And here's something I read earlier . . . 

Jennifer L. Rohn, Experimental Heart (Cold Spring Harbor, New York, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2009 isbn 987-969876-8, US$13.00/£7.99).

Jennifer Rohn is a biologist who is editor of the entertaining and informative Lablit website, “dedicated to real laboratory culture and to the portrayal and perceptions of that culture – science, scientists and labs – in fiction, the media and across popular culture.”  Some people talk about “science in fiction” (as opposed to science fiction): as far as I can see, Lablit is pretty much the same sort of stuff; contemporary literary fiction which aims at presenting decent science rather than made-up technobabble and characters who are real people who happen to be scientists rather than stereotypes. Experimental Heart is something of a challenge: after spending some time arguing her case via the website and its forums, Rohn has published her first novel, set in the biological labs of a London University. Does it live up to the aims of the Lablit movement?

Andy O’Hara is a workaholic post-doc who becomes aware of the attractive Gina, working for Geniaxis, the start-up biotech company whose offices he can see from his lab window. Gina is working on a vaccine which may be the cure for a disease which is ravaging Africa, but more than that, she may be the girl for him. Soon on the scene, though, is Richard Rouyle, an English scientist working for a German company who turns out to have several agendas of his own, Gina’s colleague Maria (who has the hots for Andy), and a host of moral issues centred around the nature of the vaccine Gina is working on. How far this is an accurate picture of the lives of modern young scientists, I could not possibly guess, but what it certainly is, is an inventive and entertaining romantic comedy-cum-thriller. There certainly is a lot of science involved, which results in much description of laboratory techniques (there are probably BSc modules in the etiquette of scrounging radioactive isotopes and experimental mice) and aspects of cell biology which possibly only cell biologists would know and love. But this is seamlessly woven in to much more general background – the hothouse atmosphere of any research team in any discipline, the really vital questions we’ve all had to face like whose choice of music is going on the communal CD player, how to stay awake during a seminar where you really have no idea at all what the speaker is talking about, whether that one last project is going to come up with the goods, get you published in a prestigious journal, and open up a proper job, and specifically whether Andy can find both a cure for cancer and the girl of his dreams. By the end, the novel is verging interestingly on melodramatic thriller territory, but it never loses sight of its characters.

Lablit isn’t science fiction (although the Labit site notes a number of science fiction writers, such as Gregory Benford and Kim Stanley Robinson, as writers of the mode) and Experimental Heart isn’t science fiction either, although it very cleverly skirts just to the edge of sf. To say much more would be to give away some essential details: suffice to say that if part of the plot had been pushed that little bit further this would have certainly been science fiction as we know it.  The fact that it isn’t is clearly, and ingeniously, deliberate; and Rohn is to be commended on her control of the form. The jokes in which Andy is scientifically analysing his passion are equally controlled. Experimental Heart succeeds – as far as I can tell – in creating accurate and plausible (and laugh-out-loud funny) science. (Of course a lot of modern science is so specialised that experts in branch A really do have absolutely no idea what is supposed to happen in Branch B: again Rohn exploits this to make it a strength of her novel’s comedy; for the novice/non-expert reader all you really have to keep straight is that you’re often supposed to be confused by the acronyms and jargon. And where you’re not supposed to be confused, you’re not, actually.) There are serious ethical debates here too, including a glorious scene at a party where it is not always possible, until people open their mouths, to tell which side of the animal-experiment/animal rights divide they are on; which leads up to a darker episode a bit later.

If this really is life in present-day laboratories, I’d say quick, throw a bucket of cold water over the lot of ‘em, the randy little b*gg*rs, and be careful who comes knocking our your door for a tube of Taq polymerase enzyme, whatever that is. But Experimental Heart is one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in a long while. Point taken – Lablit lives!

we had a good day out visiting the Gormley iron men walking from the Bootle end up to Crosby and back. It was a fine afternoon and the beach was packed, probably because the local council had decided not to keep the installation in case someone wrapped their fishing boat around it, or something. There were a few people collecting signatures for a petition in favour of keeping them: I was chatting as I signed and the guy said that they'd so far (in that day alone) collected a thousand signatures. Our friends said that they'd come up from Kent specially to see them, whch impressed.

Now to see how to work this new email system which we've got. I was kind of under the impression everyone was jettisoning Microsoft Outlook, but maybe I'm wrong . . .