic biology research can deliver lucrative commercial technologies

Artemisinin to treat malariaProbably the most commonly quoted example of the application of synthetic biology is a project aiming to stabilise the supply of a cost effective version of artemisinin, a compound found naturally in the sweet wormwood plant used to treat malaria. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded work that

enabled the pathway for synthesis of artemisinin to be re-created

in E. coli. The technology was developed by USA-

based Amyris and has been licensed to Sanofi, which, in partnership with PATH, is planning to produce 35 tonnes of synthetic

artemisinin in 2013 and 50-60 tonnes per

year from 2014.

BiorenewablesThe renewable fuels market has high hopes for the application of synthetic biology to construct new

S ynthetic biology, according to science minister David Willetts, could one day

“fuel us, feed us and heal us”. Deemed one of “the eight great technologies” by Willetts in January 2013, this relatively new field combines molecular biology with engineering, and aims to enhance existing biological systems so they perform useful functions. Synthetic organisms could, potentially, produce biofuels en masse, seek out cancer tumours or glow in the presence of dangerous bacteria, for example.

Not surprisingly, synthetic biology (synbio) is an emerging sector expected to deliver growth for the UK in the future. But can it realistically deliver – and within the timescales needed by policymakers, investors and industry to justify its exalted position?

Confidence in UK synbio is built in part on the critical mass of research capabilities. It comprises a set of multidisciplinary technologies, requiring the juxtaposition of classical ‘wet’ molecular biology tools

(DNA manipulation and metabolic engineering) alongside ‘dry’ in silico computational tools to allow predictive design and modelling.

The Biologist has already shown the UK’s track record in genetics and genomics research (‘Happy Birthday DNA’, The Biologist Vol 60(2) 22-25). Synbio innovations stand on the shoulders of these fundamental biological competencies.

The UK ranks second only to the US in terms of peer-reviewed synbio publications over the last

10 years1, generated by around 200 academics. With

46 higher education institutions in the UK

with active synbio programmes, and a national Special Interest Group with a membership

exceeding 700 at the time of writing2,

it is reasonable to expect translation of

some of this capability into commercial activity.

The Innovation and Knowledge Centre for synbio based at Imperial College London will be a key player in helping this translation process, providing support for businesses and academics wanting to accelerate a technology or concept to market.

A ‘commercial ecosystem’ in UK synbio is evolving and expanding. Companies vary in size, ranging from the eight new start-ups founded in 2012, through to multinational corporations. Some are active in product development – such as high value chemicals, renewable energy, new pharmaceuticals – while others are developing platform tools and services such as microbial strain optimisation, high throughput gene sequencing, predictive modelling software and instrumentation.

A global opportunityThe opportunity to design and build new biological systems, or modify existing ones, offers huge potential to a number of markets. Selecting those in which the UK is best placed to deliver value is more difficult.

Estimates about the potential global market opportunity for the synthetic biology industry vary but they are all sizeable – one of the most optimistic being over US$10bn by 2016. The jury, however, is still out as to how much of this will realistically be captured and retained in the UK, and in what areas.

The UK synthetic biology community uses an encouragingly broad spectrum of host organisms, or “chassis”. From bacteria such as the lab workhorse E. coli, to unicellular algae such as

microbial strains. Novel strains of biofuel producing microbes have been developed that are adapted to live on various types of feedstock carbon without additional, costly pre-processing steps.

Ingenza has developed a new yeast strain which has been piloted at a scale of 2.4 million litres. The increased process efficiency from its use translates to an annual cost saving of US$500,000.

Other synthetic biology approaches to developing biofuels include microalgae engineered to produce valuable products and improved processability (Algenuity); the use of Clostridium sp. to develop high value products like the petrochemical n-butanol (Green Biologics); and using heat-loving Geobacillus to ferment waste biomass into cellulosic ethanol and other renewable chemicals (TMO Renewables).

Synthetic biology for weed managementA team led by Dr Travis Bayer at Oxford University is working on synthetic biology approaches to

manage Striga, a parasitic weed that is a major constraint on crop productivity in Africa, affecting around 300 million smallholder farmers.

GREAT UK SYNBIO PROJECTS

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KEEPING IT REAL

Dr Belinda Clarke is lead technologist, synthetic biology, at the Technology Strategy Board. She is also a member of the UK Synthetic Biology Leadership Council.

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SYNTHETIC BIOLOGYINDUSTRY VIEW

REFERENCES 1 Oldham, P., Hall, S., Burton, G. (2012) Synthetic Biology: Mapping the Scientific Landscape. PLoS ONE 7(4): e34368. 2 https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/synthetic-biology-special-interest-group3 Synthetic Biology Roadmap, www.innovateuk.org/_assets/tsb_ syntheticbiology roadmap.pdf


One way of managing the weed is to apply strigolactone on farmland to induce ‘suicidal’ germination of Striga seeds, but chemical synthesis of strigolactone is prohibitively expensive.

The team at Imperial College has engineered yeast cells to produce strigolactones and precursor compounds by introducing a synthetic metabolic pathway using plant and microbial genes. They have shown in laboratory trials that yeast-produced strigolactone is effective at triggering germination of Striga seeds at extremely low concentrations and has a protective effect on host crops. Controlled field trials are planned next year.

Sharing and recycling DNA partsA number of UK start-ups have

been focusing on platform technologies that enable

DNA molecules to be built, catalogued

and shared. These molecules, that act as ‘parts’ in synthetic biology engineering,

may have been made in other

labs or may be commercially

available.By logging, validating

and referencing these molecules,

and providing platform software that helps with the design and sourcing of DNA parts, a number of businesses are helping the global synthetic biology community make more efficient use of synthetic biology components previously built by others. Two examples of start-ups in this area are Desktop Genetics and Lab Genius.

Build-A-PromoterPromoters are regulatory elements encoded by specific DNA sequences which influence the expression of specific genes. Some can be influenced by changing environmental conditions, and it is possible to design and build

Chlamydomonas, with plants, insects and mammalian cell lines as well, UK researchers are experts in handling a range of organisms that will help design new biological systems or redesign existing ones.

Alongside research and commercialisation capability, we need facilities to grow organisms making novel products reliably, at scale. We also need internationally agreed, standardised approaches to the nomenclature and characterisation of genetic parts and devices. These are being discussed at an international and European level to help the global industry work together and speak the same language.

The Technology Strategy Board, with Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) co-funding, has supported 15 company-led feasibility projects worth up to £500,000 each. Further funding for up to six new multidisciplinary research centres in the UK has been announced, as well as a competition for industry-led projects to develop novel tools and services to support synbio.

For the ambition to become commercial reality, issues relating to intellectual property and open models – based on sharing key parts and devices – need to be agreed on.

Many of these are being tackled by the national Synthetic Biology Leadership Council, created in response to a recommendation in the 2012 Synthetic Biology Roadmap3 and co-chaired by David Willetts. This body’s task is to deliver recommendations and to create the conditions that allow the UK to become a world-leading industrial hub, and ensuring policy and regulations are keeping pace with technological developments.

Responsible innovationEvery potentially disruptive technology is accompanied by significant responsibilities around its application. The ability to redesign and create de novo new to nature compounds and genetic constructs is an undertaking not to be considered lightly. All publicly supported synthetic biology projects are scrutinised by an expert panel for their ethical, social, legal and regulatory implications around responsible innovation.

So can synthetic biology live up to its expectations? The evidence suggests it can. There remain barriers and challenges to be overcome, but with responsible, innovative and creative input from innovators, and a continuation of the Government’s enabling approach to science, that confidence should prove well placed.

promoters that control the expression of specific genes under defined conditions.

Custom-building bespoke synthetic promoters enables gene expression in novel or existing biological systems to be carefully controlled. Edinburgh-based Synpromics is one example of a company that has turned this service into a commercial business offering.

Inspiring the next generationiGEM (ung.igem.org) is a worldwide synthetic biology competition for teams of undergraduates and, more recently, high school students and entrepreneurs. Central to the competition is a Registry of Standard Biological Parts (called BioBricks) which contains parts deposited by previous teams, and from which the challenge is

to design and build a functioning biological system in living cells.

Any new parts developed during the project are also

logged in the registry. Originally created in

2003 as a summer project at MIT, it is now a not-for-profit foundation and last year 190 teams and

more than 3,000 participants from 34

countries took part. Recent examples of

projects include biosensors to detect arsenic in groundwater

and red blood cell substitutes to transport oxygen in blood.

Synbio projects are scrutinised for their ethical, social, legal and regulatory implications

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In October Professor Jane Francis took over as director of the British Antarctic Survey,

an organisation which has led the UK’s exploration and research in the region for more than 60 years. As a palaeobotanist and geologist, Professor Francis’ research uses fossilised vegetation to understand how the Earth’s climate has changed throughout history.

A large part of your academic work has involved looking for fossils in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Presumably you enjoy working in polar environments? I absolutely do. I’ve done about 10 seasons in Antarctica and six field trips to the Arctic, and they are fantastic places to work. It’s amazing to go somewhere that is so remote and cold and find a leaf that shows the climate was once almost tropical there.

Whenever you set up camp in the field – a huge operation that can take a day or two – there’s always a moment when the helicopter or ship leaves, when you realise it’s very quiet, and you’re just a small group of people alone in a very isolated place for a couple of months.

It’s generally a very beautiful and extremely humbling place – the climate can be pretty fierce and you’re just a tiny speck in this awesome landscape. But I’ve been in the Arctic peninsula when the sun is shining, and when the wind drops


INTERVIEWPROFESSOR JANE FRANCIS

BREAKING THE ICE

Tom Ireland meets the new director of the British Antarctic Survey,

Professor Jane Francis

it’s actually quite warm. You can just sit and watch an amazingly serene and tranquil landscape, with the sunlight glinting off icebergs and the odd bird call. Then you don’t want to be anywhere else in the world.

Any hairy experiences? We take first aid and health and safety very seriously so I’ve not really had any close calls. The scariest experience was when I was working on Svalbard (Norway) a few years ago and a polar bear came quite close to our camp. In the end he fell asleep in a gully for a few hours in front of our camp and then left, but you do have to be very careful.

How did you get into polar-based research in the first place?As a geologist I started working on fossil plants for my PhD and did a project on the rocks of the Jurassic coast in Dorset. I started working there on fossil trees, leaves and pollen and reconstructing ancient forests. Then, while working in central Australia, I had an invitation from the Canadian Geological Survey to go and see these amazing fossil forests they’d discovered up in the high Arctic. They were spectacularly preserved – they hadn’t been petrified and turned to stone like you’d usually find. You could saw open the wood and it would burn; you could pick the leaves up and they’d trickle through

Professor Francis among emperor penguins in the Antarctic

We spend a couple of months in the field in a tent camp measuring the geological sections to build a picture of what the environment was like. Then we take sediment samples and try to find fossil leaves and wood to try to reconstruct the vegetation.

How do you use vegetation to draw conclusions about climate change?We use as many parts of the fossil as we can. From the fossil wood we can identify the type of wood from its structure and techniques that modern botanists use – things like tree ring analysis and changes in cellular composition to look

your fingers, just like in a deciduous wood floor in autumn. Except they were 45 million years old.

What do you find so interesting about recreating polar forests? They’re just so unusual – there aren’t really any polar forests around today so they are like a window into the past when the world was warmer, with higher levels of carbon dioxide, and forests could live way, way closer to the poles. And that’s happened many times in the past.

I worked with geologists in New Zealand looking at forests from 250

million years ago that covered great swathes of the Southern Continent. The leaves fell into swampy areas and became coal, which is where most of the southern hemisphere’s coal comes from.

How do you find fossil forests when everything is covered in ice?Most of the places we work have good exposure of rocks, for example coastal cliffs, or mountains that stick up above the ice sheet, or islands without an ice sheet. Usually someone has been there and recorded evidence of plant life and we go and look at it in more detail.

country and they’ve been really good at winning research grants. In terms of oceanography, it’s an important frontier for research and I think there’s huge potential for research that will take place between our two organisations.

