“So, what do you do?”

“Me? Oh, erm, I’m a writer. Well, sort of. Not really. I’m a science writer.”

“Oh, like for magazines and that?”

“No, mainly for companies.”

“Companies?”

“Yeah, like biotech and Pharma, although I don’t really work with pharma anymore. I used to, but I steer clear now as the whole thing seems a little gross, you know? Evil.”

“Okay, sure. So what do you write?”

“Blogs and webpages mostly. Trying to do a bit of ‘strategy’, whatever that means in reality.”

“Oh, so you’re in marketing?”

“Yeah…”

I always hesitate to call myself a writer, or at least I hasten to qualify it. The title of writer conjures up some truly creative images of whimsical or serious or thoughtful people, creating worlds and philosophies. I don’t do that and I always feel like a bit of a fraud even insinuating that perhaps I do.

Even here, writing blogs about life and science and the occasional bash at philosophy or politics, it’s not real. It’s just thoughts tumbling out of my head… rambling. Or ranting. So I guess at least I named the whole thing correctly.

It leaves such a tremendous feeling of dissatisfaction. Sometimes, I have a string of ideas and I have to get them out of my brain or I worry I’ll lose them somehow, somewhere amidst the swirl of mundane to-dos. And every time I have that feeling, that need, to get the ideas out of my brain and down onto a page or a Notes app or a scrap of paper, I trick myself into thinking I’m doing what real writers do when they succumb to that creative compulsion. But nothing of substance really comes out. It’s all a bit shallow.

I think perhaps I’ve led myself down this emo-kid fantasy of being the tortured intellectual in a job of circumstance and if I’d just been dealt a few different hands, I’d be doing something truly wonderful, or at least genuinely creative. Which is of course both incredibly pretentious and patently idiotic. I am already fantastically fortunate to be in a job that I am both good at and pays well, with a bloody spectacular family, fully capable of burning disposable income and ample free and flexible time on almost anything I really want.

But since I’m being self-indulgent and a little morose, let’s sweep aside the comfortable stability of reality for a moment and think about what else I could have been (but I promise to stop before I turn into Morrissey… I really dislike the Smiths, although they did corner ‘sad-boy pop’ pretty well).

1. Academic

The obvious one and the one I’ve been whinging about for over a decade now. The dream was something like running my own lab, heading up the research, discovering new nooks and crannies in biology, taking on my own PhD students and showing them how academia really doesn’t have to be a trial by fire.

Okay, so why aren’t I actually doing that? Well, despite going to some of the shittest schools in the country but miraculously ending up in some of the best universities in the world, I am lazy. I’m also objectively pretty smart but throw in a healthy dose of arrogance in my younger years and a very real, simmering level of insecurity, you get someone who doesn’t push themself especially hard on the off chance they do poorly in spite of their efforts and elegantly prove they weren’t as smart as they thought, or hoped. Conversely, doing okay or even well with minimal effort says the opposite. At least it did in my brain and now I cringe at that. But, there it is.

Yet, assuming I wasn’t an arrogant but insecure smartypants, and my PhD turned out as expected, and I did the postdocs and got the lab and became the professor, then what? Then I’d essentially be very senior lab admin after a few great years of postdoc research, forever chasing grants and managing people. Pass. Academia is a mess – a mess that also seems to be on fire – and I’d never have had either the financial security or general life flexibility that I have now. Plus I would’ve had to drag my family around the world chasing initial postdoc funding.

2. Artist

Okay, academic bullet potentially dodged when you look at it without the rose-tinted goggles on. My other early ambition was to be an artist. Like (over)thinking about stuff, art was another thing that seemed to come quite naturally to me. Always had a sketch pad in my bag as a kid and spent many an evening at the kitchen table, set of Daler-Rowney pencils open, copying some picture or another. I actually took Art as one of my A-levels – I started with Biology, Chemistry and English Literature (I applied for Physics to complete the holy trinity of science, but see my earlier point about being lazy, especially when it came to maths), but on day one of English Lit, our teacher opened by asking us all to explain, out loud, which animal best described us. That was a hard no for me so I swapped to Art.

The goal here was to do Fine Art, and I even applied for a Fine Art degree, after submitting my UCAS form for all the science degrees, had a quick interview at an art school at the last minute and got accepted on the strength of my existing work. So let’s say I didn’t switch back again to science and stayed with Fine Art. I’d be learning all the techniques, painting and collage and drawing and oodles of creative work. I’d be an Artist! Well, I’d be a Fine Art graduate. Maybe a little studio set up in the garage into which I could disappear for hours at a time to just paint moody landscapes or portraits or whatever else artists do. I was a little obsessed with the human form and spent most of my Art A-level copying Michelangelo and Giambologna plus a splash of Paula Rego’s work (aim high, right?), so I think that’s what I would’ve liked to have done. It always felt incredible to create something from seemingly nothing – well, besides a model or another picture. I was never particularly good at creating things from scratch in the same way as some of the fantasy artists I admired liked Gerald Brom and Jeff Easley and Tony DiTerlizzi. But an Artist! It sure sounds cool and I do (did?) enjoy it.

But from the artist friends I have now, it seems a bit of a ball ache to actually make a living from. Struggling for my art and lopping body parts doesn’t really fit with the life I was hoping for. And by that, I mean an easy one that’s also somehow deeply meaningful and fulfilling… so, yeah, not asking for much. Of course, I am aware that nothing has intrinsic meaning beyond that which we attach to it – it’s such a nebulous and subjective term, ‘meaning’, and I’m not really chasing it, so I’ll settle for enjoying what I’m doing and feeling a sense of contentment in it. I think creating art really has that as it’s so personal, and being as subjective as meaning itself, then, statistically, someone out there is bound to like it and pay you for it!

3. Writer

I mean a proper writer, a novelist; and I’m going to throw poet in here with it as well. This was never something I wanted to do growing up but it has become something I’d like to do now. It comes back to the creation from nothing feeling that drawing and painting used to bring. In fact, it’s all much the same thing, now I think about: both are creating something external from within, something wholly subjective and both seem incredibly difficult to make a living from.

I don’t think I’m actually creative enough to conjure a world. I was just about to write, “But let’s say I was, I’d create…” and my brain came back with nothing, so I think that says it all, really. Poetry probably appeals more since it has more of that immediacy – good poems feel raw, you can almost hear the tumble of thoughts and emotions falling onto the page when you read them. And they allow the reader to extract so much additional meaning from them since so little is stated explicitly. I like that. I’ll keep poetry in the back pocket as a life-possibly-still-to-come-but-maybe-once-the-mortgage-is-paid-off option.

4. Teacher

I’ve given a few classes and talks and training days to folk ranging from small kids to adults, and I love it. I even coach the rugby kids and that’s a whole different kind of teaching I wasn’t prepared for but it’s something I enjoy. Whether I tried very hard over the years or not, I’ve undeniably mopped up a lot of knowledge and even created some of it myself. I’ve also seen the whole range of teaching styles across all the education and getting complex ideas across to an audience is actually what I do now (some of the time). I like showing people how things work and how things fit together and how to think about something and how to question things – question all the things! I’m sure some of that is rooted in ego because it positions me as someone who knows stuff, but there’s definitely that wonderful feeling of opening up a new subject or way of thinking and having them realise, “Okay, yeah, that’s cool – I get it!”. That’s a good one for the soul. Plus the idea I might be helping at least a handful of cohorts in the next generation be more capable in the realms of critical thinking than whatever happens around the middle of the bell curve in the current population is rather close to something warm and fuzzy.

I would absolutely clash with the incessant rules and frameworks and restrictions and general nonsense that have ended the careers (will) of more than a few former teachers I know. I’m lazy and petulant so being told what to do and how to do it probably isn’t going to wash.

5. Doctor

An obvious one and I’ve answered the “So you’re doing science but not becoming a doctor?” question many times with one very simple statement “I generally dislike people.” Obviously, that’s not a comprehensive statement and I’m almost certainly not a sociopath – I like about ten people quite a lot and tolerate as many more – but I don’t have the patience to deal with patients. The 12 minute bursts of GP interviews trying to ascertain whether Dave’s claim of being on death’s door is actually just a sniffle and of course batting away the incessant “I asked ChatGPT and it turns out I definitely have this autoimmune condition” are not trials I am willing to face.

Medicine is super cool. So are physiology and anatomy and pharmacology and all the other very interesting aspects of being a doctor. But the people, specifically the sick people, are a real turn off. And constant assessments? Eurgh. I’ve done my exam years, thank you very much.

Okay, so being a doctor or a teacher are probably out because of the people and the abundance of relatively strict guidelines to follow. Academia is a dream I let die a good number of years ago and I’ve come to the conclusion that was a happy little death for it. Artist is something I’d quite like, but, like writing, I’m not actually good enough to be a proper artist or a proper writer. Poet… we’ll keep that one in the back pocket and offer up some sacrifices to the mercurial gods of subjectivity, just in case. Otherwise, I’d quite like to be a gardener or a groundskeeper. Outside is nice. I like plants.

So it turns out, I might be doing the perfect job. Not the part where I have to reluctantly confess my marketing activities, but the part that gives me a lot of creative freedom without having to create something akin to a novel from scratch; the part that pays pretty well; the part that allows me to write for fun at times, even if it’s not especially satisfying all the time; and most of all the flexibility to work (and surf!) when and how I want, free from most common restrictions and without exerting myself too much. Oh, and on my own; working on my own is delightful.

So, not a proper writer, but a science writer and occasional copywriter. If I put my hand over the marketing label, I might actually be doing a job that suits me and so I have to conclude that all my self-indulgent emo-esque whining is just me being a bit of a grumpy old bastard. But you probably knew that already.

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Pop down to the beach, pick up a handful of seaweed and you’re likely to be greeted by dozens of little crustaceans exploding out from underneath, frantically trying hop away for the nearest bit of cover. You probably never gave them much attention because you were busy hunting for crabs or just hoping to fling some seaweed at a sibling. And that’s completely fair as they’re far from the most attractive critters on the shore.

But if you’d looked a little closer, you’d find that those little crustaceans were beach hoppers, also know as sand fleas, which, let’s be honest, doesn’t help win them any additional popularity. These beach hoppers are a group of crustaceans we call amphipods. And one in particular, Parhyale hawaiensis, inadvertently became a bit of a biology celeb.

Coming in at under 2 cm, Parhyale lives in intertidal rubble and rotting leaf litter around warm coastlines. For those who decided to keep these little critters, it became apparent they breed every two or three weeks, all year-round, from the comfort of standard plastic tray filled with artificial seawater. Oh and they’ll happily eat a slice of carrot.

Rather mundane to warrant the title ‘celeb’, you might say, but its academic CV is nonetheless impressive. Over twenty-five years this animal has turned up in developmental biology, evolutionary theory, regeneration research, soft-matter physics, neuroanatomy, the study of biological clocks, immunology, pollution monitoring, biofuel enzymology and aquaculture. So, not too shabby for something you’d shake out of your beach towel without a second thought. Without any more rambling from me, here’s how that all happened.

It began with an egg

Not a transparent one, as you might expect of an animal we chose specifically for watching. The Parhyale egg is about half a millimetre wide and looks like a dense ball of white(ish) yolk, which you can’t see into it at all. What you can see is the surface, where a bunch of large cells sit, each identifiable by position, and all visible through under an ordinary microscope. So far so good.

In 2002 researchers dyed the cells of the egg, which we’ll correctly call and embryo from here on out, at a point when the whole thing was made of just eight cells. Four smaller ones on top, and four larger ones beneath. These eight cells of the very early embryo were followed, with studious researchers carefully mapping out where each one ended up, and found the whole future animal was already neatly parcelled out between them (1): three would build skin and nervous system, three the muscle and other internal tissues, one the gut lining, and one the germ line (the cells that make things like gametes for reproduction). These identities, or fates, were settled before there’s anything you’d call an animal. Locking in fates itself was interesting because this tends to happen much later in most other animals. Importantly, it opened the door for lots of intriguing questions around how these predestined cells related to each other.

The obvious step was to see what happens if we removed one of those early cells. Do neighbours pick up the slack and chip in to build our little beach hopper, or is it destined to be without a particular type of tissues, such as muscle, and end up distinctly more beach ‘crawler’ than hopper? Well, it tuns out if you remove one of the three internal-tissue founders, the neighbours do indeed cover for it, but nothing crosses between lineages (2), i.e. a muscle precursor removed meant only muscle neighbours helped compensate. Lose the germ-line founder and the embryo carries on building itself, but reaches the end of embryogenesis with no germ cells to be found, and nothing else steps in to supply them (3), and they still hatch! (4)

Surprisingly, if you strip out the little patch of cell goop (officially called the cytoplasm) that carries the germ-line instructions in the one-cell embryo, you get no germ cells as expected, but the embryo also never makes it as far as an early but important stage of development called gastrulation (the point at which the ball of cells starts folding itself into something with an inside and an outside). Those two points turn out to be unrelated, because an embryo that loses its germ-line cell three divisions later, at the eight-cell stage, gastrulates perfectly happily (5). This suggests the germ plasm is doing something quite separate from just specifying germ cells, which is cool and intriguing. What’s super weird is that the Patel lab reports, though not yet in print, that some animals go on to rebuild a germ line from non-germ line tissue and reach maturity fully fertile. “Nature, erm, finds a way.”

Sorting all this out required tools, and a shared staging system was the logical starting point (1). Transgenics and then CRISPR leapt in to answer more detailed questions (6), and then then a genome of roughly 3.6 billion letters, which is a little bigger than ours, came along to help link things together (7). Each new step was developed to answer another question about development and each new step handed the animal and knowledge to someone else.

Where insect wings came from

As a crustacean, Parhyale isn’t an insect (obviously), but it is an arthropod and you’d be forgiven for noting the similarities. Like insects, crustaceans have an impressive array of appendages; they come usually come equipped claws, gills, paddles, walking legs, jumping legs and mouthparts, all of which form from the same repeating segments. And once the genes that assign those jobs (the Hox genes) had been mapped (8) they could be switched off one at a time. With some clever molecular work, you can show all this with experiments where you get walking legs where an abdomen should be, or missing gills or an animal that gives up on specialisation altogether and builds the same generic limb over and over.

But back to insects and an argument running since the nineteenth century about where insect wings came from: a fresh outgrowth on the back, or a bit of ancestral leg carried upward as the body wall swallowed the leg’s base? Unanswerable in insects, who absorbed the relevant leg segments long ago and conveniently destroyed the evidence.

But Parhyale never absorbed them. In 2020 two groups attacked this from opposite ends and published back to back (9, 10). One knocked out leg-patterning genes and compared the wreckage to insects, while the other went looking for the genetic signature of a wing in crustacean tissue. They came to different conclusions about the route (one that the wing descends from an outgrowth on that ancestral leg segment, the other that it is a merger of two tissues, back and leg) but they agree an insect’s flank corresponds to a crustacean’s topmost leg segment, and that the wing is built partly from what used to be leg. Later work chased the same ancient tissue across to a very distant crustacean cousin, where it turns up as the shell of the water flea (11).

Neither settled it and the argument grinds on, with Paleozoic fossils now thrown in. But a question fought over for a century mostly by staring at insects, who had destroyed the evidence, finally had an animal you could do genetics in.

Legs that come back

We all like legs. They’re great for getting to and from places, I always find. Losing one is therefore somewhat of a bother. Unless you happen to be our favourite beach hopper of course, in which case if you lose a leg, you can regrow it in about a week (12). We know this because the limb’s shell is stiff and clear, so you can glue it to a microscope coverslip and film the whole thing in an awake animal, using the exoskeleton as splint and window at once (13). Turns out the new tissue comes from cells already committed to a fate rather than some reserve of blank ones, so, muscle from muscle lineages, skin from skin. And the muscle is rebuilt by satellite-like cells, which are a back-up group of cells lying dormant, wedged between the muscle fibre and its surrounding membrane, until there’s some damage. Up until this work, satellite cells had only ever been found in chordates, and if they really are the same cell type, the machinery was already there in the common ancestor of pretty much every animal with a front and a back! The skin, however, isn’t lucky enough to have these standby cells, and instead ordinary cells near the cut just divide, work out where they now are, and get on with it.

Compare what an embryo does when building a leg with what an adult does regrowing one and the two schedules simply refuse to line up (14). Yet when you take a look at the regrown leg properly, its sensory hairs, whether they work, what cell types it contains, and you’d never be able tell it from one that was never cut off, other than being a little on the small size (15).

Squares

Cells in a sheet normally pack into hexagons, or close enough, like bubbles or honeycomb. Parhyale embryos use tidy rows of squares (16), and since rows of those squares become the segments of the adult, this is likely more than just for show and could be tied to cell identifies and the movements needed for development. But right now it’s a bit of an open question. It does however form a nice bridge between a biology problem and a physics one, because dividing cells should really mess up any tidy arrangement. Filming whole embryos, however, showed it’s the divisions themselves keeping things tidy: waves of oriented division sweep through, and faults get swept out to the edge (17, 18), maintaining a tidy, ‘global’ pattern across the embryo. And so now, Parhyale has a whole new audience in physics journals, which nobody planned.

A brain and some rubbish eyes

You probably don’t immediately think of a brain when you think of tiny crustaceans, hopping around the beach. But it’s there, in a way, mostly in the form of a concentrated nervous system and that nervous system went undescribed for a slightly awkwardly long time (especially in considering how much attention invertebrate neurobiology has had over the year!). Thankfully, it eventually got the recognition it deserved, and it now has a proper brain atlas (19) and even some rather splendid maps of its signalling molecules (20). The eyes are cool part, each with about fifty facets, five light-sensitive cells apiece rather than the usual eight, wired into the brain differently from related animals (21). Okay, that’s the cool part, but the reality is they’re a little bit rubbish: fine for working out roughly where you are, but not for seeing anything. But hey, it’s good to know and have genetic access to understand them, especially since nearly everything we know about arthropod eyes comes from one fly.

