Six minutes of your life (Updated)

I have been thinking about this for a quite while, but finally got a kick up the backside. And now it's done.

With two members of my group I've put together a short movie on our research and, thanks to the good folks at Nature Network who enabled video embedding just last week, it is presented here for your… delectation?

What can I tell you? It's a moving but ultimately uplifting tale of triumph over adversity set in lab in a once fashionable part of London. The production values are sky-high and you get to enjoy my mellifluous Northern Irish lilt.

The well-placed kick was aimed by the organisers of a conference on Control of Foot-and-Mouth Disease that will be held in Sicily next month. Noting the dearth of FMD videos on the internet (how did that happen?), they asked participants to come up with short movies on their research. This is a trend that Heather flagged up recently.

Our FMD work is focused on the poetically named 3C protease from the virus that causes the disease. We've used X-ray crystallography (did I mention that already?) to determine the structure of the protease and are keen to pursue antiviral drug development, though this is likely to be a long and arduous road.

The conference audience will mostly be veterinary scientists whose primary focus is well above the molecular level so I have tried to keep the story relatively simple. I hope that the material might also be suitable for a wider audience – and might be able to engage the public. Now I realise that most people around here are already terribly scientifically literate (and in so many other ways too) but I would still be interested to hear any responses. It was an interesting project to undertake – one of the most tricky aspects was how to streamline the story without distorting the underlying science.

(For those without 6 minutes to spare, there's a cool bit starting at 1 min 50 sec…!)

Thank you for watching – you've been a wonderful audience!

Update: 10-10-2008: the video is now also available on Vimeo. Thanks to Eva and Marco for pointing out this higher-quality service.

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