Bearing witness

About 40 years ago, I was invited to upskill myself in the white-coat, real-science lab across the corridor from my office. I had been hired to teach population genetics because that _had_ been an important and edge-cutting area of genetics. Pop.Gen. was quite the doldrums in the early 80s, but someone had to teach it, and I was that person. The technology to look quite directly at variation in DNA was coming on-stream and they were about to inject steroids into Pop.Gen. So it was a smart move to learn which end of an Eppendorf to open [hint; not the sharp end]. I spent half a year getting to stage where a) I could generate useful, repeatable results b) I knew it would always be hard work. I recognised b) because I was working back-to-back with someone who really understood what she was doing.I had a long weekend in England recently because my molecular mentor MolMent was having a knees-up to celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary. My parents celebrated their 50th in 2000AD and my…