Two clocks

I keep an eye on the tides because they’re going to influence whether I can escape my office and get out for a surf. I imagine if was tiny beach hopper, living between the tidemarks, I probably keep a closer eye on them since whether I ate or starved, lived or died, may depended on it. But tide times move, so you need to track the tides as well as the day, and tides run on a 12.4-hour cycle that drifts against the 24-hour one. Everyone knew intertidal animals anticipate tides, but nobody could find the machinery, because there simply weren’t tidal animal that could be genetically manipulated to poke around for answers.

Parhyale to the rescue. It’s a tenacious little swimmer and can swim in impressive 12.4-hour bursts that persist without tides; you can train them to swim to ‘fake’ tides in the lab and they keep to their hardcore timed swimming sessions even when temperatures shift. With some genetic jiggery pokery, you find that if you knock out a gene called, Bmal1, you knock out the ordinary daily clock (the circadian one) and their sense of tidal rhythm (the circatidal one), too. This is first hard evidence the two clocks share parts (22). Later work also found separate clusters of clock cells in the brain, some following light, others sticking to the tides regardless (23), and very recent research suggest the remaining clock genes matter for both rhythms (24). If you give the animals irregular tides, some abandon tidal time for daylight altogether, which may be how one species colonised coastlines with wildly different tides.

Everything else, quickly

It doesn’t even stop there! But since I’m sure you have more to do with your day than read a mini-thesis about beach fleas, I’m going to whizz through some of additional, but not less important, topics since they cover an impressive range of subjects!

Pollution

Tropical marine ecotoxicology has always badly needed a standard test model organism since most protocols were built for temperate species. A Brazilian group supplied one in 2017 in the form of, you guess it, Parhyale hawaiensis, complete with a ‘how to look after your very own beach hopper In the lab’ guide and a short toxicity test in 96-well plates (25). Since then, the ecotox world has cottoned on to how useful Parhyale might be and now we have DNA damage assays, reproduction and growth protocols to look at chronic toxicity (26), the finding that males and females respond to the same contaminants differently and evidence that hydrocarbons and microplastics wreck feeding, mating and moulting well below lethal doses (27). Some studies now use limb regeneration itself as the readout.

Immunity

Parhyale’s blood cells were finally described in 2023 and the come in three types, all of which will happily eat E. coliin a dish (28). Since farmed prawns and shrimp are close relatives with worsening disease problems, an immune system we can actually study in detail is worth having. Proof that no research ever evades immunology forever!

Wood

Bet you didn’t expect to see anything about wood in a marine crustacean article? Well, weirdly, the Parhyale genome carries a full set of enzymes for breaking down plant fibre, as do those of related crustaceans (7). I don’t think they’ll be any competition for beavers – no one’s watched one digest a log... yet – but what the data turned up was the genetic capacity in a group where wood-eating was thought to be a ‘niche speciality’, shall we say.

Heat

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s been rather hot of late, so having more ways to understand how heat affects marine life is always going to be important. Folk have now grown Parhyale at 20, 23, 26 and 29^oC to work out what suits them, albeit mostly with an eye on aquaculture (29). Growth peaks when warm, survival peaks when slightly cooler and once you dip below about 26^oC they take so long to breed that a generation didn’t finish inside the study. It’s worth pointing out that this is aquaculture data, not climate data, but a hardy tropical intertidal animal with a genome, a brain atlas, a whole molecular toolkit and a known thermal preference is an obvious candidate for asking what warming seas do to the things living in them. That work is mostly still to come.

What actually did it for Parhyale?

It’s tempting to say the animal is special but, in the grand scheme of things, it’s really not. Amphipods are among the most species-rich groups in Crustacea and most are much of a muchness. As for suitability in the lab, that happened by accident, truth be told; just researchers happening to stumble across them doing very well in an aquarium. So rather than uniqueness, the thing that did it for Parhyale really comes down to legibility: you have a few dozen big cells on the outside of a yolk ball, each one east to spot, each one nameable and each one watchable for days, and that was a very useful position to start from.

And from there, every piece of the toolkit turned out to be good for something other than its original purpose. Reporter lines built to trace lineages were what was needed to light up photoreceptors, long-term filming built for embryology was what a physicist needed, gene editing built to test how segments get their identity was what a chronobiologist needed to break a clock. Each new tool, each new piece of understanding, passed to the next scientist asking a new question. And none of the answers were visible from the beach, where there’s just a small, rather boring-looking crustacean under a pile of old seaweed, keeping time with the tides.

References

1. M. Gerberding, W. E. Browne, N. H. Patel, Cell lineage analysis of the amphipod crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis reveals an early restriction of cell fates. Development 129, 5789–5801 (2002).

2. A. L. Price, M. S. Modrell, R. L. Hannibal, N. H. Patel, Mesoderm and ectoderm lineages in the crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis display intra-germ layer compensation. Dev. Biol. 341, 256–266 (2010).

3. C. G. Extavour, The fate of isolated blastomeres with respect to germ cell formation in the amphipod crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis. Dev. Biol. 277, 387–402 (2005).

4. A. R. Nast, C. G. Extavour, Ablation of a Single Cell From Eight-cell Embryos of the Amphipod Crustacean <em>Parhyale hawaiensis</em>. J. Vis. Exp., 51073 (2014).

5. T. Gupta, C. G. Extavour, Identification of a putative germ plasm in the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. EvoDevo 4, 34 (2013).

6. A. Martin, J. M. Serano, E. Jarvis, H. S. Bruce, J. Wang, S. Ray, C. A. Barker, L. C. O’Connell, N. H. Patel, CRISPR/Cas9 Mutagenesis Reveals Versatile Roles of Hox Genes in Crustacean Limb Specification and Evolution. Curr. Biol. 26, 14–26 (2016).

7. D. Kao, A. G. Lai, E. Stamataki, S. Rosic, N. Konstantinides, E. Jarvis, A. D. Donfrancesco, N. Pouchkina-Stancheva, M. Sémon, M. Grillo, H. Bruce, S. Kumar, I. Siwanowicz, A. Le, A. Lemire, M. B. Eisen, C. Extavour, W. E. Browne, C. Wolff, M. Averof, N. H. Patel, P. Sarkies, A. Pavlopoulos, A. Aboobaker, The genome of the crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis, a model for animal development, regeneration, immunity and lignocellulose digestion. eLife 5, e20062 (2016).

8. J. M. Serano, A. Martin, D. M. Liubicich, E. Jarvis, H. S. Bruce, K. La, W. E. Browne, J. Grimwood, N. H. Patel, Comprehensive analysis of Hox gene expression in the amphipod crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis. Dev. Biol. 409, 297–309 (2016).

9. H. S. Bruce, N. H. Patel, Knockout of crustacean leg patterning genes suggests that insect wings and body walls evolved from ancient leg segments. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 4, 1703–1712 (2020).

10. C. M. Clark-Hachtel, Y. Tomoyasu, Two sets of candidate crustacean wing homologues and their implication for the origin of insect wings. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 4, 1694–1702 (2020).

11. H. S. Bruce, N. H. Patel, The Daphnia carapace and other novel structures evolved via the cryptic persistence of serial homologs. Curr. Biol. 32, 3792-3799.e3 (2022).

12. N. Konstantinides, M. Averof, A Common Cellular Basis for Muscle Regeneration in Arthropods and Vertebrates. Science 343, 788–791 (2014).

13. F. Alwes, C. Enjolras, M. Averof, Live imaging reveals the progenitors and cell dynamics of limb regeneration. eLife 5, e19766 (2016).

14. C. Sinigaglia, A. Almazán, M. Lebel, M. Sémon, B. Gillet, S. Hughes, E. Edsinger, M. Averof, M. Paris, Distinct gene expression dynamics in developing and regenerating crustacean limbs. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 119, e2119297119 (2022).

15. A. Almazán, Ç. Çevrim, J. M. Musser, M. Averof, M. Paris, Crustacean leg regeneration restores complex microanatomy and cell diversity. Sci. Adv. 8, eabn9823 (2022).

16. B. L. Steinert, L. Blondel, C. Kuyyamudi, E. Stamataki, A. Pavlopoulos, C. G. Extavour, Lineage domains and cytoskeletal cables organize a cellular square grid in a crustacean. bioRxiv, 2025.08.31.673345 (2026).

17. C. Wolff, J.-Y. Tinevez, T. Pietzsch, E. Stamataki, B. Harich, L. Guignard, S. Preibisch, S. Shorte, P. J. Keller, P. Tomancak, A. Pavlopoulos, Multi-view light-sheet imaging and tracking with the MaMuT software reveals the cell lineage of a direct developing arthropod limb. eLife 7, e34410 (2018).

18. D. J. Cislo, F. Yang, H. Qin, A. Pavlopoulos, M. J. Bowick, S. J. Streichan, Active cell divisions generate fourfold orientationally ordered phase in living tissue. Nat. Phys. 19, 1201–1210 (2023).

19. C. Wittfoth, S. Harzsch, C. Wolff, A. Sombke, The “amphi”-brains of amphipods: new insights from the neuroanatomy of Parhyale hawaiensis (Dana, 1853). Front. Zool. 16, 30 (2019).

20. S. Raspe, K. Kümmerlen, S. Harzsch, Immunolocalization of SIFamide-like neuropeptides in the adult and developing central nervous system of the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis (Malacostraca, Peracarida, Amphipoda). Arthropod Struct. Dev. 77, 101309 (2023).

21. A. P. Ramos, O. Gustafsson, N. Labert, I. Salecker, D.-E. Nilsson, M. Averof, Analysis of the genetically tractable crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis reveals the organisation of a sensory system for low-resolution vision. BMC Biol. 17, 67 (2019).

22. E. R. Kwiatkowski, Y. Schnytzer, J. J. C. Rosenthal, P. Emery, Behavioral circatidal rhythms require Bmal1 in Parhyale hawaiensis. Curr. Biol. 33, 1867-1882.e5 (2023).

23. A. Oliphant, C. Y. Sia, C. P. Kyriacou, D. C. Wilcockson, M. H. Hastings, Expression of clock genes tracks daily and tidal time in brains of intertidal crustaceans Eurydice pulchra and Parhyale hawaiensis. Curr. Biol. 35, 2802-2815.e5 (2025).

24. V. Louis, Z. Bellido, A. Helfenbein, J. J. C. Rosenthal, P. Emery, Core circadian clock genes control molecular and behavioral circatidal rhythms in Parhyale hawaiensis. bioRxiv, 2026.02.27.708297 (2026).

25. M. C. Artal, A. dos Santos, T. B. Henry, G. de A. Umbuzeiro, Development of an acute toxicity test with the tropical marine amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. Ecotoxicology 27, 103–108 (2018).

26. A. dos Santos, G. de A. Umbuzeiro, Proposal of a chronic toxicity test using the tropical epibenthic amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. Mar. Pollut. Bull. 194, 115375 (2023).

27. A. dos Santos, M. T. Botelho, M. Vannuci-Silva, M. C. Artal, F. I. Vacchi, G. R. Magalhães, V. Gomes, T. B. Henry, G. de A. Umbuzeiro, The amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis as a promising model in ecotoxicology. Chemosphere 307, 135959 (2022).

28. A. dos Santos, M. T. Botelho, W. R. Joviano, V. Gomes, J. R. M. C. da Silva, G. de A. Umbuzeiro, Characterization of hemocytes from the marine amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis (Dana 1853): Setting the basis for immunotoxicological studies. Invertebr. Biol. 142 (2023).

29. S. Laramore, E. Albright, Influence of temperature on production of the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. BMC Zool.10, 6 (2025).

Originally published on The Node

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“AI is killing curiosity”, apparently. There’s research and everything. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, writing in the New York Times, describes how we type a question, skim the AI-generated summary and leave, and tools like ChatGPT and Claude have “collapsed the old habit of wandering through links into instant gratification.”

“The old habit”… You mean the golden years of wading through absolute crap and unsubstantiated nonsense in search of an actual answer to the actual question we posed? I must have missed those golden moments (even coming from someone born in the 80s). Plenty of my web browsing involved SEO junk artificially shoved up the rankings by people whose only interest was getting you onto the page without any regard for telling you anything true once you’d arrived. Ye Olde Web was many things but inherently curiosity-inducing wasn’t one of them.

Anyway, I had some lovely chats with some lovely smart people about this so wanted to share it all and expand what’s in my brain with more words than a LinkedIn post allows.

The golden age that wasn’t

I’ll concede some points here, being the fair and balanced chap I am. AI reduces clicks, obviously it does, but curiosity-squashing is not what I’ve personally found. If anything it’s driven mine the other way. What starts with one question quickly escalates into dozens, with clarifications, tangents, wildly off-topic back-and-forths I never planned on having.

I’ll give you can example of a real life chat I recently had with Claude. Trying to get my head around some quantum stuff because I’ve been reading Phillip Ball’s Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics is Different (actually just finished – it’s great, you should read it!) and I had a million questions starting with what the bloody hell what a wave function actually is. That meant asking about probability and statistics, which dragged me into the history of Bayesian thinking, which looped back to quantum, which slid into the limits of what we can actually know, which somehow ended up in a long conversation about consciousness and the nature of reality. And it was great going being able fire more and more questions, but it all stemmed from one starter question and ended in a warren of rabbit holes. It’s just such an odd and brilliant combination of breadth and specificity that most would probably never have gotten by simply browsing the web.

But I know that’s me. I’m the dorky kid who opens an encyclopaedia for fun, who spent far too long in libraries, who’d have wandered the web for hours before any of this LLM, AI, Skynet shenanigans existed. Not to be too much of pretentious dick, but I don’t think most people are like that. Most people, faced with not knowing something, absolutely did not set off on a three-hour odyssey through hyperlinks.

Curious people wandered and now curious people can interrogate more, in more depth, across more topics, in less time and ask more questions than the old web ever let them do with any hint of efficiency. So I think AI might have actually fed curiosity rather than killing it in this case.

But I get not everyone is particularly curious about things, they just want a decent answer. Before an AI overview in the search window, they went to Google, fired off a search, clicked the top link, read a bit and probably gave up after reading one blog/post/entry once their question was answered, waylaid or the only opinion was sufficiently validated. Or I guess they didn’t bother at all and stayed in the dark. But now they get an AI overview, which, admittedly, flattens the nuance (even if the sources are right next to the main result… just saying), and you could argue that for anyone who stops there, that’s a real loss. But it’s at least drawing on a spread of sources rather than one anonymous bloke’s slant. I reckon that’s a step up from clicking the first result and treating it as conclusive.

Byline’s are often fiction

There’s a worry that AI scootches itself between the reader and the truth, to which I say, maaaaaaybe. I’ve ghostwritten hundreds of technical ‘expert’ articles, so forgive me if I don’t clutch any pearls about authorship. The byline was always somewhat fictitious, shall we say, and really only useful if you’re reading an op-ed or you’re tracing how views on a topic shifted over time. Authorship in most industries tells you very little beyond how closely the named expert (or their marketing team) looked at the thing before it went out, because the framing and the voice were usually mine.

So I wouldn’t necessarily say AI created much of gap between the name on the page and the hand that wrote it because ghostwriting, with its spooky-but-paid-for ethereal hands, was there first. What does still matter, and what the AI overview genuinely lacks, is accountability. When (or if, in some cases) a human expert signs work off, someone real has put their name and their company’s credibility on the line and if it’s wrong, there’s a person at the other end with shit to lose. An AI overview has no one answerable for a specific claim, and if it turns out to be crap, it just is, and nobody’s job/rep is on the line. I do think that’s a loss worth worrying about, but that’s an accountability thing and we’re here to talk about curiosity.

Oh, and you also shouldn’t trust AI to sort out bias, obviously, as it pull from the same messy web as everyone else (LLMs use a search engine to find their raw stuff and so are susceptible to the same SEO rules as searches, it’s then AI’d into something more coherent, hopefully). But for someone who was only ever going to check a single top link or a Facebook post, it’s probably doing a better job than they’d have managed alone. On a subject you know nothing about, an average person is surely more likely to get an accurate run of answers from an amalgamation of knowledge than from picking their way through a dozen pages built with promotion in mind, with a bunch of them presenting pseudoscience, authoritatively, as fact. This is of course just speculation but you get the point.

Humans for humans, bots for facts

Subjective stuff gets a little more interesting or messy, depending on how to look at it. Someone said to be, on the matter of reviews, for example,

“The underlying content is wildly variable and often ill-considered, or may even be actively deceptive. The AI overview does a great job of smoothing out this chaos and providing what is ostensibly an aggregate view. Yet, I would rather go through the reviews until I find someone I trust, which I do based on signals like shared experience, tone of voice and other details that are nothing to do with the product. If I vibe with someone based on non-product factors, I then trust their views on the product itself. A context-free, author-less recommendation means nothing. I don’t just want advice – I need an advisor. “

And here I’ll agree that humanity is very lovely to have when it comes to subjective views on things like product or restaurant reviews, for example, but there’s a problem. If I’m reading a restaurant review that opens with

“once I’d parked my brand new white BMW in their crummy spaces, I finally sat down with the menu, and wow, let me tell you–”

I feel entirely comfortable stopping right there, because I don’t ‘vibe’ with that bloke, who I immediately assume has a gold chain hanging around his bare chest, a backwards cap and drives with seat back at at least 45 degrees and is therefore a certified bellend. Pure bias/prejudice on my part, and it cuts both ways because reviews are how I find places I love and how I build myself a nice little echo chamber of pleasant things. An AI overview on the other hand, telling me “most people praised the food (especially the mussels) and the waiting staff, though a few mentioned the small car park”, is arguably more useful for a potential customer, even if it is wholly dead inside.

