It's not me, it's you...

Hey folks. It's been quite a while since I've posted anything up here because of "interesting times" in real life. I actually wrote a blog post about new perspectives that I have about the US health care system, but we're not quite ready to share that yet. I've been compiling a mental list of other things I'd like to write about, but I'm going to ignore all of those and talk a bit about my home country, Scotland.

Scotland, last autumn. Can't remember which loch this was. Sorry.

As most people are probably aware by now, Scotland is having a referendum on 18th September to decide whether or not we would like to re-join the world as an independent nation after our 307 year hiatus as part of the United Kingdom. I support Scotland becoming independent, and I want to spend a little bit of time explaining why. Scotland has been having this conversation for a couple of years and I think most people have made up their mind, so I'm not writing this with the aim of changing anyone's position on the referendum, but to share my thinking with my numerous English friends, many of whom I love dearly (in a non-weird kind of way).

At first glance, one would think that I've done rather well out of the Union between Scotland and England*: I grew up in fairly rough working class neighbourhoods on the west coast of Scotland, did my undergraduate degree for free (well, it would have been free if I didn't change my mind after 3 years and start again...) at Glasgow University and then did my doctorate at Oxford where I was generously supported by the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based medical research charity, in labs that were funded by the various British research councils. I met my wife in Oxford and even the postdoc I'm doing now was obtained through connections that I gained via UK institutions.

So, why independence? Contrary to the myths that some on the right in England like to peddle, it has nothing to do with Anglophobia. Apart from a brief couple of hours when I first watched Braveheart at the tender age of 14, I've never really hated the English. I think that the warm reception that the English team received at the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow show that anti-English sentiment is limited to a few knuckle-dragging twats and not representative on Scotland as a whole (unless it's on the football pitch or rugby field). Some of my fondest memories involve sitting in a muddy field in Glastonbury, going to small country pubs around Oxfordshire where I spent quite a few formative years, watching Oxford vs Cambridge rugby at Twickenham and getting drunk on the banks of the Thames, all with our amazing English friends. No, the reason that I think it's time for Scotland to go her own way comes down to Britishness, and British values.

Although I was born in 1980, so spent the first 17 years of my life under Thatcherism, I was raised to believe in British values. The NHS meant that everyone, regardless of their means, received free health care, and either incredibly cheap or free vision care (um, is there a better word for this?) and dentistry. British values meant that everyone had the right to a decent home at a decent price, and that access to Higher Education should be based on an ability to learn, not an ability to pay. The Britain I grew up in believed in public ownership of essential utilities and services. These are the British values that I grew up with and, as an unapologetic socialist, I still believe in these values. Many in Scotland do. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly clear that England is losing its way and the last 34 years of Westminster governments have done much to dismantle the things that actually made Britain great (we'll ignore all the nasty imperial stuff as Scotland was equally culpable there).

The British values I believe in started to erode long before I was really aware of them: I remember poll tax only through the eyes of a child (but being raised to believe Thatcher was Satan incarnate), and was only vaguely aware that there was something happening involving coal and miners. Little did I know that much of our heavy industry was being dismantled through Thatcher's zeal to break the trade unions, squandering North Sea oil revenues to pay the massive hike in unemployment benefits caused by her war on industry. As a child, I also remember being confused in the 1990s when British Rail stopped existing and wondered why we suddenly had more than one telephone company.

Growing up in working class areas in the west of Scotland, it was assumed that once the 'evil Tories' were deposed and a Labour government elected, things would get better and swing back towards the left. In 1997, we got that Labour government and for the first time in my life, there wasn't a Tory in 10 Downing Street. Did things get better? Nope. Even then, it became clear that the Britain I knew was changing: that year, I decided to leave school a year early in 1997 to avoid paying the tuition fees for university education that were to be introduced the following year. This was the first time that I started to notice that perhaps Labour were not "for the people" and actually seemed not so different from the Conservatives after all. Let's skip through the next 13 years, nodding briefly at increasing university tuition fees, an illegal war in the middle east and the greatest financial meltdown in recent memory.