Would a merger have diluted Britain’s ‘strategic presence’ in the area at a time when there are concerns over ownership of the region?I don’t think the issues in the last two years were anything to do with that. BAS has two missions – to do high-quality, world leading science and to lead the British presence in Antarctica. By carrying on doing good science we’ll do just that.

What are your overall aims as director? BAS will just carry on doing great science. There are some really important scientific questions to answer about the polar regions – these regions are the most sensitive to climate change. We need to understand all of the environmental systems that operate there and the speed at which they change.


at seasonality. Then there’s also analysis of leaf size, shape, venation and things like that. We also look more generally at the type of tree and the climate envelope it grows in today, as well as pollen and their modern relatives. We’ll also look at the climate signal in things like isotopes and soil profiles.

Will you still get to go to Antarctica as much in your role as director? It’s going to be much more difficult but I’ll certainly be going there to visit the bases. I do hope I can manage to work in the field for another season. There is a lot of

interest and a lot to be learned about the faunas of the deep sea and southern ocean around Antarctica – people are discovering new faunas there all the time.

There’s also a lot of work on lakes as they are a really good record of past climates too. Subglacial lakes under the ice sheet are very interesting, looking at whether there are bacteria or life forms that have been isolated from the rest of the world for a long time in these hidden environments. I hope there will be other attempts to reach Lake Ellsworth [an operation to drill 3km down into the subglacial was abandoned in 2012] as it’s a really exciting project.

There was talk of a merger recently between the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the National Oceanography Centre – presumably to help both organisations deal with budget cuts. How is BAS coping with the general reduction in research funding? BAS scientists are very good. A recent assessment found that the standard of their work is as good as that of the best universities in the

Fossils found in the field give Professor Francis, pictured here in the 1980s, an idea of what the landscape was like millions of years ago

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Jane Francis trained in geology and is professor of palaeoclimatology at the University of Leeds, where she is currently dean of the faculty of environment. In 2002 she was awarded the Polar Medal in recognition of her contribution to British polar science. She was appointed director of the British Antarctic Survey in March 2013.

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INTERVIEWPROFESSOR JANE FRANCIS

Lake Ellsworth, where scientists have attempted to find life forms


In the last 40 years our ability to see beneath the skin has undergone a rapid evolution.

There is now a wide range of non-invasive imaging devices that detect radioactive, magnetic, optical, auditory or electrical signals from the body. Together with advanced mathematical modelling, we can use them to reconstruct exquisite images of our internal biology.


TECHNOLOGYBIOLOGICAL IMAGING

SEEING IS BELIEVING

Kevin Cox and Roger Gunn explain how human imaging is crucial for drug development

The ability to provide ever-higher resolution images of anatomy, and functional images of specific biological processes, has significantly increased the potential of imaging technology for healthcare applications. Diagnosis, treatment, stratification, and disease monitoring are all possible thanks to high quality and instant clinical imaging. Increasingly, PET and MRI techniques (see ‘picture of health’, overleaf) play an important role in experimental medicine studies and translational drug development in humans.

In drug development the hurdles and complexities involved in

developing novel, efficacious and well differentiated drugs have risen along with the associated costs (Scannell et al., 2012).

We are all aware of the often-repeated refrain that it takes around 10 years and over $1bn to develop each new molecular entity (NME) – largely due to the number of failures. These ever increasing R&D costs are unsustainable for the pharmaceutical industry and the wider community, and it is now more important than ever that well informed, evidence based decisions are made on whether to progress candidates through the drug

development pipeline or to kill them early with a fast-to-fail strategy and identify alternatives.

As a drug proceeds further along the development pipeline, greater and greater resources are committed, so it becomes increasingly important to make the right decisions as early as possible in the development process. This is where non-invasive imaging has a number of strengths and, with targeted application, can provide important information in the early phases of drug development (phases 0, 1 and 2, where the emphasis is on testing in small groups for safety, pharmacokinetics,

pharmacodynamics and early readouts of efficacy).

There are many key questions in clinical pharmacology that need to be addressed early on: the drug exposure levels in the target tissue; whether the drug interacts with its biological target at levels associated with pharmacological activity without exceeding the limits of tolerability; and whether the compound causes its intended pharmacological effects. These criteria have been referred to as the “three pillars” of drug development (Morgan et al., 2012) and having such knowledge reduces the risks of decision making, which can

lead to shorter and lower cost development programmes.

Radiolabelling and PET imaging of a central nervous system drug, for example, can demonstrate that it effectively penetrates the blood brain barrier when first administered to humans, providing confidence for drug developers that efflux pumps in the barrier are not preventing the compound from entering target tissue. A combination of these data, with measurements of non-specific binding, allows us to get a direct measurement of the free brain concentration of the drug, in man, in vivo (Gunn et al., 2012).

We can reconstruct exquisite images of our internal biology

Direct measurements of drug-target occupancy can also be made using PET. A suitable radioligand will bind to the target site of the drug being tested. The more a drug binds with its target, the more radioligand is displaced, providing a signal proportional to the available concentration of target sites.

Measurement of the change in available concentration pre- and post-drug administration, at different doses, enables characterisation of the relationship between dose and the level of target engagement that is achieved (Fig. 1). These data can be obtained in small cohorts (10 subjects) in first-time-in-human studies, providing early data to indicate whether a drug is achieving a pharmacologically active concentration and causing its intended pharmacological effect at tolerable doses (Searle et al., 2010; Comley et al., 2013).

The data also has real value in designing larger scale, later-phase efficacy studies by making sure that the right dose levels are chosen in these often expensive trials. What’s more, if target occupancy can be linked directly to efficacy, then these techniques can provide a direct measure of the therapeutic index – i.e. how close the minimum effective dose is to a dose that causes toxicity.

Functional changes in the body due to the pharmacodynamics effect of drugs can be elegantly picked up by PET or MRI. In patients with Alzheimer’s, the recent introduction of PET probes measuring beta-amyloid – a protein implicated in the disease – in the brain are already being employed to investigate the effect of novel therapeutics in small cohorts (Rinne et al., 2010). These measures complement structural information on grey matter volume loss that can be measured with MRI (Jack et al., 2008).

In patients with cancer, pharmacodynamic readouts can provide key early information on the efficacy of therapy before

shrinkage in the tumour is observed by other methods. The development of imatinib, which holds the record for the drug with the fastest approval time by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, was greatly aided by detection of pharmacodynamic changes in cellular metabolism using PET and the compound FDG.


These changes preceded observed structural changes by weeks and sometimes months (Demetri et al., 2002). Other pharmacodynamic markers of cancer indicators like cell proliferation, angiogenesis (blood vessel growth that can indicate malignancy) and hypoxia (deprivation of oxygen in an area) are currently available and a number of other pharmacodynamic markers are under development.

In addition to providing exquisite anatomical detail, MRI is capable of measuring a number of pharmacodynamic outputs important to drug development. MRI has been used repeatedly to test neuropsychological effects

DO YOU HAVE AN OPINION ON THIS ARTICLE? CONTACT US AT [email protected] Vol 60 No 6 / THE BIOLOGIST / 35

TECHNOLOGYBIOLOGICAL IMAGING

REFERENCES Comley, R.A. et al. Monoamine transporter occupancy of a novel triple reuptake inhibitor in baboons and humans using positron emission tomography. J. Pharmacol. Exp. �er. 346(2), 311-7 (2013).Demetri, G.D. et al. Efficacy and safety of imatinib mesylate in advanced gastrointestinal stromal tumors. N. Engl. J. Med. 347, 472-480 (2002).Gunn, R.N. et al. Combining PET biodistribution and equilibrium dialysis assays to assess the free brain concentration and BBB transport of CNS drugs. J. Cereb. Blood Flow Metab. 32(5), 874-83 (2012).Jack Jr, C.R. et al. ªe Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI): MRI methods. J Magn. Reson. Imaging 27(4), 685-91 (2008).Morgan, P. et al. Can the flow of medicines be improved? Fundamental pharmacokinetic and pharmacological principles toward improving Phase II survival. Drug Discov. Today 17(9-10), 419-24 (2012).Rabiner, E.A. et al. Pharmacological differentiation of opioid receptor antagonists by molecular and functional imaging of target occupancy and food reward-related brain activation in humans. Mol. Psychiatry 16(8), 826-35 (2011).Rinne, J.O. et al. 11C-PiB PET assessment of change in fibrillar amyloid-beta load in patients with Alzheimer’s disease treated with bapineuzumab: a phase 2, double-blind, placebo-controlled, ascending-dose study. Lancet Neurol. 9(4), 363-72 (2010).Searle, G. et al. Imaging dopamine D3 receptors in the human brain with positron emission tomography, [11C]PHNO, and a selective D3 receptor antagonist. Biol. Psychiatry 68(4), 392-9 (2010).Scannell, J.W. et al. Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency. Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 11(3), 191-200 (2012).

PICTURE OF HEALTHMRI and CTMagnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) provide high quality anatomical information that allows the non invasive measurement of, for example, a tumour volume pre and post-therapy.

PETPositron emission tomography (PET), or molecular imaging,

allows the study of biological processes at the cellular and molecular levels by capturing and analysing the emissions (positrons) of a radioactive tag attached to a molecule of interest. At its simplest, PET can be used to explore whether a radiolabelled compound, such as a candidate drug, reaches the intended tissue. By using specialist labelled reporting probes it can also measure the concentration of proteins, enzyme activity or the occupancy of drugs at their target sites.

Kevin Cox is chief executive of Imanova, a joint venture between the Medical Research Council and Kings College, Imperial College and University College London. He has experience in biopharmaceutical development and the translation of new technology for clinical and commercial benefit.

BIOGRAPHY

of drugs on the central nervous system in early stage development, and in conjunction with PET these effects can be linked with target engagement (Fig. 2, Rabiner et al., 2011). MRI has a still-growing set of functional readouts, including measures of vascularity, permeability, blood flow, as well as cellularity determined by membrane barriers to water diffusion which are often applied in early stage oncology trials. Currently, there are almost 300 active phase one and two clinical trials of pharmaceutical compounds using MRI listed in the clinicaltrials.gov database.

Imaging of humans provides most value to drug development

Fig. 1. (below right) PET study showing the level of target engagement in a particular drug at different dosing levels

Fig. 2. (below) Brain activity following stimulus using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

when it is targeted at answering key questions at the right time, and when the results directly impact on the decision making process for a given candidate. Imaging creates little value when applied retrospectively to explain why a compound has failed – it should be used prospectively.

The application of experimental medicine studies early in phase one and phase two incorporating imaging biomarkers can provide valuable information. Well- designed, data rich studies in small numbers of subjects can support strong early decision making and is a key part of effective drug development.

Roger Gunn is director of research and development and head of analysis at Imanova. He is a visiting professor at the University of Oxford and a professor of molecular neuroimaging at Imperial College London.


EDUCATIONTEACHING BIOLOGY ONLINE

There is something special about going into a science laboratory: the faint smell of chemicals

and molten agar, the sound of stirrers and shaker beds and the generally light, bright atmosphere. Putting on a lab coat marks the entry into a world of machines, glassware and samples. A world where results are anticipated, failed experiments can be experienced and health and safety is paramount.

For the last two years, however, I have taught practical environmental science to groups of undergraduate students without ever meeting them face to face, in either the field or the lab. With technology and software it is now possible to teach practical science online – but how does the distance teaching experience compare to campus based teaching?

Laboratories (and field sites) are about tangible things: sights, sounds, smells, and contact with the environment of the experiment. They are also about a psychological contract with the experiment: a state of mind that recognises rituals, drivers for success, and the satisfaction of doing an experiment.

But online learning can now provide a range of teaching and learning opportunities enabling students to conduct practical experiments. Webcams can be trained on ‘live’ experiments in the laboratory. Students can view incubation bottles and digital displays in a lab based experiment, for instance, to calculate the biological oxygen demand of water samples (Open University, 2013a). This provides an opportunity to observe the experimental set-up and collect data for later analysis and presentation. Such synchronous experiments are similar to the experience of visiting a lab or, say, a greenhouse to make observations.

Other asynchronous, virtual experiments can also be designed so that students can ‘drag and drop’ and select quantities in relation to experimental design components. For example, the determination of pesticides in water samples using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, or the counts of anaerobic microorganisms in water samples (Open University, 2013b).