(Better yet, let’s introduce standard deviations on reviews so we can see the spread!)

But research is much closer to fact-finding, and whether I happen to like someone’s tone has absolutely sod all to do with whether their account of a wave function is correct. Humans for humans, then, bots for facts. Though I’ll admit I still love it when humans do the facts with a bit of humanity in them; there’s just more to sift through when they do.

Scicomms and nobody measures the thing we’re arguing about

What I’d actually love, before anyone writes Curiosity’s obituary, is the data. AI companies are sitting on mountains of potentially anonymised query logs that could show whether one question leads to another, and another after that, which is essentially a measure of curiosity itself. In science communication (a field we all love, but, let’s be honest, it’s plagued with crappily defined objectives and outcomes nobody can measure) that would be gold. We spend our whole careers churning out words or making videos in the hope we’ve nudged public curiosity upward but almost never know whether we have. With such a humungous repository of what could be quantified as curiosity, we could start to assess trends over time and see if our work had any effect. Yes yes, I know ethics yada yada yada, and all that, but how cool would that be?!

Okay, I’m going to wrap this up before I ramble anymore. Is AI killing curiosity? I don’t think so. If anything, we gave the already-curious a sharper tool and gave everyone else a half-decent foundation to stand on instead of just diving into a top link. But I can’t prove that any more than Le Cunff can prove the reverse at a population level. It’s all speculation, based on real concerns and real issues. You can measure science curiosity in a sample well enough, (there are proper and validated scales for it) but watching curiosity move across a whole population, and pinning the shift on any one cause, least of all a chatbot, is a whole different challenge we’ve yet to resolve.

You absolutely are entitled to that opinion, though. You can have a cornucopia of them and they can be as wild as peanut butter is awful, or jam goes on the scone first or even, and I shudder just typing this, (and I quote), “strawberries are a bit rubbish” (this particular individual has since been excised from my friendship group and hopefully committed to a psychiatric facility). They can even extend beyond these already outrageous opinions to the moon landing was fake, astrology is real, crystals really heal, coffee enemas help boost my body’s detoxing, climate change is a hoax, hydrogenated water is superior, BCAAs are excellent, chiropractors are real doctors or opening your anus wide to the sun each morning fills you with some sort of magic that gives you the confidence to lie on your back on your garden pulling your butt cheeks apart to expose your arsehole to the sky and anyone in a slightly elevated position within a 50m radius.

That’s fine. You can think and believe whatever you like. You really are entitled to whatever sort of opinion pops into your brain. But do not confuse that with anyone having to have any respect for that opinion, and as soon as you voice said opinion in the wild, stating things as facts or thoughts to be listened to, you are opening yourself up to everyone with a contrary opinion.

And that’s also fine! Great ideas are made and progressed specifically because people disagree with your opinion and your exchange thoughts and justifications and sometimes, just sometimes, opinions change and thoughts evolves. It’s beautiful. It’s rarer than a professional footballer staying on their feet when coming up against even the suggestion of physical contact, but it’s still delightfully possible.

But the great thing about some opinions is sometimes they have a body of evidence, verified through repeated observations and experiments, to give you a better idea as to how valid they really are. If I have an opinion about gravity I can turn to research from hundreds of independent, reproducible experiments to say if I drop this strawberry in utter shock at someone proclaiming they’re a bit rubbish, I can be very confident that the strawberry will typically fall towards my feet at roughly 9.8 metres per second, every second (technically the earth also falls toward the strawberry but that’s another matter). Similarly, I can say with great confidence that when you take an aspirin, it will absolutely whack an acetyl group onto cyclooxygenase-1 to ultimately stop platelets doing their thing.

Isn’t that just bloody wonderful? If someone has an opinion that aspirin has no effect, I can say, “Well, here’s a bunch of research and evidence and Nobel-prize winning data that says it really does, and here’s the mechanism by which it does”.

Way too often in life, we encounter people with opinions that have zero evidence to support them. Quite often they’ve leapt on the causation wagon after looking at a whole lot of correlations whizzing by (like, “I got a massage and my muscle problem was fixed”, when the reality is you got a massage, you felt better immediately, because the pressure changed pain processing, but don’t worry it’ll be back tomorrow – you got the discount and booked a whole series of massages or ‘adjustments’ right?). If you’re not sure what that means, it’s simply saying that when things happen together, it’s easy to assume one causes the other. Sometimes correlation does equate to causation (but you need to run experiments to confirm that). Other times, not so much. There’s a very good correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks, but, to the best of my knowledge, one is not causing the other.

Anyway, like I was saying, people often hold a lot of opinions that have no evidence and are very happy to bandy them around, comfortable in the knowledge that, as part of a civilised society, they’ll rarely be countered. Most listeners will just nod along and say “Mmmm, oh, okay”, usually because this is easier than conflict, but then proceed to go home and talk to their partner about what a tit Ted is, banging on about how NASA faked the moon landing and the Earth is obviously flat. Ted sounds like someone who doesn’t rate strawberries. I’ve done that – we’ve all done that. I’ve nodded along to more conversations than I can recall and just agreed while silently hoping behind gritted teeth to never have to have the conversation again and OMG can someone please fetch me some more wine.

I AM DONE WITH THAT. My whole job is evaluating evidence. When I was a scientist it was looking at a bunch of messy biology and trying to make sense of it. As a writer I wade through mountains of marketing bullshit to pull out the evidence and find that smidgen of truth buried in the hyperbole. I’ve spent nearly 16 years writing about science and a decade studying it and I am not prepared to sit and listen to people spout bullshit any more. I’m all for being polite but I just do not have it in me to nod quietly at another dinner party to the absolute garbage coming out of people’s mouths and into my earholes, whether that’s how “gut enzymes get confused” or “reiki healing has some amazing benefits”. In the same way I’ve always been happy to intervene and ruin Christmas dinner when someone comes out with a different flavour of shitshow, like “Women just can’t [insert your misogynistic claim of choice]” or “Black people [insert your racist, bigoted claim of choice here, also]”, I am also now more committed than ever to shoot down pseudoscientific bullshit on top of challenging moral and ethical shenanigans.

If you want to have a conversation on whether or not crystals can heal asthma, that’s fine. Let’s have a conversation. I love a conversation and a debate about stuff, assuming you’re willing to accept that not all research is funded by some “Big Evil Corp” and this is what data analysis is. I’m simultaneously willing to concede plenty of research does have a whopping great conflict of interest and their stats are shit. I love having my own opinions challenged if you have compelling data, too. I’m also super onboard with people who engage with something they love simply because it makes them feel better, whether the evidence supports it or not (cold plunges, saunas, etc), as long as they’re not trying to sell it as a fix or cure for anything other than feeling a bit shit right now and looking for some temporary relief.

But if you want to claim that the positions of planets in the sky affect and predict personalities and so Sharon over there shouldn’t be engaging in that sort of activity because as a Virgo that really doesn’t align with her true self, I’m sorry but I’m gonna have to call bullshit. Hopefully I can be as polite as the Professor was while doing it, but I can’t make any promises.

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I’m doing an experiment, right now, right here in the form of these words you’re reading with your very eyeholes at this exact moment in time. In fact you are the experiment. I’m sitting at my computer with a glass of wine (I won’t lie I may have had several already) and I’m just typing with no idea where this is going to go – and I realise that’s not a particularly exciting experiment but I have a point, which I’ll get to if you just calm down, Terry!

The thing is (oh there it is), the thing is, we now seem to be inhabiting a world where everyone is shouting at everyone for either using AI or not using AI to write their words. I think the real issue is outsourcing our thinking, but that’s not my point. My point – which I told you I’d get to, so buckle up because it’s coming – is that lots of smooth brained people on the internet, who have inadvertently been perceived as actual judges of the value of writing, are relying on particular ‘tells’. Em dashes (which I’ve never really used much because I’m in a loveless marriage with Microsoft Word so do the space-hyphen-space manoeuvre (literally never spelt that word correctly but I’ll go back and let Word fix it) to make an en dash – like this) (or like that, I should say). Apparently, AI love a colon as well, and I quite like those; semi-colons are also cool but I’m not sure if AI’s a fan of those.

It’s not that those tells aren’t AI, it’s just that we all do them or did them but now we’re all second guessing ourselves – well, I mean, I am at least. I think I’ve developed a bit of AI paranoia and end up putting things I write through zerogpt and sometimes go back and change things I actually typed, from my actual brain, so the computer believes I didn’t use a computer to write them. Weird. Oh, there’s another one: super short or declarative sentences. Lists broken up my full stops rather than making them lists. I’ve done that loads, too. The “the thing is” thing is another thing I even say (and said) in real life when in the middle of a silly argument of something usually.

I don’t think people should be using AI for creative words – those are our human words. Our thoughts and feeling. The messy milieu (great word, although milieu would imply messy, so I guess no need for the qualifier there – oh I can spell milieu but not manoeuvre… spell check fixed it again, shit, so close this time!) of emotions and consciousness and all the conflicting thoughts and chaos of interpretation that makes us us, right? Right? But for the other stuff, I don’t really care. People writing company blogs. People churning out ‘SEO content’. People proudly stringing together another half-baked, zero-thought Thought Leadership post. I don’t give a shiny rat’s nipple if people use AI for that crap. I think the companies doing it, or paying for it, will eventually give a hoot because their crap progressively sounds likely everyone else’s crap, except it’s a little more polished. A little more predictable and structured. Because – and I can’t believe I’m writing this sentence again – you know how many times I’ve written this? – (can you quadruple en dash?) – companies don’t usually care about great words, they want words that’ll do.

Euurrggh. Sorry, I won’t write that again. Promise. Anyway, we’re at about 600 words so I think that’ll do for an experiment, time to slap this into zerogpt and get my score. Oh, I did say you were the experiment: is this AI? Can you tell? It’s definitely not. Crap, should’ve timelapsed myself writing it, but then I could’ve just timelapsed me sitting here tapping away at my keyboard, occasionally right clicking manoeuvre to fix – fuck, seriously, three times in a row?! – to spell it correctly. My point is that the tells are shit and words are words, and good words come from humans. But so do terrible words – like these, for example – whereas AI sometimes does good words too. Okay, too much wine perhaps. I forgot the main point. Okay, to zerogpt, let’s see.

0%! Ha, in your face, Mary Shelley! What does AI have to say?

Rude. Fair, but rude. I fixed most of typos now as well. Damn it.

These lifts are pretty easy to pick up (sort of) but you can literally spend your life mastering them. And you can bet your arse that even after decades of practice you’re still going to have days in the gym where you feel like an absolute pile of uncoordinated crap when lifting. But I’ve spent some years learning them and while I’m still pretty shit, the lifts have taught me some interesting things about life. So now you gotta hear about ‘em.

[here’s me getting over sucking with a 145 clean just for context! This took 5 failed attempts]

Your joy will make you sad

If you’ve tried to get better at something, you’ve felt the joy of getting it right. Whether it’s a proper sport or one of those weird sports people say is a sport but of course it really isn’t or an intellectual thing or whatever else you can think of so long as it’s something you have to struggle to get better at, it’s the same thing. You’re constantly in this precariously balanced state of “I LOVE THIS MORE THAN MY CHILD” and “FUCK THIS FUCK YOU FUCK EVERYTHING” and I feel if you’re not usually balanced between those states you don’t really love it at all. So yeah, I’m also judging you and your loves.

But I digress. The reason some of the joys are so, well, joyous, is because they have this incredible ability to also make you so very, very sad. The carrot of success is perpetually dangled in front of your donkey brain and like a good mammal you chase it right off a cliff over and over. But, sometimes, you get that carrot. You grab it with both hands and cram it into your mouth; the delectable moist sweetness of succeeding at the thing that was driving you to tears just moments before causes a neurochemical flood to burst into your brain and smoosh you into a little ball of grinning contentment. You did it. You did the thing. Nice.

Without that prior sadness, it’d just be another thing you ticked off. Empty. Sad. Soulless. A bit like your Mum. I’m kidding, your Mum’s a legend.

Misery drives you on

And this is the process we follow. At least, it’s the process I follow in weightlifting. I go to the gym to train and hit a bunch of snatches (giggity), over and over, making tiny changes here and there, sweating my tits off and occasionally grinding some of my teeth down into little piles of ivory dust and while my brain knows how to correct the movement, my body gives me a casual middle finger and refuses to join the team.

But when it does work and your body stops being a prick and helps, you make progress. It’s a lot like gambling and having multiple losses, back to back, and still pumping another quid in the fruit machine you’ve been crying onto for the past hour (although you told Dave it was spilt beer, which could be actually be a worse outcome), because you remember the joy beyond the misery. So you chase it. You embrace your misery and charge onwards because there’s a light at the end of the tunnel – is it 4 golden jackpot cherries, a clean lift that’d make Ilya Ilyn proud, or is it death? Who knows and let’s be honest, who cares?! It’s gonna be great, so keep going.

You are a learning sponge

And this is life. The struggle through sucking to get good. Writers are pissed at AI right now because they all like to say how much the struggle is what makes them proper writers. Shit, I’ve said it. Sometimes it’s some marketing knob just trying to flog some sort of ‘human writing course’, other times it’s real writers rightfully gatekeeping something that’s genuinely magical (if you don’t think being able to write an actual book is magical you should punch yourself in the crotch immediately – are you mental?!). Writers are pissed at giving people a free pass to skip to the end when they’ve had to mount an expedition through the Chasm of Creative Horrors and it’s this growth and learning and process of pain that makes them great writers; it’s what sets them apart and makes them even better at something so few people can do.

I am not a proper writer, so I have fewer stakes in that game, but I get their rage. Sucking at something and choosing to keep going rather than throwing it all in and taking some easier trip through the chasm – perhaps a trip in a cable cart with plush cushions and waiter with a distinctly British ‘Jeeves’ style of voice, in a tuxedo, serving canapés and champagne – builds a level of skill and confidence and satisfaction that nothing else comes close to.

[FFS BILL GET BACK ON TRACK!]

Sorry, where was I…

Oh yeah, if you aren’t sucking at some point, you’re not getting better and you’re almost certainly not learning. I always think pain is a great teacher1 and you need at least a smidge of it to shock your sponge brain into soaking up more goodness. It drives you onwards and helps confirm that “Shit, I love this”. If you can’t get over the spiky pain hump of sucking, then you’ve administered your own self-selection tool and failed. You failed, now get out and hang your head in shame, maybe the tiddlywinks team has an opening for you. But if you can, then you learn to appreciate the suck and you learn to grow from it. Pain really will teach you scary new things.

You gotta suck well

Sucking at something like weightlifting is only useful if you’re paying attention. That pain of getting it wrong also being a teacher I talked about is only good pain, good sucking, if you’re listening to what Mistress Pain is saying.

If I’m in the gym trying to get the technique of the clean or the jerk just right, just smooth enough that the barbell saunters and slides around me, then a ‘just try harder’ approach isn’t going to work. If I just try harder, I’m probably pulling too early, launching the bar into the next postcode, turning my pelvis into paste and likely looking around for something to blame.

But if I suck well, I embrace the suck and instead of just trying harder I listen. I go back and see where it sucked the most and make small changes – do something differently. You see there’s an art to sucking, to be being shit, to sucking at something over and over and still riding the high from that last success, to stop and listen and make improvements without just the imbecilic approach of ‘trying harder’. So yeah, get on that.

Sucking less sometimes looks like getting worse

If you want to learn something awesome, something that brings you real joy (not ‘I bought that crap thing on Amazon cheaper because I have no moral integrity’ joy) then you need to accept it’s going to be uncomfortable. But I think that discomfort has at least some sort of shape. You know you can’t just suffer and magically become good like a random little masochistic goblin, so you make smart changes and, yeah, those changes feel awful because it’s different to what you’ve been doing. And then, one magic day, after many days of feeling like you’re actually getting worse after making that small change, the bar flies up like God’s own divine erection and once again you’re riding that high of coming out the other side, ready to eat more of whatever Mistress Pain is dishing out.

So yes, the path through the suck is far from linear. It’s pitted with chasms of despair and pools of tears and sewers of sweat and swamps of— you get the picture. Your body and your brain are going to be in a never-ending battle, so your progress is about as chaotic as this blog but it’s happening. If you’re listening to the pain and the suck and making small changes to approach it from a new angle, you are getting better. You just need to have the drive to keep sucking and the humility to kick your ego in the dick and accept where you are, right bloody now.

My point here – and I promise I had one and then one word led to another and whoah, well, here are – is that being shit is shit. You don’t have to be shit on purpose, just accept that you will be, and your job then is to learn to stay in this stupid game, this life, the sport, this whatever, long enough to hear what the suck’s telling you, without making it your whole personality or pretending every awful thing is secretly growth just waiting to happen.

That is all.

Inflammation is going to kill you. At least, that’s the current theory. Well, I mean it’s the current marketing angle plastered all over social media. Somewhere in the last decade, inflammation went from something in immunology textbook to wellness super villain selling a subscription and now you can’t open Instagram without a brand selling you turmeric lattes, infrared sauna sessions, cold plunges for elite performance or a supplement that costs £65 a pop.

And like all good wellness scams, they’re not entirely wrong. Chronic inflammation is genuinely implicated in some of the biggest killers in the western world, but what they’re selling you mostly doesn’t address it. That’s because the things that might help you out are largely free and boring.

