Brian McCaul

Great wee video on some the most promising NI health and life science startups ..some of which I'm proud to have had a hand in...youtu.be/9ASJUPFn4VY?si… well done

".The rise of university spinouts is becoming a notable feature of Britain’s innovation economy, and one the country should use to its advantage".. University spinouts boom as startups pull in billions share.google/5WASd2koIufLAB…

Japan approves world’s first regenerative medicines using iPS cells | South China Morning Post share.google/zJeZLcOdz8jlxn…

Paul is proud to support a special screening of 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' The film is a powerful and beyond important film that received a 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival: tinyurl.com/HIND-PAULWELLER 📍 Hackney Picturehouse, London 📅 25 February, 1800 (1/2)

A simple message with big meaning: "I am somebody." We are grateful to Rev. Jesse Jackson for helping teach generations of children to believe in themselves and in one another. Thank you for being part of our neighborhood. 💛💚

Countries Spending the Most on Research and Development share.google/PyfHSXTgSq9622…

The Mandelson affair ranks as the greatest political scandal of the last sixty years. Betrayal of party, principle, government and country. McSweeney’s emails and mobile (they spoke almost daily and who the cabinet must insist resigns) should be examined by the police. New lows.

How China rewrote the rules of drug innovation - The Business Times share.google/egHiizSqWxcdmH…

.@QubisLtd story of Andor...Queen's tech transfer, Hugh and the other founders ..through to a novel prize ...

A generative AI-discovered TNIK inhibitor for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: a randomized phase 2a trial | Nature Medicine.... programme went from target discovery to Phase 1 in under 30 months (vs. the traditional 4-6 years). share.google/AKkeItuRYbFmto…

'Helping great ideas scale': One of the world’s largest mentoring and funding networks opens global pathways for Northern Ireland founders share.google/UaGAqSO6KNa20X… cc @QubisLtd @ormeau_labs @Techstars

And now aid agencies are being banned because they won’t release lists of staff member for Israel to target. The suffering of children in Gaza is a stain on all our consciences. How can we stand by? theguardian.com/global-develop…

I never struggled much with peer review. I published in almost all the top journals and funded my lab through standard peer-reviewed grants. That success didn’t mean I was being selected for the best science - it meant it was easy for me to learn how to play the game. You take your genuinely original work and ideas and reframe them around what you think reviewers want to hear. That strategy is rewarded, but it comes at a cost. The compromises required to satisfy reviewers can blunt innovation, discourage risk-taking, and reward work that fits existing narratives over work that challenges them. What advances careers is not always what advances science. We no longer need to rely on small, opaque panels to evaluate research quality. There is now technology capable of assessing rigor, impact, reproducibility, and downstream influence more transparently and at scale. Better systems are possible and overdue

@RobLooseCannon And in the US too..where many lie in mass graves Pennsylvania grave linked to Duffy's Cut could contain Irish immigrants - BBC News share.google/3cDpl81pVFokeV…

Irish “Navvies” (not those blue gobshites off the Avatar films) were an army of labourers who cut through hills, created canals, bridged valleys and tunneled under mountains to lay the water and iron arteries of industrial Britain. They got their name from “navigator,” which was first used to describe the men who dug Britain’s inland canals, or “navigations,” in the 18th century. When the great age of steam railways began it came to describe the armies of labourers who cut through hills, bridged valleys, and tunneled under mountains to lay the iron arteries of industrial Britain. But long before the railway boom, Irish labourers were crossing the Irish Sea as seasonal "spailpíns", harvesting crops in England and Scotland. When the canal projects began, these itinerant workers found steadier and more profitable work in Britain’s great engineering schemes. They were poor, anonymous, and often desperate so they went where the shovels were needed. By the 1830s and 40s, Britain’s railway mania demanded an almost limitless supply of backbreaking work. Cutting embankments, digging tunnels, blasting rock, all with little more than picks, shovels, and gunpowder. Though many navvies were English, the Irish quickly became indispensable. By some estimates, 60,000 Irishmen were building Britain’s railways by the 1840s. Then came the Great Hunger. and the construction sites of Britain were the only places you could feed your family. Now Life as a navvy was brutal. These lads worked exhausting fourteen hour days in freezing mud and rain. Horrific uninsured injuries and death were common. Explosions, cave-ins, and disease were constant companions. Engineers and contractors often resisted calls for basic safety or sanitation. The men lived cheek by jowl in rough timber hut shanty towns which were breeding grounds for typhus, cholera, and inevitably despair. To the Victorian middle class, these Irish navvies were perhaps understandibly an alarming presence. An necessary evil of modern life. They saw raggedly dressed and hard drinking blokes and quick to fight and as quick to be seeing crying on a street corner. Newspapers and magazines like Punch characatured them as simian half-savage, ignoring the exhaustion (from the legitimate work) and trauma (from the unnatural disaster they were fleeing) that shaped such behaviour. Anti-Irish prejudice only deepened the hostility, and in towns like Wolverton, Preston, and Sheffield, riots sometimes erupted between Irish navvies, English labourers, and local police. This was often in deadly conditions like the Woodhead Tunnel in the Pennines, where hundreds of Paddies died in darkness. We will visits that horror on another trip in the DTM and also the aforementioned Wolverton, Preston and Sheffield riots. In later decades, Irish navvies dug the Manchester Ship Canal, drained the fens and helped build the vast sewage systems that made London liveable. After the Second World War, a new generation of Irishmen once again crossed the Irish Sea. The old trade routes of desperation reopened. Ireland’s stagnant economy sent thousands of souls to rebuild bombed cities and lay the new motorways and airports and power stations of modern Britain. This time round though, more of them rose higher. A few who began with a shovel and a hod built their own contracting firms, and by the late 20th century, Irish names dominated the construction industry.

Class still shapes who gets that first cheque far more than talent. The data in this piece is stark: working-class and state-school founders are under-represented at pre-seed, yet often outperform once they’re actually backed. I’ve always thought class was an underestimated factor in founder development - and one that can increase value, not limit it. share.google/E7Wp1hkt5nwpGq…

Researchers at the University of Manchester led by Prof Brian Bigger spent more than 15 years working on creating the gene therapy for Hunter syndrome "Boy with rare condition amazes doctors after world-first gene therapy - BBC News" share.google/1iKvBLfoFoBsb6…

Devastated. RIP MANI xx

Perish 'publish or perish'? royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…