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Mentors in Passing

Posted on 23 August 2026 by Athene Donald

Recently I was approached by a young woman after a talk, requesting we met so I could give her some advice. In fact, I suspect she didn’t actually want advice, so much as reassurance that what she had in mind to do was sensible and likely to achieve her aims. Mentoring comes in many forms, from long term over years – during which the relationship may change to be much more that of equals, each finding the other a helpful, objective voice – to a single meeting at a critical juncture. There is also the not unrelated but distinct persona of sponsor that may be valuable at different stages, someone who puts you forward for a prize or a promotion, often without even telling you they’ve done so.

I have been fortunate in having some great mentors in my life, some of whom I’ve written about on these pages, even if sadly at a point when they have just died (Ed Kramer and Sam Edwards in particular), but other people in the field have supported me at different times in ways for which I’m permanently grateful. But here I want to celebrate someone whose name I don’t know, perhaps never did, and whom I only met once, but who shared wise words with me at a critical point in my career.

I met this woman by chance, when travelling from Ithaca (where I was a postdoc at Cornell University) to New York City to visit my husband, who was living in Manhattan at the time, working at the Rockefeller Institute. It’s about a 5-hour journey by Greyhound bus, and we were sitting next to each other. For whatever reason we started talking, although I’m not a great one for engaging in conversation with strangers, particularly if you are trapped next to each for several hours. It turned out she was an academic from nearby Ithaca College, not, I think, a scientist, but established in her career unlike me.

The critical juncture I was facing at this particular point was that I was about to apply for a faculty position in my department (Materials Science and Engineering) at Cornell. Nothing unusual there for a postdoc to try to secure a permanent, or at least tenure-track, position. However, by this point I was in my third year as a postdoc in the department, and my first two had been an unmitigated disaster. I had not enjoyed the project, not put any substantial effort into it, my experiments had not gone well and the relationship with my then supervisor had remained civil but was hardly cordial. An unsurprising response, given how unsuccessful I had been. At that point, at the end of two years of dreary unenthusiastic toil, no one would have thought for a second a tenure-track position might be on the horizon.

But…things had changed for me essentially instantaneously when I switched from grain boundaries in metallic bicrystals (the topic of my first postdoc) to working with Ed Kramer on the failure of polymers. Suddenly, I came alive. Whether this was for the stereotypical reason that as a woman I couldn’t think in three dimensions in the way studying the join between two misoriented crystals required, but  for whatever reason amorphous polymers engaged me in a way my previous project never had. Perhaps it was simply that I was fed up with being fed up and threw myself into the new project with renewed enthusiasm. Certainly  Ed was a very different kind of person from my first supervisor (Steve Sass), with whom it was apparent there was some kind of rivalry within the department, both being much of an age and seniority.

Be that as it may, for whatever reason, my first year working on polymers was a total transformation so that, by the start of my second year, I had become a plausible candidate for a faculty position. But, my problem was, how did I make a case I was a good choice when the whole department (I assumed, though possibly inaccurately) would know of my utter failure during those first two years, even if I was now transformed into an industrious and successful postdoc with Ed?

What this amazingly kind woman did for me on the bus, was to reassure me that if she were on an appointments committee, she would not simply rule me out for my two wasted years. That I had to own my failure and explain why things were different now. Over the course of those five hours trapped next to each other, she must have explored a lot of options with me, as well as discussed wider academic life. Her advice: that I should write a clear statement stating my position and owning the mistakes of the first two years at Cornell. She provided me with a framework to make my previous failure seem more explicable to the faculty, however ‘unfortunate’, and to make a case for why I was worth taking a punt on now. The details of that advice are long since lost to me, but I got off that bus feeling far more excited and positive than I had got on it. I turned up in New York feeling confident that I could write a covering letter which dealt with my lost two years in some plausible way.

This all happened nearly half a century ago (!), but the kindness and wisdom of this woman remains with me as someone who, in passing, made a big difference to me. I know that when thinking about mentoring, it is the long-term relationship that people tend to think about. But I am also aware that single conversations can be amazingly effective at some crucial moment. Individuals have told me how, some conversation with me made in passing, made such a (positive) difference to them, and it is always heartening to know that, even if I barely recall the interaction.  One doesn’t always know that someone is going to take a casual comment to heart, and it is also quite possible they may have some much more unfortunate and unintended consequence which one probably never hears about. Words matter, however carelessly they may be tossed out. Being kind to people when they’re feeling vulnerable is always important.

 

Posted in advice, careers, mentoring, sponsor | Leave a comment

In which generative AI interferes with scientific training – potentially

Posted on 23 August 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

The author as a young woman, smiling at the camera while typing on a 1980s-era computer.

One from the archives: writing up my scientific results as a summer intern at the US NIH

I have recently written about the perils of scientists relying on generative AI for writing. But the topic isn’t going away, and every day, more alarm bells seem to go off.

