Belle de Jour: The intimate adventures of a London call girl
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2005

This book is a bit of a cause célèbre in the UK but readers elsewhere in the world may not know that it’s the intermediate between a very successful early noughties blog and a somewhat controversial TV series starring Billie Piper, a former teen pop star and Dr Who assistant. I found a copy at Oxfam a while ago and read the first 50 pages or so, but then something else must have been more urgent and I forgot all about it. I picked it up again after the revelation that the author is a working research scientist, Brooke Magnanti, with a PhD in cancer epidemiology.

Intrigued by the strange case of Dr Magnanti and Ms. Jour (presumably she must have had a third name for the agency work?), I finished the book off quite quickly, and found it was even more fascinating to read as “The intimate adventures of a London scientist” rather than as those of an anonymous call girl.

With hindsight, it really is quite obviously the work of a scientist. In a section about comforting an acquaintance over a breakup, she concludes: “… I felt for her. I’ve been on both sides of that equation.” Similar science-inspired expressions and observations are pop up repeatedly. She often refers to her university years, though she doesn’t quite tell us what she studied and where. Or does she?

In fact, one section that is quite hilarious to read post facto is a list of “Pub Games for Whores.” One such game, designed to confuse men who try to chat you up, is to invent an “implausible occupation.” The paragraph ends:

Extra points if he actually holds that job. ‘Really? You’re an epidemiologist? What a coincidence!’ (p187)

Coincidence, indeed. The truth is in there. Also, the tabloids needn’t have bothered to chase her poor old dad. It’s in the book:

Have I mentioned that my father is an embarrassing perv? Runs in the bloodline, I suppose. (p168)

Reading the book as the work of a fellow scientist makes it quite endearing. We have all shared the same career worries at some point in our lives, after all. Although there are very few scientists who can write as well as she does. Clearly, this woman has many talents – research experience, communicates well, can deal with people even in awkward situations – so, from a society point of view, I find it troubling that she was underappreciated and unemployed for long enough to even consider prostitution.

I was glad to hear that, having explored other career paths, she’s sticking with science although her publishing success alone would probably pay the bills quite nicely. “Working in science is important to me” Magnanti told New Scientist in an interview after coming out. So good luck to her, I’m sure she will do well, and I hope that one day she’ll write about science too.

Way back in the dark ages before MySpace even existed, I used to visit the "official" Shakira message board hosted by Sony. Among the perks were the posts from people who had been exposed to her presence without much accommodation time, e.g. "I was dragged along to the concert by my bf / gf, didn't know what to expect." and who got completely blown away and needed to talk about the experience. A lot. To the seasoned observer, it's always fun to witness the effect an impact has on the uninitiated.

Much the same happens when UK journalists get to interview her, as they have led a rather shielded life around here. I'm not sure whether to blame xenophobia of the public or hopelessness of Sony UK, but the fact is that anything she sings in Spanish doesn't register here at all (unlike, for instance, in Germany!), and only two of the English language singles were big hits here. So to the UK media, she's still a bit of an exotic unknown quantity, and even the music journalists don't know much about her background and her foundation "Pies Descalzos".

So here's the latest journo to be impacted by all this, not knowing quite what hit him, in last Sunday's Observer:

The making of Saint Shakira

Lots of lovely quotes (if you don't have time to read the whole thing):

... realising that she not only knows what she's talking about, but puts her money where her mouth is. It suddenly strikes me that she's Madonna gone right.

(I normally resent any mention of Madonna, but this one's spot on!)

Shakira doesn't just talk about it: she gets things done.

Shakira's Pies Descalzos [Bare Feet] Foundation, which she started at 19, has so far provided education and jobs for over 30,000 Colombians.

I have seldom met someone, especially in the music world, so sane

... and from the sane woman herself:

People get jaded in every profession, but for some reason I feel as passionate as when I was 13 years old and just released my first album, I feel the same amount of adrenalin in my blood, and the same amount of curiosity as well. Curiosity about why I'm different.