At Harvard University a ‘Multi-User Virtual Environment’ (MUVE)

A combined approach of practical and online experiences can provide the best of both worlds

has been developed for teaching about ecosystems (Waldrop, 2013). Through EcoMUVE teams of students are able to explore the dynamics of an ecosystem and its surroundings. Such enquiry-based (hands-on problem solving) approaches challenge students to find answers to questions and may be more effective than traditional lecturing techniques (Olson and Loucks-Horsley, 2000).

The ‘practice’ of practical science need not be restricted to the virtual environment. With appropriate briefings on health and safety and experimental design it is possible for students to conduct hands-on fieldwork that is not directly supervised. Surveys (for example, of streams, birds and invertebrates) can be carried out with minimal equipment and suitable field guides. Such practical sessions can be used to encourage collaboration – sharing results and linking results to other databases.

A key point about teaching practical science online is that, as with all learning, good learning should encourage reflection, enable dialogue, foster collaboration, apply theory to practice, create a learner community of peers, encourage creativity and motivate the learner (Conole, 2013). Developing a combined approach of practical and online experiences can provide the best of both worlds. At Bristol ChemLabS, the University of Bristol has developed an award-winning approach to prepare students for practical lab work through online activities using simulations and virtual instruments.

But for online teaching it is important that materials provided for learners are not just the electronic files of presentations previously delivered by the teacher in the lecture room. Similarly, in teaching online practical science, we should not be seeking to reproduce laboratory experiments online; we should be looking to design learning experiences specifically for online use (Robinson, 2013, pers. comm.).

In an evaluation of online science taught at secondary level, Crippen et al (2013) found that student-teacher interactions, student engagement, and non-verbal communications were lacking. The authors suggested that communication tools need to be

Dr Richard Campen CBiol FSB is a freelance environmentalist, an associate lecturer at the Open University, where he teaches practical environmental science, and a guest lecturer at the University of Derby. He is a former director of operations at the Peak District National Park Authority.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr Richard Campen reports on the growing trend for teaching biology practicals online

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digital literacy skills, and still ensuring some ‘real world’ practical experiences for the students.

In the end, as Kellogg (2011) reported, the success of online, as with on-campus, learning depends on students’ commitment to a course of study. The author quotes the then executive director of the Sloan Consortium (Massachusetts): “It’s not about whether it’s online or on the ground. You can have good or bad experiences in both areas.” Either way, a further key point must be quality assurance through appropriate management systems and processes.

In addition to canvassing feedback from students and tutors at the end of online course presentations, there would seem to be scope for further research around pedagogies and perceptions on online learning, including those of employers. In particular, there needs to be more research to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of online practical science learning versus lab based learning.

FURTHER READING AND LINKS■ Bristol ChemLabS www.chemlabs.bris.ac.uk/ LabSkills.html■ Open University virtual experiments www.opensciencelab.ac.uk

better aligned so that “the nature of science is more clearly addressed, the work of students becomes more collaborative and authentic, and the formative elements of a scientific inquiry are more accessible to all participants”.

Mawn and colleagues (2011) explored how online students engaged in learning processes and reached three important conclusions about which all of us engaged in such learning should think. Firstly, process-related objectives are as important as content-related objectives. Secondly, students benefit from opportunities to discuss their findings with a peer group. And thirdly, open ended online experiments may encourage students in self directed questioning and exploration. From a practitioner’s perspective these points do seem to resonate.

The e-learning landscape can contain a range of learning pedagogies (educational techniques) and it is important to think about which skills in practical science are needed now, and will be needed

in the future. With the availability of technology and online courses the ‘anytime, anywhere’ approach to learning is rapidly evolving. It has been said (Miller, 2008) that “today’s students require coursework when they want it, where it is convenient for them, and how it fits their needs”.

Related to this, an interesting aspect of teaching online is that as people access this flexible approach to learning the range of students’

experiences and backgrounds may be very

wide. If the tutor can foster a safe, supportive learning environment, students can bring their professional experience into discussions. Davies (2011) suggests that the very use of creative technologies can connect people to share experiences and collaborate in problem solving as they develop their skills.

It is, therefore, possible to teach practical environmental science well online. In doing so it is important to develop skills in students and tutors using a variety of techniques: developing practice, developing

38 / THE BIOLOGIST / Vol 60 No 6 DO YOU HAVE AN OPINION ON THIS ARTICLE? CONTACT US AT [email protected]

EDUCATIONTEACHING BIOLOGY ONLINE

Students can access laboratory work on screen

REFERENCES Conole, G. Trajectories of e-learning. �ird International Conference on Quality Assurance in Post-Secondary Education. Damman, Saudi Arabia, 27-29 April (2013).Crippen, K. J., Archambault, L. M. & Kern, C. L. ªe Nature of Laboratory Learning Experiences in Secondary Science Online. Research in Science Education 43(3),1029-1050 (2013). Davies, S. Covering the Distance. Environmental Scientist, 34-39 (2011). Kellogg, S. Distance Learning: Online Education. Nature 478, 417-418 (2011).Mawn, M., et al. Hands-on and online: scientific explorations through distance learning, Open Learning 26(2),135-146 (2011).Miller, K. W. Teaching Science Methods Online: Myths About Inquiry-Based Online Learning, Science Educator 17(2), 80-86 (2008).Olson, S. & Loucks-Horsley, S. (Eds) Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards: A Guide for Teaching and Learning, Washington DC, National Academies Press (2000).Open University (2013a & b) Water quality monitoring topic, Practical Environmental Science, virtual learning environment. Module description available online at: www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/sxe288.htm (accessed 9 July 2013).Robinson, D. J. Collaborative Experiments Online in a Module Presented Globally. Bioscience Education 18 (2011). Waldrop, M. M. ªe Virtual Lab. Nature 499, 268-270 (2013).

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Editorial BoardChairPeter R. Shepherd – Auckland

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Cryobiology is the study of how low temperatures affect organisms, biological systems, or biological materials. Research uses temperatures ranging from slightly lower than normal (hypothermic) to cryogenic (−150°C and lower).

Why is cryobiology important?Low temperatures have been used in medicine and to prevent food spoilage since ancient times. Nowadays cryopreservation (freezing) is used in fertility treatment, the transport of human organs, and the long term storage of biological specimens, either for future study or simply as a record of biodiversity.

Certain bacteria can survive thousands of years in extremely cold temperatures, while many plants and animals have interesting adaptations to prevent their tissues freezing.

Cryogenics is a field outside mainstream cryobiology, which involves freezing human bodies or body parts, such as the head, in the hope of future revival. ªis remains a distant prospect.

What careers are available?Cryobiologists work in a range of industries and research areas. ªere are many industrial and medicinal applications of cryopreservation (see interview opposite) and low temperatures are used in a range of direct medical treatments, from minimally invasive ‘cryosurgery’ to simply freezing warts off. Careers are available developing the tools and technology of these processes as well as in the research labs and industries that use them.

ªe study of cold-adapted organisms and the effect of low temperatures on biological

material is also a huge area for research, with many applications in industries such as agriculture, for example protecting plants from frost. Cryo-electron microscopy is a special research tool that allows scientists to study biological materials without fixing them or staining them.

Where can I get more information? ªe Society for Cryobiology and the Society for Low Temperature Biology have promoted the work of cryobiologists since 1964. ªey both host an annual international meeting and the Society for Cryobiology publishes the journal Cryobiology. See their websites for information on cryobiology research, jobs, endorsed cryobiology related courses and meetings. www.societyforcryobiology.orgwww.sltb.info


What does your research involve? I develop cryopreservation techniques for preserving the sperm, eggs and larvae of the commercially important shellfish species we have here in New Zealand – green shell mussels, pacific and flat oysters, abalone and geoducks (Panopea generosa), a large edible clam. I’m developing the freezing techniques and making them robust enough to apply in selective breeding.

How does cryopreservation help selective breeding? Being able to store the embryos or sperm gives breeders more control – you can make crosses on demand between particular individuals and it provides a bank or library of your most valuable individuals that you can go back to, which is important if breeding objectives change. It also means you can create a reference family you can use to compare across generations, instead of using a bunch of wild families as a benchmark.

Mostly the industry is looking to breed shellfish with a high meat to shell ratio, but also it’s about making really nice looking oysters. Oyster herpes had a huge impact on the industry recently so a lot of their focus is on developing disease resistant lines.

Do you eat a lot of seafood or has it put you off?I don’t like oysters! I’ve tried geoduck sashimi, which was really nice. They have this long sort of

neck called a siphon and you slice it up and eat it raw.

How do you freeze the shellfish embryos and sperm? We use chemicals called cryoprotectants to protect the cells while they are cooled. Antifreeze (ethylene glycol) is used as it lowers the temperature at which the water in the cell freezes. Some work outside the cell or stabilise the membrane. These chemicals are often toxic to the cell and their effects vary so we play around with different amounts for each species.

It is also important to control the rate of cooling and warming. When ice forms in the extracellular space, it draws out water from the extracellular solution. Water is drawn out of the cell too. If we cool


INTERVIEW AT A GLANCE

Name Serean AdamsProfession Cryobiology and marine biotechnology scientist, Cawthron Institute, New ZealandQualifications PhD (marine science), University of OtagoInterestsShellfish aquaculture, cryobiology, reproduction and developmental biology in aquatic species, marine biotechnology, conservation biology, ecotoxicology

Being able to store the embryos or sperm gives breeders more control

the cells sufficiently slowly to an intermediate sub-zero temperature (about -30 to -40) then almost all of the water moves out of the cell and eventually when we plunge the cells into liquid nitrogen, the cytoplasm of the cell is sufficiently concentrated that it vitrifies (forms a glassy state). If there is still lots of water inside the cell, ice will form intracellularly and that kills the cell. Equally if we cool really, really slowly we expose the cell to high solute concentrations and can damage the cell that way.

�e term ‘cryobiology’ conjures up images of a classic science lab with lots of dry ice fog and bubbling liquid nitrogen. Is your lab like that? Ha ha, yes. Half of what I do is like witchcraft, half of it is science. There is a lot of mixing together various cryoprotectants and we use dry ice, liquid nitrogen and specially controlled freezers. We also make little rafts out of polystyrene that float the specimens just above the liquid nitrogen. The thicker the raft, the slower the rate of cooling.

What do you like about cryobiology?It is such an interdisciplinary field. When you go to a cryobiology meeting there are so many interesting people, in such a diverse array of fields, applying it in so many ways.

Samples are frozen in straws

with liquid nitrogen

Cryobiology

Inducing mussels to spawn for breeding

SPOTLIGHT ONSP

MEMBER NEWS


As dean of undergraduate studies for the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Newcastle University I am responsible for ensuring that our students have the best experience that we can offer. I believe that the Society’s accreditation scheme has an important role to play in supporting the development and delivery of high quality, research led bioscience degree programmes.

I took up my position at Newcastle University in 1984. In the early years of my career I was mainly focused on research, investigating how antibody responses are regulated, but over time I became more involved with teaching.

I graduated from the University of York with a BSc in cell biology and biochemistry and, having flirted with careers in book publishing and osteopathy, I became a registered biomedical scientist working in the NHS at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. Through this I was given the opportunity to study a PhD at the University of Westminster researching into a rare but potentially life-threatening blood-clotting disorder – thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. Part of my research is to look at how patient genotype can affect treatment response to the drug rituximab.

My family was my biggest influence. Having a father who was an engineer and two older brothers, something was always being dismantled and put together again on the kitchen table.

Research students are encouraged to become members of professional bodies to facilitate communication and the exchange of ideas. One of my goals is to gain Chartered Scientist status so the Society’s continuing professional development scheme will help me to evidence the competencies required.

In my spare time I play the alto and soprano saxophone in an ensemble, which challenges me in many different ways.

I also try to sneak off and climb the odd mountain when I can. My bags are currently packed for Mount Toubkal in the Atlas Mountains so I’m looking forward to stretching my eyes – and legs.

Helena Tate AMSB

MEMBER PROFILES

Members Dr Anastasia Charalampopoulou MSBGrowing up in Greece I spent my summers by the sea, amazed by nature. It wasn’t long before I decided I wanted to study marine biology.