Side note just as I was finishing up writing this, published a wonderful blog on non-coding genes and inflammation. So if you want a more technical look, definitely go read that:

Adele’s Science Corner

From Noncoding Genes into New Therapeutics

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the genetic code that holds the instructions to create amino acids, the fundamental building block to form and maintain our bodies. Typically, strands of DNA are wound up and compactly stored in our cells and make up the genome. Interestingly, 98% percent of the human genome does not actually contain instructions to make u…

Read more

4 months ago · 2 likes · Adele Lopes

The alarm system, aka, acute inflammation

Let me start with the basics and tell you what inflammation is because I’m pretty sure most people talking it about really have no clue. Let’s say you stub your toe on the door frame, yet again. Within seconds, your immune system is mobilising and mast cells at the injury site release histamine and prostaglandins, capillaries dilate, blood flow increases, neutrophils pile on in full bouncer mode. The area turns red, swells, gets hot, hurts. That’s inflammation (it comes from the Latin word iflammatio, meaning to ignite or set fire. You’ll recognise it from issues that end with “-itis”). Those five responses – redness, swelling, heat, pain, and loss of function – were described by Roman doctors a couple of thousand years ago and the mechanism hasn’t really changed since. Yeah, we know way more stuff at a cellular level, but the basics are the same and inflammation is usually your body doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

And I know, everyone on Insta is telling you that inflammation is the enemy and must be defeated at every turn, but a wound that doesn’t inflame doesn’t heal and an infection that doesn’t inflame goes unnoticed (with potential super gross repercussions down the line). Some unlucky folk have rare conditions that get in the way of acute inflammatory responses (like leukocyte adhesion deficiency) and they’re prone to dying from infections that any healthy immune system would knock out with batting an eyelid. Not cool.

The point here is that inflammation, in its acute form (“acute” being short-term, whereas “chronic” is long-term), is actually the thing that fixes immediate issues; it’s your body’s alarm system that gets all the ‘good’ cells to the right place at the right time.

When the alarm won’t turn off, or chronic inflammation

You run into issues when inflammation becomes chronic. So rather than an alarm that goes off in your body when something bad happens, it more like a smoke detector that going off for three years because your kitchen is permanently full of smoke and for whatever reason, your body ignores it (like some people – psychopaths – ignore that low battery beeping! I mean, dude, what’s wrong with you?!). This means your immune system sits in a state of low-grade, persistent activation, which as you can guess, isn’t a good thing.

The immune system a wildly complex network of signals flying to and from cells and tissues and they all do lots of different things. We can run a blood test to look for these to see what’s happening – these are the inflammation markers people always bang on (but I dare you to ask someone talking about them to explain or even name some of them!) and they’re a pretty broad group of molecules that can do a number of things, like kicking inflammation off. Think of them as clues or tracks left by whatever’s going on undetected in your body.

Okay, back to the low-grade state of inflammation smoke alarm always on thing, where you end up with those markers circulating in your blood, such as cytokines like interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-a) that stay at levels higher than they normally should be; C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of systemic inflammation (systemic just means throughout your whole body rather than just at the toe you stubbed) also ticks up from its normal levels; and now your body’s running a background process of immune activity that serves no immediate threat.

You’re probably wondering what this actually feels like. Sorry to disappoint but mostly it’s nothing you’d notice. Your arteries are accumulating damage on a 20-year timeline. Your CRP is sitting at 4 mg/L instead of 1 mg/L – a number that lives on a blood test you’ve probably never had. The same cytokines driving that background process are the ones responsible for how you feel when you’re ill; they do fun things like the fatigue and inability to think clearly. There’s reasonable evidence that chronically elevated levels contribute to persistent tiredness and low mood; the inflammatory hypothesis of depression has some research and evidence behind it (1, 2), but it’s not universally accepted. Anyway, the point is, that for most people, most of the time, chronic low-grade inflammation has no obvious dramatic signal, it’s just ticks along in the background. Which, if you think about it, is the most important thing to understand about it: you can’t feel it resolving, so when the Wellness brand tells you their supplement “targets inflammation”, you have no way of knowing whether anything has changed.

The things driving chronic low levels of inflammation are pretty dull and relatively easy to avoid. Obesity is first up, since adipose (fat) tissue is metabolically active and releases pro-inflammatory cytokines directly into circulation (3, 4). Smoking (5)… duh. And then you have things like chronic psychological stress (6), poor sleep (7), a diet high in ultra-processed food (8, 9), physical inactivity (10) and even untreated conditions like periodontal disease (11) (teeth just messing you up again for no good reason!).

These are some of the main drivers of systemic low-grade inflammation. None of them need a fancy analysis and they’re all things we already knew were bad for us.

The serious consequences of chronic inflammation

But the diseases associated with chronic inflammation at high enough levels on a long enough time are not small ones.

Atherosclerosis, the plaque that build up in your arteries and which underlyies most cardiovascular disease, is now understood as an inflammatory process (if you want to know, it foes endothelial dysfunction, macrophage infiltration, foam cell formation, eventual plaque rupture. Bummer). The CANTOS trial (12, 13) gave canakinumab, an antibody that targets interleukin-1b (a cytokine near the start of inflammation chain of events), and found a statistically significant reduction in major cardiovascular events. Blocking the inflammation, separate from lowering cholesterol, made a real difference.

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) has a complicated relationship with inflammation, too. Adipose tissue inflammation gets in the way of insulin signalling at the cellular level (14), and higher levels of CRP are consistently associated with risk of T2D in some studies (15, 16). Whether this is causation or a consequence of obesity is genuinely difficult to disentangle but the association is robust.

In cancer, NF-kb (another transcription factor with a big role in the inflammatory cascade) is active in many types of tumour (17). Chronic inflammation creates small, localised environments in your body that growing tumours just love; and they’re like secret hideout for these tumours, tucked away where your immune system can’t find them (this is called immune evasion).

In neurodegeneration, something called neuroinflammation is started by activated microglia (the brain’s resident immune cells), and this inflammation is seen in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neuron disease (MND), though whether it’s cause, consequence or an unhelpful bystander effect remains an active and disputed area.

Here comes the Wellness industry

Just quickly, people like to talk about how Big Pharma is super evil and controlling our lives because it’s so stinking, but can we take a second to remember that the global wellness market hit over $6 trillion in 2023. That’s more than Pharma (roughly $2 trillion for pharmaceuticals)! And while Pharma has an enormous number of regulatory hoops to jump through, the Wellness industry carries on pretty much unchecked.

Okay, so, having correctly identified chronic inflammation as a real biological problem, the Wellness industry has proceeded to offer you the following ground-breaking answers: turmeric lattes (with or without black pepper for bioavailability), cold plunges, infrared saunas, fish oil capsules, curcumin supplements, resveratrol, omega-3-enriched everything, anti-inflammatory meal plans priced like a mortgage payment and the occasional CRP blood test packaged into a handy subscription wellness kit so you can monitor the very inflammation you’re now anxious about.

The thing about this grifters is the sprinkle in enough scientific terms to make it sound like they know what they’re on about, which convinced you to part with your cash. But set’s take a look at some of the specifics around each of these, because the details are more damning than me just shitting on them all.

Curcumin

The active compound in turmeric does have anti-inflammatory properties – in cell culture and animal models, where it inhibits NF-kb and COX-2, two parts the inflammatory pathway. The is a real effect but the problem is bioavailability (how much your body can actually absorb): curcumin is poorly absorbed from the gut, rapidly metabolised at pH levels found inside you and quickly cleared from the body (18). There’s just no way you’re going to hit the levels of it required to reproduce those in vitro (cell culture) effects from the lab through diet or any normal type of supplementation.

Clinical trial data are a bit messy as well: a 2019 systematic review of 19 randomised controlled trials (RCTs; the absolute tip top for clinical trial tests) found no significant reduction in CRP, hsCRP, IL-6, or TNF-a (19) (those inflammation markers in the blood we talked about earlier). More recent and larger meta-analyses (where you analyse multiple trials, each with their own analysis) have found small but statistically significant reductions in CRP and IL-6, but with a lot of ups and downs across studies (20).

The honest summary is that some curcumin formulations, at high enough doses, may improve inflammatory markers modestly. But putting half a teaspoon of turmeric in your latte is never going to get you anywhere close to the doses needed.

Fish oil

Better evidence here. High-dose omega-3 supplementation does appear to reduce CRP and triglycerides a wee bit (21). But translating that to having hard clinical outcomes (heart attacks, deaths) has been inconsistent across large trials. The REDUCE-IT trial (22) showed cardiovascular benefits in a specific high-risk population, but they used pharmaceutical-grade icosapentaenoic acid at 4 grams per day – not the standard capsule sitting on the shelf at Boots. The STRENGTH trial (21), using a different omega-3 formulation at similar doses and found no benefit. The gap between ‘the supplement on the shelf’ and ‘the intervention in the trial’ is very big indeed, and those selling these supplements would rather you didn’t look too closely at.

Saunas

Who doesn’t love sitting in a sweaty wooden box with a bunch of strangers? I mean, I do, but… anyway. Observational data from groups of folk from Finland does link regular sauna use with reduced cardiovascular risk (23, 24). But these are associations in a specific population with specific lifestyles (each with they own bunch of confounding variables) and the proposed mechanism – heat shock proteins, short-term modulation of inflammatory markers – isn’t established as a reliable therapeutic pathway, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right, just that it’s not confirmed. Saunas are largely pleasant, probably not harmful, but “reduces your systemic inflammation” is a stronger claim than the evidence supports. But if you’re enjoying them and you’re relaxing, you’re probably reducing psychological stress and that’s going to be a nice thing.

Cold plunges

The post-exercise evidence is actually pretty solid: multiple meta-analyses – including a 2025 network meta-analysis of 55 RCTs (25) – find that cold water immersion at 11–15^oC for 10–15 minutes reduces delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) and creatine kinase levels after high-intensity exercise. If you’ve just done something punishing to your muscles, getting in cold water is a plausible recovery strategy (26).

The claim about cold plunges activating brown adipose tissue (BAT; the specialised fat responsible for keeping your warm by burning calories) claim also has hints of merit: cold exposure does activate BAT, where it increases energy expenditure. But the BAT evidence mostly comes from acclimated cold swimmers or sustained exposure tests (27) and a randomised trial of 6 weeks of daily cold exposure that found no change in BAT volume on MRI (28). One review noted that even when BAT activation did increase energy expenditure, it didn’t translate to measurable weight loss. The evidence for standalone cold plunges in sedentary adults, as a systemic anti-inflammatory ritual, or for “resetting your nervous system” or for just becoming a better human because you’ve been watching Wim Hof, one shiver at a time, simply isn’t there. The one thing a cold plunge reliably does is make you feel awake. Which is fine, but it’s not a therapy.

The general ‘reduce inflammation’ lifestyle, the one that frames every product as your personal line of defence against systemic immune chaos, is mostly selling you hype based on fear and anxiety (that the Wellness industry itself promotes).

The boring truth

To be fair, some things on the list are good. Exercise – actual sustained exercise – does reduce systemic inflammatory marker because it reduces adiposity, improves metabolic function and changes cytokine profiles over time. Oily fish in the diet is reasonable advice, and cheap. Cold exposure after hard training might help recovery. Saunas are relaxing, and if relaxation reduces chronic stress, and chronic stress drives inflammation, then there’s an indirect pathway that isn’t entirely fiction.

But none of these require the level of marketing bullshit we’re all exposed to. None require the supplement, the subscription, the branded meal plan, the morning routine optimised around a CRP number. And none of them address the actual causes, like obesity, smoking, sleep deprivation, chronic stress. The industry has very little financial incentive to name these, because the answer to most of them is time and discipline, and ain’t no one chomping a the bit to market those.

We understand the causes of chronic systemic inflammation and the fixes are typically boring. Don’t smoke. Sleep enough. Manage your weight. Move regularly. Reduce ultra-processed food. Where you can, reduce psychological stress. Assuming you’re not suffering from an unfortunate disease, that’s it.

The wellness industry has taken a real biological concept, covered it in rolled it in a scary marketing glitter of things they say you should be terrified of, scatted in some scientific terms and half-truths and sold it back to you as something fixable by buying all the shit they sell. Inflammation is an essential part of how our bodies deal with things, and while you should do the simple and boring things listed here to keep low-level chronic inflammation in check, you don’t need to be shelling out your cash on overpriced supplements that mostly translate into expensive urine.

References

1. R. Yirmiya, The inflammatory underpinning of depression: An historical perspective. Brain, Behav., Immun. 122, 433–443 (2024).

2. I. Pastis, M. G. Santos, A. Paruchuri, Exploring the role of inflammation in major depressive disorder: beyond the monoamine hypothesis. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 17, 1282242 (2024).

3. M. S. Ellulu, I. Patimah, H. Khaza’ai, A. Rahmat, Y. Abed, Obesity and inflammation: the linking mechanism and the complications. Arch. Méd. Sci. : AMS 13, 851–863 (2017).

4. J. Li, Y. Li, X. Zhou, S. Yang, D. Liu, H. Wen, X. Chen, C. Duan, M. Yu, M. Zhang, B. Tang, Y. Wang, L. Wang, Y. Wu, Adipocytes orchestrate obesity-related chronic inflammation through β2-microglobulin. Signal Transduct. Target. Ther. 10, 394 (2025).

5. I. Elisia, V. Lam, B. Cho, M. Hay, M. Y. Li, M. Yeung, L. Bu, W. Jia, N. Norton, S. Lam, G. Krystal, The effect of smoking on chronic inflammation, immune function and blood cell composition. Sci. Rep. 10, 19480 (2020).

6. Y.-Z. Liu, Y.-X. Wang, C.-L. Jiang, Inflammation: The Common Pathway of Stress-Related Diseases. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 11, 316 (2017).

7. J. M. Dzierzewski, E. K. Donovan, D. B. Kay, T. S. Sannes, K. E. Bradbrook, Sleep Inconsistency and Markers of Inflammation. Front. Neurol. 11, 1042 (2020).

8. M. T. Asensi, A. Napoletano, F. Sofi, M. Dinu, Low-Grade Inflammation and Ultra-Processed Foods Consumption: A Review. Nutrients 15, 1546 (2023).

9. T. Tian, T. Hong, T. Tian, Y. He, X. Wang, L. Qian, S. Deng, H. Jin, M. Jiang, J. Fan, Y. Li, Association between ultra-processed foods consumption and systemic immune-inflammation biomarkers in US Adults: Cross-Sectional results from NHANES 2003–2023. Hum. Nutr. Metab. 42, 200339 (2025).

10. R. C. Burini, E. Anderson, J. L. Durstine, J. A. Carson, Inflammation, physical activity, and chronic disease: An evolutionary perspective. Sports Med. Heal. Sci. 2, 1–6 (2020).

11. R. Tattar, B. D. C. da Costa, V. C. M. Neves, The interrelationship between periodontal disease and systemic health. Br. Dent. J. 239, 103–108 (2025).

12. P. M. Ridker, B. M. Everett, T. Thuren, J. G. MacFadyen, W. H. Chang, C. Ballantyne, F. Fonseca, J. Nicolau, W. Koenig, S. D. Anker, J. J. P. Kastelein, J. H. Cornel, P. Pais, D. Pella, J. Genest, R. Cifkova, A. Lorenzatti, T. Forster, Z. Kobalava, L. Vida-Simiti, M. Flather, H. Shimokawa, H. Ogawa, M. Dellborg, P. R. F. Rossi, R. P. T. Troquay, P. Libby, R. J. Glynn, C. T. Group, Antiinflammatory Therapy with Canakinumab for Atherosclerotic Disease. N. Engl. J. Med. 377, 1119–1131 (2017).

13. B. M. Everett, J. G. MacFadyen, T. Thuren, P. Libby, R. J. Glynn, P. M. Ridker, Inhibition of Interleukin-1β and Reduction in Atherothrombotic Cardiovascular Events in the CANTOS Trial. J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 76, 1660–1670 (2020).

14. J. Rausch, K. E. Horne, L. Marquez, The Effects of Adipose Tissue Dysregulation on Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. Biomedicines 13, 1770 (2025).

15. D. Wu, G. Chen, Y. Lan, S. Chen, X. Ding, C. Wei, L. Balmer, W. Wang, S. Wu, W. Xu, Measurement of cumulative high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and monocyte to high-density lipoprotein ratio in the risk prediction of type 2 diabetes: a prospective cohort study. J. Transl. Med. 22, 110 (2024).

16. S. Kanmani, M. Kwon, M.-K. Shin, M. K. Kim, Association of C-Reactive Protein with Risk of Developing Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, and Role of Obesity and Hypertension: A Large Population-Based Korean Cohort Study. Sci. Rep. 9, 4573 (2019).

17. H. Mao, X. Zhao, S. Sun, NF-κB in inflammation and cancer. Cell. Mol. Immunol. 22, 811–839 (2025).

18. R. Tabanelli, S. Brogi, V. Calderone, Improving Curcumin Bioavailability: Current Strategies and Future Perspectives. Pharmaceutics 13, 1715 (2021).

19. C. M. White, V. Pasupuleti, Y. M. Roman, Y. Li, A. V. Hernandez, Oral turmeric/curcumin effects on inflammatory markers in chronic inflammatory diseases: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Pharmacol. Res. 146, 104280 (2019).

20. M. J. Dehzad, H. Ghalandari, M. Nouri, M. Askarpour, Antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects of curcumin/turmeric supplementation in adults: A GRADE-assessed systematic review and dose–response meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Cytokine 164, 156144 (2023).