One of the good things that Labour did was to legislate for a Scottish parliament, which reconvened in 1999. This has allowed Scotland to go in a different direction from England, where university education is free in Scotland (instead of £9000 a year in England) and where the NHS is still in public hands, unlike that in England where the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 is allowing wholesale private provision of health care in England. You can read why this is a bad idea in this article in the Guardian or perhaps in the British Medical Journal, hardly a bastion of left-wing sentiment. This dismantling of the English NHS isn't just a Tory story with Labour laying the foundations for these changes.

As well as opening up the NHS to private provision, the latest iteration of right wing government has also done something that even Thatcher dared not to do: privatised the Royal Mail. This article explains much more eloquently than I can why privatisation is a bad thing but I can't see how selling off public assets to private providers can be seen as more efficient when you have to provide both a service and also profits to shareholders. The East Coast mainline is a telling example: this rail franchise failed horribly when it was in private hands and had to be brought back under state control. The net result? It has made £1bn in profit, going straight back to the taxpayer, since 2009. What did the Tories do? Put it back out to tender to private bidders. Britain has the highest rail prices in Europe and we also have insanely high costs for energy. Just think how much money the UK exchequer would be receiving if it hadn't sold off most of its shares in BP (2013 profit: $23.8bn). It's perhaps telling that many of the companies who own British utilities are actually the state-owned providers from different countries.

The Scottish parliament has helped Scotland avoid some of privatisation forced through from Westminster: we still have control of the NHS and the Scottish Finance Minister has resisted calls to privatise Scottish water. However, the Scottish parliament receives a block grant from Westminster and is responsible for raising very little of the revenue that it spends. This means that any cuts to the Westminster budget are also cut from Scotland's block grant via the Barnett formula. Consequently, in Scotland it's getting increasingly harder to preserve the British values of universal provision and equality that seem to have gone out of fashion in England. The only way forward that I can see is, reluctantly, to leave the United Kingdom.

Perhaps an independent Scotland can uphold these once-shared values and set an example to our neighbours to the south? Maybe we can build a better society, where we don't have to trample the poor to cover the losses of a poorly-regulated banking system. Maybe we can have a country that doesn't transfer public assets to private hands to pay for expensive vanity projects like nuclear weapons. I want a country that doesn't pretend to be a superpower and get dragged into foreign misadventures to please our 'special friend'. Independence is a leap into the unknown. But with much of the coalition cuts still to be applied, the rise of anti-immigration sentiment and UKIP, the coalition flogging off the rest of our silverware, the renewal of Trident and David Cameron's push to rip us out of the EU (our biggest trading partner after the rest of the UK), staying in the union has many knowns. And none of them look attractive to me.

So, to my English friends, sorry. I still love you all, but you keep giving us these terrible governments. You should be rioting in the street over the Health and Social Care Act or the Royal Mail. I think our best shot at a fair society is for Scotland to leave, and I hope you will see that there can be a better way. This doesn't have to be as good as it gets.


* this isn't a slur on Wales or Northern Ireland, but the UK state as we know it was created through the Acts of Union passed in the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. Wales and Ireland, you guys are awesome too. Especially when you *cough* beat our common enemy lovely neighbours to the south in the Six Nations.

Craig: plague or smeg?

Thee first thing I have to say is that is my first attempt to write a blog post from a mobile phone, so please don't judge me on the above-baseline rate of typos. Petulant and whiney arguments should, however, remain mostly intact.

Anyway, much has been written in the past of the differences between British and American English, but I'd like to talk about it anyway. Let's face it, the USians do some odd (and occasionally horrific) things to the English language. Instead of labouring the differences everyone knows about, I'd rather talk about a couple that confused me when I first arrived.
Although I do still giggle immaturately whenever a USian tells me that they got their pants dirty.

