Welcome to Navier-Stalks

Hi there. Allow me to warmly welcome you to this new and shiny blog.

I've set this blog up for a bunch of reasons. At the top of the list was my need to describe the weird and wonderful world in which I work. Until recently, I was a theoretical physicist, studying the more mathematical aspects of quantum field theory. But, having completed my PhD and finding myself unemployed (and unemployable), I thought I'd try my hand at biology; specifically bioinformatics.

At the boundary between biology, mathematics and computer science, bioinformatics concerns itself with developing algorithms to study the huge volumes of genetic information that exist in the DNA of each specie of organism.

Having aimed for Bioinformatics, I managed to miss the mark and was offered a position doing something slightly different. Instead of analysing the genetic information as it is encoded in the DNA, I was offered the chance to try to model how the DNA is used in the cell to allow the cell to respond to its environment.

For example, in the body, the microbes that are responsible for disease can emit molecules which bind to proteins on the surface of certain cells. The binding can affect the behaviour of the proteins, allowing them to modify other proteins inside the cell, which themselves might affect other proteins. This process can continue like a chain of falling dominos. Eventually, a modified protein reaches the nucleus, triggering a new protein to be manufactured using the DNA and the new protein is shuttled to the cell surface where it can be secreted in order to fight the microbe. It's my job to simulate all this.

Being offered this job was definately a good thing. Modelling a dynamical system is essentially physics and so is much closer to home, but it places me in a world between worlds. I don't know enough biology to consider myself a biologist (although I'm learning fast) and I'm rapidly moving away from the sort of maths that a physicist would use. The closest label I can find to fit this world is Mathematical Biology, although many people are pushing the far sexier (but more vague) label of "Systems Biology". Either way, that's what I do.

The purpose of this blog is to document and derive humour from, the culture clash that exists between the physical and life sciences. Physics and maths pride themselves on their rigour and exactitude and, in those fields, you can go far with a well constructed theory, irrespective of how well it compares to experiment. Biology and Medicine, on the other hand, are driven by the need to make use of the knowledge and rigour frequently goes out the window. As such, the life sciences are more akin to engineering. Of course, this is not unreasonable. The human body is an enormous machine of unknown mechanisms and unearthing how it all works is a colossal task.

Hopefully, as the weeks glide by, we will see many examples of how this process of discovery pans out and I, no doubt, will spend much of that time banging my head against my desk. But, for now, let's embrace the naive delusion that all will go smoothly.

Either way, it will be a fascinating trip.