Preboot

Hello again, world! I'm just about to reboot this here sadly neglected blog, but before I write my big comeback post I thought I'd break the ice by posting this rather exciting little missive. Let's call it a 'preboot', shall we?

We might also call it "Karen's femtosecond of fame" though it's really more like a few flashes of curly hair on either side of a close-up of my hands preparing DNA samples using white Whatman FTA cards, spread across a three-minute segment squarely in the middle of the hour-long first episode of a three-part series. Under normal circumstances this might not even be noteworthy at all, except that IT'S THE BBC, BABY, and no matter how bit my part is, I will always be proud to be associated with the network of David Attenborough.

The series is called Darwin's Garden and this episode, Dangerous Ideas* , is available to watch until the 26th of March. The segment I'm in, about a project I'm involved with through my work at the Natural History Museum to resurvey Great Pucklands meadow at Down House, runs from 30:10 through 33:15:

That's me on the left, squishing bits of our voucher specimens onto FTA cards for DNA sequencing later.

*You'd think that someone, somewhere in Beebdom would have noticed and bothered to mention to the filmmakers that Andrew Marr was planning on using the same title for his three-part BBC series.