Molecular Lounge

I’m albert, former author of the now-defunct The Half-Decent Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog. If you weren’t aware of the existence of that blog, well, please allow me to introduce myself.

I am a PhD student at a top-notch research institution in London. At least, I like to think it’s top-notch and my future career will benefit massively from that. I am Italian and a molecular biologist.

Music is the most important thing in my life. So important, in fact, that you can find a live feed with the music I listen to, courtesy of Last.FM. I play the guitar and used to play in a band. I really like all sort of music: I don’t even have an absolutely favourite band/song, but I sure have a favourite band and/or song of, say, the week.

Films are another of my greatest passions, as opposed to TV, which I turn on only to watch sport.

I study German as a way of making friends outside the lab and because, when I try to foresee my future career, I guess it might potentially be the language I’ll speak for the rest of my life,

I love cycling and playing sport in general. I believe to be a pretty good photographer, something I haven’t manage to convince the rest of the world of yet. I’m not an IT expert but a Mac enthusiast (despite having resisted the iPhone so far).

I’m also an Adobe CS enthusiast, although the only program I can objectively fully use is Illustrator, to make pictures for papers. Nevertheless, I am highly interested in extending my understand of Flash, Dreamweaver, InDesign and Premiere.

I’m less of a geek than what you might think but probably more nerdy than what I want to admit.

I like to think of my work (science) as a highly artistic one as opposed to what I call  “ordinary, boring and bourgeois jobs” (pretty much everything else). Plus, while “ordinary, boring and bourgeois jobs” tend to make you wealthy, science doesn’t. This means I feel entitled to be ferociously left-winged (and I like to talk about politics) and think of myself as a bohemian and flamboyant artist.This gives a sense of moral superiority over non-scientists, although I can see the irony in it, don’t worry…

Still, I feel like going to art exhibitions is as important (and more enjoyable) than going to scientific talks.

I love food and wine. I love both cooking and eating (but, thankfully, I’m an active and sporty guy…).

This blog will about all this things. And a bit of science, too.