Cops want to teach graffiti professor a lesson

 

Chemistry al fresco: The painting on the road outside Cavendish laboratory

POLICE and academics are trying to find a chemistry student who could be Britain's cleverest graffiti artist.

The mystery scientist has spray- painted part of a chemical compound found in DNA on the road outside the Cambridge laboratory where the mysteries of DNA were unravelled half a century ago.

Over the top of the design - described by one academic as "really nice work" - the artist has written the word "Phospholipase".

Students say the formulaic design appeared outside the Cavendish laboratory in central Cambridge a few days ago. Some suspect it to be the work on a chemistry student on the way home after a night of examination-success celebration.

"The graffiti is of a molecule called guanine. There is a picture of it (the molecule) on the chemistry department web page," said Dr Jonathan Goodman, a lecturer in Cambridge University's chemistry department.

"It is one of the structures, or bases, which make up DNA - one of the four which Watson and Crick realised could fit together to form DNA in 1953 in the Old Cavendish."

He added: "Phospholipase C is an enzyme which many people are studying."

Prof Alan Dawson, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, added: "It is a really nice bit of standard first or second-year biochemistry."

A spokeswoman for Cambridge University said: "We think it is more likely to be the work of a post- graduate student because this appeared prior to the start of term.

We certainly don't want students spraying graffiti on roads and it's not something we condone."