21. S. J. Nicholls, A. M. Lincoff, M. Garcia, D. Bash, C. M. Ballantyne, P. J. Barter, M. H. Davidson, J. J. P. Kastelein, W. Koenig, D. K. McGuire, D. Mozaffarian, P. M. Ridker, K. K. Ray, B. G. Katona, A. Himmelmann, L. E. Loss, M. Rensfeldt, T. Lundström, R. Agrawal, V. Menon, K. Wolski, S. E. Nissen, Effect of High-Dose Omega-3 Fatty Acids vs Corn Oil on Major Adverse Cardiovascular Events in Patients at High Cardiovascular Risk. JAMA 324, 2268–2280 (2020).

22. D. L. Bhatt, P. G. Steg, M. Miller, E. A. Brinton, T. A. Jacobson, S. B. Ketchum, R. T. Doyle, R. A. Juliano, L. Jiao, C. Granowitz, J.-C. Tardif, C. M. Ballantyne, R.-I. Investigators, Cardiovascular Risk Reduction with Icosapent Ethyl for Hypertriglyceridemia. N. Engl. J. Med. 380, 11–22 (2018).

23. T. Laukkanen, H. Khan, F. Zaccardi, J. A. Laukkanen, Association Between Sauna Bathing and Fatal Cardiovascular and All-Cause Mortality Events. JAMA Intern. Med. 175, 542–548 (2015).

24. T. Laukkanen, S. K. Kunutsor, H. Khan, P. Willeit, F. Zaccardi, J. A. Laukkanen, Sauna bathing is associated with reduced cardiovascular mortality and improves risk prediction in men and women: a prospective cohort study. BMC Med. 16, 219 (2018).

25. H. Wang, L. Wang, Y. Pan, Impact of different doses of cold water immersion (duration and temperature variations) on recovery from acute exercise-induced muscle damage: a network meta-analysis. Front. Physiol. 16, 1525726 (2025).

26. E. Moore, J. T. Fuller, J. D. Buckley, S. Saunders, S. L. Halson, J. R. Broatch, C. R. Bellenger, Impact of Cold-Water Immersion Compared with Passive Recovery Following a Single Bout of Strenuous Exercise on Athletic Performance in Physically Active Participants: A Systematic Review with Meta-analysis and Meta-regression. Sports Med. 52, 1667–1688 (2022).

27. C. Huo, Z. Song, J. Yin, Y. Zhu, X. Miao, H. Qian, J. Wang, L. Ye, L. Zhou, Effect of Acute Cold Exposure on Energy Metabolism and Activity of Brown Adipose Tissue in Humans: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Front. Physiol. 13, 917084 (2022).

28. T. Romu, C. Vavruch, O. Dahlqvist-Leinhard, J. Tallberg, N. Dahlström, A. Persson, M. Heglind, M. E. Lidell, S. Enerbäck, M. Borga, F. H. Nystrom, A randomized trial of cold-exposure on energy expenditure and supraclavicular brown adipose tissue volume in humans. Metabolism 65, 926–934 (2016).

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An equally mildly-confused-but-attempting-to-clarify reply then tumbled out of Jodi: “It’s the gene itself, yeah”. My eye started twitching and, well, here I am.

[BBC Breakfast, 11 April 2026, copyright and stuff – please don’t sue me, this is educational!]

The whole thing’s got the shape of a useful distinction if you never paid any attention in Biology, and it rather nicely, and depressingly, shows that despite “genes” being a word most people know, most people seem not to know what a gene actually is. There’s some vague sense that DNA is a Big Complicated Scary Thing, some sort of central human repository that makes us who we are, and genes are a slightly friendlier layer on top.

So I’m here to sort this out properly. It’ll take about five(ish) minutes and you will never nod along to a sentence about genes or pull the same confused face Naga did ever again.

DNA is a molecule – a physical, actual, chemical thing

Deoxyribonucleic acid, which, yes, is DNA’s full name, so you can see why we don’t use it, is a long chain of chemical units called nucleotides, each carrying one of four chemical bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), or guanine (G). You’ve probably seen scientists in movies looking at lines of ATCGGTCTAG; sometimes they’re looking at DNA under a regular microscope, which is of course ridonculous (but movies love to have scientists ‘looking’ at DNA and holding colourful vials up the light when in reality we’re mostly just moving clear liquid between clear tubes, putting them in machines and offering up a prayer for a clear result).

Anyway, the DNA structure itself looks like a very lovely twisted ladder. In reality it’s super crammed, folded, wrapped and packed into structures called chromosomes (46 of them, in most of your cells) which live inside the nucleus, the little membrane-wrapped command centre sitting roughly in the middle of the cell.

All that DNA, stretched out, is around a whopping two metres long per cell, scrunched up to fit inside something a tenth the width of a human hair. Evolution is very bloody good at packing.

And almost^[i] every cell in your body carries essentially the same DNA. The whole sequence, the entire instruction set, is just sitting there, in every cell – the whole lot of it.

Which immediately raises a question.

If every cell has the same DNA, why aren’t they all the same cell?

Absolutely fair question since I just told you your cells all have the same DNA, but you know there are lots of different types of cell. Your liver cells fighting last night’s cheeky bottle of vino and your neurons trying to process this information you know is more than a 5-minute read are wildly different things doing wildly different jobs. But they have the same DNA.

The difference is that different cells don’t read the same DNA in the same way. Different cell types access different regions of the DNA – it’s far too big to read all of it all the time. Some stretches are tightly wound up and physically inaccessible – the molecular machinery the cell uses to read DNA literally cannot get to them. Other stretches are open and actively being read. Which bits are accessible depends on the cell type, and that pattern of access is what gives each cell its identity and behaviour.

Okay but what IS a gene, then?

Okay, the crux: a gene is just a specific stretch of that DNA (a defined region of that sequence of As and Cs and Ts and Gs) that the cell can read and use to make something functional. If DNA’s a cookbook, genes are the recipes within it.

Usually that something being made is a protein. Sometimes it’s a type of ribonucleic acid RNA (DNA’s slightly smaller, single-stranded cousin) that does a job on its own without ever becoming a protein. Either way: the instructions are written directly into the DNA sequence. The gene is not floating above the DNA like some annotation layer. It IS the DNA, just a specific bit of it.

Okay, I know I’ve said “reading” a lot, so let me explain that quickly. DNA’s like the master copy of those recipes, so rather than always using the master instructions, your cells rely on copies of those bits of DNA – those genes – it wants to read so that it can make something. Special proteins come in and look at the gene needed – they ‘read’ it – and then copy just that bit of the DNA sequence into RNA. This is called transcription.

That RNA (specifically messenger RNA, or mRNA) buggers off out of the very important nucleus, into the rest of the cell, and gets used as a template to build a protein in a process called translation. The protein then goes off and does the usual biology stuff: carries oxygen, fights infection, runs chemical reactions, builds structures, etc.

So it’s DNA to RNA to protein to function.^[ii] When you hear people talk about gene expression or activity, they’re talking about how many copies – in the form of mRNA – of that gene the cell is making. More mRNA copies of a gene, more proteins to be made from that template, more stuff happening.

So, same underlying DNA sequence, but completely different outputs depending on which bits are being read, by how much and when. “Genes being switched on and off” is the shorthand people use for this. And sure, it’s fine, it’s just very simplified.

It gets messier in places, one gene can be spliced together in different ways to produce several related but distinct proteins (same gene, different cuts, a trick called alternative splicing), some genes produce RNA that never becomes protein at all, a surprisingly large chunk of the genome doesn’t code for anything recognisable – no, it’s not “junk”, we’re just still figuring out what it’s doing.

But none of that changes the main point that the master instructions live in the DNA, in the form of distinct chunks of As and Cs and Ts and Gs that we call genes and genes are DNA.

So gene therapy is...

This brings us back to BBC Breakfast and gene therapy, which is acting on that DNA, because that’s where the genes are, because they’re the same thing (sorry, Naga). All clear on that now? Good.

Where was I? Oh yeah, gene therapy. Gene therapy can act on DNA/genes in a few ways. Sometimes it delivers a working copy of a ‘broken’ gene into cells, typically using a modified virus as the ‘vehicle’ (literally the shell of a virus we stick the working gene in), since viruses are, at their core, just genetic material in a protein coat that evolution has spent millions of years optimising^[iii] to get inside cells, and researchers essentially hijacked that trick for cooler purposes. Sometimes it edits the DNA sequence directly, using tools like CRISPR-Cas9 – molecular scissors that can find a precise location in the genome, cut the DNA, and either disable a gene or swap in a corrected version. Sometimes it doesn’t change the sequence at all but alters how strongly a gene is expressed, where it nudges activity up or down without touching the letters themselves.

All of these things involve the DNA, because that’s where the genes are. I cannot stress this enough.

Conceptually, gene therapy works super well, it’s just that getting the right gene into a person (the delivery) is actually really hard.^[iv] In a great big adult human with around 37 trillion cells, you just can’t reach every cell in the body in one go, so therapies are built around what’s accessible: blood-forming stem cells, which can be pulled out of the body, edited in a dish, and returned; liver cells, which are especially good at taking up material delivered into the bloodstream; local tissues like the retina at the back of your eye, where we can inject directly and the anatomy works in our favour.

But in reality, you don’t even need to fix every cell. In lots of diseases, correcting a fraction of the relevant cells is enough to shift the biology back toward something that works. Sickle cell disease – caused by a single letter change in a single stretch of DNA – has now been treated by editing the blood stem cells of patients with results that, depending on who you ask, look a lot like a cure. One wrong nucleotide, in one gene, in one molecule, changed back. How cool is that? Patients who spent their lives in and out of hospital are super to a treatment that will see their haemoglobin functioning normally, all from a single letter, in the actual DNA. Which is the same thing the BBC told you wasn’t being edited.

^[i] I say “almost” because some cells don’t have a nucleus and don’t have DNA – like red blood cells. Although they are carrying oxygen bound to haemoglobin around your body so you can do important things like move and not die.

^[ii] On top of that, specific proteins called transcription factors (think of them as deeply opinionated readers who only ever want certain chapters and will physically shove other readers out of the way to get them) stick to specific parts of DNA and push gene activity up or down.

^[iii] I know evolution doesn’t actually work “towards” anything, you get my point, don’t come at me like that.

^[iv] Technically, the delivery problem can be solved, you just have to do it at the very beginning, when you’re still a single cell. Back then it’s just one nucleus and so one copy of the DNA (the genome). You fix that and every cell that forms from it carries the correction. Job done, in theory. This is called germline editing, and it’s where things get properly complicated since any change you make to that single cell gets inherited by every cell in the resulting human, and potentially by their children, and their children’s children. This pushes you over the line of treating a patient to making a heritable change to the human germline. Which is why it’s currently banned for clinical use in the UK and most countries, why people get twitchy at the designer babies thing, why the one scientist who did it anyway (He Jiankui, in China in 2018, who edited embryos to attempt HIV resistance) ended up in prison and why it remains one of the genuinely thorny ethical debates in biology right now. So yeah, nice in principle but not happening down your GP any time soon.

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If you want to know how we go from single to cell to the multicellular mess we all are, here you go:

Career advice from people who’ve done the thing you’re considering is often rose-tinted bollocks. Either they stayed and they’re trying to justify it, or they left and they’re doing the same. I left. I’m doing the same. Keep that in mind.

But I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think – more than I did when I first wrote a tame little list of reasons to stick around – that for some of you, leaving would be the actual mistake. It wouldn’t be a courageous ‘pivot’ or healthy boundary-setting, it’d be a mistake that haunts you. And in 2026, with science looking like it does right now, that’s a more complicated thing to say than it used to be.

So let me try to say it honestly.

You are about to own something nobody else has

There is a moment in research that has no equivalent anywhere else in adult life. It sneaks in when you’re in the middle of something else, usually at about 11pm, usually when you weren’t expecting it. Your gel image loads, the model ling data look odd, the sequencing results comes back and they’re saying something they really shouldn’t be saying, pennies start to drop. And for a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, sometimes a few days, you are the only person on earth who knows this particular thing is true. No one says, “Eureka!”; it’s much more “WTF is that? That looks weird… hang on…”

And this isn’t a finding where you’re ‘ahead of the news cycle’ or you’ve spotted the trend before your competitors. No. This is a “You are in possession of a fact about reality that has never been in any human brain before yours. The universe didn’t know you knew it. Now it does” moment.

That’s what’s actually happening. You discovered something, and I don’t care how small or niche or trivial it might be, you discovered something no one else ever has. And no amount of ‘excitement from a “fast-paced dynamic environment” job spec from a marketing agency in Shoreditch comes close to it.

And that, goddamnit, is incredible.

The freedom is real (and getting realer)

I said in the original version of this that science gives you freedom. I was right, but I was underselling a specific thing: science is one of the very few careers where the thing slowing you down is the problem itself, rather than line manager’s priorities or that one person’s aesthetic preferences or a client who needs the deck to pop more.

What’s changed, though, is AI is eating the grunt work. It might also eat the bench work, but right now, it’s not eating the science work. Literature reviews that used to take weeks, data cleaning nightmares, experimental design optimisation, image analysis. If you’re early-career right now, you are entering a version of research where a meaningful chunk of the tedious scaffolding is being handled by tools that didn’t exist five years ago. What’s left is the bit that was always the good bit: the thinking, the questioning, the arguing about what the result actually means.

(Yeah, I know, “You said AI will take your lab job!” That’s a different piece. This is the optimistic one – stay with me.)

Science is having a weird, brilliant, slightly terrifying moment

I need you to understand how much is happening right now. GLP-1 drugs are reshaping metabolic medicine in ways that were unthinkable a decade ago (for better or worse). Gene therapies are moving from 'theoretical eventually to clinical reality. The tools for understanding single-cell biology have made the previous generation’s methods look like reading tea leaves. Structural biology has gone from slow and expensive to fast and democratised, because of AI, in a handful of years. Psychedelics are re-entering the clinic. The origin of Alzheimer’s pathology is being genuinely re-evaluated rather than just incrementally nodded at. Antimicrobial resistance is being approached with actual novel mechanisms rather than variations on known themes. Hell, I just read a paper about “vault” proteins in cells and using them a data recording devices – like a plane’s black box – in cells essentially track the transcriptome of the past!

If you are working at a bench right now and you are studying any of these things or a host of other things, you are at the actual edge of things. Not trying to make a sales pitch here, that’s just the reality that seems to be whipping out ahead of us at record speed.

Okay, the honest bit

Here’s where I tell you the system you’d be choosing to stay inside is also, right now, trying to eat itself. US federal science funding is in a state of active political assault. The NIH – the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet – has been haemorrhaging staff, having grants clawed back, watching indirect cost caps imposed by people who don’t know what indirect costs are. If you are in the US or your work is US-funded, this isn’t background noise you can just ignore, because is so far reaching. UK research funding through UKRI has also been under sustained pressure. Postdoc pay in real terms is still, in many institutions, a polite exploitation. The average age of a first independent grant in the US is hovering around 44. Add to that the very unstable, competitive, often cut-throat, brutality of academia in some places and it’s no secret this could be a hard slog at times.

The academic career pipeline, the one that says PhD to postdoc to PI to tenure, was always a pyramid scheme with excellent branding and that hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that people are saying it out loud more, people are pissed are they’re happy to shout about it, and there are slightly more alternative routes within science (industry, biotech, science policy, clinical research) that don’t require you to do your best work at 50% salary for a decade and a half while pretending to be grateful.

So, the science is brilliant, but the system the science lives inside is under considerable stress. Both of those things are true at the same time, and anyone who tells you only one of them is either selling something or lying.

On being the person in the room who actually knows

There’s a subtler version of the freedom argument that I didn’t have the words for when I wrote the original piece, which that expertise is its own form of power. I don’t mean influencer power or platform power, but the power of being the person who actually understands what the p-value means, what the confidence interval is saying, whether the claimed mechanism is biologically plausible. That’s confidence, baby! It’s hard to stick on value on knowing how things really work. As the information environment gets noisier – and it is getting noisier at a rate that makes my eyes water – the value of genuine human expertise is going up, not down. The world certainly isn’t short on opinions about science but it crying out for of people who can evaluate evidence and come to rational conclusion. Critical thinking is at the heart of being a scientists and I reckon we need that now more than ever.

Staying in research means you remain one of those people. Leaving, and I say this as someone who left, means you spend an increasing amount of time watching arguments about science happen in rooms you’re no longer technically in.

Right, so, should you stay?

I can’t answer that. Obviously. Deeply, categorically not my call. And you knew I was going to say that. But I’ll tell you what I think, which is if you’re leaving science because you’re exhausted and underpaid and your supervisor is making your life difficult and the funding world is frightening, then those are all legitimate reasons and I’m not going to pretend they aren’t. They’re real and they’re structural and they’re not your fault.

If you are leaving because you don’t think the work matters, or because you’re not sure whether anyone cares, or because it feels like you’re shouting into a void – I’d push back on that, gently. The work matters, you caring is real, the void is loud and we all feel like we’re shouting into it anyway.

And if you are leaving because you think there’s something better out there – more stable, more respected, more financially sensible – well, yeah, sure. Maybe. Possibly. I mean. Hmm. You have to think about what you value the ability to chase down curiosity in a way nothing else can come close, but in a system that right now gives you all the tools but just makes them needlessly hard to reach.

I’m not going to tell you I’m not still appending everything with “but I used to be a scientist.” Because I feel I am, in a way, and I’ll probably be adding that note to my “About” intros forever, but my taste of science is something nothing has ever surpassed and I don’t expect anything to , either. You just have to decide if getting out now trumps the “What ifs…” you’ll have a little further down the line.