After a degree in biology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, I pursued my marine biologist dream by doing an MSc and PhD in biological oceanography at the University of Southampton. My PhD research focused on the effects of climate change and ocean acidification on coccolithophores, a group of calcifying marine phytoplankton. I had the opportunity to go on research cruises to Svalbard, in the Arctic, and the Southern Ocean. Both were rewarding and inspiring experiences.

I work as an aquatic ecologist for an environmental consultancy, at Jacobs UK Ltd. I specialise in marine phytoplankton ecology but I am also involved in fisheries and water-quality work. My current role involves investigating potential impacts of power-station operation on marine environments, particularly plankton and fish populations.

As an academic I was always up to date with recent developments in the biosciences and networking with people from all over the world. I joined the Society because I think it will help me do the same now that I am in working in industry.

In my free time I enjoy diving and hiking. My next holiday will be in Indonesia where I will be diving at Komodo and hiking up a volcano in Lombok. I can’t wait.

I have always been fascinated by the natural world, especially the interface between biology and chemistry and, more recently, evolutionary biology. Going to school in rural Norfolk, I knew that I wanted to attend university in London and chose King’s

College, where I completed undergraduate and PhD degrees in biochemistry.

I spent a very enjoyable five years carrying out postdoctoral research into diabetic

nephropathy at Imperial College, under the guidance of Professor Roger Mason. During my studies at King’s and Imperial I was given the opportunity to lecture students and run practical classes, and it was here that my love of teaching blossomed. After I completed my postdoc I applied to become a biology teacher at Highgate School in London, where I have taught for 10 years.

Having been head of biology for the last four years, I find the pupils I teach are a great inspiration to me and it is very rewarding to help them develop as life scientists, and to see a large number go on to university to study a relevant discipline – definitely my best achievement professionally.

In my spare time I like to get out on my bike as much as possible but, more recently, seem to have developed an alternative career as a taxi driver for my two sons, Etienne and Olivier.

Dr Ben Weston CBiol FSB

Inspire a new generation

Professor Jane Calvert FSB

My greatest career rewards have come from my interactions with students. I love to teach because it stimulates me to improve my own understanding and I get a buzz out of sharing my passion and inspiring the next generation of scientists.

At school I had an inspirational teacher, Miss Jacklin, and at university I became interested in microbiology, then immunology. After my PhD I had the opportunity to do a postdoc in Birmingham, Alabama, with Dr Max Cooper.

Outside of work I spend a lot of time in the Yorkshire Dales with my dog Max. I sing in a choir and enjoy reading detective novels.

Amazed by nature as a child, I pursued my marine biologist dream

I love to teach because I get a buzz out of sharing my passion

Society Fellow to front RI Christmas LecturesDr Alison Woollard FSB is

to present the 2013 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

In the famous festive addresses Dr Woollard, a geneticist at the department of biochemistry at the University of Oxford, will explore developmental biology, looking at the transformation of a single cell into a complex organism.

Her ‘Life Fantastic’ lectures will be broadcast on BBC Four in three parts: “Where do I come from?”, “Am I a mutant?” and “Could I live forever?”

“I am incredibly proud to be presenting the Christmas Lectures,” said Dr Woollard.

“Everyone has an inner scientist and I hope ‘Life Fantastic’ will get people excited by the idea of doing science themselves, as well as encourage them to join the debate around complex issues in biomedicine.”


MEMBER PROFILES

James Leaf AMSB

I am currently doing postgraduate teacher training, teaching biology at a school in York. I want

to inspire a new generation of biologists, and have a particular interest in promoting education for pupils from underprivileged backgrounds.

I completed my BSc (Hons) degree in physiology at the University of Liverpool, winning both the Physiological Society Prize for outstanding performance throughout my degree, and the Society of Biology Top Student Award for graduating with the highest undergraduate degree across the faculty of health and life sciences at Liverpool.

A passion for science was instilled in me by an enthusiastic school teacher, Mark Langley, now a professional development leader at the National Science Learning Centre in York. An exceptional A level teacher, Robert Gardener of York College, potentiated my enthusiasm for biology.

I recently became very interested in research into ubiquitination, the attachment of ubiquitin, a common protein, to other proteins. It could potentially provide strong therapeutic targets for numerous cancers and neurodegenerative disorders. I would love to see a small mention of ubiquitination and phosphorylation at A level, since these signalling pathways have become key concepts in biology.

I joined the Society because I feel it is important to keep up to date with developments in biology, and because membership provides ways to explore exciting educational opportunities for my pupils.

I am a research fellow studying cardiac arrhythmias at the University of Cambridge. Arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeats, represent the second greatest cause of death worldwide, exceeded only by all types of cancer combined. My work has focused on heart rhythm changes that occur when heart rate increases. I am also a teaching fellow in medical physiology at Murray Edwards College.

I studied for my medical degree at Downing College before moving to Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge to study for a PhD in cardiovascular electrophysiology.

During this period I was particularly inspired by the dedication and intellectual rigour

Dr Gareth Matthews MSB

of Professor Christopher Huang. Despite being an internationally renowned researcher for his work on skeletal and cardiac muscle, he went out of his way to help with my science. As a result I completed my PhD with 12 publications. And also found time to get married!

I joined the Society as it is a professional body with quality and ethical standards. The study of biology has wide-reaching importance in healthcare, both clinically and in industry, making a professional standard essential. I am now returning to medicine but continuing my academic work at the same time. I hope this dual training will allow me both to translate my work into the clinic, but also to garner new ideas for academic study from my interaction with patients.

11 December Churchill Room, House of Commons 19:00-22:00 The Society is organising a parliamentary Christmas reception on behalf of the science and engineering

community. The event is invitation only, but to enquire about attending, contact [email protected]

11 December Charles Darwin House, London Time TBC This year’s autumn Member Organisation Meeting will be a panel discussion focusing on research funding. Professor Ian

Boyd, the chief scientific advisor for DEFRA, will be speaking. Additional panellists and the detailed programme will be circulated as soon as possible. The meeting will be of most interest to chief executives, heads of policy and similar senior level representatives of our Member Organisations. For more details contact [email protected]

Dr Matthews (centre), his wife Dr Claire Currie, and Professor Christopher Huang outside Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

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New, Transfer & Chartered MembersOCTOBER 2013 ELECTION

Aysun Styles, Stefan Szymkowiak, Farah Tahamsebi, Simas Tatoris, Paris Tatt-Smith, Michael Taylor, Rachel Taylor, Genet Tefera, Pratish ªakore, Marakarasi ªiakarajan Sethu, Robin ªompson, Chris Tovey, Fern Towers, Andrew Trigg, Jade Tuck, Eleanor Tye, Michal Tykac, Whitney Usenbor, Gloria Uwadiegwu, Supreeta Vijayakumar, Joseph Vinson, Ayla Wahid, Cristina Wang Tao, Amy Ward, James Watt, Gary Way, Louise Wells, Beth Westwood, Mary Wheeler, Rebecca Williamson, Katie Willis, Bethany Wilson, Katrina Wiseman, Amy Withers, Alexander Wood, Rebecca Woolridge, Katie Wright, Maria Zicos.

Associate (AMSB) Clare Adams, Kirsten Adams, Ryan Bennett, Matthew Brennan, Louise Brown, James Butler, ªomas Butler, Zohra Butt, Aria Butterwick, Mia Cahill, Stefanie Carter, Sultan Cetiner, Jade Cogdale, Benjamin Conlon, Elvira Conlon, Natasha Curley, Jonathan Decker, Anton Dietschel-Buehler, Katie Donovan, Lin Eastaugh, Stuart Edgington, Eric Edmonds, Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft, Holly Emmens, Ashley Emslie, Ashley Ferro, Jasmine Foley, George Fowler, Christopher Fullwood, Lindsay Fulton, Harpreet Ghataore, Jonathan Goodwin, Iain Gordon, Ellen Gough, Samantha Guest, ªomas Guilliam, Kathryn Hamilton, Gillian Hargrave, Pascoe Harvey, Yousef Hawsawi, Jack Haynes, Daniel Hollingsworth, Tara Hoole, Kate Howell, Michelle Hulin, Jay Humphrys, Lara Husain, Christopher Jackson, Claudia Kathe, Sean Kelly, Ramsay Khadeir, Doaa Kredi, Gareth Krummeck, Katerina Lawlor, Sam Leonard, Tin Lung Leung, Yuet Kan Liu, Callum Macgregor, Will Matthews, Vivienne Mechie, Charlotte Miller, Jai-Paal Mudhar, Anantha Barathi Muthukrishnan, ªomas Myerscough, Laura Nolan, Richard O’Hanlon, Bianca op den Brouw, Jignesh Panchal, Lucie Parr, Geraint Parry, Ridhwan Patel, Unnati Patel, Richard Phillips, Sarah Pinder, George Powell, Lewis Quayle, Nina Richartz, Philip Riddell, Samantha Rivers, Daniel Rowson, Nithya Selvan, Julia Simpson, Emma Siragher, Iustina Slabu, Dominic Taylor, Kathryn Tennant, Anna ªomson, Silvana Tivadar, David Urry, Stella Victorelli, Matthew Viner, Nicholas Watkins, Nicholas Westgarth, Andrew Wilson, Nathan Winch, Sertip Zangana.

RSci AMSBBenjamin Halsall.

Member (MSB) Raya Al-Shawi, Roslyn Anderson, Rachael Antwis, Deborah Atkinson, Rhys Baker, Mikaella Bennie, Amy Birch, Emma Bishop, Alix Blockley, Sarah Jayne Boulton, Lucie Bowbrick, Rod Bulmer, Jess Buxton, Juan Canete, Rachel Causey, Sze Wa Chan, Leonard Cheung, Wang Ngai Chow, Emily Clark, Susie Coyle, Nicola Crewe, Meera Cush, Kelly Ann Dallas, Victor Dapper, Alessio Delogu, Jessica Devonport, Tanya Diver, Helen-Marie Dunmore, Elizabeth Dunn, Ally Evans, Madeleine Fairweather, Robert Finn, Dina Ghali, Victoria Gortowski, Elizabeth Granger, Rhys Grant, Timothy Grocott, Venkata Gudimetla, Monique Hili, William Hope, Lesley Hoyles, Susie Humby, Annette Hutchinson, Dominic Jenner,

Nichola Johnston, Samireh Jorfi, Mayia Karachaliou, Ross King, Clare Kingsley, Craig Knight, Madzia Kowalski, Wai Lung Lai, Jacqueline Law, Jennifer Lee, Hong-Sheng Lim, Lorena del Rosario Lizarraga Valderrama, Cecilia Lui, David MacDonald, Jason Manton, Andre Marques Smith, Zoe Martin, William Mauchline, Sarah McAuliffe, Daireann McDonnell, James McLean, Krista McLennan, Roger Melliger, Gabriel Mutungi, Yuen Ng, Rachael Oaten, Albert Okorocha, Osahon Osadolor, Chris People, Gus Pettitt-Wade, Liz Price, Iain Reid, Emily Richmond, Andrea Rickard, Sophie Robinson, Anna Ryan, Ramesh Sagili, Kay Savage, Varun Sawhney, Giovanni Sena, Kerry Simpson, Joanne Spurgeon, Martyn Stenning, Rachel Stubbington, Hephzi Angela Tagoe, Matthew ªakur, Li Tian, Kenneth Wade, ªomas Watson, David Webster, Amy Whetstone, Vivienne Wilson, Leo Wong, Sani Yahaya, Richard Young.

RSci MSBBenjamin Swift.

Chartered Biologist Member (CBiol MSB) Helen Brown, Jonathan Caddick, Anastasia Charalampopoulou, Alejandro Correa, Jason Easter, David Hanlon, Linsey Haswell, Jenny Chung-Yee Ho, Kris Jeremy, Ashley Jonas, Michel Khoodoo, Rowland Lees, Amber Murch, Osahon Osadolor, Yusrizam Sharifuddin, Eva Sharpe, Jennifer Smith, David Tigwell, Mun Yam.