By the end of it I had even forgiven the author that he got the name wrong (I believe the last part of the quartet, i.e. her mother's name is Ripoll, not Ripoli).




"now who's the rock star here ?"

The UK parliament's HoC Science and Technology Sub-Committee is debating homeopathy right now, you can watch it live or from the start here.

I'm a bit softer on this point than many scientists. I think we should appreciate that the placebo effect is real. The belief that you are doing something to treat your malady can mobilise the body's defences and induce a real improvement in some people's condition, so if something "only works as well as placebo", that means it does something. And as medical doctors aren't allowed to give you a sugar pill and pretend it's a drug, we need people who can apply placebos and actually believe in them. Which is what homeopaths do. As long as they aren't stopping people from getting a better treatmetn where one exists, I don't mind them doing what they do.

It's the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the origin of species" today, but I'm not getting much of a celebratory vibe. OK, the display at the library is saying something about virtual Darwin day, and Nature has done the third special issue on Darwin in the year, but it's not even trending on twitter, so it can't really be happening. Or it's less important than New Moon and Christmas. Or everybody is suffering from Darwin fatigue after commemorating his work nearly all year long ? Time to move on to the 2010 anniversaries ?

Oh, hang on, not yet. My domain name www.michaelgross.co.uk is turning 10 next month, so I'll prepare something special for that. Be afraid ...

There is a brilliant catalytic process that can turn almost anything, from natural gas through to biomass and waste, into liquid fuels that can be used in cars, for instance. The process was invented by Fischer and Tropsch in the 1920s, and there is only one thing wrong with it: fuel made from crude oil has been cheaper than synthetic fuel in most places, most of the time.

Therefore, the history of Fischer-Tropsch visits some unpopular regimes, including Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, and it perks up each time there is an oil shortage. The fact that it can be used with a very wide range of feedstocks, from stranded gas to solid waste, has now given the method a new lease of life, with green considerations (rather than political isolation) now being the main driving force.

I wrote a feature article about Fischer Tropsch revival for Chemistry & Industry, which is out today:

Catalysis: Liquid fuel revival
Chemistry & Industry No.22, 23 November 2009, pp 21-23

It should soon turn up online here -- not sure whether it will be open access, though.

amidst all the fall-out of the Belle de Jour story, I loved yesterday's report in the Guardian, saying that a fellow blogger alerted her when the Daily Mail got wind of it. The clever chap called Darren had figured out her identity from the fact that she appeared to be an experienced blogger even when she started blogging as BDJ, so he looked round the small circle of people in the UK blogging scene and found the right one. He set up a website which casually mentioned both her real name and her pseudonym. At the time this was of course the only website to do so (technically called a GoogleWhack), so anybody searching for both names would end up on his site and register in his visitor stats. So he could sound the alarm when the Daily Mail computers showed up, and Brooke Magnanti was able to out herself before becoming a trophy on the Mail's wall.

Which goes to show -- UK prime ministers past, present, and future take note! -- that one can beat the tabloid press if one is clever enough.

PS With hindsight, there is a clue in her publication list too. Four of the seven scientific papers she co-authored have a title starting with the word "sex". I admit that the papers are not about sex, but about sex-specific effects in cancer epidemiology, but she could have used the term gender-specific ?

It's been a crazy time for the interface of science and sex (which I tend to file under the label "Cupid's Chemistry" -- the preliminary title for the translation project that ended up being published as Lust and Love: is it more than chemistry?).

First everybody went batty over the fruity practices of fruit bats. Clearly, everybody else angling for next year's IgNobel prize in biology can stop trying now. There's not a chance in hell you can beat that.

Then "21st century Moll Flanders," blogger, and bestselling author Belle de Jour turns out to be a working ... scientist. On hearing the news I went looking for my copy of her first book (one of the treasures I found at Oxfam), and found I had already put it on my "Cupid's chemistry" shelf. Very prescient. Also found out she has just published her fourth one, will need catch up with the reading ... Which shouldn't be a problem, as she writes extremely well, for a scientist.

