It’s good to know your limits, and I met them hard the other week at an event on cell therapies, CAR-T, and gene therapies. It’s an exciting area for personalised treatment. It could involve taking a cell, reprogramming the genome, and popping it back in. Doing that, you’ve perhaps taught your cells how to fight a...

Of course I don't understand this work simulating the cell cycle for a bacteria, but it looks incredible: (The title of my post comes from the source code for the simulation).

Reading: Immunological sin: how a person’s earliest flu infections dictate life-long immunity, Nature, 17 December 2025. The term OAS [original antigenic sin] comes from researchers who, in the 1950s, recognized that most of the flu-binding antibodies circulating in people’s blood match whichever influenza strains were...

Thank you to the MRC, the University of Glasgow and the Centre for Virus Research for the paper art viruses. We've made a start on a couple of the easy ones. Why are they symmetric? From the PDF, viruses "have to be assembled from an extremely limited set of components, using the same building blocks repeatedly."  They...

you want to know why I find biology interesting, it's this. From 2017, and still genius and beautiful, and there's an hour of commentary.

The British Society for Research on Ageing (BSRA) has started running public lectures under the banner of "Understanding Ageing: Meet the Scientists". The first was from Janet Lord, Professor of Immune Cell Biology at the University of Birmingham. The main takeaway from the lecture was: your immune system doesn't work...

I’m interested in the idea of replacing animal models with human-derived ways to assess drugs. Animal models make sense in that we share evolutionary history, but that’s not the same as human testing. One new approach is to use microphysiological systems (MPS), colloquially known as “organ-on-a-chip” (OOC). Why MPS To...

The Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) is a repository of biological sequencing data. A research paper might deposit data in GEO as a number of files, either to allow others to replicate the work, or so the data can be used for a different analysis. For example, the paper “Single-cell transcriptome analysis reveals...

I’ve heard the phrase a few times, and I don’t get it. It sounds unhinged.Philip Ball, writing in The New European asks “Do we need a modern Darwin?” (13 November 2024). He reports the view of organisms have agency in their evolution, more so than genes: […] by virtue of being able to make choices, and in particular to...

Reading: How your brain detects patterns in the everyday: without conscious thought, Nature news, 25 September 2024. This is a clever experiment: identify neurons that respond to particular images, then present the images via a hidden rule and measure the neuron's responses. It seems neurons learn to anticipate the...

Reading: Promising lung cancer vaccine trial begins in UK, BBC News, 23 August 2024. This is like science fiction. Cancer? “Just pop this mRNA vaccine and monoclonal antibody we whipped up in the lab” (if it works). A 67-year-old man has become the first person in the UK to try what doctors hope will be a revolutionary...

Tonight I was at Tim Coulson’s Brighthink event, covering the physics, chemistry, biology that is part of The Universal History of Us: A 13.8 billion year tale from the Big Bang to you. I was taken by this slide, neatly summarising the big and small numbers involved in what makes up people, from 30 trillion cells of 220...

Reading: We Should Do More Direct Replications in Science, Stuart Buck, Harvard Data Science Review, 1 Aug 2024. It seems a no-brainer to me: […] science funders such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF)—which will spend nearly $60 billion this year, collectively—should...

Reading: How scientists are hacking the genetic code to give proteins new powers, Nature technology feature, 20 June 2023. File under “incredible” and “terrifying (provisional)”. It seems our DNA and the transcription/translation machinery is hackable to the extent of being able to augment the 20 amino acids we use with...

Surya Ganguli is quoted in El Reg on the energy cost of fast, reliable, bit flipping. Even with clever hacks, it is expensive. Biology is completely different. The final answer is just good enough and all the intermediate sets are slow, noisy, and unreliable. But not so unreliable that the final answer isn't just good...