Oblivious to the bowl of day-old pasta resting among the exposed wires of his home-built computer, 16-year-old Laurie Pycroft, a floppy-haired sixth form dropout from Swindon, flicks between three screens to keep up with his emails, blog and website. Empty Coke cans, juice bottles and fried chicken boxes litter his bedroom floor.
This is the unlikely nerve centre of a new pro-vivisection campaign which has attracted the backing of some of the most respected scientists in the country. In Oxford today, Pycroft's group, Pro-Test, will launch the fightback against the city's army of vocal and sometimes aggressive anti-vivisectionists.
At noon, the teenager will stand up in front of as many as 1,000 vivisection supporters and introduce the most eminent supporters of his campaign, consultant neurosurgeon Professor Tipu Aziz and neurophysiologist Professor John Stein.
"Professor Aziz is a kind of hero," says Pycroft, who has wanted to be a neurosurgeon since the age of nine. "An extremely eminent neurosurgeon at one of the world's premier neurology institutes and he's coming here to give a speech at a demo I started. It's like a normal person having David Beckham speak at their wedding."
He has been practising his speech, which includes the statesmanlike line: "We stand as one, not just for Oxford but for the whole world's scientific community." This from a youth who, until his mother confiscated it, used a ball bearing gun to shoot holes in his bedroom lampshade, and who wrote in his blog that his diet "primarily consists of anything with caffeine in, backed up by microwaveable food, noodles and popsicles".
But then he founded Pro-Test. It began just four weeks ago on a shopping trip to Oxford, when he staged an impromptu protest to counter a much larger demonstration by Speak, the group which has led a high-profile and partly successful campaign to halt the building of a new animal research laboratory in Oxford. Pycroft and two friends chanted "build the lab" and scrawled a placard declaring "Support Progress, Support the Oxford Lab". They were shouted down and went home.
Surprised by the volume of support attracted by his blog about the day, Pycroft built a website which was receiving 300 hits an hour by Wednesday. He decided to set a date for a protest march. A group of Oxford students proposed forming an organising committee. Everything was happening through the internet. Since then Pro-Test has taken over his life and he says he can spend 16 hours a day online, with breaks to read and watch TV, fuelled by Coke, coffee and chocolate.
He knows about the risks but is pressing on regardless. The police have dropped in twice to warn Pycroft and his family about the danger they face to their property and personal safety from anti-animal testing protesters, some of whom have already denounced him, posted his picture on the internet and published his address.
"The worry is I am going to be targeted for property damage or worse, but it's something I have to live with if I am going to get my point across," he says. "It is sad that in this country where we are meant to have free speech, I can't have free speech without the police coming round and talking to us."
Today he will share a platform with Prof Stein, who induces Parkinson's disease in monkeys and then attaches electrodes to their brains to test therapies which may help human sufferers. Does he understand some people consider this abhorrent?
"It's necessary," he insists. "The suffering of a few animals can vastly improve the quality of life of thousands of people so I think it is entirely justifiable, especially since they are bred for the purpose and it is not a wild monkey."
Pycroft says he has researched the science as a member of the National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth, a government initiative which nurtures England's brightest children, and which has given him access to courses on neurology and neurochemistry. He enjoys it much more than school, which he has dropped out of for a year. "I found school very frustrating. Basically it was a bit slow and to be honest I'm not a people person."
"I quite like being not normal," he added. "I guess there aren't that many 16-year-olds that have started a protest like this."