Two opposing opinion pieces on this topic were published in the same week this month, one in Science, and the other in Nature Africa. In the first, early-career clinician scientist Bastien Le Guellec recounts how all his drafts used to get massacred by his supervisor, and it took ages of iterative input to refine manuscripts. So he turned to ChatGTP for help. The more he relied on ChatGPT to draft his papers, the more his supervisor praised his outputs, and the more he felt his productivity and success increased.

However, he began to sense his joy in writing was ebbing, and he no longer experienced the pride and ownership that had made writing so special. What’s more, he started to worry that in losing his direct engagement with the ideas, he was allowing the AI to uncritically tell the tale he wanted to believe, whereas before, writing things himself tended to expose the weaknesses in his own arguments and force him to grapple with them. So he decided to ditch the chat and produce his work from scratch again, thereby restoring the role of the writing process in developing and refining ideas. The act of writing, he concludes, is not merely a way of expressing ideas, but a vital process to exert the critical focus that all scientists need to have.

In the second piece, which has incited a lot of ridicule on social media, senior professor Bertie Fielding recounts the fallout after a journal flagged up one of his pieces as being wholly AI-generated. The journal was not wrong: Fielding admits unapologetically that he created almost none of the prose, but remained the “thought leader” of the contents and ideas. To him, generative AI is a “ghostwriter” in service to his human thoughts.

I personally think both authors have valid viewpoints, but as someone who finds writing one of her greatest joys in life, I am much more aligned with Le Guellec than with Fielding. As a bit of fun, I asked Copilot what it thought of the two pieces – as well as the blog post I wrote last time about the perils of LLM. It agreed with me that all of us had useful insights, but pushed back a bit on our all-or-nothing attitude. There was, perhaps, a compromise, whereby scientists could use AI like a tool without it completely replacing the critical thinking unearthed in the process of generating original text.

Not to put words in Copilot’s mouth – here is exactly what it concluded:

You occasionally sound as though there is a binary choice between “human writing” and “AI writing.” In practice, I suspect many excellent scientists are already occupying a middle ground. A non-native English-speaking postdoc who uses AI to improve readability may not be surrendering any intellectual ownership at all. Likewise, using AI to shorten a paragraph is very different from asking it to devise the central hypothesis of a fellowship application.

Nevertheless, I still feel a key question here remains unresolved: how can a junior scientist learn the craft of critical thinking and argumentation if they no longer experience one of the main ways we all traditionally absorbed this essential training?

Like Le Guellec, I too learned how to write a scientific paper through the painstaking and iterative process of submitting drafts to my supervisor. The first manuscript I wrote during my PhD came back with a bloodbath of red ink (literally, as this was before online editing and tracked changes). It was embarrassing and exposing seeing my rookie errors underlined and frankly annotated with (a) exactly why it was so bad and (b) what word choices could fix the issue. Nonetheless, through this painstaking apprenticeship-like process, I slowly learned how to make cogent, succinct arguments; to overcome objections in advance; to apply narrative and flow and transition to explain, persuade and truly engage. And when I shared the first draft of my fourth paper, I was shocked when she returned it with only a few minor tweaks. I had, apparently, finally mastered this essential craft of my trade. I was a true writer – and scientist – at last.

Over the years, I continued to hone my skills, branching out into other forms of writing (popular science, news, and of course, my three novels). None of these additional works were ever completed in a vacuum – I was continually exposed to editors, some of whom were ruthless, most trying to improve my writing (appreciated), others seeming to want to replace my voice with theirs (resented). But I was building on that solid base of hard-won, learn-by-doing lessons obtained during my PhD years. And until recently, I was paying it all back by editing the writing of my trainees, every bit of feedback as uncompromising and meticulous as I’d received at the same stage.

Of course, now there’s a difference. Starting sometime last year, manuscripts increasingly come to me already beautifully polished by generative AI. Perfect language has the tendency to lull me into a false sense of security: I feel my own critical thinking skills struggling to crack the persuasive and confident tone, like fighting through a cloud of magic fairy dust. It somehow makes me work twice has hard to find the sloppy logic or the missing pieces. And that’s me, a scientist with decades of experience.

But consider the early-career researchers. Instead of submitting an imperfect draft to me, and learning what’s wrong with it, they are receiving perfectly crafted prose from their pet AI. Not only is the AI making it harder for me, the supervisor, to spot the errors, but it is depriving the researcher of that valuable back-and-forth training in critical writing skills during the ideas-crafting stage – and possibly, of the critical thinking skills themselves, if you buy the arguments of people like me and Le Guellec.

I feel that we, as a profession, are on the cusp of some great divide. Maybe the rise of LLM-generated scientific texts will continue and eventually take over, for better or worse. Alternatively, perhaps there will be a backlash: people might become increasingly sensitive to the too-good-to-be-true tone, and authentic writing might come back into fashion – just like sourdough during the Pandemic.

