iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

I was in Jerusalem on 1st September 2024. There were protests every week against Netanyahu's attempt to muzzle the legal system and we in the UK, were being warned it might be a travel danger. These are two things I saw, that I found interesting at the time @odedrechavi.bsky.social

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

And beautiful places on the way. Oh and it took ages (17ish hrs) and was really hard

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

I cycled this a couple of weeks ago. 200 miles across the UK in one day. Thank you very much for your lovely sponsorship. It was massively inspirational to me to make it before sunset 🙏🏻

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

Sorry I haven't posted much science/history/gene therapy recently - will get back on this soon. Am doing some preparation for a big cycle ride next month. And did this practice ride a week ago (ride initially mapped by Chris Ward road.cc/content/blog...). Saw so many nice places.

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

I had the pleasure of being at the @asgct.bsky.social in New Orleans last week - fantastic conference, as always, and a welcoming city. I won't post anything about the conference, just three photos I took of a monument facing the Mississippi River. The "Monument to the Immigrant":

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Well done to Juan Diaz, Sonam Gurung for their awards @asgct.bsky.social 🧬 🥳🍾

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

While on a cycle yesterday I parked up and took this photo. Bluebells and fern. Calming

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

As a kid I always thought dandelion clocks were beautiful. They still are.

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Goodbye Mum. Rest in peace 🧡 Anne Maureen Waddington. 28.03.1931-10.01.2025

Picture of Simon Waddington as a child and his mother, Anne Maureen Waddington. Year around 1975. His mum is holding a flower for him to look at

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

And James Watson appears to have been quite the a-hole in many ways, including what he wrote about her. But even he credited her for her contributions. She became good friends with the Cricks. John Bernal and Aaron Klug tried their best to ensure she was credited.

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Here are some brain cells as a welcome present for you 🧬🧪🧠

Photomicrograph of neurons (top) and astrocytes (bottom)

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Finally, I learned that, on her gravestone, her contributions to virology were recognised. Buried in Willesden Jewish Cemetery, 3 miles from my house. So on a chilly morning today, 8th January I went there and took this picture. Each stone placed by someone showing her honour and respect.

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

L to R: Anne Cullis, Francis Crick, Donald Caspar, Aaron Klug, Rosalind Franklin, Odile Crick, and John Kendrew April 1956, Madrid, International Union of Crystallography Creager ANH, Morgan GJ. After the Double Helix. Isis. 2008;99(2):239-72. (photo by Caspar)

Left to Right: Anne Cullis, Francis Crick, Donald Caspar, Aaron Klug, Rosalind Franklin, Odile Crick, and John Kendrew

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

(This is the 6th in this mini-series of women in genetics and some more general genetics history) ‪@1000womeninstem.bsky.social‬ @cathyabbott.bsky.social @tanialouis.fr‬ @doudna-lab.bsky.social @ucl-ifwh.bsky.social (Picture credit Henry Grant Collection/Mol/Shutterstock)Ros

Rosalind Franklin looking down a microscope

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

The scale is difficult to convey in photos, and even difficult to comprehend when you're there

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

I recommend visiting Iceland between Xmas and New Year, one of my sons and I did in 2019. This is Diamond Beach. Straight from the camera, not edited. Zak described it best - it's like a fever dream.

Photo of Diamond Beach in Iceland. Black basalt sand in the foreground. Huge blocks of ice on the sand, and even bigger ones in the sea. They are blocks from a glacier, calving ice, from a river that feeds into the sea (calving like a cow, I think?)

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

🧪🔬 Quick late Friday image which I guess no-one will see - this is green fluorescent protein (GFP) expression in the lens of the eye of a mouse (yes, they are spherical) @profjng.bsky.social @richardsever.bsky.social @helencooksley.bsky.social

Microscopic image of the lens of the eye of a mouse, expressing the jellyfish protein GFP (green fluorescent protein). Looks like an old depiction of a planet in the solar system

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

Ooopsie, forgot to post the paper and the year 🤦🏻 - 1953 Screen

Screenshot of paper published by Allfrey, Daly and Mirsky showing depeendence of protein synthesis on RNA

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐲𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐃𝐚𝐥𝐲. 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐍𝐀 🧪 This is the 6th in this mini-series of women in genetics (and some more general genetics history) (photo: Archives of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Ted BurrowsP)

Picture of Marie Maynard Daly at a bench, using chemistry apparatus

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

I don't think we have done sequencing - but that's a very good point and I totally agree - I think this is all coming from integration - AAV-mediated expression usually goes away completely after neonatal delivery. Good old AAV: "a non-integrating vector" 🤭😉

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

This was our first attempt using a bicistronic AAV9-DGUOK-GFP. Liver disease was corrected, but to correct the brain will need to use a dual targeting approach. Interestingly, there appears to be a repopulation advantage for corrected hepatocytes, a bit like the FAH model

Injection of AAV9-DGUOK-GFP into knockout & wild type mice. Graph on left shows number of positive cells. Figure on right shows lots of GFP +ve cells in KO mice, but not wild type, showing repopulation advantage

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

A decade of accumulating evidence culminated in the experiments of Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey experiments. They used radioisotopes (and a waring blender) to show that T2 phage replicating by injecting DNA into bacteria, but that the protein coat was left behind.