Chartered Scientist Member (CSci MSB) Ian Devonshire, Nicholas Humphreys, Marie McKenzie-Mills, David Morland, Minal Pandya, Huw Turk, Karen Williams, Paula Williams.

Fellow (FSB) Anthony Baines, Geoffrey Baldwin, David Barrett, Roger Bick, Hilary Bird, Marian Bond, Rituparna Bose, Alan Boyd, Bernadette Byrne, Gus Cameron, Bambos Charalambous, John Colbourne, Sofia Consuegra Del Olmo, Simon Croft, Tudor Dawkins, Dominique Despeyroux, Snezana Djordjevic, Michael Douek, Genoveva Esteban, Colin Fricker, Niklas Gericke, Annette Gough, Frank Gunn-Moore, Jonathan Ham, Robert Harris, Adam Hart, Tetsuya Hirano, Nicholas Hole, Simon Hollingsworth, David Hoole, Hilary Hurd, Ahbor Ighoroje, William Johnson, Eleri Jones, Steve Kerrigan, Tracy Lawson, Catherine Lindon, Philip Maini, Enca Martin-Rendon, John McGrath, Donald McManus, Francesco Michelangeli, Robert Michell, Sam Miller, Michael Moore, William O’Connor, Steve Ormerod, Sharon Peacock, Anthony Perry, Adrian Pierotti, Jacqui Piner, Mark Pook, Roy Powell, Robert Risk, Jeanette Rotchell, Colin Sanders, Christopher Schofield, Graham Scott, Kevin Shakesheff, Paul Smith, S Sreenivasaprasad, Susan Stanford, Heleen van de Weerd, Heather Wallace, Jeremy Walters, Simon Webster, Saffron Whitehead, Craig Williams, Kay Yeoman, Mei-Yi Yuen, Rolf Zeller, Nikolai Zhelev.

Chartered Biologist Fellow (CBiol FSB) Steve Kerrigan, Jonathan Nguyen-Van-Tam.

Chartered Scientist Fellow (CSci FSB) Timothy Atkinson, Terence Gourlay.

Support your local branchOur branches rely on your support. If you would like to give a careers talk at your local school or help with public engagement activities then get in touch with them – contact details on page 49.

scabies (Scabiosa columbaria), and the oval sedge (Carex ovalis) also appeared for the first time. It was a terrific event buzzing with enthusiastic experts and volunteers.Phil Porter LWT warden and Marianne Overton CBiol MSB

LUNCH ON THE EDGE8 June 2013Three licensed ringers demonstrated netting and ringing farmland birds at an award-winning conservation area on the Lincolnshire Cliff Edge, home to Peter and Marianne Overton. Ringers Alan Ball and Keith Boden gave us a chance to see wild birds up close and to learn how to assess and record their condition and other details.

The Lincolnshire Edge runs north to south and forms a natural migration route for birds to ‘lunch on the edge’. Donna Staples, coordinator of the RSPB Explorer groups, presented a long service award to local group leader Andrew Chick.

Paul Stancliffe, of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), spoke about the recent strides made in migration route research.

“Over the last couple of decades many of our summer migrants have shown alarming declines and it has become more and more important to understand their complete migratory cycle,” said Stancliffe. He also explained how satellite tags, weighing less than 5g, have allowed birds as small as cuckoos to be tracked around the globe. This helps answer questions on migration routes, where birds stop over to rest and feed, and the precise location of their wintering areas.

“Having lost over 50% of our breeding cuckoos during the last 25 years, it is vital to understand the pressures these different populations face – here and when they leave the

Vol 60 No 6 / THE BIOLOGIST / 4746 / THE BIOLOGIST / Vol 60 No 6

EVENT REPORTS

Beds, Essex & HertsSCIENCE UNCOVERED27 September 2013Our branch attended the annual Science Uncovered event at the Natural History Museum in Tring. It may have been the third year in succession but the enthusiasm and interest of our visitors was undiminished.

The challenge of the day – “which is the odd one out: spider, fly, butterfly?” – provided plenty of correct answers but very different reasons. Well done to the young biologist who declared “the spider of course, it is an arachnid!”

The question “what gives a peacock feather its colour?” led to a good discussion on the link between physics and biology. Vivienne Heys CBiol MSB and Jacky McPherson CBiol MSB

UK,” explained Stancliffe. “These tags are enabling scientists at the BTO to do just this. They have already highlighted hitherto unknown migration routes through Iberia and the Adriatic, identified stopover sites and the winter location but there is still a lot more to uncover.”

Anyone can follow these birds as they make their way to Africa at www.bto.org, the BTO website.Marianne Overton CBiol MSB

Kent, Surrey & SussexBEER RESEARCH4 September 2013Since its inception in 1992, Hogs Back Brewery has won over 40 awards, with its Traditional English Ale voted CAMRA’s best beer in 2006.

This small brewery uses techniques very similar to traditional craft brewers and produces over 7,000 gallons of real ale per week. Fermentable sugars are derived only from malted barley and the hops used are local whole hop flowers. The

yeast strain is carefully maintained and reused and,

at the end of the fermentation, the beer is cask or brewery conditioned.

Noel Armstrong from Hogs Back entertained

us with his knowledge and enthusiasm for the

brewery’s products and with a succession of jugs of

beer and cider. Following the tour, we were privileged to have chief brewer Miles Chesterman answer our more scientific questions on the art and science of brewing.Dr David Ware CBiol FSB

Northern IrelandMAMMAL CONSERVATION IN THE EU11-16 August 2013The Society sponsored a lecture

East MidlandsWHISBY BIOBLITZ13 July 2013Our challenge at Whisby Nature Park: identify 1,000 species on one site over one weekend. The joint bioblitz, led by the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust (LWT) and the Lincolnshire Naturalists’ Union (LNU), fell just short with a still-impressive total of 889 species. An amazing 126 species were new to the reserve’s list, confirmed by the 17 LNU specialists.

It is important to influence youngsters about the value of the natural world and local LWT Wildlife Watch groups. Schools came armed with specimen pots and searched through the hectare of protected education habitats to find the sort of mini-beasts that adults often miss. The LWT Education Centre provided excellent visual aids such as microscopes and projectors, while officers from LWT HQ helped to keep track of the stream of information for the species lists.

The most specialised contributions came from the Environment Agency, whose staff dealt with single celled freshwater animals and algae. Lichens, mosses, slugs, snails, flies, beetles and moths were also identified.

In order to expand the lists with nocturnal animals, two moth lights succeeded in attracting about 100 species. The real surprise was finding Nathusius’ pipistrelle (Pipistrellus nathusii) a new and rare species for the reserve.

On the second day, a visiting entomologist found the characteristic pupal cases of the large red-belted clearwing moth (Synanthedon culiciformis), which had never been recorded here before. The pale lavender-flowered small

www.societyofbiology.org/eventswww.societyofbiology.org/events

Hogs Back brewery

BranchesEVENTS CALENDARFor more details and to book a place on an event, see the Branch Contacts on page 49, or visit the Events page of the Society website.

East Midlands REGIONAL SCHOOLS BIOLOGY COMPETITIONSaturday 22 March 2014 09:45-14:30To celebrate National Science & Engineering Week, there will be a series of biology poster, essay and podcast competitions at the University of Leicester. Students will be encouraged to ask: ‘What will the world be like in 100 years’ time?’ For further details contact Cas Kramer ([email protected]) or Rosemary Hall ([email protected]).

Kent, Surrey & SussexTOUR OF THE GARDENS AND SEED BANK AT WAKEHURSTWednesday 18 December 2013 11:00Due to the popularity of our visit in July we will be returning to Wakehurst Place. Meet at 11:00 for a tour of the gardens. After lunch, at 13:30, we will meet up with laboratory manager Keith Manger and head of research Professor Hugh Pritchard, who will take us on a guided tour of the laboratories, dry rooms, cold rooms and other facilities at the Millennium Seed Bank. Admission is free for National Trust members, children under 16 and Friends of Kew. For other members there is an entry fee. If you wish to attend then please email our secretary at [email protected]

From left: Professor Ian Montgomery, conference organiser; Dr Dai Roberts, chair of the Northern Ireland branch; András Demeter, European Commission

Ringer Alan Ball (in blue) teaches East Midlands members how to assess a wild bird

Marianne Overton and Donna Staples present Andrew Chick with a long service award (see Lunch on the Edge)

West MidlandsDARWIN FESTIVAL 2014 Saturday 15 February 2014 14:00Norma Broadbridge will give a talk entitled ‘The Galapagos Islands: 150 years on since Darwin’s visit’ and will cover what present day visitors can see of these unique islands. Norma will discuss the present pressures and problems and some of the solutions. Join us at: Shropshire Wildlife Trust, 193 Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, SY2 6AH.

To make a booking email Deirdre Marsh at [email protected]

FAMILY DAY DAFFODIL WALK AND LECTURESaturday 22 March 2014Family day for members and their guests. Guided walk to view wild daffodils, an SSSI and historic churches, followed by wild daffodil talk. Lunch in church hall and refreshments. Kempley, Gloucestershire. Further information and booking details on the website in the new year.

TOXICOLOGY LECTURELate March/early AprilAston University, Birmingham. For confirmation of date and booking arrangements see the events website in the new year.

´e Millennium Seed Bank Exhibition

black. Our knowledgable guide, Nigel Brown, explained the intricacy of fungi, the challenges they present to taxonomists and their strategies for reproduction and survival, chemical complexity and the delights and affronts they can impose on our senses.

There was a profusion of the deadly (to plants) honey fungus (Armillaria mellea), with its fruiting bodies lined up along the lawns. This was puzzling, as the fungus is a root parasite but made its way across the grass and not around a tree. Perhaps its black rhizomorphs were following a straight root run from a distant tree.

Red admiral butterflies were also in abundance, and we saw them feeding on fermenting fallen apples and becoming intoxicated and less cautious as a result. The afternoon ended with an inspection of the massed collection of the two dozen foragers.Professor John Solbé MBE CBiol FSB

North WesternSCHOOLS QUIZ19 July 2013This year 24 teams of four students descended on the University of Central Lancashire to pit their wits against branch members, who set the quiz. Pupils from schools and sixth form colleges across the North West tackled 10 diverse questions, including practical and problem solving tasks, such as taxonomic identification using microscopy of skin and fur, matching hosts to parasites, physiological and pharmacological skills and simulations, chemical analysis, cell biology and ecology.

The first prize of a microscope was awarded to The Manchester Grammar School by Society chief executive Dr Mark Downs, with a book for each team member. Book prizes were also awarded to teams finishing second (King George V College), third (St Wilfrid’s CE Academy) and fourth (Sandbach High & Sixth Form College) and all participants received one of the limited edition souvenir mugs complete with the Society of Biology crest. As in previous years the standard was extremely high and the North Western branch is indebted to

from András Demeter, adviser for the European Commission’s environment directorate, as part of the 11th International Mammalogical Congress at Queen’s University Belfast. Over 120 delegates from the congress and local branch attended this enthusiastic review of the established directives and direction of European conservation.

The presentation focused on mammals (the conference theme) but also provided a detailed overview of the EU Habitats Directive and the Natura 2000 network. Natura 2000 is the largest science-based, legally binding ecological and conservation network in the world. It consists of over 26,000 sites covering almost 18% of the EU’s landmass and more than 145,000km2 of its seas. Under the Habitats Directive, 128 species of mammal need strict protection with less than 15% in favourable and 40% in unfavourable conservation status.

