A scientist has taken to singing about life in academe. Among the themes of Cambridge academic Ron Laskey's "Songs for Cynical Scientists" are the morning after the conference banquet and seminar fatigue. Professor Laskey is director of the MRC Cancer Cell Unit in the Hutchison/MRC Research Centre. "Having performed as an undergraduate alongside a then unknown American musician called Paul Simon, I decided that if this was the standard of singer songwriters, I had better become a scientist," he said.