In the meantime, all I can do is be vigilant and try my utmost to make sure that those under my care truly understand the fire they’re playing with.

Posted in academia, AI, Nostalgia, Research, Scientific thinking, The profession of science, Writing | Leave a comment

Steamboat Ladies

Posted on 14 August 2026 by Athene Donald

The University of Cambridge has not had a very good week or two in the media. I’m not going to enter that fray given how much has already been written and I’m a long way away from the details of the crises, but I’ve had another blogpost in mind about a historical story relating to (lack of) diversity in the University. Having given two talks recently to, predominantly non-academic audiences, about the history of women at the University, the question of ‘Steamboat Ladies’ is much in my mind. So, here goes….

I’m an alumna of Girton College, the first women’s College in either Oxford or Cambridge. It was initially founded in Hitchin in 1869, before moving to its current site in 1872, safely up the (only) hill and a mile or two away from the haunts of male undergraduates. For many years I was a Fellow of Robinson College, founded in 1977, the only Cambridge undergraduate College to be founded as a mixed college. And from 2014-24 I was (the first female) Master of Churchill College, the first, formerly male College to vote to admit women, taking its initial mixed cohort in 1972, along with Clare and Kings. So, my personal history feels closely intertwined with the way women have become ‘mainstreamed’ within the University. I may have views about how successfully gender equality has been achieved at all levels; I may lack confidence the progress I’d like to think we made on this front some years ago (naturally I believe we did when I was the Gender Equality Champion and had a highly supportive PVC to work with in Jeremy Sanders), but formally there are no barriers for women now.

Not so, back in the early days of Girton and its companion women’s college Newnham, founded shortly afterwards. Women were tolerated, but they weren’t ‘real’ members of the University. Were women capable of serious study? Would it impact their reproductive capabilities (yes, really, people thought wombs might shrivel up if women studied too intensely)? Even amongst those pushing for women to be admitted to the university, there was disagreement about what the aim should be. Whereas Emily Davies (Girton’s founder) wanted women ultimately to pursue the same curriculum as men, initially Henry Sidgwick and Millicent Fawcett (Newnham’s founders) thought this was asking too much.

Over the next decade women were allowed to attend lectures, if the (male) lecturers permitted it. Not all did. In 1881 the University did agree that women could sit the same degree exams. However, their names appeared on a separate list from the standard results list and, worst of all, this did not mean women were admitted to degrees. They could not put the crucial letters BA after their name (note that in Cambridge, everyone gets a BA; no BSc’s are available). It was embarrassing when, in 1887 Agnata Frances Ramsay gained higher marks in the Classical Tripos than any man – but was not entitled to claim a Cambridge degree. A few years later in 1890, Philippa Fawcett (Millicent’s daughter) came top in the Mathematics Tripos. Normally, the student at the top of the maths tripos list could claim the title of ‘Senior Wrangler’, but not in her case as she wasn’t on that list at all, but on a separate one where her position was described as ‘placed above the Senior Wrangler’.

You might have thought, evidence such as this would have put the nay-sayers to shame and women would swiftly proceed to being admitted to degrees and treated just like the men, even if carefully segregated in their women’s only colleges. Sadly, not so. Although women were receiving degrees from other universities around the country, Cambridge was not willing to move with the times. In 1897 the matter was put to a vote – which had to be done in person in the Senate House, the administrative hub of the University. Anyone with an MA could vote and special trains were put on from London to bring people, sorry, men, to vote. (They were all men because anyone could claim a Cambridge MA six years and a term after first entering the university, but obviously that was only men.)  The vote was 1707 against the proposal, and only 661 in favour. The majority of men were totally opposed to letting women get degrees, not least because that would then mean they would be able to participate in the governance of the University, as well as borrow books from the University Library and other such ‘perks’.

This is where the Steamboat Ladies come in. Not being able to claim to have a BA was a substantial disadvantage for women, particularly for those wanting to enter a career such as teaching. They appeared to be unqualified, despite their years of study. Other universities, from Aberdeen to London, already allowed women to proceed to degrees, so the Cambridge women were disadvantaged.  For a brief period, 1904-7, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) allowed women who had passed Cambridge (and Oxford, which was in the same position) degree exams, to take a Dublin degree. Around 700 women (including Philippa Fawcett) availed themselves of this opportunity, probably rather more than had been expected. They became known as Steamboat Ladies because of their mode of travel on a steam ferry to reach Dublin. TCD did not let this state of affairs last long. As the women who studied at TCD (starting in 1904) proceeded to complete their own degrees, the offer to Oxbridge women was rescinded, sadly for them. The money that had been raised from the fees the Oxbridge women had paid for the privilege were put to creating a hall of residence for TCD’s own women students.