There remain large gaps in our understanding of the conservation status of mammals in Europe, particularly marine species. We also heard about the challenges of large carnivore conservation in the region. The presentation concluded with a live demonstration of the Natura 2000 Viewer, which provides electronic access to information on the 26,000 sites.Dr Dai Roberts CBiol FSB

North WalesFUNGAL FORAY IN TREBORTH5 October 2013Members joined students from Prifysgol Bangor on a fungal foray to Treborth, the University’s botanical garden. The autumn colours had hardly developed due to the Indian summer but the fungi made up for this with an amazing array of hues from blush pink, through orange and brown to white, deep violet and


BRANCHES EVENT REPORTS

BEDS, ESSEX & HERTS Dr �eresa Huxley [email protected]

DEVON & CORNWALL Christine Fry [email protected]

EAST ANGLIA Amanda Burton [email protected]

EAST MIDLANDS Rosemary Hall [email protected]

KENT, SURREY & SUSSEX Dr David Ware kentsurreysussex@ societyofbiology.org

LONDON Ken Allen [email protected]

NORTH WALES Dr Rosemary Solbé [email protected]

NORTH WESTERN Glenn Upton-Fletcher [email protected]

NORTHERN Dr Michael Rowell [email protected]

NORTHERN IRELAND Dr David Roberts [email protected]

SCOTLAND Dr Jacqueline Nairn [email protected]

THAMES VALLEY Dr Ray Gibson [email protected]

WESSEX Rachel Wilson [email protected]

WEST MIDLANDS Deirdre Marsh [email protected]

WESTERN Joan Ashley [email protected]

YORKSHIRE Paul Bartlett [email protected]

BRANCH CONTACTS

www.societyofbiology.org/events www.societyofbiology.org/events

Dr Leroy Shervington and colleagues from UCLAN for hosting the event. Graham Bonwick CBiol FSB

WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP11 May 2013The workshop took place on Hilbre Island, a small uninhabited island located in the Dee Estuary. The party set off from the slipway at West Kirby under the watchful eye of Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Glenn Upton-Fletcher, and leading biological illustrator Mike Clapham.

Crossing the sands at low tide, first to Little Eye then Middle Eye, meant that the party was ultimately cut off from the mainland by the advancing tide. On arrival we were greeted by the unexpected sight of the Hilbre Island bluebells and after scrambling over sculpted Bunter Sandstone, refuge from the elements was sought in the old warden’s cottage.

An introduction to some of the basics of practical wildlife photography was provided, plus a guide to equipment essentials. This was followed by a chance to put our new found ideas into practice supported by Glenn’s expert one to one tuition. An invaluable introduction to the challenges of wildlife photography,

complete with intermittently hostile

weather, made for a highly enjoyable

and rewarding day topped with a diverse range of marine wildlife observations

including the local common seals.

Graham Bonwick CBiol FSB

WessexSCIENCE CAREERS DAY3 October 2013Ambassadors from the Society took part in a science careers event at South Wilts Grammar School for Girls, Salisbury. The day was created for the 130 Year 10 students and was aimed at getting them to think about how the sciences can be applied beyond GCSE and A level.

The event involved a speed dating-style session in which small groups of students spent five minutes grilling a professional scientist before moving on to the next one. Many of the

scientists involved volunteered through the Society of Biology and ranged from academics and consultants to test pilots and authors.

Other activities included a planetarium show, chemistry demonstrations involving liquid nitrogen, talks from local companies, DSTL, PHE and Harnham Water Meadows Trust. Student teams also competed in an Engineering Challenge to build towers from spaghetti. This is an annual event hosted by the school which always relies on the generous support of local volunteers in giving up their time for the girls.Jane Brown

A FOREST THROUGH TIME14 September 2013The New Forest is an area of outstanding natural beauty that has been of scientific interest for 40 years. In 2005 it was designated as a National Park. Gillie Hayball, a New Forest park ranger, headed an engaging walk introducing its history, management and conservation.

The walk began upon the yew capped Bolton’s Bench, an ancient burial mound which offered beautiful views of Lyndhurst and the surrounding forest. The group was lucky to also have the experience of Barry Dowsett, an appointed Forestry Commission verderer. ‘Verderer’ comes from the French word ‘vert’, meaning green, and the New Forest verderers date back to the 13th century. They regulate the rights of commoners and set forest byelaws. One of the main rights of the commoners is the ability to turn their animals out to ‘pasture’. The diversity in grazing activity has helped shape the landscape of the forest over time.

After walking across the open

heathland, the group learned about the deer population of the forest and management of the four main populations: fallow (Dama dama), roe (Capreolus capreolus), red (Cervus elaphus) and sika (Cervus nippon).

We ended with a challenge: how do you age a tree? One easy way is to ‘hug for 100’ – if one person’s arms fit round a tree it indicates 100 years of growth in some species. An interactive map is being developed from a database of ancient and unusual trees in the UK, the Ancient Tree Hunt.Dr Marja Aberson MSB

West MidlandsCANNOCK SEWAGE WORKS10 June 2013Following a warm welcome from Deirdre Marsh, Severn Trent’s senior adviser on Public Health and Standards and committee member, the group split up to visit Cannock Sewage Works. One half was given an insight into the microbiology of the activated sludge process with a fascinating presentation from Severn Trent Water biologist Ian Gray.

The other half donned hard hats, yellow high visibility jackets and protective gloves for a tour of the treatment works. Our excellent guide, experienced site operator Tom Ward, was enthusiastic and knowledgable, explaining how raw sewage was collected from the surrounding areas and treated on site before the cleaned water was discharged into the waterways.

It was an excellent day and members learned a great deal, particularly about the unsuitable items that customers flushed into the sewers and the impact this has on Severn Trent and the sewage treatment process. Thanks to Severn Trent for their kind hospitality.Lesley Payne CBiol MSB

Members in North Wales enjoying a fungal foray

Severn Trent’s Tom Ward takes West Midlands members around the Cannock Sewage Works

Members of the Wessex branch enjoy a visit to the New Forest

Hilbre Island

Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of W D Hamilton “Hamilton advanced evolutionary theory by focusing on survival of the genes”


Working in EntomologyRachel McLeodAmateur Entomologists’ Society, £10.48Not many books are written by 14 year olds,

especially not ones based on research conducted when the author was between 8 and 10 years old. I once met Rachel while undertaking a Bug Safari at her primary school and she stood out as exceptionally keen then – and obviously still is, having set out to produce a career guide to encourage other keen young people to consider working with insects.

The core of the book is a series of standardised interviews with prominent entomologists covering different aspects of entomology. The questions are highly incisive – including “What is the most important question I should have asked you?” – and she finishes by interviewing herself and answering her own questions.

For example, Simon Leather kicks off with a personal account of his career path, starting at age three, illustrating how a child’s natural interest in insects can develop into a lifelong career. George McGavin gives us an academic turned TV expeditionist’s perspective, while others cover genetic engineering, forensics, evolution, behaviour, pest control and entomological supplies. The author finishes with her personal thoughts on what it is to be an entomologist, and a brief section on insects and conservation.

Aimed predominantly at other youngsters who she is out to inspire, this is also useful reading for the parent of young “bug-aholics” who will be reassured that their offspring’s enthusiasm might lead them to a fascinating career. As Sir David Attenborough says in his preface: “It is a fascinating read.”Roger S Key

Touching a NervePatricia S ChurchlandW W Norton and Company, £16.69Patricia Churchland is widely recognised

as a pioneer of modern neurophysiology. The title neatly

alludes to the complex and sometimes controversial relationship between neuroscience and philosophy explored in this book – also known as the brain-mind debate.

Churchland proposes that ethical questions about choice, learning and morality can be explored and understood by our growing understanding of biology and how the brain works. She guides the reader through a personal account of how neuroscience has enhanced her understanding of philosophy, often beginning with a tale from her childhood that prompted a personal conflict.

Throughout the book she draws together evidence from behavioural studies, psychological testing and neurological experiments that demonstrate the delicate interplay between function of the brain and human thought and behaviour.

Churchland doesn’t shy away from provocative questions such as: Is the soul separate from the brain? Is genocide in our genes? And does sexual orientation have a biological basis? She acknowledges that “sciences of the mind can be unsettling” and draws the book to a close asserting the need for balance and caution when interpreting results.

This book provides an excellent overview and introduction to the fascinating subject of neurophilosophy. The conversational tone and anecdotal nature of the book creates an engaging narrative and prevents the complex subject from seeming impenetrable. Churchland has succeeded in creating a thought-provoking and impassioned exploration of how our brain works and what that says about us. Jenni Lacey AMSB

Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of W D HamiltonUllica SegerstraleOxford University Press, £25.00William Donald Hamilton (1936-

2000) was best known (though relatively unsung) for his significant contribution to evolutionary theory, notably for clarifying the role of self-sacrificing behaviour as an advantageous trait.

His work showed that altruistic behaviour is advantageous as long as progeny or close relatives benefit, i.e.

kin selection. With this, Hamilton advanced evolutionary theory by focusing on survival of the genes rather than on the individual. Hamilton is also considered to be an early advocate of sociobiology – the theory that social behaviour results from evolution.

Born in Cairo to New Zealanders, Hamilton was educated in the UK but worked in the USA and later returned to Oxford University as Royal Society research professor. Much of his fieldwork was conducted in the biodiversity rich Amazon and later the Congo.

Clever, controversial and sometimes confrontational, Hamilton was primarily a scholar and researcher whose influence was widely felt and whose legacy remains through his own work and through that of colleagues and students.

Ullica Segerstrale, professor of sociology at Illinois Institute of Technology, has produced an interesting and readable biography based on Hamilton’s letters, published work and the testimonies of friends and family. It is detailed and uncompromising. Hamilton’s academic and personal worlds were not perfect and nor was Hamilton.

The extensive notes and references will prove valuable to historians of science and students of sociobiology. The text also provides an insight into the major and minor players in biological science, plus the uncertainties, rivalries and publishing paradoxes in evolutionary and related science in the late 1900s, many of which remain today. Dr A M Mannion

Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects (2nd Edition)Jonathan CowieCambridge University Press, £34.99

Literature on climate change and its impact has burgeoned in the last few years as what was once a possibility becomes a reality. Approximately half the book is therefore concerned with the record of climate change.

Topics include methods of climate reconstruction, such as dendrochronology, pollen analysis, oxygen and other isotopes, and their interpretation, plus the proxy record of climatic change through 5 billion years of geological time including a

The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us About Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable SocietyDavid Waltner-ToewsECW Press, £12.99

One is drawn immediately to this book by its wonderfully whimsical title – a play on Darwin’s famous paper – and the merriment does not end at the front cover. With chapters entitled Turds of Endearment and Know Sh*t: A Way Forward, there are plenty of puns, jokes and anecdotes, but the underlying message of how management of natural waste can provide a solution to environmental challenges is a serious one.

Waltner-Toews, a Canadian conservationist and epidemiologist, outlines how in nature excrement is a source of food and energy and is important in the recycling of nutrients. This holistic view of poo is at odds with its perception in today’s ultra-sanitised developed societies, where it is seen as something unpleasant and which disposal of is, er, the end point.

It is argued that while substandard sanitation leads to fouling of waterways and public health concerns, faeces should be embraced on an industrial scale as a ready made source of energy. Using biodigester technology, both human and animal sewage can be digested anaerobically to make nitrogen-rich fertiliser and to produce methane to generate electricity and heat.

Importantly, this would provide a simple, cost-effective solution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from farming waste. The electricity and fertiliser can be sold for profit and the heat generated reused on the farm to save money. A case of “where’s there’s muck, there’s brass”.

This book is recommended reading for all those with an environmental conscience – not just the organic composters among us.Dr Andrew Taylor-Robinson CBiol FSB

Kangaroo “Links the animal to its continent and the humans that invaded Australia”

KangarooJohn SimonsReaktion Books, £9.99Kangaroo made the longlist of the Society’s 2013 popular biology book award and is one of the latest offerings in Reaktion Books’ widely acclaimed ‘Animal’ series. John Simons, an expat Brit in the Australian university system and a multi-disciplinary animal academic, has crafted a lively, engaging and reflective socio-cultural and environmental history of the kangaroo, from the southern supercontinent Gondwana to Skippy.

This is a big history that links the kangaroo to its continent and the humans that have invaded Australia

over thousands of years. Richly illustrated throughout, the book interacts with key questions and contradictions of both kangaroo identity and Australian identity. It examines long relationships with aboriginal Australia, including first contact and “the burden of strangeness”; eating kangaroos and culling them as pests as well as cuddling toy kangas at bedtime and appropriating them in the name of Aussie sport and nationhood.

It is, as the publicity states, “a pouch-sized look” at an Australian icon. A wonderful book for those who love, research or teach Australia. Dr Robert Lambert

Reviews

THE MARSUPIAL MACROPOD

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Tobago’s bird life. This edition also includes pictures of more vagrants and a complete species list updated to 2010.

