An Iconoclastic and Flirtatious Master

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Athene Donald

I am currently reading Patricia Fara‘s recent book Science: A Four Thousand Year History which cuts an interesting swathe through different cultures, different individuals and different discoveries (sometimes even the same discovery in different places). It is not your average Eurocentric view of progress. Reading the chapter entitled China, she stresses how many of the things that are traditionally claimed as European Renaissance inventions actually have their roots in China well before that time, even if it was the Renaissance that saw their applicability and utility widely developed; examples include gunpowder and printing. This chapter also stresses the key role Joseph Needham played in bringing the importance of such Chinese inventions and knowledge through the centuries to the attention of the West.

Needham was a figure whose name flitted in and out of my teenage years, who was an iconoclastic (and possibly surprising) Master of a Cambridge college when I was a student and whose second marriage in 1989 to a fellow, Lu Gwei-Djen of my own (current) college, I remember well. An intriguing character brought to life in the biography I read last year: The Man who Loved China by Simon Winchester and who formed one of the group of five socialist scientists featured in the 1988 book by Gary Werskey, The Visible College. All these works have contributed to my knowledge of the man.

Needham was a giant. He was unusual and multi-facetted, combining Marxist leanings (without ever joining the Communist party) with a high Christian piety, a very strange – one might almost think incompatible – combination. That he reached the position of head of the college (Gonville and Caius) that had initially treated him as an outcast because of his avowed left-wing views is a remarkable story. He personally changed the way the West viewed Chinese science through his patient scholarship and the initiation of the project which led to the multi-volumed Science and Civilisation in China, even if he died before the ever-expanding project came to completion.  Yet his training was all in science, his election to the Royal Society in 1949 based on his work in embryology and morphogenesis and his education in both the Chinese language and the skills of a historian acquired largely on the job as the book project progressed.

I do not think I should regard him as a good role model as I prepare to be a Master, albeit of a much less traditional college. He made many enemies and some bad decisions of both a political and strategic kind, in China and the UK and he was persona non grata with the Americans for many years. In some ways there are strong similarities between him and Desmond Bernal, a contemporaneous socialist scientist, whose love was for Russia rather than China but who equally committed himself so firmly to the socialist cause that it damaged his credibility (he also features largely in the Wersky book as well as has his own biography told in Andrew Brown’s J.D. Bernal: the Sage of Science).  But Needham’s life story is intriguing, writ larger than life; its impact is still felt.

Both Needham and Bernal were names from my childhood. The latter because his daughter by Margot Heinemann was a schoolfriend of mine from early years; though I have no memory of ever meeting Bernal I was vaguely aware he was a crystallographer without having the slightest idea of what that meant. Needham’s name was in currency because a distant cousin and frequent visitor to my family home was also an ardent Chinese supporter during the 1960s and worked closely with Needham at the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) and travelled to China on one of their early tours, possibly even with Needham. But Needham’s presence was more felt during my student years because he so palpably did not fit the expected mould. The (completely atypical in Cambridge terms) portrait of him in his blue Mao suit dominated the Caius hall, surrounded by dreary, dark portraits of elderly bewigged gentlemen  and dusty clergymen (fellows and benefactors all, no doubt) from which it stood out with its lusty colours. I expect it still does.

His lover of more than 50 years Lu Gwei-Djen was a delightful, friendly and welcoming fellow at Robinson when I first arrived there in 1981. The relationship between her and Needham formed part of a curious ménage-a-trois (not always literally) which Needham’s remarkable wife Dorothy, herself a biochemist and very early female FRS, apparently completely accepted. Beyond these relationships he seems to have been an unapologetic womaniser.  Lu Gwei-Djen was an absolutely crucial partner in the massive book project, the one who first introduced Needham to China and its fascinating culture, past and present. She was also very influential in seeing the establishment of the Joseph Needham Institute (for the study of the history of science technology and medicine) in the grounds of Robinson College. Opened in 1985 it continues to provide a building – in the ‘Chinese style’ – where scholars in the field may study.

Needham himself would have liked to see Caius accept female students during his time as master (1966-76) but failed to persuade sufficient of his colleagues that this was the right way to go. So, while Churchill College and others moved to admit the first women in 1972, Caius persisted in its male tradition. It was no coincidence that a number of the founding fellows at Robinson were ex-Caius, leaving the college in dismay/disgust at the continuing refusal of the college to change its statutes. Robinson on the other hand, was founded as a mixed college, admitting its first students in 1979.

I may not take Needham as my role model as Master, but as a staggering intellect and a brave man who held onto his beliefs however unfashionable they may have been, he is truly remarkable.