One thing that all North Americans get wrong (yes, I'm making a bold statement and saying "wrong") is that they have some specific linguistic retardation when it comes to pronouncing my surname. They pronounce "Craig" to as "Creg", for some unknown reason. For ages, I thought 'Cregg' was just a typical North American name like 'Brad', 'Randy', 'Jeff', etc. But no. It's a bastardisation of my surname. In the US, this word list flows naturally: Smeg, Leg, Peg, Keg, Dreg, Craig. Weird, eh?

To my North American readers, I shall hereby give you the definitive guide to pronouncing "Craig" properly. Take the word 'train'. Say it out loud. Swap the 'T' for a 'C' to get 'Crain'. Say it out loud again, pronouncing it as you did for 'train'. Got it? Okay, now swap the 'N' for a 'G', and say it out loud again. Was that hard? Try this word-list: train, plain, bain, main, chain, sprain, Craig. There should be a lovely assonance. Thank you.

Since my bus isn't at work yet, I'll talk about the way USians use the phrase 'Excuse me'. In the UK, this phrase is used to interrupt a person to make an enquiry, or to get them to move out of your road. So, if you're asking for the time, "excuse me" means "sorry to bother you old chap, but may I bother you for a brief moment of your time?". But say you're on the London Underground and some numpty of a tourist is standing on wrong side of the escaltor. In this situation, saying "excuse me" translates as "Yo, muthafucka, get your stupid arse out of my way right now before I frown disapproving at you". See? It's a simple context-dependent phrase.

In the US, however, they use "excuse me" where someone back home would say "pardon me" or simply "sorry". Such as trampling a stranger by accident at rush hour. Which seems fine, unless you listen in British English. For the first 6 months we were here, I would often get enraged by someone bumping into me, or blocking the lift (elevator if you're North American  when I'm trying to get off, because they would say "excuse me" and, in UK English, that translates as them having a go at me for
being bumped into or blocking their entrance to the lift. Thankfully, I worked this difference out before saying something like "Naw, YOU excuse ME, pal!" as this may have precipitated a situation...

So, take-home messages? North Americans, hopefully you can say "Craig" now. Even you Canadians do this wrong, which is disappointing. Second lesson? Glasweigan friends, if an American spills your pint in a pub and says "excuse me", they're not actually trying to start a fight.

Microchimerism, or how my genes are spreading even further than I'd anticipated...

As an active biological researcher, I'm often amazed at just how impressive nature is, but we discover cool things all the time so I don't often get that "wow" factor any more. However, I recently learned about a phenomenon that actually completely blew my mind: microchimerism. For reasons that are obvious to most of you by now, I've been taking more of an interest in developmental biology in recent weeks. I work in a developmental neuroscience lab but my focus was widened somewhat from interneurons in the hippocampus to how a little human is actually made. Before I explain microchimerism, we need a quick embryology primer for those few friends I have who didn't do a biology degree...

Most people know the basics: sperm meets egg, buys it a few drinks, they sneak off somewhere quiet, fuse their pronuclei (the half-genome that each of them brings to the party), and create a stem cell. This stem cell is pluripotent, meaning that it can form any type of tissue. The cell begins to divide and multiply and, before you can have a panic attack after peeing on a little stick that changes your life forever (*), you have a little ball of cells that have burrowed their way into mummy's uterus and are marching towards the path of becoming a living creature. As the ball of cells gets bigger, some of the cells start to differentiate to form specific lineages of cells that will become brain cells, immune cells, liver cells, etc. The early stem cells can form any type of tissue but you get more specialised stem cells that can form a subset of tissues and these can persist into adulthood: new brain cells are created from adult stem cells that migrate into your hippocampus where they form dentate granule cells (kind of important for memory and learning), and other adult stem cells in your bone marrow give rise to, um, immune cells and other stuff I know nothing about (hey, I'm a brain guy...).

