Day 5: May 11
Guest Lecture on Alexander Fleming
Despite not being able to see the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum due to the pandemic, we did get a thorough presentation from the curator. It is amazing how penicillin went from discovery, to production, and mass use (especially in wartime). It speaks to the fact that bacterial infections were so impactful in the past. We should see this as a warning that antibiotic resistance in bacteria is a real threat to the future of medicine.
Natural History Museum
My assigned topic was lichen, and I was determined to find some on my lunch break. I guessed that the natural history museum would be the logical place to go. After speed-walking through all the exhibits that seemed remotely related, I asked a staff member. (I should have asked first. At least this way, I was able to get a quick look at much of the museum in a very short time.)
There was not much in the way of lichen in this particular museum. The exhibit they do have was informative on the observation of lichen to monitor air quality.
The formalin-preserved specimens were interesting, but they did make me relieved that I ended up with a purely computational internship rather than the one based on physically extracting 100-year-old DNA from jars of old lizard. (Though the challenge of analyzing that data does still intertest me.)
Science Museum
I could have spent many more hours in the Science Museum. It had so many areas, biology, computers, mechanics, and more. Highlights for me were Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, the first protein model (made of clay, yet surprisingly similar in overall shape to our computer-generated versions), a circular painting that transformed into a ship when viewed in a cylindrical mirror, and Watson and Crick’s DNA model. I have seen Enigma machines before, but that never gets old. The museum even had a medical kit from Scott’s 1910 expedition to Antarctica. That expedition is the basis of one of my favorite adventure memoirs, The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard.
Outwitting Cancer Exhibition
We ended the day at the Outwitting Cancer Exhibition at The Francis Crick Institute. The exhibition is set up as a series of interviews about advancements in Cancer research. It was interesting and also a nice low-key end to a busy day. They also had an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION, which is an amazingly small device for real-time DNA sequencing.
Key moment of the day: Honestly I can not pick a single moment from this day, so I will say the Science Museum. I was just walking around, flitting from display to display, soaking up the sight of so many interesting artifacts.