At the moment I am visiting Boston for the first time in my life. On Thursday I gave a talk at Harvard Medical School, at the invitation of Jeremy Gunawardena. The fact was not lost on me that this address was a quite exceptional one among the long list of places where I have given talks in my life. The subject of my talk was T cell signalling and, in particular, my work on this with Eduardo Sontag. I had a look around in the surrounding area and was impressed to see the variety of prestigious medical institutions which I knew by reputation, such as the Boston Children’s Hospital, The Dana-Farber Cancer Center and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I was happy how many pedestrians there were, indicating that at least in Boston the pedestrian is not an endangered species.
On Friday I gave a talk on T cell activation at Northeastern University at the invitation of Eduardo Sontag. This is an institution which has recently jumped up in the rankings by cutting its student numbers drastically and increasing its fees correspondingly. The basic subject of the talk was the same as on Thursday but it was modified in order to try to cater for a different audience. The talk on Friday included more mathematics (since I expected that on average the Friday audience would have a stronger mathematical background than that on Thursday) and more biology (since on Thursday I left out more of the biology which I assumed would be known to most of the audience). There were two other talks by Michael Margaliot and Yoram Zarai. They were on the subject of certain models for the way that ribosomes are allocated to mRNA. A key idea is that many ribosomes moving along an RNA molecule could get into traffic jams. Indeed there is a close relation between these and models for traffic jams in the literal sense. The question is then how the machinery of the cell should be organized to avoid such traffic jams. Typical mathematical techniques which were applied in the work explained in the talk were theorems about monotone systems of ODE (or corresponding control systems) satisfying some extra conditions leading to a simplification of their dynamics.
Today, Saturday, I spent most of the day walking around in Boston and Cambridge. In the morning it rained quite a bit but with an umbrella that was no problem. I was blissfully unaware of the fact that there had been a tornado warning and I also only heard later that a tornado did today hit a place not too far from Boston. In Cambridge I observed a turkey sitting on the pavement and looking into a shop window as if it was considering what it might buy. After a while it crossed the road and seemed to be well-educated since it was very careful to stay on the zebra crossing. By chance and without expecting anything special I happened to enter the palatial Boston Public Library. Later in the afternoon I was on the waterfront near the aquarium and the pleasant experience of sitting by the sea was heightened by the fact that the gull on top of the lamppost was a Ring-Billed Gull, a treat for my European eyes. I also spontaneously decided to take a boat trip around the harbour. In coming to Boston I had no special expectations about the city itself. Despite my short and superficial acquaintance with the place I can say that it has gained a secure place on my personal list of the most attractive cities I know.
Hydrobates 
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