 

Steamboat Ladies

Following the admittance of women to degrees in Trinity in 1904 a request came from women in Oxford and Cambridge to have Trinity degrees awarded to them ad eundem gradum at a time when their own universities refused to confer degrees upon women. From TCD exhibition. This photograph shows these graduands in 1906 in TCD. (‘Eundem gradum’ comes from the Latin form of admission to degrees, meaning ‘to the same grade’, implying these Oxbridge women were being admitted on the same terms as those from TCD.)

However, Cambridge was still not willing to grant them degrees itself. It might have been thought that after the First World War, as the first women were granted the right to vote not least in recognition of all they had done for the war effort, the University would change its position. Or indeed, the embarrassment of realising Oxford had already taken this step in 1920. Not so. Another vote was called in 1921. The vote was less emphatically opposed to women being granted degrees, but it was still a firm ‘no’, with the victors ‘storming the gates’ at Newnham in celebration, thereby causing substantial damage.

Not till 1948 were women finally admitted to matriculate and take degrees, disgracefully long after every other university in the country had done so. This was long after women had been appointed to the various faculties; indeed by then, some had become professors in the University (although they still couldn’t borrow books from the University Library). Despite this, women were not entitled to put BA (or MA) after their name, nor participate in University governance, until 1948. Steamboat Ladies were a sadly short-lived phenomenon, but for those who managed to get to Dublin during those three years, highly significant.

Posted in BA, degrees, education, Trinity College Dublin, University of Cambridge, Women in science | Leave a comment

The Dissing of Summer Lawns

Posted on 9 August 2026 by Henry Gee

Prolonged drought has turned everyone’s lawns to stubble. I wonder how many people have wondered why they bother to have lawns at all, and, what with climate change, whether lawns will be sustainable? Consider: back in the Olden Days, ordinary people, if they had gardens at all, would use them to grow herbs, vegetables, flowers and chickens. Maybe a goat. Lawns – well, all that space for, essentially, croquet – were for posh people. And with good reason. Lawns need an inordinate amount of care, and were once luxuries that posh people would use to demonstrate their status. For lawns imply servants, with scythes, and, later, mowing machines. The growth of Metroland meant that the rising middle class could have lawns of their very own… and then spend all weekend mowing the things.

Here at the Maison des Girrafes we once had a lawn, but free-ranging hens and occasionally rabbits reduced it to a desert. When the rabbits went, and the hens were corralled, we hosted, on all that nitrogen-enriched soil, the British National Collection of Stinging Nettles. Mostly it’s now a Shrubbery, with the beginnings of Another Shrubbery down the end, separated by a path for that Split-Level Effect. Also, a failure of a pond. No more lawn. And  you know what? Even with hardly any rain for weeks, our garden is as lush as lush, and requires virtually no maintenance. Here are two views:IMG_1521

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The reason why our garden is an oasis is, I think, that the mature shrubs, trimmed weeds left where they fall, and other bits of neglect rewilding create humid microclimates, retaining such moisture as exists. Wildflowers and herbs have been brilliant this year and have attracted a lot of bees, which has to be a good thing. Many years ago I had the good fortune to interview gardening writer D. G. Hessayon and fellow Leeds University alumnus for the Leeds University alumni magazine. The best-selling writer in Britain (virtually everyone has a copy of one of his many Garden ‘Expert’ books) he lived in an enormous Georgian pile, maintaining it himself (he was in his eighties) with the help of one gardener. What was his secret for a maintenance-free garden? Put loads of black polythene everywhere and plant shrubs in it. Job done. I have followed his advice.

So why would you even want a lawn? Football? Go to the park. If you persist against my reasoning and have a lawn, please don’t scalp it. Cut it long, at least two inches high, so that at least some moisture is retained between those benighted blades.

Posted in Domesticrox, Gardening, lawns, shrubbery | Leave a comment

What I Read In June and July

Posted on 31 July 2026 by Henry Gee

I apologise once again for the reduced frequency of my book blog. Frankly, I blame myself. However, I am enjoying a brief respite from my current project (working title: The Only Way Is Ethics) so I can catch up.

John Gribbin In The Beginning I do love a secondhand bookshop and found this in the secondhand shelves at Aberglasney Gardens in Wales in May. You’ll both know I’m sure that Gribbin is a prolific writer of popular science books mainly on hardcore physics. This one, from the early ’90s, is out of date in some respects (pre Higgs boson) but is a great read nonetheless, mainly because of  its core idea – that Universes propagate according to a principle akin to natural selection. If one takes as read that new Universes form from black holes, those most successful Universes are those that produce the most supernovae, which then collapse to form black holes. It so happens that life is ultimately the product of supernova explosions, but forget the Anthropic Principle – the Hokey Cokey black holes are what it’s all about.

Stella Rimington Riptide In which our intrepid heroine at MI5 Liz Carlyle and her colleagues get involved with Somali pirates and a dastardly Islamist plot closer to home.