And now we have a "female viagra" which turns out not to be acting on the blood flow, but on the brain, so nothing like viagra really, except that it helps getting some action going. Flibanserin turns out to be a failed anti-depressant developed by Boehringer Ingelheim, which now was tested successfully for treatment of "hypoactive sexual desire disorder". Which leaves me wondering who (men or women) defines where the normal ends and the hypo starts. But anyhow, the drug should be around soonish. Watch out for the spams offering it cheaper.

... while it's still available. I've learned from my research for the piece published in today's issue of Current Biology that coffee growers in central america would have to shift their plantations to higher altitudes at a rate of 3-4 metres per year -- which is physically impossible, as coffee grows slowly, and as they will be running out of suitable mountain surface area quite soon.

A stark reminder that climate change isn't something that's going to happen in 2050, it's happening now, and people are suffering the consequences already. For farmers in tropical countries, this means they may no longer be able to feed their families. For us, less catastrophically, it means we may not be able to drink as much tea and coffee as we used to. But maybe a few empty shelves in our supermarkets is what it takes to make people understand ?

anyhow, my article is here:

Coffee growers feel the heat
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 21, R965-R966, 17 November 2009
summary and restricted access to pdf file

Well, it’s not quite le chateau de ma mère, but at Oppède in the Luberon region, in Provence, some 30 km east of Avignon, there is a ruined castle that just might have belonged to my mother’s ancestors, as I found out only recently.

My mitochondrial (i.e. purely maternal) blood line goes back to a woman called Catherine Elisabeth Obelode, born 1832 at Steinhagen, near Bielefeld. And that’s as far as it went, until Google came along. Two years ago, during the Xmas holidays, with a computer and not much to do, I systematically googled all the “orphans” in my family tree, and got lucky with Catherine Elisabeth Obelode. A nice and helpful Mr Obelode, who knows everything about every carrier of that name that was ever born (it is a rare name that only arose once, and is linked to a specific farm in the area where my mitochondrial ancestor was born), helped me out with data covering several generations.

Obviously, for every orphan I find the parents for, I create two new ones, and one of the new “last known ancestors”, which I then listed on my website was Anna Maria Dopheide. From the sound of that name I was very sure that it was from the northern German dialect, plattdeutsch. But it appears I was wrong.

Somebody involved with the clan of the Dopheide descendants found my website and managed to link up my ancestor to the data that they have. And I learned that the Dopheide descendants believe that the first carrier of that name in Germany (which, again, is a unique name), a Johann Dopheide showing up around 1535 in the Bielefeld area, was in fact Jean d’Oppède (*ca.1515), son of the baron Jean Maynier d’Oppède (1495-1558) from the town of Oppède in Provence, who was married to Louise de Vintimille. Legend has it that the younger Jean fled after converting to protestantism, while his father was a staunch defender of catholicism and is in fact held responsible for a massacre wiping out an entire protestant village.

Apparently there is no hard evidence that Johann Dopheide and Jean d’Oppède were in fact the same person, but if the story were true, I could add dozens of French ancestors to my family tree (in fact so many that the numbering system would become impractical, so I won’t actually put them in). The male line of the Mayniers alone goes back over several centuries, to a first mention in the 11th century, while the ancestry of Louise de Vintimille goes back to Guido (Guy I)Guerra, comte de Vintimille (954), marquis des Alpes-Maritimes et seigneur de Lunigiana et de Garfagnana (see this Wikipedia entry).

If Johann Dopheide really is an immigrant from France, his arrival is now one of 15 immigration events recorded among my ancestors before 1700. Which is intriguing, as they appeared all very settled and very German between 1700 and 1900, and only by digging deeper into the past did we find that there has been a lot of movement going on, and the idea of separate nations is undermined (more about my migrants). While many fled from persecution (mostly on religious grounds) there have also been positive stimulants, such as the resettlement of areas devastated by the 30-years war with migrants from Switzerland.