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Good morning, everyone. Look, I appreciate the past few posts have been pretty full on, but I’ve had a bunch of stuff about society and AI and an industrial apocalypse whizzing around my mind grapes, so I had to squeeze them out. So, erm, thanks for subscribing and sticking with me.

For a little change of pace, here’s what’s going on right now.

1. Limited shenanigans

I’ve been a freelance science writer/copywriter for about 6 years now and I’ve always been a sole trader. Well, from next week I’ll officially be a Limited company. At Companies House I’ll be Hinchen Copy & Consulting, but I’ll still be trading as “bill hinchen copy” because that’s how everyone’s known me – although I suspect no one actually knows that at all and folk just come to “that bearded science nerdy bloke – Hitchin or something”. No knowledge of “bill hinchen copy” at all.

Okay, first of all, shut up, I know all the business names are super dull. The HC&C thing was because I might team up with my very excellent wife in the future so needed actual flexibility and so that HMRC don’t throw some weird investigation at me because they suspect I’m up to some dodgy-Dubai-tax dodge style thing when I’m just trying to live and do things by the book, FFS HMRC let me live! The bhc thing was because, well, it’s me doing copy and I thought most of the ‘creative’ names out there were just a bit shit. So I thought, “Well at least people will know it’s me”.

Anyway, Ltd is a thing so now I’ve gone and got myself an accountant, I’m learning about all the new tax things, I have to figure out what dividends actually are, how shares work, transfer all my direct debits to a new bank account and I probably need to do something with expenses and company minutes reporting and basic salary and employer contributions and holy shit why did I do this?

2. More than words

I’ve always half joked about “I just do the words” as a way to separate out what I do from the mountain of business bullshit out there. But of course it’s more than that as there’s a shed load of thinking – sorry, I mean “strategy” – involved. Before something’s written I have to think about the audience(s), the content that exists, the content that’ll come next, the goal of this bit of work (what do we want the audience to think/do right now?), what competitors are doing, whether the work fits the company tone of voice. I think some people split this off into their whole job, which is kind of outrageous, but there you go.

The point is, I need to get better at making it clear that I’m more than just a copy monkey. I want people to come to me before they need something written because I guarantee they haven’t thought about what they really need. But I’ll stick my nuts in a Brevel before I call myself a “strategist”.

3. Gotta get more science out there

Finally got around to looking at the Public Attitudes to Science report.

tl;dr science in the wild is a big old mess and we need to start being more honest about what we don’t know.

Okay, right off the bat, science is splashed all over social at the moment, but

• fewer people feel informed (51% —> 43%)

• fewer think what they hear is generally true (50% —> 40%)

Volume up, confidence down – a bad signal-to-noise ratio as us nerds like to say

People say science info

• is biased, misleading, conflicting or fake (24%)

• media content specifically is biased/misleading (19%)

• social media is worse (20%)

• it’s influenced by money or politics (12%)

And

• 47% say there’s so much conflicting information it’s hard to know what to believe

• 55% think the media sensationalises science
  

Totally fair – between wellness loons and health grifters, who wouldn’t think that?

Most people have no chance of verifying claims in the literature so they have to trust in the scientific process (whack a “significance” value or a few technical terms in and you win some people over, for better or worse) or the source/institute it came from. And when you have mainstream media saying everything’s a “breakthrough”, the real science fades into the background.

So, like I tell commercial clients, we need to be more honest about things.

1. Stop writing like a marketing department where everything’s perfect and groundbreaking

2. Talk about what’s uncertain, be clear about what we do and don’t (yet) know

3. Have a little transparency – everyone loves to talk about funding bias from “them”, so show who funded it and what that means

4. Stop trying to convince people of hard facts and treat the disagreement within as part of science – that is how science progresses after all. Most people just want their beliefs confirmed anyway so the best you can hope for in those cases in some discussion.

5. Show what it means for people; what changes, for whom, to what extent and when

6. Show the human side of research, like the researchers, and invite people to look deeper

7. Overall, less polished outcomes, more “science is a working progress so let’s talk about it”

Everyone has to get way more comfortable with uncertainty. And that goes for pretty much all walks of life.

4. Reading slump

I’ve been trying to read the Horus Heresy books for ages now, but after 24 books, I can conclude that this series and the writing is a steaming pile of shit. Sorry. Yeah, there are some standout moments (Thousand Sons, anything by ADB) but overall, turbo crap. I’m just not about powering through because the world is so bloody cool and I’m not judging anyone who loves the stories. But for me, the words are pants are I will not have them in my eyes anymore.

Thankfully, I’ve lined up and assortment of grimdark fiction to get through and scratch that itch, I’ve got the new Dungeon Crawler Carl on preorder and I sent off for a little something on quantum physics because hey, I’m still a massive science dork and I just have way more questions than I do anything even vaguely looking like an answer. I blame Sabine for this as I’m always left with a whisper “Ahhhh I think I get it!” followed by “Wait, what, hold on…”

5. Speaking of reading…

… I came across a SubStack by Tom Rowley, who quit his job writing for The Economist to set up his own independent bookshop, “Backstory”. Not only has Tom stolen (STOLEN!) my very longstanding dream (which may or may not be fuelled by simply wanting to be Bernard Black from Black Books), but he has some excellent articles on there and you should definitely go and get them in your eyeholes.

Really like the recent on the definitely-not-AI-written-she-promises-but-AI-edited book Shy Girl by Mia Ballard

My Bookshop Backstory by Tom Rowley

I read the novel 'written by AI'

The second half of the survey about Backstory will now follow next week… what follows was too juicy to wait…

Read more

5 months ago · 108 likes · 32 comments · Tom Rowley

Okay sausages, that’ll do for now. Go forth and enjoy your Easter weekend, gorging yourself on chocolate eggs squeezed from a magical bunny just like Jesus would’ve wanted.

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You stick your hand in a glass of water – wet. You paddle in the sea – wet. You feel laundry hanging on the dryer and ask, “Hmmm… is that just cold or still wet?” You jam your finger into a pot of soil next to the slowly dying spider plant you swear you’re going to repot soon because apparently, like me, you’re now at that age where you collect houseplants like regrets – and again you ask, “Is that wet? Damp? ...Alive?” And behold: CONFUSION!

Yes yes, you know what wet feels like. You’re pretty confident you’re wet when, you know, you’re wet (again, get your mind out the gutter). Like when feel the sea splash against your legs as you wade out amongst 10,000 sunburnt Brits on a beach littered with sunbeds and empty Stella cans in what was once a lovely part of Spain; or when you feel the cold droplets hitting your face as you stare up at the rain falling from dark clouds on your lunch break because you decided sitting at your desk was just too sad to do yet again, or when... okay you get the picture. But technically – lowers glasses to peer over the top – you can’t actually tell. Not directly and not physiologically, at least not in the way we think we can.

“Why? Huh? WTF Bill?! YOU’RE MAD!” I hear you cry. Okay, settle down. Here’s the short version: you don’t have hygroreceptors.

Other animals – cockroaches, bees, flies, frogs, probably that weird dog down your street – can actually detect humidity changes. They have specific receptors in their sensory organs. You? Nah. Nope. Sorry. You’re just guessing. Puny human.

Humans are hygroreceptor-free. That means we can’t detect moisture directly. Instead, we fake it. We cobble together a sense of wetness from two things: thermal cues (cold, mostly) and mechanical ones (pressure, friction, weird squelchy feelings).

This biological mashup is what science nerds call a “synthetic perception”. And yeah, “synthetic perception” sounds like something a your mate faking science knowledge with AI would invent, but it’s real. Your brain’s basically guessing and faking it: you learn what wetness feels like based on what wet things usually do to your skin. That’s it. Now you can feel less bad about faking all your other feelings since your body does it too.

So when you touch water, your skin cools (because water conducts heat better than air, duh). You feel the temperature drop, and your brain goes, “Ooh, that’s probably wet.” But if something’s cold and dry? Or warm and wet? You get confused. Like when you pick up that cold T-shirt and aren’t sure if it’s still damp or just giving you the silent treatment. That laundry situation is just your body and brain having a stab in the dark.

Same thing with touching something really cold. “Is this wet? Dry? Am I bonding with this frozen lamppost and recreating that Dumb and Dumber scene? WHAT IS REAL?!” Who knows? Not you, for sure. Your thermoreceptors are screaming “COLD!” and your mechanoreceptors are like “Feels smooth... maybe slippery?” and your brain just slaps a big “PROBABLY WET?” post-it on it and moves on for someone else to worry about.

Turns out, we process wetness in a way that mimics how we deal with pain or itch: by smooshing (smushing?) together multiple sensory signals into a single perception. That’s why we can run experiments to trick people into feeling wetness without any actual water involved. Cold metal + light pressure = “The fuck? Did something just drip on me?” Scientists are fun like that.

Essentially you learn wetness through experience because you really can’t physiologically tell when you’re wet. You’ve basically been training your brain this whole time to recognise “wet” from your repeated interactions with soggy socks, drizzly commutes, little accidents and questionably moist leftovers. But it’s all based on indirect clues because there’s no built-in water detector.

So yeah. The next time you’re standing in the kitchen staring at a mug wondering “Is this still wet or just cold?”, take comfort in the fact that science has your back. You’re not an idiot. You’re just a damp little guess-machine in a meat suit.

Anyway, was just thinking about this and wanted to let you know.

In case you were wondering...

“Am I wet?”

I don’t want to go to work, I don’t want to be at work, I don’t want to think about work or reply to things about work or pretend that work matters enough to be something I should have an opinion about.

I don’t want to write about enzymes or antibodies or workflows or customer success platforms, I don’t want to open a brief and be met with that empty, humming grey of nothing and I don’t want to smile while someone explains a “great new content opportunity” which just means three more weeks of writing the same sentences in a different order.

I don’t want to care about tone of voice or brand architecture or any other phrase that sounds important and means nothing. I don’t want to be good at this.

I don’t want to make a plan for the weekend, I don’t want to start the back-and-forth of who wants to do what and who doesn’t and why everything is boring now even though it was fun last month. I don’t want to go to the skatepark, again, where time folds in on itself and I’m just standing there with cold ankles and too many tabs open in my head, pretending not to be bored while also sort of enjoying it because my son’s now awesome at skating and I don’t want to think about how I should also be practising my skating or surfing and being less shit.

I don’t want to referee another screen time argument or come up with something interesting to eat.

I don’t want to have a conversation about protein.
I don’t want to give a shit about protein.

I don’t want to renew the car insurance.
I don’t want to deal with the MOT.
I don’t want to check if we need to bleed the radiators or when the bins go out or if we’re somehow still being overcharged by a broadband provider I’ve spoken to four times and threatened with cancellation and who keep calling my bluff.

I don’t want to sort recycling into categories so specific they may as well be organised by atomic number. I don’t want to feel bad for not knowing whether this plastic yoghurt pot is recyclable in our borough or if it’s made from the wrong kind of hope. I don’t want to google when the recycling centre is open so I can book a slot between 1 and 1.30 pm on a Saturday to drive there and dispose of my waste in the most polite way possible.

I don’t want to do pension maths, I don’t want to compare interest rates, I don’t want to calculate investment returns to realise there’s enough for a year or two assuming the apocalypse ins’t already upon us. I don’t want to be 44 and wondering if I’ve missed the window for being A Person Who Sorted Their Shit Out.

I don’t want to remember which streaming service we cancelled.
I don’t want to deal with another bloody platform that doesn’t work in Safari but does in Chrome and sends all its alerts to an email address I don’t check.
I don’t want to be the family tech support, logistics coordinator, admin assistant, doctor, fixer, finder or the forgotten lore.

I don’t want to do any of it.

I don’t want to answer questions.
I don’t want to answer my phone.
I don’t want to jump on a “quick call”.
I don’t want to lean in.
I don’t want to circle back.
I don’t want to follow up.
I don’t want to add value.
I don’t want to clarify my availability.
I don’t want to be available.

I don’t want to care about how many steps I’ve done.
I don’t want to track my mood.
I don’t want to gratitude journal.
I don’t want to take a moment for mindful breathing when what I actually need is a lie down in a soundproof room where nobody is asking anything from me, not even to be present.
I don’t want to hear the word “intentional” ever again.
I don’t want to be intentional.

I don’t want to be tired all the time.
I don’t want to be guilty all the time.
I don’t want to be chasing better all the time.
I don’t want to be thinking about whether this is the right way to live, whether I’m setting the right example, whether I’m keeping up.
I don’t want to keep up.

I don’t want to admit how lucky I am, because I am so fucking lucky, and I know that, and it makes it worse.
I don’t want to keep having this conversation in my head about how I shouldn’t feel like this, because things are fine, really, they’re fine, they’re good, better than most, and if I’m still complaining then what does that say about me?
I don’t want to write a whiny list and call it a blog.

I don’t want to feel like this is petty.
I don’t want to feel like this is all my fault.
I don’t want to feel like everyone else is just getting on with it.

But I do.

And I do all of it.
Every single thing I didn’t want to do.
And sometimes I even enjoy it, which is the worst part because the enjoyment proves me wrong, again, and I hate being wrong about anything.
Because if I’m wrong about this, then maybe all the not-wanting is just noise.
Maybe all this resistance is just my brain being a dick.
Maybe I need to shut up and do the thing.
Which I do.
Which I always do.

Even though I don’t want to.

Obviously.

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Turns out they need someone who can think clearly; someone who asks awkward but useful questions (the proverbial pain in your arse); someone willing to point out the bullshit and say “No. Bad. Stop it”; someone who understands what came before, what’s happening now and what actually makes sense as a next step, rather than what happens to be fashionable this quarter.

Apparently, we’re calling those people ‘strategists’ now. Sounds like just thinking about things properly to me, but if we want to take the work strategy and apply it to marketing, fine. I’m on board (although I may wince at the mention of it once or twice at the start).

Because in a lot of cases, folks have already got writers, an internal team, a roster of freelancers or maybe even a decent agency (that they’re almost certainly overpaying for). The problem is that despite this vast amount of content potential, nobody’s quite sure why half of it exists, who it’s for or whether it’s doing anything other than filling a CMS, which some poor intern is crying over as they try to manage its exponential growth.

And I’ve noticed that’s usually when the shiny new ideas start trundling along, sitting pretty atop the latest bandwagon. Sheryl reads a post and is now dead set on cross vertical synergy. Dan went to a webinar and thinks you need to talk about the company values of being human and honest and dedicated more often. Ted from sales decides your serious B2B science brand needs to be “more TikTok”. And suddenly there’s motion and un-founded urgency, but not much direction or sense – or, dare I say, strategy – behind it.

This is where I think I can be useful.

Over the the years I’ve written a lot of words for a lot of people and more often than I’d like to admit, it started with me pushing back: “Are you sure you want say this? It might be better if you [insert much better idea I actually thought about].” But alas, the allure of that shiny bandwagon or the sheer stature of “what we’ve always done” it’s usually too great to derail.

So, my plan is to have people get me in before that stage, before Ted plants his little TikTok dance seed. I’ll look at what already exists and tell them what’s working, what’s quietly failing and what probably needs to be put out of its misery. I want to help folk decide what’s worth saying, how to say it without sounding like every other innovative solution-provider accelerating discovery, how to have a go at possessing a spine without making the shareholders piss blood, and of course which buzzwords you can and should safely retire immediately.( Everyone can bin “thought leadership” straight away. Consider that a freebie.)

I’ll give language guidance, tone-of-voice tweaks, content direction and campaign ideas that fit the science, the audience and the actual constraints. More importantly, I’ll also spell out what NOT to do. Honestly, half this job is pushing a boulder back up the hill and saying “Don’t be a silly sausage” all the way.

And unlike the aforementioned overpaid agency, I have no desire to wrap all this up in a vague-but-very-pretty 70-slide deck that gets admired once and then banished to dusty SharePoint folder. I want to give people something they can actually use. AI’s coming for writing, but for a while yet (hopefully), thinking still seems essential and in worryingly short supply.

So, if what you need right now is a delightful bearded bloke to make sense of a well-meaning but ever-so-slightly on-fire pile of content and copy – and give it at least a sliver of purpose – give me a shout. I’ll help you work out what to do next.

Then you can hand it all back to your internal team or second-favourite writer (because obviously I’m your fave) and carry on.

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Humbug

I don’t hate Christmas. Honest. Honest! I like the merry vibe, the feel of everyone being out in the cold together, the mince pies, the sherry at any hour – it’s splendid. I don’t even mind getting gifts for people as long as they’re gifts I think people will enjoy and, more importantly, haven’t asked me to get them. Look, if you want something, just buy it – I’m not responding to a soulless Amazon link. What I hate is how you’re not allowed to deviate from the accepted view that Christmas is fucking magical and you do love it, or you’re some sort of emotionally devoid, humbug deviant. I hate the same songs and same food and same activities unpacked from our dusty memories every year. I also hate the almost-pity in people’s eyes when you don’t concur that this ritual is just a little mad. Not to mention the stress we collectively accept and ignore, neatly gift-wrapped in a package of cognitive dissonance (Jamie’s back on TV showing us how to fill your fridge with a butter-smothered turkey crown, chuffed-up potatoes and whipped up chicken livers days or weeks in advance to reduce the stress of that ‘Big Day’ – or stretch it out, depending on how you look at it). Christmas is a weird ideal we can never live up to, and we end up stressed and underwhelmed. I still quite like the build-up but I hate we’re not allowed to not love it.