Stella Rimington The Geneva Trap In which our intrepid heroine at MI5 Liz Carlyle and her colleagues get involved with a dastardly Russian plot to penetrate the West’s most closely guarded secrets. I do enjoy a Liz Carlyle novel, but after reading a few, I feel I still know rather little about Carlyle save the externals. She seems a bit of a goody two-shoes to me. I do wish she’d have some endearing dangerous characterful flaw that would render her as more than a LinkedIn profile. But one can’t fault the action, and the Liz Carlyle novels just get better and better.

D. B. John Red Star Down This is one of those airport-lounge thrillers I don’t often read, but Mrs Gee saw it and thought I’d like it, and as Mrs Gee so often is, she was right on the money. It’s unusual in that it’s about North Korea (the author is one of the few westerners to have been there) and the power dynamic of the ruling dynasty, which in itself was fascinating. What really got me though was its other setting — the White House of Trump’s first maladministration, capturing the febrile atmosphere of a White House in which everyone is trying to guess what ‘The Boss’ will do next.

Chloe Dalton Raising Hare The author, a high-powered policy wonk, finds herself rusticated thanks to the Recent Unpleasantness and doing something she’d never imagined – raising a young leveret (that’s a baby hare). Rich in detail and totally unsentimental, this is a wonderful memoir and a stellar piece of nature-writing.

Posted in Jenny of my book, Writing & Reading | Leave a comment

Across The Sea

Posted on 29 July 2026 by Henry Gee

IMG_1525

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire is now available in paperback in a land run by criminal gangs with no respect for democracy, human rights or the rule of law universally applied, where disease runs unchecked across the burning land, and advocates for reason, science and truth are persecuted by star chambers as if they are witches. 

Also, Canada. 

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The White Heat of Creation

Posted on 28 July 2026 by Henry Gee

I wrote somewhere that there is no surer sign of an unwillingness to write than an untended blog. I should perhaps qualify that statement, because blogs might remain untended for all sorts of reasons, chief of these being, in my case, that no-one cares what I think, but coming a close second is that one is far too busy writing something else. So it has been with me for the past few weeks.

I have been contracted to write another book. As it’s in the early stages let’s pretend it’s a popular work on moral philosophy called The Only Way Is Ethics, even though it’s neither. Getting the synopsis right was hard work. In the early days it would take a year to get the synopsis into a state that my agent would not feel embarrassed showing it to a publisher. Even today, with a substantial oeuvre on my shelf, publishers still like a synopsis, and they are still hard to get right, though they don’t take as long as a year.

Eventually the synopsis passed muster but two things happened.

First, my UK publisher bought it, and I have a contract, but my editor announced that he was leaving for another publisher (editors do this) which was a shame because he is in my opinion something of a wunderkind and his ideas for reframing the synopsis were on point. I’m sure he’ll go on to do great(er) things. Happily his replacement is highly experienced and well-thought-of, but different editors have different opinions.

Second, my US publisher declined the option to publish The Only Way Is Ethics, citing poor sales of my earlier works (publishers often say this) but it reflects a declining market for popular science in the US, perhaps as that country lurches into a new Dark Age.

The third thing, out of these two things, was that a book appeared with a similar theme and title to mine. The publisher didn’t think this was a problem, but I felt I had to recast things somewhat. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

One of the subjects in The Only Way is Ethics, which I tackle in the first chapter, is something I know (or knew) very little about — too little even to make a kind of plan. I had to research the subject from the ground up. Writing was postponed until I was practically OMT on it and was ready to start writing. This was an amazing experience as I like learning new things, but one chapter became two, and I ended up writing the equivalent of a scholarly Annual-Reviews type article on this subject, though with more jokes. (The abbreviation  ‘OMT’ is Gee-family slang and not suitable for polite use).

During the course of this I thought some more and got a richer, deeper appreciation of what the book should be about, so having drafted these chapters I drafted a prologue – which acts as an overture to all the chapters – as well as writing chapter summaries and a new statement of intent. Phew! So, almost 40,000 words later, I have a document I’m happy with, which I have sent to my agent; my editors old and new; and the foreign-rights department of my UK publisher who want to start hawking the idea abroad.

During this process I avoided AI for the actual writing. I’m a writer, dash it all, and people actually pay money for words put together, in some sort of order, by me. I didn’t use AI to correct anything. I did use AI, though, as a kind of search engine when I wanted to look up papers, using specific prompts such as ‘is there any evidence that Southend Pier is made of toenails and treacle?’ and then I’d take it from there. For the final check, before sending, I had the computer read the text to me at a slow pace, while I followed along. This picked up the kind of mi$takes it’s easy to miss when reading silently to oneself, as one often skips across things without noticing.

So, there we are. I might take thirty minutes off, or even half an hour, before I start researching for chapter 3, during which break I can catch up with this untended blog.