With me so far? Okay, let's explain what microchimerism is and why it's so mind-bogglingly awesome. Well, it turns out that some of those fetal stem cells will go on a jolly and cross the placenta into the mother's body. This in itself isn't so unexpected - there are lots of diagnostic tests where medically-inclinded folks measure fetal DNA from the mother's blood. But what is insane is that these fetal stem cells not only enter the mother's body but migrate to random tissues where they establish permanent cell lines and integrate into the mother's organs. Crazy, eh? The Wikipedia page on microchimerism has this detailed and highly technical diagram:

So a few fetal cells make it to the mother's body and don't get eliminated by the immune system. So what, eh? They can't do anything useful, can they? Actually, they can. This study carried out in rats found that, when experimenters damaged the heart of the rat mother and subsequently got her pregnant, stem cells from the fetuses entered the mother's heart and actually repaired some of the damage. In their introduction, the authors of this study note that their motivation was the observation that, in humans, male cells had been observed in the hearts of mothers with cardiomyopathy (aka 'a dodgy ticker').

Another study (in mice) found that, using green fluorescent cells, they could detect fetal cells in the brains of the mousey mother. The really cool thing is that they found more fetal cells 4 weeks after birth than they did at the time of delivery, implying that the fetal cells had established permanent populations in the brain.

Fetal-maternal microchimerism has been known to occur in most mammals for quite some time. Is there any evidence for it in humans? Well, this PLoS study from 2012 found evidence of male DNA in multiple brain regions of 63% of female autopsied brains, all of whom had had male offspring. What is really interesting is that those women who suffered from Alzheimer's disease were significantly LESS likely to harbour male DNA. Obviously, this doesn't imply that the fetal cells were neuroprotective, but it does raise interesting questions. As an aside, this phenomenon also occurs with female fetuses, but it's much easier to detect male DNA in a female brain, which is why most studies focus on this. The pretty picture at the start of this post comes from this review article, showing male cells detected in a female liver.

If you're more interested in this (and who wouldn't be!?), it's worth looking at these non-specialist articles in The Scientist or Scientific American to find out more than the brief foray that I've made into the subject here.

Most of you know that my lovely wife Dom is a big fan of cake and sleeping. But since she's been pregnant with the twingers, her sweet tooth has been replaced with a craving for bread, cheese and beef jerky. Instead of sleeping in until 10am, she wakes up at 5, ready to eat all the food in the world. We like to joke that this is due to my genes being expressed in her brain, via our future progeny. If she starts making dirty jokes and chasing deer in our local park, we might start to believe this...

Last word? Microchimerism is pretty bloody amazing. And... look what I did (**):

(*) or at least seeing the stick after someone else pee'd on it...
(**) my wife may have done some of the hard work too...

Paying the bills

Happy New Year. Just a quick blog post today.

Most people by now are aware that Scotland is having a referendum on September 18th 2014 to decide whether or not she wants to leave the United Kingdom and become a separate country. Technically, Scotland wouldn't actually leave the UK because this country was created in 1707 when Scottish and English parliaments both passed Acts of Union dissolving their respective parliaments and forming a Parliament of Great Britian, based in Westminster (I'm trusting Wikipedia on this), so repealing the Act of Union would re-establish both Scotland and England as separate countries. I think. I'm not a lawyer. And I wonder what this would mean for Wales and Northern Ireland - would they become English colonies? I just read that Wales formally entered a Union with England a few hundred years after the English conquest.

Anyway, sorry, I'm havering. Technicalities of what to call the new countries is not what I want to talk about. During the independence debate, the Scottish Government has been declaring that all will be easy and sunny in a new Scotland, whilst the no campaign has been focusing on trying to terrorise the Scottish people into being too scared to quit the union. The last couple of years have been filled with scare stories from the UK government and "independent" think-tanks, detailing how much poorer Scotland would be after independence.

