My people My People

On St John's Day 2022, I broke out of the confines of Coronarama and drove across country to the University of Limerick UL to attend the 1st VIBE [Virtual Institute of Bioinformatics and Evolution] meeting after the lockdowns and disruptions of the pandemic. I've been involved in these events from the very beginning in 2002; and played myne host on two occasions 2006 and 2014. That June day in '22 started off with great promise as I sauntered across country in Summer sunshine but the weather turn cold with showers by tea-time and my voyage home was less exuberant. The weather was a pathetic fallacy of how I felt inside.

When I started "analyzing DNA and protein sequences" in 1990 that was the definition of Bioinformatics and our small lab in Dublin was really at the cutting edge. The sequences which I was analyzing were drawn from databases which were tiny by today's standards and I was expected to curate them carefully to eliminate sequencing duplicates and minor genetic variants but retain cases where two or more genes had accumulated changes after duplication from a common ancestor. My first paper considered all 45 genes that were then available for the fungus Aspergillus nidulans. I read every paper associated with each of those genes. In those days it cost ~€1 to sequence one DNA basepair. 20 years later the price was 10 million times cheaper.

And ten years later at the 2022 VIBE, The Effectives were a) 40 years younger than me and b) cranking through datasets which were 40 million times larger. Obvs, these young turks were not reading all the relevant papers, let alone with care and attention. And the analysis hinged on using "pipelines" of concatenated software, some of which they'd acquired off the shelf and some were hundreds of lines of Python all their own work. I had a nice nostalgic lunch with a couple of other crumblies and I did chat to some of the youngsters. But at the end of the day, driving home in the drizzle, I quoted Tennyson "

. . . The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world . . .

and resolved to find myself an iceflow rather than going to the next VIBE. So I missed 2023 at QUB Belfast and 2024 NUIGalway but didn't miss missing them. 

In early 2025,  word went out that VIBE was coming full circle back to TCD to celebrate 25 years of sharing ideas about sequences and evolution in Ireland.

• Dublin is a lot more easy of access than Limerick, Belfast or Galway
• I got me bus-pass
• I'd been sort of supervising [by zoom and email] one of the TCD Effectives who might be presenting her work
• Having been at TCD man and boy, I know where all the t'ilets are - not unimportant for an old chap
• They promised a free lunch and there was hope for some merch

I had a great time. There were a few people of my generation, and several of the next generation with whom I'd worked back in the day. And I got to meet 'my' Effective as she stood by 'our' poster. I could follow many of the talks in the morning session - because they were talking more about evolution and less about pipelines. Some of them made me think and/or question my certainties. All in all, a pretty good day.

But come 5 o'clock I was done. I'd been awake for 12 hours. The afternoon session was leaning towards the software end of our field and I was lost at the second or third slide of each prez. But I had an Exit Strategy which was to go out to dinner with Dau.I and Dau.II. We went sub-continental and it was biryani dahlicious. They gave me a bed for the night and I went home by train into Storm Bram the next morning. Midmorning on a weekday Heuston Station is very quiet, and I was able to find a seat to wait my train. A while back Irish Rail installed a public piano in the station concourse and a young bloke was tinkling away on it to pass the time. But the tannoy called the Cork train and he left and nobody took cudgels to the keyboard. There was no Christmas Music which was a relief and a blessing and I had a rather good ear-book.

Eating the seed corn, Not

Dau.I-the-Book was recently working in Coolock Branch Library, settled in the shadow of the Nort'side Shopping Centre, Dublin 17. I wrote a tuthree book-reviews for their newsletter. Dau.I WAS SINCE promoted [woot!] and moved to other libradventures. But a former colleague messaged "your Dad's a scientist, maybe he's like this science book whc I noticed on the return-to-shelf trolley". Which is an engagingly naive view of the eclectic reading habits of yer average scientist. Most of us are woefully hyper-focused: knowing more & more about less & less.

That's how I got to read The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City under Siege by Simon Parkin. Lots to reflect on here. The key theme is the question "what / who shall be saved" . . . when armageddon arrives. As The End of Times are round the corner, these are not merely metaphorical meanderings. Parkin is at pains to use Latin binomers for the species which form part of the extensive but still meagre diet of Leningraders who survived the first dreadful Winter of the siege. Sorrel Rumex acetosella [✓], coltsfoot Tussilago farfara [χ]  - it's the carcinogenic pyrrolozidine alkaloids innit? 