 

 

Posted in Research, Writing & Reading | Leave a comment

In which human scientists are losing the battle

Posted on 25 July 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

This is the year that AI in science first began to scare me.

(Disclaimer: I’m not talking about machine learning, which is a useful and powerful scientific tool. I’m using the term AI here as shorthand for Large Language Models.)

It’s been building for a while, of course. Starting as a quirky curiosity, AI soon ramped up to a minor annoyance: a cringeworthy ChatGPT approach letter here, a too-polished student essay there. On the one hand it made marking student work less frustrating – the preternaturally perfect grammar being something I’ve never witnessed in all my decades of undergraduate evaluation. But the novelty soon wore off, to the point that, these days, when I stumble over a rare essay with a comma splice or the lack of subject/verb agreement, it now approximates the pleasure of listening to an authentic vinyl album with its faint crackle of dusty audio blemishes.

This is all just cosmetic stuff, nothing existential. Recently, however, it’s begun to snowball: a search engine result summary containing misleading or false scientific information. An author response to peer review clearly generated by LLM prompts, resulting in nonsense replies. Entire submitted manuscripts so heavily steeped in the queasy tone of AI – half used-car salesman, half sycophantic cheerleader, alongside its entourage of conspicuous Oxford commas and M-dashes – that you no longer trust the data behind it.

You can almost imagine a day when the grants will be written and reviewed by AI; the papers will be written, peer reviewed and rebutted by AI, and selected for publication by AI editors – at which point, science will eat its own tail. Maybe they’ll still need actual people to pipette the small amounts of clear fluids from one tube to another in a physical lab, but liquid handling robots already exist and could soon render the entire process human-free.

For me, it is grant writing that’s the most endangered: the burning crucible where research questions and testable hypothesis are born in the fire of the mind. I have now started to witness the ultimate betrayal: a few ride-or-die wordsmith colleagues who previously revered the process of writing as strongly as I did, and executed it so well, now turning relentlessly to Claude and CoPilot to “refine their thoughts”. It’s a lonely feeling, thinking I might be the last scientist on earth who composes her own sentences, and finds it enjoyable. Of course I might be left behind in the process, dying on a hill that’s already been conceptually bulldozed and turned into an motorway – destroying a string of charming hamlets in the process.

You could argue that the keyboard did the same thing to the pen, but I disagree: the keyboard didn’t replace your thoughts; it just made it easier to get them down. (Mind you, I also still use a pen to scribble both my personal and scientific thoughts, as this process seems to mine different parts of my brain.) The use of LLM is something else entirely: the potential death of independent and original human endeavour, until everything is a regurgitated remake of last season’s Netflix hit, the Chinese whisper errors rippling until the result is a hopeless muddle of slop.

We are already seeing the first lines of defence being hastily erected. The UK Medical Research Council is now requiring live interviews before making the final decision on who should receive major grant money. Can you look the panel in the eye and persuade them that the ideas in the grant are yours, and can you extrapolate further into the future without AI prompts? It’s like a Turing test, except now we poor humans are the subjects. A friend of mine thinks that even this doesn’t go far enough, as any smart scientist could memorise and swat up on an AI-composed grant. No, they say, we will need live “grant camps” where you show up, get locked into a Faraday cage with ten key papers, and have to bash out your entire application with no internet in a limited amount of time. In theory, only the true originals and visionaries would rise to the top.

Surely you are wondering whether I ever use LLMs myself. The answer is, of course. It’s a useful tool for shortening longer text, although I always have to edit heavily to exorcise the techbro tone and fix the inevitable errors. I sometimes try to use it to find papers, but the choices are almost always wrong, whether that be because papers have been hallucinated, or just aren’t quite right. AI summaries on search engine results, while again often misleading, at least point towards useful links on occasion, sometimes in a more organised way than the traditional first page of results. But beyond that, I have not embraced the tool for anything meaningful. Maybe that is a personal failing; maybe I am actually missing a trick. I do not know, and I do not want to find out. Not yet, anyway.

In the meantime, writing that is genuinely human becomes incredibly rare and thus, increasingly precious. I recently received a thank-you gift bag from my outgoing flock of medical students; tucked in among the gifts were a few cards containing multiple paragraphs of heartfelt sentiment, written by hand – with a pen. Sure, there were smudges and a few crossings-out, but the true feelings leapt off the paper with a brilliance and humanity that is as luminously unmistakeable as it is irreplaceable.

I found my eyes filling with tears, as if these scribbles were a missive from the past.

Or a warning about the future.

Posted in academia, AI, Nostalgia, Science Funding, Scientific thinking, staring into the abyss, students, Teaching, Writing | Leave a comment

How did we manage before the Internet?

