By guest blogger Danielle Vincent, Communications Officer at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust

Las tnight members of the public were given the opportunity to learn more about the latest breast cancer research and treatments being pioneered by UCL and the Royal Free Hospital.

About 120 people attended a breast cancer public engagement event at the Royal Free to mark breast cancer awareness month.

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This, being my first press conference, was a slightly strange, exciting and revealing experience. Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society and Director of the Francis Crick Institute, was here to take questions on a hotly-anticipated forthcoming Nature paper.

The paper is a genome-wide association study (GWAS) and there is word that this may be the next big thing in genetics research. Paul  gave us a brief back-story.

Ten or fifteen years ago, it was thought only about 1-2% of the human genome was biologically functional, the rest considered to be “junk DNA” with no known function. Recently, however, a lot of evidence has been gathered to suggest that the remaining 98% is doing a lot more.

Sir Paul was predictably asked whether this new research will be a major “breakthrough” in medical genetics. Coolly dismissing the media’s obsession with breakthroughs, he replied that he preferred to describe it as “just another brick in the wall” –  he must be a Pink Floyd fan.

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Once a month, something beautiful happens in a dark room behind the Wilmington Arms pub in Islington. Now don’t let your imagination run away with you – I’m talking about Bright Club, the alternative comedy night from UCL.

On this night, researchers, academics and otherwise serious folk gather in the tiny room and, for two hours, tell silly stories and generally make fun of their chosen careers.

The event is understandably popular; tickets had sold out and I was glad that I got there early enough to grab a seat on a rickety wooden bench. By the time the metaphorical curtain went up, there were people leaning on all the walls and my bench was surrounded by those who had been further back in the queue and were forced to stand through the acts.

Each month’s gathering has a theme and the chosen topic for July was “Failure” in order to tie in with UCL’s series of Olympic-themed events, Exercise your brain. The idea being to take the edge off all the talk of winning and medals inspired by the Games by celebrating the fact that not everything always goes according to plan.

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Come on, isn’t that yesterday’s news? Most people mildly interested in particle physics will have heard by now that the data indicating neutrinos had travelled faster than the speed of light late last year was the result of a faulty cable in the OPERA experiment. Einstein’s relativity theory still seems to hold and time travel once again is relegated to science fiction movies and novels.

What new could this event then bring us? A lot indeed, because Jim Al-Khalili and his fellow physicists on the panel are doing a brilliant job in explaining not so much the OPERA experiment or neutrino travel, but how the quality of scientific results can be assured and what the consequences of publishing data which has not been checked thoroughly enough are. Actually, in explaining the actual relativity theory they are maybe doing the least convincing job here.

“Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof and extraordinary proof needs extraordinary care.” This is how Jon Butterworth, professor of physics at UCL, puts it and consequently argues that is was a mistake to release the data before all eventualities had been checked.

Giles Barr from the department of physics at Oxford counters: in his opinion, the publication of the data combined with the request to independently check the OPERA results was the right thing to do, because only in hindsight can it be known what the cause of the results were.
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