When I was a schoolboy one standard history text was AJP Taylor's The Origin of the Second World War [1961]. It's been a while but I don't remember a chapter on Sleepwalking but that's a big part of how The Allies finished up in WWII. On 23 Aug 1939, one week before Germany invaded Poland, (and my mother sheltered [briefly] under the kitchen table) Foreign Ministers Molotov RU and von Ribbentrop DE signed a non-aggression pact. Over the next two years, the Soviets sold 1.6 million tonnes of grain to the Reich and continued to do so right up until the launch of Unternehmen Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Stalin was a delusional ideologue: he wanted the world to mirror the ideals of Marxist-Leninism and really didn't like being told that he was wrong. Accordingly, bat-shit five year plans for Soviet agriculture resulted in famine and failure and those responsible were taken out and shot for not trying hard enough. From being students in the 1970s we were always aware of Nikolai Vavilov [stamp R] as a Good Geneticist, pally and parity with the Best of the West in the 20s and 30s. He was undone as a Morgan-Mendelist [=Darwinian whose understanding of the world was informed by him being a 19thCC capitalist], condemned as traitor and spy and replaced by Trofim Lysenko during WWII. Lysenko's theories of plant breeding and agronomy were pure Soviet and pure nonsense but very agreeable to Stalin and the Supreme Soviet. Adopting Lysenkoism possibly killed as many people as the Wehrmacht.

Apart from practicing the standard model of genetics, Vavilov was a pioneer in capturing diversity and studying the origin and biogeography of crop plants. He, his students and collaborators travelled widely through the 20s and 30s seeking out the oldest available peasant and taking samples, seeds and cuttings of obscure varieties of vital agricultural species: potatoes, wheat, rye, barley, pulses, apples everything. |This precious seed-bank of diversity (and potential resistance to plague and scourge) was brought back to Leningrad and propagated in the Institute's field plots. Vavilov was arrested on a field trip to Ukraine in July 1941 and disappeared into the gulags.

By August 1941, Operation Barbarossa had swept through the Baltic SSRs, surrounded Leningrad and the siege began. In Parkin's book, Vavilov is like the ghost of Hamlet's father: always off stage but always present. He inspired fierce and enduring loyalty from those who worked for the Institute: scientists, but also the secretariat, managers, gardeners, lab.techs, drivers, students and field-workers. Parkin interleaves chapters about Vavilov's prison journey with the main theme of desperate hardship in Leningrad.

The hook that makes the story is that a few dozen people living existing on starvation rations in sub zero [in °F!] temperatures did not eat into several tonnes of irreplaceable heritage seeds which they were hoarding against the dragons without. Those dragons included the German invaders, but also Commissars who didn't care two buttons about scab-resistant wheat, and rodents, and desperate citizens who had loved ones to care for.  Now here's the thing, several of the Institute's staff did indeed die of starvation [and from shrapnel etc.] but having a purpose, being part of The Project, gave the emaciated survivors a reason to live. The sunk costs from their time and trouble in saving the seeds incentivized them to save for the future.

The potatoes were a special case because frost would destroy the seed-tubers and so they had a sell-by date much much shorter than, say tomato seed - which can be good for 20 years. In the Spring of 1942, the citizens of Leningrad were given a commissariat reprieve. The delusions in Moscow and wilful [la la la can't see you] failure to anticipate - or respond appropriately to - Barbarossa had left Leningrad with absurdly depleted reserves when the jaws of the pincer clamped shut in August '41. As soon as the snow melted, there was a concerted effort to plant every available hectare with cabbage and spuds. And educate the people about which weeds were good to eat. The only place left to propagate mere heritage spuds was some fields about a mile from the front lines in full view of German snipers and artillery. The tractors had long ago be shot up and the horses eaten, so the Potato People had to turn sod with shovels and sticks in the dark. And carefully record the location and provenance of each little plot: on the ground and in the ledger. Always anticipating that they could, any of them, die on the instant leaving someone from the future to read their hand-writing. I am sure I don't have it in me to match their courage, determination and fixity of purpose. Hats Off! And hats off to Simon Parkin for digging up the story. brushing off the dirt to reveal a Truth for Our Times.

Media diet

Well, yeah, y'know that's just like your opinion, man.