Posted on 20 July 2026 by Athene Donald

If you’ve read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (the Guardian’s recent choice as the best novel in the English language), you will recognize the problem Mr Casaubon faced in trying to write his magnum opus, relying on multiple books in a range of languages. It is no wonder that he never completed his Key to all the Mythologies, and even if Dorothea had been allowed to help him (and had been educated enough to know all the languages which he felt he had to be able to read), it would have been a nightmare of a challenge. Any researcher knows the challenge of (re)finding the right reference or quote to insert into their own work. Yet now, how different life is from Mr Casaubon’s. A few clicks on a computer and the world is (almost) at your fingertips. Many e-books are available to me, at least to read, through my own university library. Many archived papers can be found on JStor, or on the publication’s own pages. Unlike my predecessors, I don’t have to get a ticket to the British Library Reading Room in order to access obscure journals (or, at least, I have never felt the need so far in my life).

Reading a book by an American Catholic priest and Vice President of Notre Dame University, written in 1913 about women in science, reminds me how different access to information was for him. HJ Mozans was the pen name of the Jesuit scholar John Augustine Zahm, 1851-1921. (He also wrote about Darwinism, for which he got censured as a Catholic priest). His book, The Story of Women in Science: From Ancient Greece to the Early 20th Century (also referred to as Woman in Science in the Gutenberg edition) uncovers a wide range of women whose names were previously unfamiliar to me. It is, of course, ‘dated’ and yet it strikes me as far ahead of its time, written before either Oxford or Cambridge – let alone Princeton or Yale – had admitted women fully to degrees. He seems to have been prompted to write it when travelling around Greece, in particular considering the absence of recognition of the site of the ‘salon’ of Aspasia, consort of Pericles in the fifth century BCE. She was a courtesan and not an Athenian and therefore – unlike Athenian matrons – allowed to consort with men and circulate outside the home. This she did with great skill and effect. Contemplating this woman, he

‘began to realize, as never before, that women of intellectual eminence have received too little credit for their contributions to the progress of knowledge, and should have a sympathetic historian of what they have achieved in the domain of learning.’

Hence, over many years, he laboured over this book.

It must have been a startling revelation to those who read it, long before Margaret Rossiter pointed out how women had been systematically excluded from the scientific narrative, and coined the phrase, the Matilda Effect, for the way men appropriated the ideas of women. But how did he uncover the names of all these women when there was no internet? It is a puzzle. Many of them are still names that don’t turn up very often in discussion, and searching the web today often provides scant information about them. I did not previously know, for instance, that abbess Hildegard of Bingen (ca 1098-1179) – whose plainsongs turn up quite regularly on Radio 3 these days – wrote two ‘scientific’ books, one about healing and the aetiology of disease and the other concerning the natural world.

Or, from a much later period, I had never come across the name of Janet (or Jane) Taylor, 1804-1870. She became an expert navigator and astronomer, and was the first to recognize that the Earth was spheroidal, bulging slightly at the equator. This discovery changed how people navigated for the better, and she was able to correct locations at sea and recalibrate instruments. Given the name, I can turn up more information on the web easily enough. But for Mozans/Zahm, how did he manage?

We are spoilt for information these days, but inevitably too often these are not primary sources. That AI summary at the top of a Google search – is it accurate (and of course the answer is often not)? Does it give the original source so that one can check it and expand the information. Again, often not. But how much easier it is for me now, than for a Mozans, or indeed a Casaubon. I could even, although I’ve not attempted this yet, use a translation programme so that I don’t have to learn Greek to find out about Aspasia, nor use my schoolchild French and German to explore more recent learned women, such as Sophie Germain, Emilie du Châtelet or Dorothea Christiane Erxleben.

So, hats off to Mozans. He is impressive, but inevitably a bit dated. He sometimes slips back into the language of those who want women to be merely decorative and good housekeepers, even while he wants to laud these women from the past. For instance, of Nicole-Reine (also Hortense) Lepaute, an astronomer, who worked with Jérôme Lalande and Alexis Clairaut on calculations regarding when Halley’s comet would return, he says

‘it is also gratifying to be assured that her engrossing work in astronomy in no wise caused her to neglect her home duties or to lost that sweetness of character and delicacy of refinement for which she was noted before she entered upon the absorbing and taxing career of astronomical computer.’

Not many female astronomers would like to be remembered for their attention to home duties these days, however much the reality is they are likely to be doing it with more or less input from a partner. The reality is the chores still have to be done, but we – as women – no longer have to do as Mary Somerville said she felt obliged to do:

“I hid my papers as soon as the bell announced a visitor, lest anyone should discover my secret”,

something which would have been close to Jane Austen’s heart too. We – male or female – can do literature searches from the comfort of our own computer. But, as young women have told me too often, they may still get written out of the narrative of a research team’s endeavours, when a male student is allowed to lay claim to a woman’s research – and which historian of science will be able to track that down, by whatever means?

 

Posted in Aspasia, Hildegard of Bingen, HJ Mozans, JA Zahm, Research, Science Culture, Women in science | Comments Off on How did we manage before the Internet?