Crow

Anyone know how to get the crows to love me? Ever since I saw someone feeding a group of crows regularly and getting them to solve little puzzles in exchange for treats, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with wanting to do the same. Went through a bunch of bird feeders in the garden and finally settled on a nice wooden one with an open table. Also tried loads of different food and crows consistently come down for peanuts (unsalted, still with skins on, but they also like monkey nuts). It draws in the chonky pigeons as well, who mindlessly slam their little faces into the food over and over. By comparison, the crows eat while looking around – appearing to think, to consider what’s going on. The crows swoop down in small groups or alone, take a few nuts and then fly off. If there’s ever suet bits thrown into the mix, the starlings swarm down in a frenzy and make a huge mess. It’s carnage. Been trying to shake the tub of peanuts each time before venturing out to see if the crows will learn to associate that sound with feeding, but no luck. When will the crows love me?

Idiot

I think most people are probably idiots. Sorry team, I realise that’s pretty sweeping and mean and prejudiced and cruel and thoughtless and privileged and a whole bunch of other stuff. But it’s the only conclusion I came to. Every time I see people rattling off racist or sexist ideas, defending Trump’s actions, deciding Nigel Farage is probably a decent bloke, killing people because they believe the same thing people they don’t like believe, boldly defying rudimentary science because some spandex-clad tit on social media said “Here’s what Big [Industry] doesn’t want you to know”, throwing rubbish on the floor, drinking alkaline water, being cruel to animals, having no empathy for anyone else, boosting their immune system, and just failing to ever, EVER, take the time to stop and think critically for themselves about anything, I can only assume most people are probably idiots.

Hypocrite

Private schools should not exist. There’s simply no justification for having a tiered system of education where those with wealth can give their children not only more potential opportunities but also what will likely be a generally more pleasant experience (which takes up a not-insignificant amount of kids’ early lives). My friends and I went to various state schools while my wife and most of her friends went to private schools. And the experiences were worlds apart, serving to highlight just how skewed the fairness of state vs private schooling is. However, my son has been offered a scholarship for a local private school, and I am seriously considering paying the rest of the fees to send him there when the time comes. Intensely hypocritical, I know – sharpen your pitchforks. But I think I’m willing to swallow my internal objections if it means my son will have a better school experience than I did. I’m not quite sure how to resolve it, and I can’t really justify it, but there it is.

Busy

Saw a geezer online saying how shocking it is trying to work on a train in 2025: no wifi or tethering, no USBs – this is a digital-first G8 society ffs! Let me offer an alternative: for those two and a half hours, and your trundle along to that client meeting, read a book. Have a think. Maybe just stare out the window. No email you have to send is so important it has to be done in that small time slot while travelling. Nothing you do at work is that important. You, are not that important. You probably work in marketing, in which case you’re definitely not doing anything truly important. We’ve decided that we must always be working, always be busy, any interruption of this is a personal affront – an absolute horror to be avoided. Perhaps, just chill the fuck out. Enjoy the breaks, enjoy the quiet moments when they present themselves. You don’t always need to be busy – no one’s looking, and no one cares. Let’s take it further and remove wifi from the train altogether – let’s not even make the attempt, and remove weird expectations from similarly busy-delusional senior types.

Good

As much as I complain about shit, it’s always wonderful when you find a little pocket of good in the world. I’ve recently started coaching kids’ rugby. I was super nervous at the start, but I do it with a couple of other coaches who’ve been doing it for a while. Since starting, I’ve found myself up to my neck in people from all walks of life who volunteer their time to help out of the rugby club: coaching kids, running fundraisers, organising events, travelling to coaching training sessions, running the cafe on game day, shuttling people around – and no one’s getting or asking anything in return. I appreciate this isn’t anything new, but it’s heartwarming to see – and now be a part of – people freely giving up their time to help so many kids enjoy this beautiful game. It still makes me a feel a little emotional when the kids come up to you after a practice session or a game and say “Thanks, Coach!” Not quite a full-on-faith-in-humanity-restoration, but definitely a welcome step in that direction.

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“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Horseshiiiiiiiiit. Do what you love and you’ll slowly learn to hate it, because now it’s chained to invoices, deadlines, and Brian asking if you can “just make it pop a bit more”. You know what happens when you turn passion into work? It stops being passion. It becomes tasks. It becomes deliverables. It becomes Tuesday afternoon, and you’re staring at a Google Doc wondering WTF Anonymous Beaver is making me do this for.

And the thing is, I’m not bad at it. I’m actually really bloody good. I can come up with ideas and churn out the words, make the science sound shiny, fluff up the copy until it’s rock solid. Clients thank me. But there’s no dopamine hit at the end. No inner cheerleader saying, “Well done, champ”. Just the dull satisfaction of a job ticked off the list. And then another job appears. And another. Until you start to think: maybe the real dream isn’t doing what you love. Maybe it’s doing absolutely nothing at all.

And I don’t think society really gives us a way out – not really. We’re meant to just keep doing the stuff. Forever. Like obedient little productivity hamsters, running until we drop. The only genuine escape routes I can see are:

1. A life of crime. But let’s be honest – I’d be terrible at it. It sounds quite high on the anxiety chart. I’m not slick enough to rob a bank and not brutal enough to go full gangster. My version of crime would probably be shoplifting fancy stationery, which isn’t exactly a retirement plan.

2. OnlyFans. A bold choice, but who the hell is paying to watch a tired forty-something half-heartedly eat crisps in bed while sighing about deadlines? (Actually… don’t answer that. There’s probably a market. And I don’t want to know about it.)

3. Obscene, accidental wealth. The lottery win, the forgotten great-uncle inheritance, the crypto miracle before it inevitably implodes. Basically, some deus ex cash machine swoops in and saves me from ever having to reply “no worries at all, happy to help” in an email again.

That’s it. Those are the doors. And none of them are exactly swinging wide open (but I am doing ther £220 million lottery tonight).

Look, I’m not a clueless entitled prick, I know we all have to do the stuff, and contribute to society, and pay for the things, and fund the NHS and buses, and we can’t just be given things like food and shelter for free, but…

I’ll keep doing the things. I’ll reply to the emails. I’ll polish the sentences. I’ll make the graphs look sexy. But every time, I feel that little internal bleeeeurrrgghhh before I hit send. Because that’s the deal: we work, not because we’re inspired or fulfilled, but because the gas bill doesn’t pay itself.

And maybe that’s fine. I know work isn’t supposed to be satisfying all the time. Maybe it’s just supposed to be… done. The myth is that jobs should be passion projects wrapped in joy, although I don’t think anyone other than a few LinkedIn loons really believes that. The reality is that they’re obligations dressed up as careers. And if you happen to be good at it? Congratulations. You get to do it more.

Every once in a rare while, I write some work stuff I like. But, the reality is I’ll keep doing it because people pay me to and I like having somewhere to live. Thankfully, competent-but-constantly-grumpy is still a marketable skill. But if anyone’s got a spare lottery ticket, a foolproof art heist plan or a thriving niche audience who desperately want videos of a big bearded bloke eating crisps and sighing – my inbox is open.

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Lately, I’ve had a lot of folks come to me and ask about how to get into science writing; how I did it, what I actually do and how they too can dedicate their lives to sharing the wonders of science. For lots of young scientists, science communication (scicomm) looks like a noble escape. Academia is often cut-throat competition, stressful and big on short-term contracts that lead to a bit of a nomadic existence, or even just leaving you out on your ear when your grant fails to come through. Industry can offer good salaries but little autonomy, since you’re often running assays just until automation comes along enough to wipe out your role. Scicomm, on the other hand, promises meaning: educating the public, shaping policy, inspiring the next generation. It’s basically got rainbows shooting out of its eyeballs and there’s no shortage of social media scicommers spreading the good word of science.

But – and you knew it was coming – for the most part, science communication’s selfless nobility is an illusion: underpaid, precarious and inherently tied to marketing, institutional agendas or performative outreach. Like so many good things, it comes down “Who the fuck is paying for this?”

Who actually pays for science communication?

The dream of independent, public-serving scicomm collapses quickly when you follow the money.

Universities fund external writers and press offices primarily to polish their institutional image, attract students and meet funder requirements like Research Excellence Framework (REF) impact markers.

Charities and NGOs communicate science to attract donations, bolster campaigns or influence policy, rarely just to educate the public. Yes, policies may impact the public at some point down the line, but it’s a rare instance when anyone in the public ever notices (or the government give enough of a shit to actually do something about the mountain of data and evidence you dump at their feet).

Industry (especially pharma/biotech) hires communicators to frame research in ways that support product launches, regulatory demands or keeps shareholders sweet. You can tell yourself you’re helping scientists make better buying decisions – and yeah, that’s true – but it’s still just marketing.

The magazines we all wanted to be journalists for (New Scientist, Scientific America, etc) all receive a metric shit ton of work from aspiring science writers and people are literally throwing feature articles at them in the hopes of just getting their name out there. This means pay is little or even nonexistent. It’s worth always keeping in mind that science journalism and science PR are not the same. Journalism is there to investigate, critique and hold science accountable. Science PR (university comms, corporate media teams) promotes institutional interests.

Open-ended, independent scicomm (that is, public-facing work not tied to a product, research project, or institutional goal) is almost nonexistent (1, 2). Communicating science only really works if it’s tied to some sort of financial payoff at the end. That usually means products and services.

Pay and job stability

The pay landscape across scicomm sectors is underwhelming.

Global freelance science journalists often earn under $20,000/year on average, according to The World Federation of Science Journalists (2023); many supplement income with PR, consulting or teaching. Entry-level science writers in the UK can expect to earn between £26,875 and £33,000 per year. My first ever medical writing gig in an agency paid £25,000 and by the time I was an in-house senior science writer at a biotech company, it’d risen to £33,000. As a Research Comms Manager (degree + postgrad degrees + 8 years writing experience) at a charity, I was on £35,000.

In the UK, freelance copywriter day rates average ~£433/day according to ProCopywriters, but editorial work pays well below that, sometimes under £200 per piece. Yes, the freelance numbers can be relatively high here, but, trust me: you ain’t getting a science research charity to pay those day rates – numbers like these come from big business paying you to help them sell stuff. (All hail content marketing.)

Maybe you could get a special qualification to help? I’m not sure how much I’d rate these courses at all. Science communication master’s degrees (those are a thing) have a load of enthusiastic graduates waiting to sign up, but job pathways are fragmented and highly competitive, often leading to portfolio careers without security (3).

Digital media hasn’t solved any of this, if anything, it’s added more short-term, precarious outlets, often without improving pay or editorial standards (4).

Impact? Mostly hype

Okay, but do scicomm efforts change public attitudes, boost science literacy or increase trust in science? Evidence suggests… ding ding ding! not so much, and we rarely know for sure.

The UK Public Attitudes to Science survey shows ~70% of people say they’re interested in science, but only ~30% actively follow science news (5). Trust in scientists is high (~80%), but trust in how science is used by governments or business drops sharply (~40%). People like science as wonder (think Attenborough, our Lord and Saviour) but get wary when it enters political or personal domains (6). During COVID, scientists were thrown into the spotlight, and what did they get for it? Online abuse, political misrepresentation and an overwhelming desire to get the fuck out.

If we take a look at professional scicomm practitioners, not scientists thrust behind TV podiums, they admit they struggle to show meaningful, long-term impacts on public knowledge or attitudes. Studies repeatedly find:

• Evaluations focus on outputs (number of posts, events, media hits) or short-term outcomes (audience numbers, social media clicks), not whether minds changed or behaviour shifted (7). Most science comms is still one-way – press releases, articles, social media posts. And even when engagement happens, it’s typically small-scale: open days, panel talks, or niche citizen science projects, not mass shifts in public understanding.

• Only ~30–40% of science communicators routinely evaluate their work, and when they do, they use simple metrics and one-off surveys. As the authors bluntly put it, “Evaluations are not (yet) widespread, and when they are carried out, they are usually based on simple methods, selective indicators, and one-off measurements.”

• More rigorous, holistic evaluation (tracking cognitive, emotional, behavioural outcomes) is rare because it’s expensive, methodologically demanding, and institutionally unsupported (7, 8). Again, shit ain’t getting done if someone isn’t paying for it.

Yes, there are some context-specific, documented examples where targeted, participatory scicomm initiatives did measurably shift local attitudes or behaviours, like some vaccine campaigns or climate engagement, but these are the rare exception, not the rule.

In short, scicomm is better at performing the appearance of outreach than delivering a measurable public change. Sure, it can do report-worthy things like “enrich local dialogue, connect pockets of interested public, or enhance specific projects”, but the idea it’s democratising science or transforming public attitudes on any large scale is a fairy tale.

Teaching: maybe the only meaningful scicomm job?

In my mind at least, one of the few science communication roles that reliably changes minds is teaching: lecturers, outreach educators, museum explainers and other things I haven’t thought of. These roles give you the chance to interact directly with real, ongoing, sustained engagement and measurable educational outcomes. Teaching, of course, has its own issues that I’m not going to get into. But even here, growing academic precarity, rising workloads, and short-term contracts are eating away at the profession’s stability – not to mention anyone’s desire to throw themselves into it (3).

The two options in scicomm

If you’re trying to make a career in communicating science, you’re usually staring down two choices:

Option one: take the money

Go into medical writing, pharma comms, corporate PR or university press work. You’ll get paid (sometimes decently), but you’re ghostwriting marketing material in some form. You’re shaping stories to promote products, secure grants, attract students, manage reputation or push campaigns. You’re not “educating the public” in some pure sense, you’re selling.

Option two: take little or no money and chase the noble cause

Start a blog, run a podcast (if you must), join a grassroots science festival or try independent science journalism. You’ll do it for love, not for pay. But even if you pour your soul into it, the impact is often negligible or impossible to measure. The audience? Small and self-selecting. The mass public? Largely indifferent. And the odds of breaking through to Attenborough-level influence? Vanishingly small.

In both cases, you hit the same wall: the money comes with strings; the noble path can come with a worryingly small pot of cash. Either way, don’t fool yourself that you’re stepping into some pure, heroic public service. It’s messier than that.

Why do it at all?

If all this sounds bleak, it’s because the scicomm field really doesn’t like to talk about its weaknesses (realities). To be honest, I depressed myself talking about this last night and again this morning, writing it all down. But there is joy to be had in this hugely diverse industry.

If you like speaking to people and just learning about different areas of research, then science journalism is going to be wonderful. Yes, it’s challenging to get into and yes, shitty top-tier journals and magazines still dish out unpaid internships, but the work can be bloody awesome and genuinely fascinating. Travel, learning, writing… There’s a lot of good. There’s no getting away from the relatively low pay in that field, but that isn’t going to be a deciding factor here for some people.

If you love the idea of working at an agency with deadlines for papers, marketing decks and conference booth headlines flying at you, left, right and centre, then agency science/medical writing is going to give you the horn. Medical writing is a mix of marketing and looking through data to turn it into proper papers (think Lancet, BMJ, etc), whereas biotech is going to be all marketing. If that floats your boat, you’re gonna have fun.

If you just want to talk to the public about research they helped fund, charity comms is a good one. Take the research papers, convert them to content to help explain it to the public, secure funding, drum up subscriptions, interview scientists – there’s a lot going on. The pay is usually lower than in the private sector and things can seem a little chaotic, but you score some good soul points.

If you don’t need money or are already a big deal on the internet, then social media scicomm superstardom is waiting there for you. You have nothing to lose since you’re already sorted for cash, so you can just talk about cool science.

I’ve met loads of brilliantly talented people across all of these areas – from medical writers to full-time higher education writers – and they straight up love their jobs. Thankfully, not everyone falls down the trough of despair that I keep hurling myself into every month or so. Lots of scicommers find heaps of fulfilment, whether they’re helping universities and institutes share their science and courses, sharing charity-funded research with the public or even writing up product spec sheets minus all the marketing wank. Again, there’s joy to be had in scicomms, science writing, content creation – whatever you want to call it – but you need to be aware of the realities underpinning it all.

With that out of the way, let’s summarise it all, shall we?

• Science communication is mostly funded when someone – a university, a funder, a company – benefits financially or reputationally.

• Pay is typically low, roles are unstable, and a huge amount of work is really marketing in disguise. Private sector freelancing does have real income options, though.

• Public interest is patchy, and most communicators work in niche, self-selecting audiences, not mass public arenas.

• There are a lot of niches, so if you’re deadset on this, you can almost certainly find something. Sacrifices may need to be made.

So why do it at all? You do it because you love it – because you think someone should. But go in with your eyes open, because science communication might not be that career escape hatch you were hoping for.

References

1. UKRI, STFC-261124-PublicEngagementStrategy2024-2028.pdf. (2024).

2. J. Turney, Engaging science: thoughts, deeds, analysis and action / edited by Jon Turney. | Wellcome Collection, Wellcome Trust (2016). https://wellcomecollection.org/works/bnjnpffc/items.

3. N. Longnecker, Twenty years of teaching science communication — a personal reflection. J. Sci. Commun. 21, C06 (2022).

4. H. Pearson, Careers in Science Journalism and Writing. Cold Spring Harb. Perspect. Biol. 9, a032961 (2017).

5. BEIS, Public Attitudes to Science. 8, 11–11 (2019).

6. N. Lorenzoni, L. R. Hallsson, M. Flatscher-Thöni, L. Förster, C. Schusterschitz, Science communication during the COVID-19 pandemic: experiences, challenges and expectations from the perspective of scientists in Austria. Front. Commun. 10, 1519438 (2025).

7. S. C. Volk, M. S. Schäfer, Evaluations in science communication. Current state and future directions. J. Sci. Commun. 23(2024).

8. K. Biermann, L. Banse, M. Taddicken, “It’s mostly a one-way street, to be honest”: the subjective relevance of public engagement in the science communication of professional university communicators. J. Sci. Commun. 24 (2025).