Over on MetaFilter recently, there was a long and opinionated thread about the nature and ethics of piracy. It's quite difficult to square 
a) journalism is work, journalists should get paid
with
b) there was a time when MegaMedia loaded their intellectual property IP up on the internet and we-all could read it for free. 

I've always maintained that the World would now be a better a place if, like for electricity, we'd all been charged 1c for every MegaByte we 'used'. We'd be more thrifty on the servers. 

Free media was how it was at the Birth of The Blob in 2013/'14/'15. I could surf around the web and read news and commentary; quote something; add my own bit of Talmudary; and post it all on The Blob. Nowadays, not so much, I don't read Food & Wine or Vanity Fair or New Yorker or Nature or Science because they are all behind paywalls. Which is fair enough because journalists should get paid. I'll preen myself a bit by asserting that I always tried / try to add something extra to the debate in any Blobs I posted. Many failed to do that, merely re-churning the basic facts of the case often lifting whole phrases and sentences from the original. A practice [plagiarism] which we used to forbid our students at The Institute. Obvs, my years of Sunday Round-up (mostly YT) were an exception of whc I am now ashamed.

There are ways of circumventing paywalls often involving various archive sites which are trying to capture the ephemeral internet. Just to note that Nature and Science is a slightly different case. Both periodicals employ journalists to write copy: opinion, commentary, overview and explanation. These people are paid and readers should pay for access. But the majority of pages in any issue of these keystone publications are taken up with original primary scientific research reports.  For other scientific journals All the pages are scientific papers. The hard graft of creating the IP and writing about it is already paid for - largely by research grants from government or foundations. So Elsevier are gouging punters when they charge $50 to read one article. Other MegaPublishers are available. I've ranted extensively about this. Sci-Hub will get you older 'copyright' scientific pubs.

Fungible media. But Science is not my beef today. I didn't contribute to the MetaFilter discourse but my hot take is that it don't matter tuppence if you cannot access That article which someone else recommends. If you're alert and curious, the gap in your knowledge will be filled with something else . . . anything else? Literature is fungible, I guess I'm saying. There is plenty of choice [R Easons Waterford Ryw Station 1924]. All grist to the mill of keeping the grey cells active. And maybe less is more? My father enrolled in a speed-reading course at the age of 80 because there was so much to read but so little time. It killed him in the end. 

If you feel you spend too much time restlessly scrolling then cold turkey works for me. I've taken a fortnight off from YouTube, Metafilter in the past just to cool down. And I paused the Blob's Sunday Miscellany a while back because my TY links are contributing to someone else's glazed-eye dopamine issues aka GEDI.

Of course if you're alert and specifically curious you will have already subscribed to Matchboxes Quarterly or Model Railway Tunneller.

Punch & Jamie

 cw: Murder manslaughter 

Things don't "come in threes": we're just primed to be aware of that sort of thing after something odd / outré / other sails over our aware-horizon. I had just finished reviewing O Brother - a harrowing tale of a young chap going off the rails and never quite getting back on track. From quite another field of my attention a similar story burst front and centre. The Rest Is Politics TRIP is a two-hander podcast in which Alastair Campbell [New Labour] and Rory Stewart [Con.] disagree agreeably. They are both white cis-het British centerists, so their disagreements are hardly existential. They chatter on about British and World politics much like other members of the commentariat. They are actually much better networked than most regular journalists and started a sub-podcast TRIP-Leading where they have interviewed past and present prime ministers and Presidents of  . . . Albania, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Guyana . . .

But they also share space with other people who are making a difference. In mid November, they did a foursome [also on YT] with James Graham and Jacob Dunne on Prison Reform, Masculinity, and Restorative Justice. Rory Stewart knows something about prisons because he was Minister i/c of them in the brief Theresa May government. He took his job seriously rather than soundbytely: visiting the most hellish and trying to put lipstick on the pig. Jacob Dunne knows rather more because, like Gary "O Brother" Nevin, he was banged up .  . .  for killing a stranger with a single punch while off his face with drink and other drugs.  Because he was 19, and no longer a child, because he plead guilty he was sentenced to 4 years in prison and served 14 months. Prison is not the best place for the dispossessed to find meaning or guidance on what next?

