All talk...

The Society for General Microbiology is a UK charity that offers funding for microbiologists and also holds a biannual meeting. As it's a general microbiology society and not specific to microbial ecology my interest in meetings tends to vary from year to year. Next week in Edinburgh is the 161^st meeting and it looks like an interesting one. I'm not saying that simply because I'm presenting. Honest.

I'm in the Hot-Topic session called “Post-genomic analysis of microbial function in the environment” which is joint with the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) who sponsor my current project. I was a little bit surprised to get a talk, when I submit an abstract for a poster I always tick the 'would you like to be considered for an oral presentation?' box as posters are more easily ignored, and this will probably be the largest audience I've spoken to (at least since assembly at school, we had a big year). As I'm an offered paper rather than an invited speaker I get a slightly shorter slot of 15 minutes. Three to five minutes of that will be reserved for questions leaving me to prepare a 10-12 minute talk. It's an odd length of time, I really can't introduce the subject and cover all the aspects that I would ordinarily include in a longer talk. I think I'm going to give a broad taster of what I'm doing, focussing on approaches that we've decided to take and why rather than presenting detailed results on any one of them. It is easy to slip onto the habit of chucking together formulaic presentations and the shorter time has really made me think about this one.

Hopefully you'll be able to judge for yourself if you can't make it to the meeting (or nod off during my bit – I'm in a fidgety session, just before lunch on the final day of the meeting) as I'll upload the slides to Slideshare and link here. I've also got hold of a lapel microphone and will be recording my talk on my MP3 player. I should be able to sync the two together; voila! a fascinating talk on the metagenomics and metaproteomics of marine polysaccharide-degrading bacteria without the added distraction of my handsome physog. Hopefully it'll also allow me to find out what's wrong with my talks, they always seem to pass in a blur and and people are (mostly) polite afterwards – good for the ego, not so good for improving your technique.

On the topic of talks I should also plug my boss' talk, Prof. Alan McCarthy will be enlightening a rapt (and probably chuckling) audience with the ecology of shiga-toxigenic phage (the ones that make Escherichia coli 0157 as nasty as they are). He's not written it yet - allowing me to be a little smug - as he's being overwhelmed with everyone else's posters to check over; but he is always amusing. No pressure Alan.

In Our Time

I've sporadically kept a blog before about an Alternative reality game (Perplex City - now on sabbatical) and found that I really wanted to post about so many more things than purely that. One of the main distractions was microbial ecology and this blog is my attempt to give free rein to that distraction.

Though in this first post I still can't quite escape. Through the blog of one of the creators of Perplex City, Adrian Hon I came across a series of programmes on Radio 4 called In Our Time, hosted by Melvyn Bragg (gratuitous photo of famous bouffant do left).

I don't listen to the radio very much, it's something I associate with being driven to swimming lessons as a child (not that I didn't like swimming) and The Archers omnibus on a Sunday when my mum was doing the ironing (idyllic huh? And who'd have thought that Debbie Aldridge was much better as a comedian?), but these sounded great; panel discussions on all manner of subjects including hell, negative numbers, Jung and the Higgs Boson (I have a prejudiced view of the Higgs Boson that for the moment I will refrain from letting forth).

Being quite cautious when it comes to sampling new things I scrolled down the substantial list of programmes in the archive, all still available to listen to, to find one that I might know something about already (goodbye chaos theory and Wittgenstein) and found Microbiology. I fully expected to get annoyed at inaccuracies, or at the ecological aspects of microbiology being ignored in favour of the grisly, crowd-pleasing medical aspects, but was unable to. It was a lovely potted history of the subject which managed to cover the history of its development, its impact and future potential in only forty minutes, less than your average undergraduate lecture. Culturabilty, phylogenetics and similar were all mentioned

Though some of the anecdotes anyone with a GCSE in science will have come across - Edward Jenner injecting poor James Phipps with pus and coming up with vaccination for example - other parts of the programme were more novel. I'm sure I've always been taught about microbiology's origins via the history of microscopy and that the two were inextricably linked, but one of the panellists, Andrew Mendelsohn pointed to the real beginnings of the subject being in studies of function of microorgansisms - physiology rather than microscopic observation. It's nice to make these little connections that I've failed to fully appreciate and happily function has also been the subject of my own work. Definitely worth a listen.

And in case you get hooked on In Our Time (sorry), Adrian also has a discussion site about the programme, After Our Time.