What price Science?

Something early in a scientist’s life makes him or her want to know about the world around him. For a biologist it was a curiosity about the life that surrounded him and a driving need to find out all about it. The road for most of us was long and full of sacrifices but after years of undergrad and postgraduate work, for a few, a lucky few, the holy grail of an academic position came their way.Lectures mix with research and the never ending quest for grant money to pay for the research, their salaries and those of their graduate students (slaves). Over the last 20 years grant money has become harder and harder to come by and some academics have chosen or been forced to choose between taking money from people with their own agenda in mind or doing something else with their lives. Some of these agendas you might agree with and some of them you might not. But, what happens is that if they take money from someone like BP it forces us to ask are they on the side of the truth or the money?

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Gulf Coast ??? Oil Coast ??? Dying Coast?

The Gulf Coast runs from Brownsville, Texas north and east through the bayous and rivers of Louisiana – past the coast of Mississippi and the sugar white beaches of Alabama – past Pensacola’s emerald waters, Apalachicola, Big Bend and around down south past Tampa to Key West. The Gulf Coast provides a nation hungry for seafood with shrimp, crabs, oysters and finfish.

What do you call it?

We eat shrimp in our salads, burgers, boiled and just about anyway you can think of. Alabamians catch and eat a lot of shrimp but can you put a name on your shrimp just by looking at them?