The secretary of the pharmacology department at Oxford was puzzled by the deliveries she received for one of the researchers, Geoffrey Burnstock. It was not only their contents — condoms — that puzzled her. It was also that they were all different sizes and their ends had been chopped off. What, she wondered, was the use of a condom with its end chopped off?
Blushingly, Burnstock could in fact answer that question. The deliveries were a leftover from his days studying the gut movements of goldfish and pike. Having cut the fish open, he needed to wrap them in a transparent film through which to see their innards. A truncated condom did the trick.
He had concluded his research before moving to Oxford, but for