A most interesting tale

Today I heard a wonderful story – I was sitting in my new office at Imperial (I have visiting professorship status for the year) – and my wonderful office companion a very distinguished Professor of Physiological Fluid Mechanics told me a story about his mother in law (an even more distinguished lady who was made a Dame in 2000). She was a self funded scientist, due to her immense wealth, who made amazing observations about parasitic behaviour, many many years ago.

The story goes they were looking at the effect of fleas on rabbits and identical experiments were conducted in the New York and London labs. However, completely opposite results were obtained. Even when the New York scientists came to London and vice versa the same effect was seen. This had everyone completely puzzled, why if everyone was following the same protocol should the results be completely opposite, even when the same scientists carried out the experiments in both locations. After 5 years of head scratching the answer was found, the newspapers that lined the rabbits hutches in both locations were very different. One was a pulp the other a recycled material, the pulp was actually emitting a hormone similar to that given off by a rabbit resulting in the effect seen.

As a scientist myself who is often puzzled by why my experiment does not agree with what someone else reported in the literature in another lab, this truly was a fascinating story. I think I am going to enjoy my time here!