Manchester the Hippopotamus

After first going to Manchester some time last century(!), it's finally time to leave. I'll be off to Sheffield soon to work with Cap'n Bilko on a new biofuels project. It isn't a totally new angle for me - much of the groundwork has been laid in Manchester through my work on modelling lipid metabolism. I'm hoping to do something applied and results-driven, not pie-in-the-sky/25 years until it works stuff. Not that there is anything wrong with basic research, just that we can't and needn't wait any longer for this project.

My time at Manchester was split between tiny, friendly UMIST, and big, cumbersome Manchester. This was quite some cultural change given that my desk never moved more than 150 yards when they merged in 2004.

Jackson's Mill on the old UMIST campus, where I did my PhD View Larger Map

Like the company that owned the vacuum cleaner factory in Stephen Poliakoff's Friends and Crocodiles, The University of Manchester is so big it's a bit like a hippopotamus - slow, lumbering and a bit difficult to steer, but at the same time pretty hard to bring down. It's size protects it, but it's not so nimble.

This much was evident during work with Douglas Kell on drug uptake transporters. Several times after presenting our work at conferences I have been approached by other Manchester researchers in our area that we had never met before, but clearly should have done. Communication is the single biggest problem with being a hippopotamus. There's no easy solution, but one simple thing might be to compel researchers to maintain a tag cloud of interests and expertise. It works for Flickr. Much better than paying useless facilitators that research staff openly resent.

Another problem I think size exacerbates is that to be noticed you have to make a lot of noise, and in my opinion some people put so much effort into this they end up not being very good at anything else, or they drown out better people who aren't so self-promoting. This happens everywhere I'm sure, but in the gargantuan melee that is Manchester I fear your voice has to be that little bit louder. It's okay, the hippo is hard to bring down, remember, but he'd be much happier without blood-sucking leeches.

Not that I want to give the impression Manchester is bad. It does many good things. Most recently the university has appointed Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell (DBE, FRS*) to President and Pro-VC. I may have once accidentally nearly knocked her down the stairs at a conference, and another time perhaps almost set her hair on fire (in the days when the Lass O'Gowrie still had gas lamps), but I didn't mean to. I worked briefly with one of the Rothwell group, David Brough (excellent scientist, well-deserved Fellow and thoroughly nice chap), who gave me the distinct impression Nancy Rothwell is some sort of superstar. I hope she knows how to handle a hippo.

 

*I went to the Royal Society to give a talk. The gallery of women fellows seemed to line a corridor that led only to the men's toilets. Hmm. (See 'The Admission of the First Women to the Royal Society of London')