Hershey and Chase’s paper finally confirming that DNA is the material of heredity (Hershey AD, Chase M (1952) Independent functions of viral protein and nucleic acid in growth of bacteriophage. J Gen Physiol 36: 39-56.)

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Avery, MacLeod & McCarty’s experiments in Pneumococcus started to overturn the paradigm – showing that “desoxyribonucleic acid” was the “transforming principle”, converting bacteria from a non-virulent to virulent form. But his DNA had 0.02% protein contamination so people weren’t convinced…

Avery, MacLeod and McCarty’s paper showing DNA transforms bacteria from non-virulent to virus strain ( Avery OT, Macleod CM, McCarty M (1944) Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types : Induction of Transformation by a Desoxyribonucleic Acid Fraction Isolated from Pneumococcus Type Iii. The Journal of experimental medicine 79: 137-158.)

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

1952 – Martha Chase. DNA, rather than protein, is the inherited genetic material. 🧬🧪 This is the 5th in this mini-series of women in genetics (and some more general genetics history) #genetics #sciencehistory @richardsever.bsky.social @cathyabbott.bsky.social @profjng.bsky.social

Picture of Martha Chase (copyright California Institute of Technology).

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

A biography is provided by the Royal Society (yes, the problematic one at the moment) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/.... Interestingly sounds like she might have nicked the idea a bit. It’s complex. But ideas are easy. Realising them is hard. And she did the hard bit.

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

1941 – Charlotte (Lottie) Auerbach. Discovered that mustard gas mutated DNA. This is the 5th in this mini-series of women in genetics. She was concerned that chemicals as good as X-rays were hard to find, because the search was arbitrary. She arrived at mustard gas because of her considerations:

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Hurrah! New paper day. Macrophage inhibitor clodronate enhances liver transduction of lenti, but not AAV or LNPs 🧬 🧪 🔬 🥳 www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/13...

Figure showing that clodronate liposomes enhance lentivirus-vector gene expression in murine liver after neonatal & adult administration

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

My friend, I was in Istanbul twice last year. Therefore I have so many cat pictures that the internet servers would sag under their weight. To misquote Groucho Marx, I have calico cat pictures...and if you don't like them, I have others

A picture of a calico cat, crouching in a hole in a wall, surrounded by graffiti

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

I may occasionally post pictures of cats. I'm slightly a cat person. This is Sam, 1986.

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

And this is Florence Bell, I’m guessing during her PhD. The Yorkshire Evening News missed the chance to use the term “Womansplaining” which might have becoming a meme…except newspapers…and also World War II started 6 months later… #genetics #science #history

Picture of Florence Bell in the Yorkshire Evening News, Thursday March 23rd, 1939. Captioned "Miss Florence Bell, a 25-year-old graduate of Cambridge University, explaining the fibre test for wool at an exhibition held in conjunction with a conference on industrial physics, which opened to-day at Leeds Univerrsity"

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

And concluded this chapter of her thesis with this text

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

She (and Astbury) firmly believed that nucleic acids were important for life, writing this in her thesis

text which says "“Possibly the most pregnant recent development in molecular biology is the realisation that the beginnings of life are closely associated with the interaction of proteins and nucleic acids. Both plant and animal chromosomes, and all the fourteen odd strains of virus which may have so far been isolated in quantities large enough for analysis, have been found without exception to be nucleo-proteins”

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

And this is one of the X-ray photos of DNA, which she published in her thesis. The university of Leeds provides a link to her thesis, here explore.library.leeds.ac.uk/special-coll.... She was supervised by William Astbury.

Image of the first ever x-ray crystallograph photo of DNA, by Florence O. Bell

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

1938. Florence Bell. Produced the first X-ray crystallography of DNA. This is the 4th in this mini-series of women in genetics. She learned X-ray crystallography from Lawrence Bragg (as in Bragg’s Law en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bragg%2...). #genetics #science #dna

Florence Bell's PhD thesis front cover, "X-Ray and the related studies of the structure of the proteins and nucleic acids"

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

And here is another - a little bit more icky because you can see evidence of surgery. (Rabie ME, Arishi AR, Khan A, Ageely H, Seif El-Nasr GA, Fagihi M. Rapunzel syndrome: the unsuspected culprit. World J Gastroenterol. 2008;14(7):1141-3.)

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

This is a 45cm trichobezoar removed from the stomach of a 7 year old. (Frey AS, McKee M, King RA, Martin A. Hair apparent: Rapunzel syndrome. Am J Psychiatry. 2005;162(2):242-8.)

A picture of a hairball (a trichobezoar) removed from the stomach of a seven year old child

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

She was a bit of a cytogeneticist, as I’m sure you know, @matbobed.bsky.social

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

This review covers her work pretty well (Brush SG. Nettie M. Stevens and the discovery of sex determination by chromosomes. Isis. 1978;69(247):163-72.)

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

1904. Nettie Stevens. Discovery of sex chromosomes

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Simon Waddington @profsimonwad.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

And here is their "calcium technique" paper - which they explain is an improvement on DEAE-dextran

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