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.