Team Working and Loneliness

Posted on 12 July 2026 by Athene Donald

Some years ago, the Science Council created a list of ten different kinds of scientists, to showcase the fact that not every scientist does the same kind of work. Ranging from technician scientist to entrepreneur scientist via the more obvious researchers denoted explorer and investigator scientists, it covered many different aspects of the work scientists do. This list was created some years ago, although I suspect the case studies are being regularly updated. However, as someone said to me when we were discussing it recently, it can feel a little outdated. In particular, we were considering explorer scientist which was described as:

The Explorer Scientist is someone who, like the crew of the Enterprise, is on a journey of discovery “to boldly go where no one has gone before”. They rarely focus on a specific outcome or impact, rather they want to know the next piece of the jigsaw of scientific understanding and knowledge.

They are likely to be found in a university or research centre, or in Research & Development (R&D) at an organisation, and are likely to be working alone.

It was that last phrase we took exception to. Few scientists now work alone. Team work and collaboration, possibly across continents, is much more the flavour of the work these days, and implying we still live in the age of the ‘lone genius’ who is putting the jigsaw together on their own, strikes me as misleading and potentially off-putting to a teenager considering a career in science.

That idea of fitting in the next piece of a jigsaw reminds me of a description in Nobel Prize winner Venki’s book Gene Machine, where he refers to his then postdoc Brian Wimberley (at that point working in Venki’s old lab in the US, after Venki himself had moved to the LMB in Cambridge). Trying to place proteins within the so-called 30S subunit (part of a bacterial ribosome) had been ‘so exciting that Brian said it had been like eating crisps. Once he did the first one he couldn’t stop.’ Definitely like putting a jigsaw together; definitely not working on his own. There were many steps required to get to the point where the jigsaw could be completed, done by an array of different (kinds of) scientists on both sides of the Atlantic.

Venki was of course the team leader, and that – as fellow Occam’s Typewriter blogger Jenny Rohn said recently – can be a lonely role. There, one may be on one’s own, trying to make decisions about how the group should be run and funded. When a student turns up feeling lost or stymied by their research, how do you give them confidence, either at a personal or professional level? Indeed, how do you learn what is the right thing to do in such a situation? When group dynamics go astray, who does one turn to to get them on a sounder footing? Group dynamics can go wrong for many different reasons. Where there is a bully, it is the leader’s job to step in and try to effect behaviour change: to rein in the bully. Sadly, such people are often of the variety who ‘suck up and kick down’, so without a victim stepping forward such behaviour may be hard to spot by the head of the group.

That is a hard enough nut to crack. One of the hardest challenges I remember facing was when one of the senior postdocs in the team decided to undermine me because he felt the wider department was not appreciative of his work and therefore it must be my fault. It took me a long time to discover this was going on, because, of course, no one  mentioned it to me. But it became apparent when a more junior postdoc was being pushed to turn against me, even though they were working on a completely different project from the person trying to sway them. Here, I was indebted to the group secretary for drawing this to my attention, who served a wonderful role as a pastoral carer for everyone (myself most definitely included). Sadly, with ‘efficiency savings’, such local support has been phased out of my department, and probably more generally too. Such a vital component of care is lost when everything is centralised and there is no local non-academic present to be a safe pair of ears for anyone in the group.

Preparing students and postdocs, not just for how to work in teams without attempting to hog the limelight, but also how to lead projects and write grants, should be part of their training. Although grant writing is probably a skill most useful if staying in academia, the ability to project manage is likely to be useful in any sphere in which science is at the heart. Yet, too often, it isn’t one that gets much attention. Being taught some relevant skills could be helpful, but it won’t solve the problem of being a lonely leader. The best advice I can give to current and future leaders is to remember to cultivate a circle of trusted allies. These may be academics from a different department/university – be they collaborators or not – with whom difficult group personalities can be discussed without obvious conflicts of interest, or the group secretary (assuming such a person still exists). It could simply be a neighbour who has experience of managing conflict in a very different sector.

This ‘loneliness of the leader’ occurs in any sphere, but is probably as acute in academia as in politics, because competition is inherently always present. Who do you trust with your inner fears? I was lucky to have a school friend who ended up in personnel and professional training (not in academia), who was excellent at taking my rambling concerns, extracting a few key facts from my narrative and then asking the awkward questions I didn’t want to ask myself. In one case this boiled down to ‘ok, you don’t get on with this influential person, but what do you want from him?’, and I realised the answer was quite simple. I wanted their respect. That does not, of course, answer how to go about getting it, but it was a useful insight.

This set of musings was set in train by annoyance with the idea that anyone can still propagate the view that scientists largely work on their own, but there is no doubt that loneliness can still be a key component in a senior scientist’s life.

Posted in collaboration, Jenny Rohn, Science Council, Science Culture, Venki | Comments Off on Team Working and Loneliness