As I'm a scientist and like to play with numbers and spreadsheets (hey, everyone needs a hobby!), I decided to trawl through some of the media statements and reports by people like the UK Treasury, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, etc, and added up all their claims of how much independence will cost Scotland. Caveats time: it's a public holiday and I'm going to make a cake soon for Dom, so I only spent 20 minutes Googling and skimming media reports. Therefore the true total cost of Project Fear could be significantly higher. However, everything here is from an attributable comment made in a mainstream media outlet (BBC, Guardian, Scotsman but not the Daily Mail) or in a published report or policy document. Wanna see my data?

Who	What	When	How much?
Hague & Alexander	Extra EU contributions	18-Jan-14	£3,800,000,000
Danny Alexander	Chilcare costs	17-Dec-13	£1,640,000,000
IFS / Alexander	Aging population and reduced oil revenue	26-Nov-13	£3,000,000,000
IFS	Reducing debt to 40% GDP	18-Nov-13	£6,000,000,000
IFS	Matching UK spending cuts to 2016	29-Oct-13	£2,500,000,000
Alistair Darling	Extra borrowing costs for Scottish Government	27-Nov-13	£9,000,000,000
Philip Hammond	Loss of defence spending to shipbuilding	08-Oct-13	£1,800,000,000
Scottish Global Forum	Running a new military	13-Nov-13	£2,500,000,000
John Swinney	Extra costs of collecting taxes	leaked paper	£312,500,000
Total ANNUAL costs			£30,552,500,000

In graphical form (because everyone loves graphs):

Disclaimer: I would never use such garish colours in a scientific publication, so this is the only chance I get to make hideously-coloured, non-colour-blind-friendly graphs. Don't judge me.

These data do not take into account any start-up costs for establishing new embassies, building a new military, etc. Indeed, Rory Stewart, Tory MP and former Foreign Office diplomat, claimed that setting up secure communications systems for embassies would alone cost "billions'.

Obviously, no-one from the No Campaign has tried to claim that being an independent country would cost Scotland more than £30bn a year extra, especially given that the annual budget for the Scottish Government is £28.6bn. But if you tally up even a small sample of the claims being made by Better Together, then this is the number you get at. While each scare story in the media may sound plausible on its own, adding it all together demonstrates just how ridiculous Project Fear is getting.

Generally Recognised as Safe

Today, I want to talk about food additives. That evil institution despised by crazy UKIP and an increasing number of 'mainstream' conservatives in the UK, the European Union, has very explicit rules stating what can and cannot be added to foods. I'm talking about things like artificial preservatives, colourings, flavourings, etc. While some on the right decry the EU as being a source of unnecessary bureaucracy, designed to stifle business and create jobs for overpaid paper-pushers, these rules can occasionally be rather helpful: to introduce a new additive to the European food chain, it has to go through rather rigorous, long-term safety assessments. This seems pretty reasonable, and I assumed that similar standards were applied here in the US, especially given the highly litigious nature of American society.

A few months ago, I read an opinion piece in Nature magazine (as one does) talking about US food additives regulation. It turns out that, to use an additive in the US, FDA (Food and Drug Administration) rules say that if it is Generally Recognised as Safe (GRAS), it is does not need to be approved by the FDA. According to Wikipedia, the source of all human knowledge:

The substance must be shown to be "generally recognized" as safe under the conditions of its intended use. The proponent of the exemption has the burden of proving that the use of the substance is "generally recognized" as safe. To establish such recognition, the proponent must show that there is a consensus of expert opinion regarding the safety of the use of the substance

Which seems fair enough. However, the Nature news piece (which I thoroughly recommend you read) pointed out some flaws in the system: the manufacturer of the additive is itself responsible for assessing whether a substance qualifies as GRAS after which is it requested (but not legally required) to notify the FDA. There are no data describing how much companies actually comply with these regulations, but the FDA found in 2010 that 4 out of 4 energy drink manufacturers that it inspected had not actually carried out the required checks. Yikes!

