Martin Hayes – författare

When We Were Almost Like Men explores the world of the modern courier industry, the working lives of the men and women caught inside the machinery of the modern city. From controllers to couriers, telephonists to mechanics, supervisors to sales reps, Martin Hayes is a guide to a kind of hell that is simultaneously fascinating, depressing, hopeless and hilarious, exploring what it means to hold down a job when all the odds seem to be stacked against you.

Martin Hayes’ third Smokestack collection is a hymn to the invisible workers everywhere who hold up the sky – specifically the couriers and support staff who have been working 15-hours a day to distribute PPE and test kits up and down the UK.

Underneath is a brutally funny collection about work, comradeship and community, the deals we do to stay human in the dehumanising conditions of the twenty-first century, the years we exchange for a fridge full of food, a well-stocked medicine cabinet and the chance to swim in the sea once a year. It’s a book about work-mates and neighbours, warnings and redundancies, managers with their ‘Moray eel smiles’ and the alien rich who think that the world belongs to them. Martin Hayes gives a voice to everyone at the bottom of the pile, below the salt, underneath, defiantly asserting that we are not defeated – at least not just yet.

The continuing quest for new drugs and agrochemicals has seen researchers looking to the natural world for potential products. Plants and microorganisms have long been investigated as sources of new lead compounds, but the scope of this book has been widened to include substances derived from marine organisms. Advances in genetic engineering, high throughput screening and structure elucidation have also opened up further avenues for exploration. Competitive pressure from the field of combinatorial chemistry has expedited new approaches to natural product analysis and stimulated debate on the industrial utilization of natural products. Biodiversity: New Leads for the Pharmaceutical and Agrochemical Industries reviews and discusses aspects of modern natural products research. The central theme of many articles is the sustainable use of global biodiversity. Microbial, plant and marine products are presented as the sources of new drugs, including antifungal products, antibiotics, anticancer agents and animal health products. There is also coverage of the biosynthesis of polyketides and the chemical synthesis of natural products and their derivatives. A unique blend of industrial and academic perspectives on the importance of biodiversity and natural products, this book will prove an important source of state-of-the-art information for researchers, teachers and graduates in the chemical and biological sciences.