The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2312 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

I entered the university and was greeted by Pippa, she was such a fixture there that I always felt things were as they should be when I saw her. We chatted for two minutes during which time Tom came out of his office and scolded us for not working. We ignored him and continued talking.

“We pay you to work not talk,” he said firmly.

“We are working,” I retorted.

“Yes, I’m bringing Cathy up to date on everything.”

“Oh,” he said and retreated back to his room.

“Will you be all right?” I asked offering to go and smooth his ruffled feathers.

“Course I will, I’ll take him some coffee in a minute. I know how to handle him.”

Being an attractive young woman, Pippa knew perfectly well how to handle him. Tom was a sucker for young, attractive women. It was how I’d survived this long here.

I made my way to the labs and my office, gave Spike a couple of nuts and a piece of dried fruit, checked my time-table and went off to the large lab which we were using for the basic biology class. One of the girls, a geography or history student was having real problems with using the reagents. We were showing them their own DNA from a mouth swab. The blessed Brian Cox showed a very basic method using vodka and Fairy Liquid. Ours was practically the same but using industrial meths instead of the vodka—less chance of them drinking it.

Hilary showed the girl once again what to do. She still didn’t seem to understand. Everyone else had long chains of DNA forming in their test tubes, except Cheryl, who was very pretty but seemingly also pretty dim.

Finally, I showed the clip from Brian Cox’s series about the origins of life. I got her to slosh some saliva round her mouth and spit in the test tube like Professor Cox had done... it worked. She was an earthling, she had DNA, like the rest of us.

We stopped for a coffee break and Hilary made us each one. “That was hard work, Cathy.”

“Wasn’t it? I do sometimes wonder about the wisdom of taking on non-science candidates, especially if they think it’s all about poncing round in front of a camera while wringing the neck of a dormouse.”

Hilary laughed, “Your film and reputation have attracted so many more female students who think if you can do that and still look sexy, then that’s what they want to do.”

“Why have they got to look sexy?”

“Because you do.”

“Thank goodness Cheryl Cole doesn’t teach biology.”

Hilary laughed at my statement. We continued chatting until the students started to drift back. As they’d isolated some of their own DNA, the second part of the morning was the heavy stuff—about what DNA did and why.

I taught them about what the current theories were about the origins of this nucleic acid polymer, with its double helix structure which is so stable on the whole, normally forming mutations about once every four billion divisions. It explains why most cancers occur in middle or old age.

This stuff is so exciting—the first time you hear it or teach it. I had lots of slides and short videos of what it does and how we think it works, even one on the discovery of the helix formation by Crick and Watson. Sixty or seventy years ago we knew so little by comparison to today with all sorts of microscopic imaging and other technologies. Young Cheryl must have come from another planet, she didn’t understand what an electron micrograph was when I showed her one of mitochondrial DNA from a human cell.

“Can we see that with our microscopes, Dr Watts?” she asked and I began to wonder if she wasn’t just taking the urine.

“If we had a scanning electron microscope, we might.”

“Is that different to these then?”she pointed at the microscope box sat on her bench.

“Only by about a couple of million quid,” suggested a boy from the back.

I showed her a photo of a SEM at London University. She went very red and apologised. She asked to come and see me after the class, which I agreed, even though it would shorten my lunch hour. I asked Hilary to get me a tuna roll from the refectory. Cheryl followed me back to my lair and sat alongside my desk.

“Dr Watts, I don’t think this course is for me.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Transfer to a history degree.”

“What made you want to do biology in the first place?”

“I wanted to know more about how things worked and I saw your dormouse film.” This is usually followed with, ‘I could do that,’ or, ‘I thought I could do that, or like to do it.’

I felt like saying, “No you can’t, it’s actually quite difficult.” Mainly because in order to do it properly you have to understand what is going on in the film with the species you’re trying to show. I’m not saying someone couldn’t present a programme without knowing much about the subject under discussion, but I don’t think it’s as good as one with an authentic presenter who knows her stuff.

“Have you thought about looking at the history of science or different bits of it. The discovery of evolution and its evidence is a fascinating one, especially the convergent thinking between Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin. They both happened on natural selection by very different routes.”

“Did they?”

“Oh yes, just do a bit of basic research on the two. They became good friends and such was Darwin’s status, Wallace waited to publish his own ideas instead they sort of joint published assisted by Thomas Huxley, who was Darwin’s main cheerleader and protector. The fall out, especially in America, was phenomenal and still causes problems there.”

“Why?” she asked.

“The US is very much more a religious nation than we are, very much the result of the rise of secularism in Europe brought about by scholars seeking and finding earlier texts of the Bible which showed beyond doubt that the Bible was the work of man who also edited it and left out the stuff he didn’t like.”

“Really?”

“So when Darwin suggested all life evolved from common ancestors and new branches grew off the tree from later common ancestors, which enabled branchlets to grow and in turn do the same again. So humans and the great apes had a common ancestor so many million years ago.”

“Yeah, I met him down the union a few weeks ago,” she said quietly smirking.

I smiled, I think he’d had a room a couple up from me in the hostel place I lived in before I moved in with Tom.

“Will you be teaching this stuff on the course?”

“Yes, I do one on evolution through natural selection, usually gets boycotted by the god-squad when they know I’m doing it.”

“Really?”

“Really,” I sighed.

“Why?”

“Because there are people who are brainwashed by their religion to believe in Adam and Eve and so on, they’re called creationists and they try to get their madcap ideas accepted onto university courses.”

“Shouldn’t that be on a religious studies course not biology?”

“They won’t do it, they consider the creation as an allegory now beginning to be explained by science not magic or mumbo jumbo.”

“This is much more interesting than spitting in test tubes.”

“It can be, depends upon all your baggage and the teacher.”

“Oh I think we have a very clever teacher.” She beamed at me and I blushed.