A study published in December last year found some startling results:

• Fewer that 38% of GRAS claims were backed up by toxicology studies in animals.
• 80% of additives intentionally added to food lacked information on what the safe levels were
• 93% of additives had no data showing reproductive or developmental toxicity.

The same authors reported in another study that, although GRAS assessments should be made independently to avoid conflicts of interest, none in fact are. Of the assessments the authors examined, 22.4% had been carried out by an employee of the manufacturer, 13.3% were carried out by an employee of a consulting firm selected by the manufacturer, and 64.3% were carried out by an expert panel appointed either by a consultancy firm or the manufacturer. Rather chilling reading!

What does this mean? Well, it explains the discrepancies found between the same foods sold in the US and the EU. Skittles sold in the UK are coloured with natural colourings because the dyes used in the US version are mostly banned in the EU because they cause behavioural deficits in children.

One more reason to reduce the amount of processed food we eat, I guess... (dirty processed food such as 7-11 hot dogs, consumed whilst drunk, don't count!) I'm not arguing here that all food additives in the US are dangerous because that would be unscientific: in most cases, there are no data to support the assertion that they are either good or bad. They're probably not deadly because someone would have noticed by now... in fact, they're generally recognised as safe. 

Oh, Canada.

*Updated: I found this article on a Canadian academic website that explains some of the Harper attacks on science with more eloquence and detail than I can muster. Recommended reading for Canadians and non-Canadians alike*

One of the running jokes for liberal Americans is that if the Republicans / Conservatives win an election, they are going to move to Canada. Canada being that lovely, fluffy, kind country to the north of the US that is known for being liberally minded, environmentally aware, having sensible gun-control laws, universal health care, and generally just being a progressive, socialist, European-flavoured version of the US. They even correctly spell many words, such as flavour, although they do share the US obsession with the letter "Z" (e.g. bastardized vs bastardised). But at least they pronounce it "zed" and not "zee".

Unknown to most people, in the last 5 years Canada has been lurching horribly to the right under the leadership of the Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper (not to be confused with Steve Harper, the former Newcastle United goalkeeper). The first time that I heard of Stephen Harper was on my first visit to Canada, when there was a furore over the fact that he prematurely dissolved parliament for the holidays to avoid a vote of no-confidence that would have brought his government down. Even then, the signs were clear that this guy was a bit of an arsehole but, at that time, his party didn't have an overall majority in the Canadian parliament so the damage he could do to the country was limited.

All of this changed in 2011 when Harper won an overall majority in the Canadian parliament, allowing him free reign to start undoing all the things that have made Canada great. I would need several blog posts to go through the terribleness of the Harper regime in full detail, so I'll stick to just the highlights from his assault on the environment and scientific research. One of the first things that he did with his overall majority was to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, which pretty much sets the scene.

Every year in Canada and the UK, the government brings a budget bill to parliament for approval. Unlike the US, where failing to pass a budget shuts down the government, voting down a government budget bill in Canada or the UK is considered a vote of no-confidence in the government which, by convention, means that a general election has to take place to form a new government. This means that voting against the budget is very much a nuclear option that no politician will have the stomach for.

Harper has exploited this by introducing omnibus budget bills spanning several hundred pages that pack a myriad of law changes spanning everything from environmental legislation through to rights of aboriginal peoples. Last year, he used these bills to strip First Nations tribes of rights allowing them to defend and benefit from resources in their territory. He also used the bills to repeal environmental protection laws such as abolishing the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, removing the oversight of regulatory bodies on major projects and giving the final say to parliament, allowing the National Energy Board to grant permits for development even when they will threaten endangered species, and many more things. Click on some of the links I've provided, as I'm barely scratching the surface - he's also cutting funding for the arts, removing legal oversight of the security services, etc...

