Search for "microbiome"
Epigenetics: A blogging retrospective
May 31, 2019
Looking back over my blog posts, I realised that I have written 15 posts on epigenetics between 2013 and now (some with Aleksandra Stelmach). It’s time to take stock. Epigenetics is the latest in a long line of developments in genetics and genomics that I have studied through the lens of metaphor analysis, from cloning …
The exposome – the what?
February 22, 2019
I recently came across the term ‘exposome’ (roughly, the sum total of everything we are exposed to) and started to read up on it. But I just don’t know what to make of it… is it merely humbug or is there more to it? In this post I want to summarise a few milestones in …
Phage and fiction
August 23, 2018
We have known about bacteriophages for over a century. I myself became vaguely aware of them around 2004 when I started to be interested in bacteria and antimicrobial resistance and later on when my mother had Clostridium difficile, a health-care associated infection related to antibiotic use. However, I never actually looked more closely at phages until Carmen …
Making Science Public: Six years on
April 20, 2018
It’s coming up to May 2018. In May 2012 we started our five-year Making Science Public Project, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I directed the programme between May 2012 and October 2016. I then retired and Sujatha Raman took over as director. The project had a non-cost extension for a year and now …
Fermenting hope; fermenting hype?
March 23, 2018
When I first became involved with the Synthetic Biology Research Centre here at the University of Nottingham in 2014, I wrote a blog post in which I pointed to fermentation as one of its historical and intellectual roots. I called it ‘Fermenting thought’. Now, four years later, I have come across an article in The …
Microbiomics: Heading the bandwagon off at the pass
February 24, 2018
Epigenetics once was a new and emerging field. Although there is no scientific consensus about the correct meaning of ‘epigenetics’ and scientists are increasingly sceptical of some claims being made, one can say, following Kat Arney, that epigenetics tries to “explain how the things that happen to us during a lifetime somehow imprint on our …
Making Science Public: End of year round-up, 2017
December 15, 2017
This is my sixth end-of-year blog post for the Making Science Public blog. A lot has changed since I posted my first one at the end of 2012 (and this post is my 307th). The Making Science Public programme, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, has virtually come to an end but the topics it began …
Making microbes public: A workshop report
May 19, 2017
This is a post by Carmen McLeod who participated in a workshop held at the University of Oxford on 3/4 May 2017 entitled Making Microbes Public. She wrote the original post for the blog of the Interdisciplinary Microbiome Project and it has been reposted here with permission. Carmen is a social anthropologist currently based in the Nottingham …