Notes Epigraph From Robert Thorndike’s review in the American Educational Research Journal, 5(4), 1968, of Pygmalion in the Classroom by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. ‘The Sun Box’ The French materials scientist and Nobel laureate, PierreGilles de Gennes, asked about the prospects for viable nuclear fusion reactors, replied ‘We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don’t know how to make the box.’ ‘A Gene Sequence’ The genetic code is the language of our DNA. It encodes the instructions for making proteins, the working parts of our cells. Each protein is a chain of amino acids; the DNA sequence specifies the order in which the amino acids are assembled, and the genetic code is the language of that specification. Three nucleotides – repeated blocks of DNA – form the unit which translates into one amino acid. There are four kinds of nucleotide, Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine, abbreviated to A,T,G and C, and each amino acid is specified by several nucleotide triplets – for instance, the amino acid phenylalanine is encoded by both T,T,T and T,T,C. There are also triplets which encode instructions to begin and end an individual protein. ‘A Gene Sequence’ takes the abbreviations of the nucleotide triplets as initial letters of each line; the individual sections are named after the amino acids being coded; the narrative takes place in Cambridge, on the Biomedical Campus at the end of Hills Road, post-Brexit and pre-pandemic. 69