He removed $31b from health care and weakened food and drug regulations, including giving the Health Minister the right to exempt products from legal oversight at will and removing the Canadian Food Inspection Agency from government oversight. Harper has also been doing terrible things to the Fisheries Act  including removing habitat protections, reducing the law to only cover fish of "economic interest" and any development that crosses a river, seabed or whatever can only be halted if it will actually cause harm to those fish that are of economic or sporting value. Oh dear.

Harper is a conservative, big business, big oil kind of guy. Most of his policies are aimed at "cutting red-tape" and making it easier to exploit oil resources, but he claims to be trying to save money. I wonder how much of the money he is saving (actually, I know - $65,000) has gone towards plastering Washington, DC with Canadian government-sponsored adverts supporting the Keystone XL pipeline - something so environmentally-damaging that even the US thought that it was going too far.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Harper regime is its assault on science and the gagging of Canadian government-funded scientists. Harper has introduced rules that prevent any government scientist from talking to the media about their research; when they can speak, they are only allowed to answer questions pre-vetted by the government and in some cases, can only give interviews in the presence of a government minder. All very dark and Orwellian. The international science community is taking notes of this, with Nature running a series of damning news articles and editorials. Canadian scientists are still protesting against this, but this government is not for turning.

It gets worse. Last year, the Canadian government announced that it was cutting funding to the ELA, the Experimental Lakes Area, a 61-year old scientific experiment that has a closed lake system which has allowed hugely important research to take place. Science from the ELA has proven that fertiliser use causes algal blooms, demonstrated how methyl mercury accumulates in fish and goes up the food chain, revealed the mechanisms of acid rain, documented greenhouse gas release from hydroelectric reservoirs and demonstrated how oestrogen in contraceptive pills feminises male fish. The lakes would already have been closed if it wasn't for the campaign of Diane Orihel, who was doing her PhD at the time and managed to make lots of noise and find some alternative funding streams to support the ELA. Harper has also slashed funding for environmental research in his 2012 omnibus bill and has cut funding for basic research in favour of that for applied science.

It gets even worse. This year, the Canadian Government massively changed the remit of the National Research Council, the main funding body for building scientific infrastructre, demanding that the agency only fund projects that are useful for industry. The NRC has cut its priority areas to just five:  health costs, manufacturing, community infrastructure, security, and natural resources and the environment. The Harper government has been truly awful for Canadian science.

So why do I care, or bring this up? Well, I'm quite fond of Canada for a start. Given that my wife is Canadian, we have a vested interest in her country not going to ruin while we're living abroad. Once we've finished playing here in the US, we will need to choose a country to settle in and raise our little ginger babies.

Dom does environmental research so it's becoming increasingly clear that her type are not welcome in Canada. I research basic neurophysiology so, while my research is important, it's not going to immediately lead to breakthroughs in disease or produce something that is readily monetisable. That's not how science works. While I often talk about what I see as flaws in the US, one advantage that America has is that it understands the importance of funding basic research both to produce new solutions to environmental and health problems, as well as helping to drive a knowledge-based economy. George Osbourne, take note.

Ironically, given how Canada has changed under the Harper regime, it is the Republicans in the US who should be threatening to move to Canada: Harper is trying his hardest to make Canada a place where they would feel at home...

Canada, sort your shit out!

Half-time review

This is a photo from outside of the Modern Art Gallery in Glasgow - the statue with the cone on its head is a classic piece of Glasweigan iconography and I was pleased to see that, while many of the pubs I used to frequent have changed hands or disappeared, the traffic cone on Wellington's head remains constant.

As I'm sitting in London, basking in the warmth of pies that actually have meat in them, shit weather, catching up with old friends and watching the BBC news, this seems like a good time to reflect on what we've learned so far about the US. If I were to score the country like a high school student, the report card would be somewhat mixed: while the US scores well on some things, it continues to linger at the bottom of the class in many subjects.

