Of anthropological interest

I write from the palatial lobby of the Diamond Light Source administrative building, on day three of the meeting of the BIOXHIT project. This is a four-year project on bioinformatics and improved software and hardware for handling synchrotron radiation; it's my first exposure to EU project management. Rather over a hundred people here, among whom I'm very junior; something like fifteen million Euros over four years coming from the project.

There's a large contingent from EMBL Hamburg here, so on every other coffee-table the language of conversation is German ... a German-speaking Englishman is unthinkable, so the North Germans assume I'm Swiss and the South Germans assume I'm Dutch. This pleases me.

The food's very good, which always makes me feel slightly guilty for an EU project; there is one EU budget, every eurocent we spend on too much wine is a eurocent not available to the Plovdiv-to-Ploesti motorway project. And whilst understanding ammonium metabolism in E.Coli or running three parallel projects to design crystallisation robots and two parallel software packages to recognise crystals in images is clearly useful, I'm not sure I'd wish to justify this over the motorway project to Mr Alexandrescu in his broken-down van on the Bulgarian border.