Author: medkth

I’ve been gripped by the recent Cold War TV drama ‘A Spy Among Friends’ based on Ben MacIntyre’s book, but having spent the past few years immersed in writing about insulin and diabetes, I think I may have spotted glaring error in the portrayal of the condition in the TV dramatisation. In Episode 1, when MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott (played by Damian Lewis) suffers what appeared to be an attack of hypoglycaemia due to having diabetes, why did he suddenly break off from an intelligence debrief, to stagger out into the corridor, collapse against the wall and inject himself with a hypodermic syringe that I presume was meant to contain insulin??? This would have sent his already low blood sugars plunging even lower to dangerous levels!!?? A guaranteed way to put himself into a coma – or worse! Surely he would have known to grab a handful of sugar lumps from the tea he was sharing with Anna Maxwell-Davies and scoff them??? But I guess that’s maybe not as visually dramatic as a plunging a hypodermic needle into oneself?

2023 is Leeds ‘Year of Culture’ and alongside Kaiser Chiefs, Utah Saints & Chumbawamba, the city has several other notable achievements include 2 Nobel Prizes, the first crack at solving the structure of DNA thanks to a ‘housewife’ with X-ray vision and an unsung scientific pioneer in a monkeynut coat…and not to forget…the life-saving drug Tamoxifen, thanks to Prof. Craig Jordan who, as PhD student found how a failed contraceptive had anti-breast cancer properties… Much to be proud for #LEEDS2023

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jan/10/i-get-knocked-down-leedss-year-of-culture-rises-from-the-ashes-of-brexit

When I heard that local shops in my area would be involved in a trial using delivery robots, I was fascinated to know whether milk and groceries would be brought to my doorstep by R2D2…or maybe the Cylons from the new (ish) turbo-charged reboot of late ’70s classic space opera ‘Battlestar Galactica’.

Well, having just taken the dog for a walk round the block, I now know the answer…looks as if those teenage years spent immersed in Isaac Asimov novels was time well spent…

Big thanks to Mr Bill Astbury for his kind donation to Karen Sayers of Special Collections, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds of some new documents and letters from his grandfather, the scientist William Astbury. Bill first found these whilst clearing his own late father’s house and kindly shared them with me when I was researching my 2014 book about Astbury, ‘The Man in the Monkeynut coat’. The material includes Astbury’s birth & death certificate, letters with his family in which he talks about his failing health and a correspondence with some American colleagues about a proposed lecture tour to the USA a year before his death – but, far from being just a dull and turgid exchange between academics about dates and venues, these particular letters offer a powerful insight into the ugly politics of racial segregation in the US at that time. With this material & a revised edition of ‘Monkeynut Coat’ just out in paperback, the story of this scientific pioneer just keeps evolving…