Small enough to take into the field, this book is presented more as a reference guide. It contains interesting background information about the islands and their habitats, but also some arguably superfluous information in the rather verbose species accounts (particularly for vagrants). It would have been more user friendly as a field guide if the plates had been next to the species accounts and if distribution maps had been provided for localised species.

If you are planning a trip, I can thoroughly recommend this book. If you’re not planning a trip, I thoroughly recommend it too. Dr Rebecca Nesbit MSB & Phil Gould

Mating Males: An Evolutionary Perspective on Mammalian ReproductionTim GloverCambridge University Press, £29.99

This review has been a difficult task, partly because I know Tim Glover and enjoy his company, as the book is a curious mish-mash of different approaches to the reproductive biology of mammals. The 1970s and 1980s flavour is confirmed by the references. There isn’t an “evolutionary perspective” except in such phrases as “it is fashioned to suit the mode of coitus in each species” when talking of penis shape.

Apart from a description of spermatogenic cycles in the middle of the book, the approach is much more for the lay reader than for the professional biologist. Nevertheless, biologists will learn a lot from it, such as the elephant is the only mammal that can step on its own penis.

There are, however, lots of little errors, and a few big ones: that meiosis occurs after fertilisation in Lepidoptera (forgivable in a mammal-specialist); that the vomero-nasal organ “is essentially equine” (except for nearly all reptiles?); and I have a personal distaste for the use of “varies” where he means “differs”.

Otherwise this is a useful book for most modern biologists to read.Too much from the last century has been forgotten in today’s teaching programmes.Dr Jack Cohen CBiol FSB

since the 1970s. Challenges include sustainable development, appropriate energies of the future, and adaptation to a warmer world with an increasing population.

This is not a groundbreaking book, but it is a useful synthesis of recent literature for undergraduates.Dr A M Mannion

A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (3rd Edition)Richard ffrenchCornell University Press, £25.95From tiny

hummingbirds to spectacular scarlet ibises, Trinidad and Tobago provides wonderful birding and this guide does the island’s brilliant bird life justice.

This is the third edition of the book but the 40 colour plates, produced by a group of eight artists, are new. Although tightly packed, the plates beautifully depict Trinidad and

relatively detailed documentation of Holocene change.

Additional chapters examine recent and future climatic change; the emphasis is on how climate has influenced biological change since the Little Ice Age (c.1600); the record of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere pre- and post-accelerated fossil fuel use; and the influence of climate change on human activity.

The evidence for current warming and its impact on biological/ecological systems is also examined, along with possible future effects including the identification of all-important thresholds.

How human impact has caused climate change and how this is affecting society are also debated, with sections on population, energy, health, food security and ecological mechanisms for mitigating climate change. Some 70 pages are given to the political dimensions of climate change, which have mostly emerged


REVIEWS

A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago “Small enough to take into the field, this book is presented more as a reference guide”

The scarlet ibis is found in Trinidad and Tobago

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costs time and money, and you are competing with people who already have experience in the new area.

I concur that scientists’ skills should be welcomed and would be beneficial in many arenas, for example politics, journalism, teaching, patent law and industry, but there are some scientists who should be able to remain scientists. I am grateful for the opportunities I have had and for my current position. However, I am anxious about my future. Fiona Frame MSB

RESIDUAL THOUGHTSI would like to extend the comments of Dr Victor M Shorrocks (The Biologist Vol 60(5) p53) relating to my article ‘What’s Your Poison’ (The Biologist Vol 60(4) p28-31).

Enquiry into the safety and nutritional merit of conventionally and organically produced food is yet another area where opinions are at variance with the facts. Pesticides used by organic farmers, such as copper sulphate, pyrethrum and rotenone, are of a similar order of magnitude of inherent toxicity as pesticides used in conventional farming.

However, what counts are the pesticide residues that reach the consumer via food. These are systematically tracked by the DEFRA Expert Committee on Pesticide Residues in Food (www.

POST FROM A POSTDOCAlthough Professor Turner’s article ‘The Problem with Postdocs’ (The Biologist Vol 60(4) p9) is a good summation of the situation, it is unfortunately nothing new. I am saddened that postdocs, while being hailed as ‘crucial’ and ‘indispensable’, are still perceived as a ‘problem’. As my postdoc years increase, my feeling of being a problem also increases.

There is a long way to go before the majority of postdocs happily and easily transition into a new career in their thirties or forties. With only 10% of postdocs going on to become lecturers, academic supervisors and postdocs need to be re-educated and informed of realistic career destinations. Indeed, attitudes and expectations of both parties require a dramatic shift if Professor Turner’s solution is to work. Specifically, if we are being told that we are surplus to requirements in our chosen profession, where do we find the confidence to enter pastures new?

The true long term solution would be to either reduce the intake of biology undergraduates, or increase the number of stable scientist positions, neither of which is likely to be economically viable.

More departments are embracing the solution illustrated by Professor Turner and have in-house careers advisers. It’s a positive move, but let’s not forget that changing career

pesticides.gov.uk) and regularly reported. The latest report, covering the first quarter of 2013 and now available online, provides details of the findings on individual chemicals.

It makes reassuring reading and is clear that, as far as human health is concerned, the difference in pesticide residue levels between food grown conventionally and organically can be described as the difference between insignificant and irrelevant. This publicly available information should help the consumer make a rational food choice.Dr Barbara Hall CBiol FSB

PEER REVIEW CLARIFICATION In the article ‘The Journals They Are A-Changin’ (The Biologist 60(5) p10) Eva Amsen suggested Frontiers’ peer review process does not involve collaboration or require unanimity, when in fact it does.

In 2007, Frontiers designed and built an online review forum that enables authors and reviewers to communicate and collaborate directly with each other, as well as reviewers amongst each other, until consensus is reached and all agree unanimously to accept an article.

Frontiers also discloses the names of reviewers and handling editors on accepted articles to promote accountability, constructiveness and transparency. Overall, the mission of Frontiers is to democratise academic publishing for the benefit of scientists, researchers and everybody around academia.Costanza Zucca, editorial director, Frontiers

FUNGAL FAULTSThank you to the keen-eyed mycologists who spotted that one of the captions on our spectacular ‘Finding Fungi’ opening spread (The Biologist 60(5) p30-33) was incorrectly labelled. The specimen shown was not Phallus impudicus, but the netted stinkhorn Dictyophora duplicata, a rarity in Britain.

Send your comments to Biofeedback, Society of Biology, Charles Darwin House, 12 Roger Street, London WC1N 2JU or [email protected]

The Biologist reserves the right to edit letters where appropriate.

� eBiologistTHE SOCIETY OF BIOLOGY MAGAZINE ■ ISSN 0006-3347 ■ SOCIETYOFBIOLOGY.ORG VOL 60 NO 5 ■ OCT/NOV 2013

How disease from domestic animals could wipe out iconic endangered species

WILDLIFEWARNING

RESEARCH

FACT AND FISSIONUsing neutrons to

study biomaterials

BIOGRAPHY


Victorian scientist

MYCOLOGY

RICH PICKINGSExploring treasures

in the fungal kingdom

EVENTSCALENDARINSIDE

2013

FACT AND FISSION

study biomaterials


Victorian scientist

00_BIO_60_5_COVERS_V2.indd 1 19/09/2013 10:28


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DEFRA tracks pesticide residues in food

specimens had been found two years earlier on Ellesmere Island, northern Canada, when a team of palaeontologists spotted a skull sticking out of a cliff.

With finely preserved fins and scales, Tiktaalik is clearly a fish. But its front fins feature arm-like skeletal structures more akin to those of a crocodile, including a shoulder, elbow and wrist. In a detailed study of Tiktaalik’s skull in Nature in 2008, researchers claimed the animal would have been able to prop itself up on its fins on solid ground and breathe air.

The term ‘missing link’ is somewhat misleading. Tiktaalik is really an example of one of several lines of ancient sarcopterygian fish that developed adaptations to the oxygen-poor shallow-water habitats of its time. It is likely to be a close relative of the ancient fish that was a

direct ancestor of the first tetrapods. Still, scientists had long predicted that the first land mammals were descended from fish, and Tiktaalik provides clear evidence of this.

One of the discoverers of Tiktaalik, Neil H Shubin, is now provost of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the skull and lower jaw of an original fossil are on permanent display in the Evolving Planet exhibition at the museum. Alongside it is a cast of an entire skeleton, a cast of the limb Tiktaalik used for walking, and a life-size model of the fish.Chicago’s Field Museum is open daily (except Christmas Day) from 9:00 to 17:00. www.fieldmuseum.org

A life-size model of Tiktaalik alongside a cast of its fossil found by a team of palaeontologists, including Neil Shubin (below)

I n 2006 this 375 million year old fossil was revealed to the world as the ‘missing link’ between fish and

four legged land animals (tetrapods). Three remarkably well-preserved


#005TIKTAALIK ROSEAE FOSSIL

Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago

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Museum PieceBIOLOGICAL EXHIBITS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

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Across1 Found in the wettest rainforests (6)5 Odd bits of live virus start to act strangely (8)9 Placing bait with care ... (8)10 ... or they will go round it (6)11 Not a spice I wanted for cooking (10)12 Story you hear (4)13 End of mammal after marine disaster (7)16 Students excel learning about this (3,4)17 Study doctor working (7)19 Seal may swim around (7)23 Turn up at exam centre (4)24 Hybrid fir sterile (10)27 Arched bone inside of noses (6)28 Immoral couple (4,4)29 It is collected by duster moving around (8)30 Mix litre to use (6)

Down2 Long walk requires time on inclined section (5)3 Against introduction of conservation - that’s not a sensible way to behave (5)4 Wild centre of Borneo, avian paradise (7)5 Problem with reception still (6)6 Entourage reunite after disruption (7)7 It turns up in Iceland suprisingly showing no variation (9)8 Is fairer to have long shot for those that can shoot (3,6)11 Add some sound (3)14 I’ve changed attire; not just the once (9)

This issueAs usual across answers are from the world of biology and clued without definition. The remaining clues are the normal combination of definition and cryptic indication.

How to enterTo be in with a chance of winning a £25 book token please send us your completed puzzles by Wednesday 8th January 2014. Please include your name, address and membership number with your entry – an email address would be handy too. Post your entries to: Crossword, The Biologist, Society of Biology, Charles Darwin House, 12 Roger Street, London, WC1N 2JU.

Winners Well done to last issue’s winners, Ian Michael Foot CBiol MSB and John A Hallewell CBiol MSB. Book tokens on the way.

WIN A £25

BOOK TOKEN

Last issue’s solutionVol 60 No 5

15 Bungled an overdue attempt (9)18 Unconventional like policeman behind desk (7)20 Some breaking down is one type of biological division (7)21 Heart to heart means that you need to listen (3)22 Be taken in by professional’s examinations (6)25 Force that is keeping politician on left (5)26 It involves sex in some fashion to be a living entity (5)

CrosswordMelt your mind with this issue’s biology blockbuster

Volume 60 no 6 compiled by Doug Stanford

Discounted training courses for members

The Society of Biology is expanding its training programme, with a comprehensive range of courses being developed.

Whether you’re an enthusiastic amateur or an experienced biologist, we offer courses to suit all interests and competencies.

Members can save up to 75% on advertised prices.

Visit www.societyofbiology.org/training for further details

S ince its inception the Society has almost tripled in size. An important part of this diversification has been

the growth of the Society’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

For all five SIGs, 2013 has been a busy and productive year. The UK Plant Science Federation (UKPSF) was formed in June 2012 with 29 Member Organisations and funding from the Gatsby Charitable Trust and the Society for Experimental Biology. This month they will be publishing a major report on the current state of plant science in the UK. We often excel in this frequently undervalued but critical area of biology, yet – as the report shows – there are major threats.

With 2 billion extra mouths to feed by 2050, innovation, infrastructure, application of research and the global political environment are critical. The UK’s agricultural output has not grown since 1986 and we are increasingly reliant on imports to feed the nation. The UKPSF can play a major role in providing the evidence base and stimulating debate to help ensure we all address this challenging problem.

