My partner and seaweed

The jobs stuff is all settled down for the moment, still getting a few well wishes ect so I though a bit of a glimps into my home life would be fun.

I though I would spend a few words on fame and my life partner. But before I do that there is a story that is worth thinking about. It is in context so please read on.

In Japan the fishermen of old used to get through the off season by collecting seaweed. Not just any sort but the stuff you wrap around those sushi rice roll things. I think it is called Nori. Every now and then there would be a season where the seaweed would not appear on schedule and the fishermen (and families) would go hungry. It turns out that the life cycle of the algae responsible for this sort of seaweed is complex. Now around the other side of the world an English lady was researching the mysterious life cycle of a seaweed that grew around the English coast.

She developed the model that basically gave the recipe for successfully growing the stuff on demand. A scientist from Japan read her paper and made the connection and the fishermen never went hungry again (and ensured a plentiful supply of the weed allowing the mass popularity of sushi rolls). The lady in question was made a hero by the grateful fishermen who made a statue for her and reserve a day of the year in her memory.

Unfortunately she died before she learned of her fame. Apparently here name is well known in Japan but virtually unheard of in the UK.

Life has its’ doubles and here is my partners story.

She has a PhD is microbiology and has a great love of living systems, the forests in our part of the world in particular. Unfortunately our government does not fund science or research very well and so she was forced into research on the environmental aspects of a human pathogen as part of our health system (on a wage less than our local garbage truck drivers get).

She put a lot of effort in and developed a useful set of tools for identifying the pathogen in environmental and biopic samples. SWhe wrote a couple of papers and funding ran out.... Now it turns out that the pathogen in question is big news in Brazil.

To cut to the chase she was asked to got to Brazil to show a few of the locals her technique. Through this she got on local TV, front page of the papers and numerous articles in the local press. She was famous in Brazil, luckily she experienced her fame and the high regard of her Brazilian peers.

Well now she is back in home, she does some demon-straighting for the local university (in a unrelated field) and is finalising some papers on the pathogen above (for free). Her old boss keeps talking about funding for further research but so far nothing real, welcome to the third world….