My first impression of the beer in the US has very much been confirmed - the craft beers found in the US are truly delicious and I've made a far more comprehensive study of these now. It is not unusual to find a bar that has at least 15 excellent beers on tap, with many more available in bottle. Coming back to the UK has been a bit of a shock, with many bars not going beyond offering a few dodgy European imports and (if you're lucky) Guinness and a couple of cask ales.

However, there are definitely some green shoots visible - Scottish supermarkets are starting to offer some craft beers (in the name of science, I sampled widely) and we found one bar in Edinburgh, The Hanging bat, which offered a selection of 16 craft beers in keg, and another half dozen or so from the cask. Most of the beers were sourced from within the UK and were just as good as anything I've found in the US; there must be other similar bars around the UK. So, while craft beer explosion that happened in the US has yet to come here, I don't think it's far away...

Another first impression that I've confirmed is that the baseline quality of food in the US is higher - pub grub almost always comes with some nice side salads or steamed veg, while the definition of a salad back home ("la salade anglaise", as I like to call it) still consists of a sad, naked mix of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. Excellent food does exist here at home, but in general you have to pay more for the equivalent quality. The one exception to this is ethnic food - Indian and Chinese food in the US is simply bland and terrible. I'm not sure if this is because the food is adjusted to the American palate or because they've just not had the same level of immigration? If I had a restaurant like Kismot in Edinburgh (amazing Indian / Bangledeshi deliciousness) or Banana Leaf in Glasgow (tiny little hole-in-the-wall doing the best South Indian food I've come across), then living in the US would be much more tolerable. We've only really sampled DC so perhaps other parts of the US does better, and Ethiopian and Latin-American food can be very good in DC.

While the superficial things like food and drink make living in the US good fun, when you consider: quality of life in terms of holiday / parental leave, primitive provision of socialised medicine and the American dream, which states you can have anything you want if you work hard enough but if you're poor it's your own fault for not trying hard enough; these things show that the US still has a lot of growing-up to do before it can really be considered a proper country. A fact I would like to repeat here is that only four countries in the world have no statutory paid maternal leave: Papua New Guinea, Liberia, Swaziland and the USA. When the "land of the free" is lagging behind Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba and the rest of the world, you know something has to be fixed.

More poignantly, the recent US government shutdown demonstrates that the political system has basically ground to a halt and is making the country ungovernable. However, the prolonged madness of the shutdown has at least highlighted how bat-shit crazy the Tea Party wing of the Republican party actually is. Hopefully there is enough anger in the country to force some sort of political change although I can't imagine what shape this change would take.

The thing that is most confusing about the US is that I meet huge numbers of people who would agree with most of the last two paragraphs - many Americans are actually very reasonable, intelligent people who believe that the government should do more to help the poor and sick, and that the US should engage positively with the rest of the world. But the design of the US political system is such that a small minority of nutters can bring the whole thing tumbling down. If everyone plays by the rules, the US system should force compromise and produce better legislation. This fails when someone throws their toys out of the pram.

It is fascinating, if nothing else. We're just over halfway through our American adventure now: we initially planned to come for two years, but science is going surprisingly well so we'll stick around a bit longer. My complaints may make the US seem like a terrible place at times, but it is very easy to live there, even without a car or a decent credit rating. One thing that the US does do much better than the UK and parts of Europe (and, sadly, also Canada now, but that is another story) is that it still invests heavily in its science and even though grant approval rates are at an all-time low, the system it at least relatively transparent and the playing field is fairly level.

Whilst the US is a very good place to do science, is that enough to make us consider staying there long term? In a word: no. Although we're enjoying our time there and are grateful for the opportunity to do our science there, the US is just not home. As individuals, it's easy to live there but as left-wing, environmentally-aware, socialist hippies, we don't really belong in the US. It would also be nice to live in a country where at least one of us does not need a visa..! It's looking increasingly like we belong in Europe, especially now that Stephen Harper (evil conservative Prime Minister) is working his hardest to undo everything that makes Canada good. But that will need a long rant into itself, so will have to wait for another day.