An Uncommon Scientist with a Lot of Common Sense

Abstract

Maybe it was jet lag, and maybe it was just a mixture of my own American prejudices and the excitement of visiting London for the first time, but as I walked into David Colquhoun’s curiously cluttered office to interview him at University College London (UCL), I couldn’t help but feel that I had just stepped into a scene from Mary Poppins. Certainly part of the fascination was Colquhoun’s own, unique personality and my first view of him, pecking calmly away at not one but two desktop computers, a laptop and a handheld, with La Traviata playing in the background, and pipe in hand. Having traveled and worked around the globe, including professorial stints at Yale University in the US and as a Humboldt scholar in Germany, he speaks about science and society with a broad worldview. And yet he is wonderfully British, having been for over thirty years of his career at UCL, a place rich in the history of pharmacology, of which Colquhoun speaks with unconscious pride. About his own career and background, he is surprisingly modest, and speaks excitedly of statistics and membrane channels, and refers to his good luck in having stumbled into a career that he loves. Even to me, someone who has anxiously experienced statistics as a requirement rudely foisted on graduate students, Colquhoun can make complex math seem like a matter of common sense, worth pursuing for its own sake. Statistics and matrix algebra are not difficult, he will tell you, because if they were, he would probably not be able to understand them himself. What he makes clear is the power that statistics has for understanding intricate questions of single receptor biology, and for guiding researchers in probing their own research questions and inferences. He also finds it important to apply some common sense to the perceptions and misperceptions of science as part of the wider societal discourse. If you visit his Improbable Science Web Page (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/quack.html), you will find appraisals of and links to a variety of health-care claims that Colquhoun follows on behalf of lay society. Professor Colquhoun will also be at the World Congress of Pharmacology in San Francisco to deliver the Second IUPHAR Lecture in Analytical Pharmacology. Whether you really want to learn something about receptor biology, or just want to enjoy the personality of a speaker who is not only scientifically distinguished but also fun, you’ll certainly be able to do so at Colquhoun’s lecture. — HBS