I am alive and well. This is to assuage all the fears that near and loved ones may have following a protracted leave from answering emails. Immunology is a lovely subject and although my lab is not Wimbledon(where I could spend hours together and never get bored) I spend considerable time in the glass encased building which leads to my absence on your inboxes.

I attended a nice lab talk the other day ny my lab-mate and it made me realise how far we actually are from finiding a vaccine for malaria. I sometimes wonder whether all this science is really ever done with that intention in mind. The reason I say this is that we have labs that focus on one area of vaccine work, example T cells and another lab focuses only on Antibodies, and neither lab is actually willing to believe that it might be a combination of the two that is needed most. This makes it much more difficult to actually find a protective vaccine(although that might sound slightly redundant).

In other news, I am being gifted an iPod for my b'day, an event which occurs on the same date every year unerringly. Seems to me the major purpose of b'days is to remind one of their age and although it is meant to be a cause for much celebration, I often wonder what there is to get so excited about. So, in a couple of days time I will be 25( I know Amma, it has been that long since you brought me into the big bad world) but today I am 24!!! Doesn't quite make sense to me...

Aside from my ever ready age rant, I still havent come up with something to do on my b'day. A dinner is boring but evergreen, the problem being that I shall have to spend a considerable amount of time in the lab on Sunday (yuck..I know but my dear experiments are not in a mood to wait for me. Any suggestions?

Finally, may I just say that some of those lines which I put forward as iPod epitaphs were great.
Here is my all time favourite list :

1. Is your journey over, has it just begun? - Man of Sorrows, Bruce Dickinson
2. He say "I know you, you know me"
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free - Come together, Beatles
3. lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me.
But the room just filled up with mosquitos,
they heard that my body was free. - Cohen, One of us cannot be wrong