infocus #49 March 2018 Microscopical Realities and Fake News

DOI: 10.22443/rms.inf.1.157

The award of Honorary Fellowship by Council in July 2017 brought with it a request for a lecture on my lifetime spent working with the living cell. It was the sight of minute forms of life during early childhood that matured into a commitment to research, and the legacy of the great pioneers was a continuing preoccupation.

The dawn of microscopical awareness marked the beginning of today’s era of bioscience research, yet curiously the subject is unfamiliar to the public. Television programmes rarely venture into the microscopical realm, and the media fail to celebrate these insights – even though they are the most important in revealing to us the nature of life (2017).