You’ve probably seen the headlines.
“TOXIC WEEDKILLER FOUND IN TAMPONS!”
“GLYPHOSATE 40X HIGHER THAN LEGAL LIMIT!”
“CAUSES CANCER, ALZHEIMER’S, ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE!”

I first saw someone going absolutely crazy at this on LinkedIn. It’s funny that she goes on to link the Daily Mail as one of her sources because her post reads just like something from the Daily Mail.

But hang on. Take a breath. Let’s look at what the numbers actually say and whether this is a real health risk or just another bout of chemophobia-fuelled panic.

TL;DR

Yes, there’s glyphosate in your tampon. No, it’s not giving you cancer.
Yes, it’s in your food. No, you’re not being poisoned.
Yes, it’s bad for bees and biodiversity. No, banning it alone won’t fix the problem.

What’s glyphosate?

Glyphosate is a herbicide. The main one. You’ve probably seen that weed killer, Roundup, in the garden centre – well, it’s in that. On a bigger scale, it’s sprayed all over crops like wheat, maize, soy and loads more (like the cotton that goes into making tampons). It stops plants from making certain amino acids, which they need to live, and so – surprise surprise – they die. Crops have often been modified to specifically be resistant to glyphosate, and so they’re left unharmed. It’s been around since the ‘70s and is the most-used pesticide in the world.

Cue decades of debate over whether it's the Devil’s actual unholy jizz or just an incredibly useful chemical that’s (mostly) fine if used properly.

The tampon thing

In May 2025, a report from Pesticide Action Network UK found glyphosate in tampons at levels up to 4 µg/L. This got reported as “40x the EU drinking water limit”, which is 0.1 µg/L per pesticide.

That’s true, but misleading. The EU water limit isn’t a health-based threshold. It’s a legal policy level and it’s set extremely low on purpose. Like, zero tolerance low. Not ‘this will harm you’ low.

The actual EU Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) for glyphosate is 0.5 mg/kg/day. For a 60 kg adult, that’s 30 mg/day safely put away in your body. The amount in a tampon? A few micrograms. You’d need to soak and consume thousands of them to get near the ADI. Please don’t do that.

And yes, mucous membranes (like the vagina) absorb chemicals more efficiently than skin. But there’s no evidence that this exposure route meaningfully increases your systemic glyphosate levels.

The 41% cancer risk is not what you think

Let’s me start by saying that yes, a 2015 review by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation, classified the weedkiller as “probably carcinogenic to humans”.¹ This puts it in Group 2A, and the IARC’s classification focuses on whether an agent has the potential to cause cancer (hazard), not how likely it is to cause cancer at real-world exposure levels (risk).

Risk depends on dose, duration, and route of exposure, as well as individual susceptibility. What the IARC describe as “limited” human evidence, comes mostly from studies where exposure was very high – bigger, more frequent doses than for the general public. The animal evidence is from controlled studies at higher doses. So, keep that in mind.

Back to the headline figure: “41% increased risk of cancer”. This comes from a 2019 meta-analysis looking at people with high occupational exposure, mostly farmers and pesticide applicators.² They found that those with the highest exposure had a 41% increased relative risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).

But the baseline risk of NHL is about 2%. A 41% increase makes it 2.8%. So the absolute risk increase is 0.8 percentage points. Also, these people were using glyphosate in concentrated form, regularly, often without protection, for years. Whereas the general population is exposed to far, far lower levels (from food, water, and now apparently tampons).

A more recent meta-analysis looked at the association between occupational exposure to glyphosate and the risk of NHL and multiple myeloma (MM). They conclude there was “no overall evidence of an increased risk for both NHL and MM in subjects occupationally exposed to glyphosate.”³

I will note that a 2025 study fed rats doses of glyphosate at between 0.5 and 50mg/kg/day (remember, the ADI for glyphosate is 0.5 mg/kg/day) for 104 weeks, and the rats ended up with benign and malignant tumours.⁴ They conclude, “These results provide robust evidence supporting IARC’s conclusion that there is ‘sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity [of glyphosate] in experimental animals’.” Yes, this needs to be looked at more carefully, but it’s not a case for panic.

Regulatory agencies like EFSA, EPA, Health Canada, and Australia’s APVMA have all reviewed the data and concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a cancer risk at real-world exposure levels.

So, unless you’re bathing in Roundup and chasing it with a tampon smoothie, your cancer risk is probably unaffected.

What about Alzheimer's, Parkinson’s, autism, etc?

I’m going to just be blunt here and say there’s no convincing evidence that glyphosate causes any of these: not Alzheimer's disease, not Parkinson’s disease and certainly not autism. There are studies in cells or animals that show oxidative stress or mitochondrial weirdness, but at doses hundreds to thousands of times higher than you’d ever get through normal exposure. And they often use glyphosate formulations (like Roundup), not the chemical itself.

But human data is, overall, pretty flimsy. No good extensive epidemiology using levels the public comes into contact with, no clear mechanisms and lots of cherry-picking. The only one with nuance here is Parkinson’s, and that all comes from a Lancet paper that talks about case studies⁵ and one epidemiological study (looking at farmers with already high exposures) that suggests there might, maybe, be a possible association between glyphosate exposure and Parkinson’s.⁶

The data are still preliminary in this Parkinson’s case but definitely warrant looking a little deeper, especially for people who happen to work in agriculture and spend far too long wading around in Roundup.

So again, if there’s a risk here, it’s theoretical at best.

Bees, biodiversity and the bigger mess

Here’s where we might have a problem. Glyphosate isn’t great for ecosystems. It messes with soil microbes, aquatic critters, and yes, our beloved bees. While glyphosate doesn’t kill bees directly, it does disrupt their gut bacteria, which weakens their immunity.⁷ It can also mess with their navigation and foraging behaviour at field-relevant concentrations when exposed over a long time.⁸ Plus, by nuking wildflowers and creating monocultures, it removes the stuff they need to survive.

So no, glyphosate isn’t a bee-murdering demon. But it’s part of a system that’s slowly strangling biodiversity, and its role in that deserves scrutiny.

Still legal, still controversial

Glyphosate is still approved in most places:

• EU reapproved it in 2023 for 10 years.

• UK, US, Canada and Australia all allow it.

• Luxembourg banned it.

• Germany, Austria, Mexico, and others have partial or phased restrictions.

There’ve been huge lawsuits in the US, awarding billions in damages to people with cancer allegedly linked to glyphosate. That’s driven a lot of public fear, but the legal standard of evidence is not the same as the scientific one.

So, Should You Panic?

In a word: no.

• Glyphosate is not safe in all contexts, but the levels we’re exposed to are low.

• The tampon story is mostly a red herring – mildly gross, but not dangerous.

• The cancer risk is real for heavy, occupational exposure, but vanishingly small for most people.

• Environmental concerns are legit, but they’re about ecosystem fragility, not acute toxicity.

• The real issue isn’t glyphosate. It’s how we farm.

If you’re angry, be angry at the industrial agriculture model that made this seem normal, not at the molecule.

Why am I writing this?

Science is really bloody hard. The data are often complex, and if you’re not familiar with scientific papers and looking at experimental setups, data analysis and interpretations, it's really easy to jump to the wrong conclusion. This story ran in the Guardian, and to be honest, they did a really shitty job of being objective. There’s no reason for most people in the public to have the skills to look through the data and draw a sensible conclusion. If COVID taught us anything, it’s that people going ‘do their own research’ is rarely helpful. Without a good scientific eye, it’s far too easy to leap to the wrong conclusion and whip people up into panic and fear. Science journalists need to do a better job and talking about data, explaining nuances and helping people understand hazards and risks.

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References

1. IARC Monograph on Glyphosate. https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-glyphosate.

2. Zhang, L., Rana, I., Shaffer, R. M., Taioli, E. & Sheppard, L. Exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides and risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma: A meta-analysis and supporting evidence. Mutat Res Rev Mutat Res 781, 186–206 (2019).

3. Donato, F., Pira, E., Ciocan, C. & Boffetta, P. Exposure to glyphosate and risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma: an updated meta-analysis. Med Lav 111, 63–73 (2020).

4. Panzacchi, S. et al. Carcinogenic effects of long-term exposure from prenatal life to glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides in Sprague–Dawley rats. Environmental Health 24, 36 (2025).

5. Eriguchi, M. et al. Parkinsonism Relating to Intoxication with Glyphosate. Intern Med 58, 1935–1938 (2019).

6. Bloem, B. R. & Boonstra, T. A. The inadequacy of current pesticide regulations for protecting brain health: the case of glyphosate and Parkinson’s disease. The Lancet Planetary Health 7, e948–e949 (2023).

7. Motta, E. V. S., Raymann, K. & Moran, N. A. Glyphosate perturbs the gut microbiota of honey bees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, 10305–10310 (2018).

8. Almasri, H., Liberti, J., Brunet, J.-L., Engel, P. & Belzunces, L. P. Mild chronic exposure to pesticides alters physiological markers of honey bee health without perturbing the core gut microbiota. Sci Rep 12, 4281 (2022).

You should write.

Not because it’ll get you followers, or likes, or book deals (lol), or validation from strangers on the interwebs who put inspirational quotes in their bios (who are terrible people, btw).

You should write because it’s the only time you get to be the person you think you are in your head.

Not the person you perform as. Not the one who smiles politely on Zoom calls or tones it down for the group chat. The real one. The mess. The occasionally articulate, unfiltered, slightly what-your-mates-might-say-is-unhinged you that no one else ever gets to hear because you're too busy decoding social cues and moderating your big hairy face.

When you write, no one’s looking at you.
No one’s listening.
No one’s reacting.
You don’t have to read the room. You are the fucking room.

And that’s rare. Because most of your day is spent performing – even if you don’t realise it. You walk around like a live-streamed version of yourself, constantly adjusting the camera angle. You respond to raised eyebrows, bored expressions, overly long pauses. You soften things. You backpedal. You rephrase. You turn your thoughts into something digestible because people are watching and you don’t want to get it wrong and think you’re a nutcase, whatever the hell that even means.

But when you write? Bleuuurghhh.
It all comes out.
No pushback. No corrections. No raised fucking eyebrows.
Just you. On a page. For everyone see but with none of the feedback.

Maybe it’s smart. Maybe it’s petty. Maybe it’s you being hilarious or scathing or accidentally profound. Doesn’t matter. No one’s marking it. No one’s interrupting with, “Well actually…” in their rancid nasal voice. It’s a one-way valve and you can just open all the way up. It’s you, with no audience to please.

Because – and this is the depressing reality I just thought about in the post-wine-shower – most of us spend our lives figuring out who we are by looking at how people respond to us. If everyone laughs, we’re funny. If they frown, we’re weird. If they smile and nod, we’re safe. We exist in other people’s faces. We calibrate own whole personalities based on the expressions of other humans who are just as clueless as we are.

Imagine living in a vacuum. No humans. No opinions. No “just a quick bit of feedback”. No, none of that. No one watching, judging, liking, disliking, rolling their eyes. Would you still feel anxious about saying the wrong thing? Would you still second-guess your own voice? Woudl you feel depressed or remorseful or awkward?

Probably not.

No. With no audience, you’d just… be.

But we don’t get ever that. We live in a society full of other people and their stupid faces and their stupid reactions. And everything we do – every gesture, sentence, sigh – is filtered through that mess.

Which is why you should write. I don’t want to be that cunt who says “write like no one’s reading”, but writing is as close as you come to to existing like no one else exists.

Because writing is the one time you get to say exactly what you mean without explaining yourself. Without rewording it for clarity. Without turning it into a ten-slide carousel for LinkedIn or Insta or wherever we’re whoring ourselves at that moment in time.

Just write the shit and leave it there.

That’s it.

Don’t edit it into a thought leadership post. Don’t tidy it up so your ex thinks you’ve grown as a person. Don’t turn it into fucking content. Just write. For no one. For nothing. For the sake of saying the thing that’s bouncing around your skull like a moth in a microwave. (I was going to say flame, but then microwave just came out, so, here are.)

That thing you wish you’d said in a meeting three hours ago? Write it.
That ridiculous idea you’re too embarrassed to tell anyone about? Write it.
That thing you believe that no one else does? Write it.

You can delete it later. Or not.
You can read it back and cringe. Or not.
You can write 3,000 words of bile and bile-adjacent metaphors and never show a soul. That’s fine.

The act is the thing.
The bleuuurgh onto the page is the point. The brutal honest point.
It's the pressure valve you have full control over. The purge. Freeing up those brain slots to be you. The self that doesn’t come with a trigger warning or a content strategy.

So yeah.

Write shit.

Especially if no one reads it.

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Hey Bill, it’s Bill, from the future,

We’ve had a pretty good time going through our undergrad and master’s degrees. The work was hard at times, sure, but let’s be honest: there was a substantial amount of ‘recreation time’, right? In that pub? And the Student Union? And that one Thursday night we don’t talk about anymore? Yeah. And that’s good  –  great, in fact. But it’s PhD time now and you gotta step the fuck up. Put on your big boy trousers, dust off the lab coat and keep your eye on that one good P100 pipette. No timetables, no lectures ,  just you. I’m going all Schwarzenegger here to come back and give you some words of wisdom, so listen up if you want to live  –  I mean, get through your PhD. Same same.

You don’t have as much time as you think

I know you think that three years is ages (or 6 if you’re a cursed US PhD…), but trust me: it ain’t. It’ll fly by quicker than the speed you made it back in time for two-for-one cocktails at Fresher’s week. So, you’re going to have to plan your experiments. But don’t just plan the experiments, plan for experimental design, plan for running the experiment, plan for when things go a little (or waaaaay) off-track, plan for when all the shit hits all the fans and plan for analysing your data. So much data analysis… Stick it in Google calendar or something you can easily block out hours or days at a time. And try to stick to your schedule. It makes getting shit done so much easier.

Read more stuff

While you’re planning experiments, set aside time for reading. I know that sounds lame, but seriously, set aside at least an hour each day that you devote exclusively to reading the literature. That means reading about the researchers that have gone before you as well as those who are putting out new research. Also, read around your subject: having a broad understanding of how your work fits into the bigger picture is so bloody useful and helps you be a better scientist. You’ll be way more up-to-date on what’s happening  –  plus where the research gaps are that you can fill  –  and you’ll perfect the art of reading journals without crying. Because yeah, there’s more to it than skimming the abstract, the last line of the intro and the last paragraph of the conclusion! No, seriously.

Speak to other scientists

It’s safe to say that networking has never been our strong point  –  you get better at it in the future, but we both know we’d rather be at home with a bottle of wine and a book. Away from all the people. The many, many people… But don’t panic, you don’t have to go out schmoozing at “networking events” (*shudder*), but try to get over that initial hesitancy/terror at talking to other scientists (and, you know, humans in general). They’re not always the unapproachable, lofty academics you think they are. In fact, they’re usually helpful and happy to talk about themselves and their work  –  which may or may not make them (us?) all deeply narcissistic on some level.

Go out for a beer or a coffee with them, discuss their work, discuss your work, ask questions and you’ll quickly find you’re all bashing faces against the same problems. You’ll also build up a great group of contacts and friends you can ask for support and advice if you need it. Just the other week I was having a beer with a professor of genetics and the director of a research institute! How cool am I now?! Come on – that is kinda cool… right? Plus you’ll learn loads of new things. Probably.

It’s fine to not know everything

Don’t ever be worried to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Can you just explain…”. No one will be offended or think less of you. I they do, well thjose guys can eat a bag of dicks. Don’t ever just sit there wonder the fuck people are on about. If you’re wondering, so is someone else.

Similarly, don’t be the knob who always gives bullshit replies when you’re the one talking, “Oh, yah yah, yeah, I totally get it…” when you know you haven’t got a fucking clue. It’s never a good idea to pretend you know what someone means as you’ll rapidly find yourself way down a pretty dark rabbit hole and you’ll just end up looking like a even bigger bellend. “Sorry, what do you mean?” is absolutely fine to say! Clarify questions, ask more questions – just be honest. Awkward at first but so much better it the long run.

You don’t need to understand everything everyone throws at you right away. No one expects you to. When you don’t know something, just ask. This science malarkey is all about gaining knowledge and experience, so always feel comfortable to gain it. Science only works because we don’t know everything, yet.

Relax

In between planning experiments, reading, pulling the occasional all-nighter in the lab (because sometimes it feels cool to be in the lab after dark!), networking and asking questions, make time  – don’t try to find time, make time  –  to relax. It’s a complete myth that you need to be in the lab 24/7 to be successful. You need to balance things. Don’t spend all your weekends in the lab or the library. Get out. Soak up that vitamin D! Do some exercise. See friends. Sure, sometimes you have to dash into the lab for an hour or two on the weekends, but don’t make it a habit. The weekends are your time and you’ll be happier and more productive for taking advantage of them.

A bigwig academic once told me, “I don’t trust people in the lab all the time doing all the experiments. I expect you to be smart enough to be in the lab when you need to, doing the right experiments.” I like that. Be that person.

Anyway, I think those are the main points to getting through your PhD with your sanity mostly intact – defo brace for the occasional meltdown, but hey, that’s just life. Oh, save all your data to the cloud (do you have the cloud yet?)  –  don’t trust mechanical hard drives! But most of all, remember: it’s your research, so make the most of it because there’s nothing else quite like it. But don’t let it take over your life.

Bill

P.S. That facebook thing totally takes off before kinda dying again, 56k modems become archaic real quick, AI’ll be replacing loads of what you do in the future, no one’s colonised the moon, being a nerd is totally cool now (for reals), VR’s a thing but kind of shit and there still aren’t any goddamn hoverboards, ffsm, but I’m pretty sure some dorks are building robots they can bone… so, peaks and troughs.