After Jacob was released, his probation officer wasn't able to help him find somewhere to live: there was a long waiting list for . . . zero available places. But she was able to talk to him about Remedi an organization helping people come to terms with their actions and the consequences. They also hold out a hand to the victims of crime, helping them come to terms with their loss. After some time communicating through intermediaries, Jacob got to meet 'his' dead chap's parents and everyone in the room did well with their anger management. Joan Scourfield, the grieving mother and Jacob Dunne the killer got past forgiveness and became . . . friends? They meet on the regular anyway and have done two-handers for / with The Forgiveness Project, demonstrating that being kind to others is being kind to yourself. And that revenge and hate just keeps the juggernaut of self-righteous anger crushing more souls. Jacob Dunne has written a book about his journey: Right from Wrong: My Story of Guilt and Redemption [2022] - co-writer credit → Mark Eglinton. Some months later, the story was flagged by edgy playwright James Graham and he brought the story to the stage as Punch.

 Graham [b.1982] and Dunne [b.1992] both grew up working class in Greater Nottingham, a post-industrial conurbation in the English Midlands. But their lives were very different. As a teenager Graham was figure-skating on the local rink while Dunne was more into getting hammered. Graham stayed in school and went on to college; Dunne failed and then dropped out of school, supporting himself selling drugs. But they had common ground and a similar accent and collaborated to bring a powerful drama to the stage . . . many different stages, on both sides of the Atlantic. Audiences have been shaken and stirred and resolved to do better and be kinder and less judgemental. Who knows, maybe a powerful play can shift the dial where decades of statistics and analysis and hand-wringing has achieved nothing but heartache all round. Like Mr Bates vs The Post Office in 2024 [see also Blob].

There are those who never met any of the people involved and refuse to condone or explain or forgive. For those folks mired in their certainties, evil actions are only carried out by evil people. And of course they themselves are squeaky clean in thought and deed. A sample from FB

• Bindy Beridge How about you change the word ‘scrapping’ in the article to violent assault. 
• John Mccaffrey He killed an innocent man, but we have to listen to his sob story and watch him make money out of the man he killed from his book. 
• Tracey Poole Rehabilitation is all very well but where’s the justice for the victim and their family? It’s like they’re just meant to move on and be pleased that the offender who ruined their lives is having a nice time now. There would be no forgiveness from me. 

What they don't appreciate is that Jacob Dunne is walking right next to Mephistopheles "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it". It's okay if he cracks on with new dogoodnik path though life; indeed it's okay if he cracks a joke once in a while. He clearly has an inherent reservoir of empathy: when he was a teen, his presence would light up The Gang. Now he's turning that one talent [which is death to hide] on for funders and donors and prison officers and offenders. Getting a more positive message to / for / about the dispossessed whom the state forgot requires time and treasure. We have decades of inertia to turn the ship of state from victim blaming and depriving the deprived.

One optimistic note. In contrast to the friend-group of Gary "O Brother" Niven in Irvine; 'most' of Jacob's pals have grown out of nihilistic self-destruction and are now, like him, 30-something Dads making a better fist of living their best lives than they were when punching people back in the days of their youth.

Mammals suck

Thanksgiving last, a post on FB went so viral that both my correspondent G and Katie Hinde noticed. The latter's not too surprising because the FB post was all about Professor Hinde and her 20 years of research into the composition of milk. And correspondent G? She is the best researcher I know who was never trained in how to do research but worked it all out for herself, and created a sharp set of tools for Finding Out. Like us all, G is focused on a subset of all things, but I haven't yet worked out what are the limits of that subset. In the present case: milk, lactation, evolution and amazin' women in science. 

One interesting facet of the story is how fractal research can be. In 2018, another of 'my' amazin' women, Dau.II, asked a gimlet question about seal milk whc set me off down a comparative composition of milk mammal-hole. It was clear to me then that "a milk is a milk is a milk" [ref] is just not true: the protein content of milk can vary 1% to 13% among mammalian species. Humanity has about the lowest [protein] known. Hinde's earliest milk research documented quite different milk content within the human species. There is even a suggestion that mother's tailor their milk to suit each pregnancy: boys and girls get a different shake. One comment under the Hinde TED talk cited below asks "What about fraternal twins one of each sex" hey I was half of that conundrum in utero.

