Not such a clean sheet after all

Sir David King, the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser and climate-change guru, left an almost indelible mark on Imperial College London, Sir Richard Sykes, the rector, told the audience of the fifth Dennis Gabor lecture recently. High praise indeed, it would seem.

But it was rather more the mark of a vandal than an intellectual. According to Sir Richard, it took years to scrub off soot stains made by Sir David when he was a postdoctoral student in the 1960s from a laboratory wall.