I love my job. I’m trying to understand how plants build themselves out of thin air. It’s exciting, it’s creative, it’s beautiful and on top of all that it’s important and useful. I like working with other people with different perspectives and I like the sharing of ideas and the piece-by-piece building of understanding from careful observation, experiment and analysis. (more…)

Guest post by Clare Wenham

My time as the first Nuffield Council on Bioethics POST Fellow has come to an end – and what a whirlwind of fun it has been! The idea of a POST fellowship is to produce a four-page research briefing (a POSTnote) on a topic related to science and technology that is of policy interest to both Members of Parliament and Peers. The topic that I was allocated was biobanks, which I have to admit, due to my own ignorance, was something I knew nothing about! However, this proved beneficial throughout my time at POST as the idea is to write an independent, a-political and balanced piece, and the fear would be that if it were a topic which you were familiar with there would be too many ready formulated opinions which would need to be challenged. (more…)

Guest post by Natasha Wilcock, Rosie Bradford and Ellis Richardson who participated in a workshop held by the Council at Varndean College, Brighton

What it was like to take part in this project, why we were there and what the researchers can learn from us (more…)

Guest post by Dr Pete Border, Biological Sciences and Health Adviser, POST.

Of course it does. And to prove it the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) are launching a new fellowship scheme to allow a bioethics PhD student to spend three months working in Parliament on a public policy issue with a strong bioethics component.

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