For reasons which baffle reasonable-patriarch me, human lactation and breast-feeding is highly charged and politicized. We were barred from Bewley's in 1976 for suckling The Boy invisibly in  a café. It is not kosher to advocate for breast-feeding because that will shame mothers who cannot. "cannot" is a broad church from a breast cancer survivor who has undergone a double mastectomy to a 1st time mother from a buttoned-up family who "just can't".  And it's not a linear spectrum! All kinds of reasons, unreasons and circumstances can align to prevent mothers using their own milk-bar. You don't want to get too high horse about this because clearly there are successfully walking talking thinking and earning adults who were formula from Day 1. Thing is blaming 'victims' is sooo much cheaper than blaming systems. Hinde advocates [What we don't know about mother's milk TED alert] that 'society' looks at making it easier for mothers to feed their own with their own in, say, the work-place. How might that happen? 

• there is a place other than the jacks where a lactating manager might get going with a breast-pump
• there is a creche in the building
• there is a government policy to mandate paid parental leave for those who want it 

Your company, your country may be failing here. I think we can all agree that The Answer is unlikely to be "increasingly polarized assertion, please". 

Some statistical number crunching might help: what are the levels of glyphosate in human milk? Is that level higher than in other human bodily fluids? DDT, back in the day, accumulated in apex predators, because it was metabolically stable, so every meal up the food chain had higher concentrations. If kids are loading up with glyphosate from the water or pollen or the air they breathe then breast milk isn't making it worse. And more focused: what's the level in cow's milk from which infant formula is created. Next: what about BPA in milk: same questions apply. 

• Are bottle fed children or their later adult selves different from breast feeders w.r.t. [insert condition here]?
• is the difference statistically significant?
• does it matter; or is the difference just part of nature's wonderful diversity?
• will the difference cost society / the state more than making, and making available, some fun engaging infomercials to ante-natal classes?

One of the rhetorical devices used by Katie Hinde points out that breast-milk is minority interest to the biomed research world. I updated her stats on pubmed paper-counts to reflect the state of play in late 2025:  

I'll add that there were 57 extra hits [erectile disfunction] for the right-hand column from spelinge challenged research groups. Earlier prez at Harvard Thinks Big 4 by younger Hinde: "Why Mammals Suck".  Much more data-rich prez by even younger Hinde: showing how mother's milk differs for boys and girls.

Hard chaw gone

cw: suicide

All happy families are alike; each unhappy 
family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy. 

Apparently this phenomenon is known as the Anna Karenina principle. It's probably true for healthy and sick bodies. Take blood pressure: it is driven up if a) the heart beats faster b) pushes more through each beat c) fluid builds up in the finite circulatory system d) the walls of the blood vessels constrict , so that the finite fluid volume is squeezed e) some other effect I may have forgotten. "Normal" blood pressure is maintained by a complex and multiply-redundant system [ACE, ADH, ANP, ANS, ARB etc] of hormones, neurotransmitters, receptors and ligands. Doctors have a rather large pharmacopeia [at least 9 different statins] from which to prescribe. The skill is working out which part of the system is banjaxed and targeting that without jerking around the bits which are doing their best under adverse circumstances.

I've been ear-booking a memoir, O Brother by John Niven [Guardian review], which is disc-harrowing and redemptive by turns. Niven and his wee brother Gary were raised in the 1970s among the dispossessed of Irvine, a New Town SW of Glasgow. There was plenty of scope, and many role-models, for having dumb-ass, often violent, adventures on the move fast and break things spectrum. It was easy enough to get aff their heids with glue, Bucky and vodka - and later (with more money) ecstasy and cocaine. Yet these boys had quite divergent life-courses: 

• John pushed himself to, and through, college [1st class hons, no less] and became [eventually, much struggle] a successful author and screen-writer with fast cars and nice suitings.
• Gary became a woefully inept drug dealer; serving time for possession with intent to supply. 

One late-onset tonk the brothers had in common was being afflicted with cluster headaches - a rare [1/1000] crushingly painful, episodic condition. This was seriously and serially mis-diagnosed in the boy who was left behind in Irvine: his GP clocked "headache" and prescribed Nurofen. John, in London, with college education and access to Google, got both diagnosis and access to treatment (insofar as there is effective treatment!). happy heads are alike; each unhappy head is achy in its own way and aspirin won't blatt a brain tumour.

Poor wee Gary, broke and broken, finally managed to off himself . . . while in hospital [having called 911 after another evening of suicidal ideation and dead-end despair]. It shouldn't happen under those circumstances. But my father shouldn't have died "unexpectedly" in hospital after falling downstairs and being subjected to a succession of 'hilariously' inappropriate medical interventions. My brother and I went to identify the body half expecting to meet The Other Mr Scientist on the hospital books whose treatments had been shuffled and intercalated with the Da's. There was an outside chance that our father was on a trolley awaiting an MRI in the other hospital in the same Trust. Oh, and they lost his medical records! 

