Author: Dr Emmanuel G. Reynaud, Collaborator of Zeeks - who calls himself “a disgracefully ageing scientist”, who we call “a man with a remarkable life, inspiring many”.

Why do we need another blog that takes time out of our over busy lives, you ask! Maybe because it is not a blog, but a view from the wrong corner of our lenses asking sometimes questions nobody wants to ask. For example, why lenses are mostly all round and beautiful without any edge leading us back to where we started, while the digital world, from camera chip to screens, is aggressively squared. Can we encircle the square or must we chop the circle to fit the square?

A few months back, my family considered that it was time for us to leave our wandering life from Germany to Ireland and finally call France our home. My wife wanted to pursue her career at the hospital as an anaesthetic nurse and my kids enjoy life without school uniforms and more bread and cheese…not wine yet! And as they had committed to my career as a wandering scientist, it was natural for me to now drop my lenses and move back… It is a long and treacherous path past 50 and so this blog will be also about looking back at how science has changed and our ageing views of curing all diseases, the struggle with social media and its never-ending flow of new microscopes, new imaging workflows as well as hatred, heated debate and broken friendships lying cold on the cold floor of our failures to communicate. 

This blog is called “The Wrong Lenses, an obvious relation to the Wrongs Trousers where Wallace and Gromit by Nick Park team got caught by technology, is to be blamed. So maybe a more humorous view at our techno world of pixels and numbers piling up to forest levels (CO2 my dear friends!) could help me get better soon but also help others to breathe, get out and think with a laugh on their face! Inspire………………………………………………………..Expire!

And as the mood changes, I will tackle different issues. The first stop will be childhood and the LEGO bricks to unravel the world with the Power of LEGOpticals! And as the photons pass the first lens we may diffract to geometry and how to properly chop a perfect circle before diffusing slowly into the mystical perfect trade off. And then nothing can stop us if we crank up the power! Why do we need to jump from one scope to the next in a rush for novelty attracted by light like moths creating a never-ending impossibility to compare results as unique imaging systems give unique results while we seek reproducibility…I hear your teeth grinding! 

Join me on the wrong optical path, please do be careful and leave me room to manoeuvre, breathe and share the fun if you wish. I am too old and too frail to take on more trolls. If you are already looking forward to this tribune, you can start with “The Biology of Imaging” I wrote under Kirti Prakash pressure about getting older, eating  mouth full of bioluminescent molluscs with a Gin and Tonic! And if you are unconvinced that being a bit witty and funny in science is good for your work, why not check the science.

From the objective with love,

Emmanuel

If you want a free guide to image analysis resources, click here.

If you want to learn more about biomedical image analysis, then click here.