The Animal Science Group (ASG), comprising 27 organisations, has also been busy, acting as a key player in the development of Government

policy and broadening debate. This year the ASG has again partnered with the NC3Rs (National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research) to run a symposium for scientists using animal models. It has organised two full day meetings with the Home Office on the UK’s implementation of the Directive on the Use of Animals in Research and ensured an inclusive response to many key animal science policy issues representing the breadth of the Society’s interests. In parallel, the Society has been running the secretariat for the UK Bioscience Coalition, focused solely on the EU Directive’s practical implementation in the UK, since January 2013, ensuring close linkage with the ASG.

The flexibility of our SIGs is particularly exemplified by the Natural Capital Initiative (NCI), a partnership between the Society, the James Hutton Institute, the British Ecological Society and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. The NCI is a forum for independent debate around the practical implementation of an ecosystem service approach: in short, how we can better take account of the value we get from the environment in policymaking. This includes issues such as the value of biodiversity, pure water, good air quality and how the

environment impacts on health. The secretariat is actively considering a new major policy seminar to build on early successes.

Our Heads of University Biosciences SIG helps ensure our voices are heard in areas ranging from the impact of high fees to science funding, through strong connections with the bioscience academic community (over 80 universities are members). The group’s biannual meetings attract high level speakers including ministers, research council CEOs and members of the Prime Minister’s advisory Committee on Science and Technology.

In terms of outreach, however, the UK Biology Competitions SIG is totally reliant on its outstanding volunteers and it has led the way with its school-focused competitions. The Biology Challenge and the Biology Olympiad saw over 35,000 children participate in 2013. In the international Olympiad, a team of four 18 year olds again secured a full house of medals for the UK. The challenge now is to raise £1m to host the event in 2017.

With SIGs delivering so much for the Society, we are bound to see new ones established in 2014. Provided we can find secure funding models, the Society will do all it can to support this route to diversification.


TAKING AN INTEREST

DR MARK DOWNS FSB, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, SOCIETY OF BIOLOGY

With Special Interest Groups delivering so much for the Society, we are bound to see new ones established in 2014

Final Word

Journal of Biological Education is firmly established as the authoritative voice in the world of biological education. The journal aims to bridge the gap between research and practice, providing information, ideas and opinion, in addition to critical examinations of advances in biology research and teaching.

Through the coverage of policy and curriculum developments, the latest results of research into the teaching, learning and assessment of biology are brought to the fore.

Each volume of JBE contains four issues and members of the Society of Biology can subscribe for just £40 a year. Contact [email protected] for more details.

www.tandfonline.com/rjbe

Published on behalf of the Society of Biology by Routledge

Journal of Biological Education

Volume 45 Number 3 September 2011

ERIDOB ISSUE

Contents

Editorial

Note from the Editor

David Slingsby 117

Guest editorial

Authenticity in biology education: benefits and challenges

Anat Yarden and Graca S. Carvalho 118

Research paper

Children’s attitudes towards animals: evidence from the RODENTIA project

Maria Joao Fonseca, Nuno H. Franco, Francis Brosseron,Fernando Tavares, I. Anna S. Olsson and Julio Borlido-Santos 121

Research paper

Supporting learning of high-school genetics using authentic research practices: the

teacher’s role

Hadas Gelbart and Anat Yarden 129

Research paper

Developing a pedagogy of risk in socio-scientific issues

Ralph Levinson, Phillip Kent, David Pratt, Ramesh Kapadia andCristina Yogui 136

Research paper

Learning progress in evolution theory: climbing a ladder or roaming a landscape?

J €org Zabel and Harald Gropengiesser 143

Research paper

The reasoned arguments of a group of future biotechnology technicians on a controversial

socio-scientific issue: human gene therapy

Laurence Simonneaux and Habib Chouchane 150

Research paper

Towards an inter-language of talking science: exploring students’ argumentation in relation

to authentic language

Clas Olander and Ake Ingerman 158

Book reviews 165

JournalofBiologicalEducatio

nVolume45

Number3

September2011

ISSN 0021-9266


ERIDOB ISSUE

CYAN MAGENTA YELLOW BLACK

ContentsNote from the Society of BiologySociety of Biology: influencing government policiesMark Downs 63

EditorialA love of lifeJean Wilson 65

Case studyProject-based learning: a student investigation of the turtle trade in Guangzhou, Peopleʼs Republic of ChinaSze Man Cheung and Alex T. Chow 68

Research paperStepping into the unknown: three models for the teaching and learning of the opening sections of scientific articlesHedda Falk and Anat Yarden 77

Research paperWhy traditional expository teaching–learning approaches may founder? An experimental examination of neural networks in biology learningJun-Ki Lee and Yong-Ju Kwon 83

Research paperUsing soil seed banks for ecological education in primary schoolEun Jeong Ju and Jae Geun Kim 93

Case studyIntroduction to experimental design: can you smell fear?Chris J.R. Willmott 102

PracticalStudent-centred experiments with stream invertebratesIan Vaughan, Stefano Larsen, Isabelle Durance and Steve Ormerod 106

WebwatchExploring the marine environmentCompiled by Jean Wilson 112

Book review 114

Volume 45 Number 2 June 2011

Volume 45 N

umber 2 June 2011

ISSN 0021-9266



RJBE 45-2 Outside Cover.qxp:Layout 1 5/2/11 3:37 PM Page 1

JBE.indd 1 30/08/2011 15:19

Volume 47 Number 4 December 2013

ISSN 0021-9266


Journal of Biological E

ducation

Volume 47 N

umb

er 4 Decem

ber 2013

Contents

EditorialAnimals and plants in natural history dioramas in museums: specimens or objects?

Sue Dale Tunnicliffe 189

Research paperAnalysis of students’ arguments on evolutionary theory

Nicolai Basel, Ute Harms and Helmut Prechtl 192

Research paperPre-service science teachers’ acceptance of biological evolution in Turkey

Özgür Task n 200

Research paperThe effect of explicit embedded reflective instruction on nature of science understandings in advanced science students

Mustafa Serdar Koksal, Jale Cakiroglu and Omer Geban 208

Research paperA comparison of biology majors’ written arguments across the curriculum

Melissa Schen 224

Research paperHow Spanish primary school students interpret the concepts of population and species

María-Pilar Jiménez-Tejada, Cristina Sánchez-Monsalve and Francisco González-García 232

Case studyA guided inquiry methodology to achieve authentic science in a large undergraduate biology course

Carolyn Martineau, Stephen Traphagen and Timothy C. Sparkes 240

Case studyTransforming a school learning exercise into a public engagement event: ‘The Good, the Bad and The Algae’

James Redfern, Dariel Burdass and Joanna Verran 246

PracticalEnzyme assay: an investigative approach to enhance science process skills

Rekha Vartak, Anupama Ronad and Vikrant Ghanekar 253

Book reviews 258

Spine width = 4.5mmRJBE_47_4_OC_TandF 11/11/2013 6:32 PM Page 1

Journal of Biological Education is firmly established as the authoritative voice in the world of biological education. The journal aims to bridge the gap between research and practice, providing information, ideas and opinion, in addition to critical examinations of advances in biology research and teaching.

Through the coverage of policy and curriculum developments, the latest results of research into the teaching, learning and assessment of biology are brought to the fore.

Each volume of JBE contains four issues and members of the Society of Biology can subscribe for just £40 a year. Contact [email protected] for more details.

www.tandfonline.com/rjbe

Published on behalf of the Society of Biology by Routledge



ERIDOB ISSUE

Contents

Editorial

Note from the Editor

David Slingsby 117

Guest editorial

Authenticity in biology education: benefits and challenges

Anat Yarden and Graca S. Carvalho 118

Research paper

Children’s attitudes towards animals: evidence from the RODENTIA project

Maria Joao Fonseca, Nuno H. Franco, Francis Brosseron,Fernando Tavares, I. Anna S. Olsson and Julio Borlido-Santos 121

Research paper

Supporting learning of high-school genetics using authentic research practices: the

teacher’s role

Hadas Gelbart and Anat Yarden 129

Research paper

Developing a pedagogy of risk in socio-scientific issues

Ralph Levinson, Phillip Kent, David Pratt, Ramesh Kapadia andCristina Yogui 136

Research paper

Learning progress in evolution theory: climbing a ladder or roaming a landscape?

J €org Zabel and Harald Gropengiesser 143

Research paper

The reasoned arguments of a group of future biotechnology technicians on a controversial

socio-scientific issue: human gene therapy

Laurence Simonneaux and Habib Chouchane 150

Research paper

Towards an inter-language of talking science: exploring students’ argumentation in relation

to authentic language

Clas Olander and Ake Ingerman 158

Book reviews 165

JournalofBiologicalEducatio

nVolume45

Number3

September2011

ISSN 0021-9266


ERIDOB ISSUE

CYAN MAGENTA YELLOW BLACK

ContentsNote from the Society of BiologySociety of Biology: influencing government policiesMark Downs 63

EditorialA love of lifeJean Wilson 65

Case studyProject-based learning: a student investigation of the turtle trade in Guangzhou, Peopleʼs Republic of ChinaSze Man Cheung and Alex T. Chow 68

Research paperStepping into the unknown: three models for the teaching and learning of the opening sections of scientific articlesHedda Falk and Anat Yarden 77

Research paperWhy traditional expository teaching–learning approaches may founder? An experimental examination of neural networks in biology learningJun-Ki Lee and Yong-Ju Kwon 83

Research paperUsing soil seed banks for ecological education in primary schoolEun Jeong Ju and Jae Geun Kim 93

Case studyIntroduction to experimental design: can you smell fear?Chris J.R. Willmott 102

PracticalStudent-centred experiments with stream invertebratesIan Vaughan, Stefano Larsen, Isabelle Durance and Steve Ormerod 106

WebwatchExploring the marine environmentCompiled by Jean Wilson 112

Book review 114


Volume 45 N

umber 2 June 2011

ISSN 0021-9266



RJBE 45-2 Outside Cover.qxp:Layout 1 5/2/11 3:37 PM Page 1

JBE.indd 1 30/08/2011 15:19


ISSN 0021-9266


Journal of Biological E

ducation

Volume 46 N

umb

er 4 Decem

ber 2012

ContentsResearch PaperStudents’ learning outcomes and learning experiences through playing a Serious Educational GameMeng-Tzu Cheng and Len Annetta 203

Research PaperDevelopment and application of a two-tier multiple-choice diagnostic test for high school students’ understanding of cell division and reproductionErtugrul Sesli and Yilmaz Kara 214

Research PaperHIV/AIDS content knowledge and presentation strategies in biology for effective use in everyday lifeLindelani Mnguni and Mia Abrie 226

Research PaperConceptual ecology of evolution acceptance among Greek education students: the contribution of knowledge increaseKyriacos Athanasiou, Efstratios Katakos and Penelope Papadopoulou 234

Case StudyCan the effectiveness of different forms of feedback be measured? Retention and student preference for written and verbal feedback in level 4 bioscience studentsPhil Buckley 242

PracticalAn interdisciplinary experiment: azo-dye metabolism by Staphylococcus aureusKayleigh Brocklesby, Robert Smith and Duncan Sharp 247

PracticalBioinformatics: a history of evolution in silicoVladan Ondrej and Petr Dvorák 252

Book Reviews 260

RJBE_46_4_OC_TandF 11/15/2012 7:07 PM Page 1

SUPPORTING LIFE SCIENCES

As the leading professional body for the biosciences, the Society of Biology is committed to recognising professional excellence, through degree accreditation, professional registration and membership networks.

For more information (including a list of accredited degrees) visit www.societyofbiology.org

Degree accreditationOur Degree Accreditation Programme has been designed to address the skills gap between academic study and employment in the biosciences. Degrees accredited by the Society of Biology can help employers to identify research-ready graduates, with a known profile of skills and knowledge.

Join todayIn addition to professional registers, members can access a range of valuable membership benefits including discounted training courses, a free subscription to our award-winning magazine The Biologist, and our credits-based CPD programme. We offer several membership categories to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to get involved in our work.

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