Gary was kept on life-support for four [4!] days after he'd killed himself. X-rays, and oxygen and intubation and MRI were readily available for the dead. But simple care-and-attention were not there for the living. The family never faulted the coal-face staff at the ER and ICU - they were kind, professional and effective. The System and The Management; not so much. John and his surviving sister went, through three [3!] FoI requests, after the transcript of Gary's 911 call. They sued the hospital for negligence and cover-up and won.

It was a Pyrrhic victory. No amount of win, no amount of compo, could bring back the wild beloved boy who never grew up. It took ten years of process before John the Writer could get their story down on paper. By that time, John was able to record that all of Gary's pals were dead. Some additional back-story in Holyrood.

Tolstoy's quote in the original Russian: Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему. 

DKFL

I just finished ear-booking a memoir Eyewitness: The Rise and Fall of Dorling Kindersley by Christopher Davis. In a first for me, it was read by a voice-bot; but it would have been hard to determine this from the aural evidence alone. It had about the same number of egregious mispronunciations as the, like, people they employ to create audio-books.

In our pantheon of the Saints of Kapital, Peter Kindersley ranks second only to Sir Clive "ZX81" Sinclair, [of whom multiprev].  We were distantly aware of Dorling Kindersley as a publisher of gorgeous glossy informative non-fiction for families. Dau.I and Dau.II were born in 1993 and 1995 and by 1996 we joined Sa Bhaile [At Home] a community of woo-folk [a lorra Birkenstocks and rice-cakes] who chose intentionally to keep their kids out of school.  In 1998, The Education Welfare Bill threatened to regularize Home Education in Ireland. Some of us in Sa Bhaile had a [interminable] series of meetings to create a new more structured disorganization; the better to fight or divert The Man from interfering in our version of educating kids at home. It was quite heady as we decided to organize the first conference sponsored by our nascent Home Education Network HEN.

Around this time, The Beloved went to London for a meeting [AGM??] of Education Otherwise EO, the well-established British equivalent  of HEN. The key-note speaker was Peter Kindersley, riding high on a direct selling pyramid scheme venture called Dorling Kindersley Family Learning. The business model for DKFL was for wannabee thousandaires to host DKFL jamborees at their homes - think Tupperware Parties for heavily discounted books, CDs and other merch. After his talk, TB barrelled up to him and said how inspiring DKFL was . . . and would DK like to sponsor the launch of HEN across the water in Ireland. Kindersley answered positively in a way that was not just "ho ho an untapped market". But businesslike, he asked for a business plan and proposal to be sent to his PA. 

Within a month a personal cheque for £2,000 had been lodged in the HEN bank account! In those far-off days, £2K was enough to cover all the upfront costs of running the 1st HEN Conference in Newtown School in 1999. That conference broke even - turning a modest profit from The Raffle. The Peter Kindersley Memorial Fund was rolled over to float the 2nd Conference in 2000AD. And so on! That subsidy enabled HEN to stagger on from year to year without requiring any Effective to raise funds for the major expense of the HEN financial year. Which was just as well because the HEN community was long on visionaries but short on grunts. So long and thanks for all the fi$h, Mr Kindersley.

The Beloved also signed up to be a "Presenter" for DKFL which didn't make us hundredaires let alone thousandaires but did allow us to acquire dozens and dozens of books at cost-price ad maiorem edu glossiem of our girls:  

The title of Christopher Davis' book Eyewitness is a reference to the long series of Eyewitness Guides whc fill the bottom right corner of the picture above: Sea Life; Mammals; Sports; Plants; Transport; Your Body; Space etc.. Those DK books formed the core resource for Dau.I and Dau.II to educate themselves from the comfort of their own sofa.

Davis was the 2nd Hire when Dorling and Kindersley launched DK at the Annual Frankfurt Book Fair in 1976. He was therefore witness to [and co-cause of] the Rise and Rise of DK through the 80s and 90s as they launched a string of million copy best sellers including John Seymour's Self-sufficiency which got us where we are today. Davis was "let go" just before DK imploded spectacularly by investing in millions and millions of unsellable items of Star Wars merch in 1999. The book is wry, funny and a good lens on booze, deals, hubris and humility. The bare bones of DK's history and timeline is captured here.