Educating Rita

A large chunk of my existance has been spent in education. I am the eternal student. I was the person that caused the nerd alert in school. My glasses were too big for my pea sized head and my braces were too big for my mouth. Somalian was the allocated nickname of choice due to my skinny bod. Kilts was the schools uniform of choice. Sweaty and scratchy in the summer, soaked up all the rain, refused to dry and smelled like wet doggie in the winter. My shoes were too big, thumbs stuck through regulation holes in the cuffs and secretly I wore a metallica 'kill 'em all' t-shirt under my shirt. I almost died in physical education once a week, hated that my locker was at floor level and thought that the passé composé was the devil.

I did love science. The science of living organisms or orgasms as is used at some point in every high school biology class. When I started secondary school (high school) I met skeletor. Nuns on the run never met her! Sister X whose skull you could kinda make out under particularly white/papery skin and wore luminous yellow turtle necks under her habit. Scared the be-jesus outta me I tell ya! Anyhow, she turned out to be a big pile of mushiness - if you did your homework that is. But she instilled in my pea head a love of that little biological unit called the cell. I kept up with the krebs cycle and the life cycle of the flukeworm and before I knew it I had a bachelors in science. Groovy! Then I hobbled across the cobblestones of Trinity College to gain a Masters in Molecular Medicine. Rock on! Then screw it, went to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and threw a PhD thesis together. Dance party!

I am now a Marie Curie Fellow working at the University of California Irvine. I run experiments on the beach and lecture from my surf board. Kary Mullis was a northern California boy, a molecular biologist, and nobel laureate. Dr Mullis designed a developed a technique called the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). It is one of the most commonly used laboratory techniques to date in both research and diagnostics. What does one do when one recieves the science equivalent of an Oscar? Well obviously you patent your technique, retire, become a beach bum and surf surf surf. Meet Kary Mullis, my idol (in the flesh in the picture below)! He grooved, rocked and danced his science career.

'A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales' - Marie Curie