[ I would recommend all of the books I mention in this post as good, eye-opening reading. The hardest going for me was the Wersky, probably because I am not sufficiently well-versed in the socialist ambience and language of the 1920’s and 30’s. The biographies of Bernal and Needham were informative and accessible. I am only about a quarter of the way through the Fara, but I am certainly enjoying it so far.]

 

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Hacked Off

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Athene Donald

Can one ever escape the workaday grind, successfully avoid slipping over the edge to descend into the chaos I wrote about a little while ago or even manage merely to keep one’s cool despite provocation? There are so many things sent to try us! I went away over Easter weekend to spend some time with my wider family. I did take my computer – and, I regret to admit, my iPhone and my iPad – not because I intended to spend the entire weekend working, but so I could write some talks on the relatively long train journeys to and fro (and the iPad doubles as my Kindle for reading material). I was intending to unwind and switch off from the workaday. Imagine my fury, then, to find late on the Saturday night my Twitter notifications were filling up with kind people telling me my account had been hacked.  Ditto my email inbox.  I appreciate their helpfulness in pointing out the problem; my fury was not directed at them!  Of course the simple moral is I should switch off notifications and never look at my email when away. That way I would not have discovered this trying fact until back in the formal world of work, but of course things don’t divide that straightforwardly into work and play.

The Twitter problem itself was easily resolved – indeed Twitter itself seems to have known (how?) and reset my password while I slept. That did at least mean there was only one (I believe) offending tweet hawking diet pills to my followers sent illicitly under my twitterhandle. I didn’t lose any sleep over it, literally, as I hardly felt this was a matter requiring instant action on my part. But it annoyed me more than somewhat to feel that a rare long weekend when I wasn’t intending to get my laptop out was frustrated by someone’s idiotic malevolence.

Of course that raises the vexed question of how much one really switches off, literally and metaphorically, when on holiday. How wise is it to have access to any electronic device to connect one to the working world when temporarily out of it? Personally I subscribe to the view, which fellow OT blogger Steve Caplan articulated a while back, that being able to stay in contact is more relaxing than being explicitly disconnected.  I like to know that there isn’t a disaster waiting to happen, no chaos getting loose or crises building up ready to burst as I walk back through my office door. That position is absolutely fine as long as it applies. The problem arises when you read your email, in order to reach this happy relaxed state, only to find a vitriolic referee’s report burning up the space or a query which really, really needs a response before you get back. If that happens then of course it would have been better not to know, rather than to know and either still do nothing or feel obliged to spend an hour or two’s precious vacation time on resolving the problem.

One of the good things about Easter (and indeed Christmas) is that, by and large, the rest of the (UK) academic community is also on holiday. The likelihood of a peremptory demand from an irate committee chair or head of department requiring your immediate attention appearing is low. Not so breaks taken at other, less formulaic, times of year. Nevertheless, despite all this, I do tend to keep a watchful eye on my email even though I just about never do anything more than read and file – or even better read and trash – what is arriving.

Twitter is of course another kind of beast. I really feel absolutely no need to look at it from one week’s end to the other if I have better things to do with my time, which includes relaxing. (Admittedly it took me a few months after first signing up to reach this happy, laid-back state). It is, as someone explained to me early on, entirely ephemeral. I don’t expect to send my followers holiday snaps, or accounts of the weather from wherever I am. I don’t usually feel obliged to explain what wonderful exhibitions I have visited, or the unusual birds I have just seen from a bird hide, although it is possible I might wax lyrical about something vaguely scientific (walking round Green’s Mill, for instance) in a rare burst of 140 characters. And my deliberate absence from Twitter is probably why I felt so particularly incensed to discover at around 10pm on Saturday night that my account had been hacked.

I am naïve enough to have no idea of why someone would want to expend effort on sneaking into my account and sending out a single Tweet about diet pills under my name. Judging by the messages I saw, some one/organisation had simultaneously attacked a range of people including Nature Physics, although whether all of us had the same sort of ridiculous tweets sent out falsely under our names I have no idea. It is comforting to realise how many people saw this tweet and thought that it really didn’t look like my kind of thing and hence I must have been hacked. And then tell me; so thank you one and all.

 

 

Posted in Science Culture, social media | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Prejudice Go Down

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Athene Donald

I wasn’t really paying attention to the radio. I was busy cooking, but it sounded to me as if the question Clive Anderson asked the film-maker Andrea Calderwood on Saturday’s episode of Loose Ends amounted to ‘how come a nice woman like you is making films about the nasty episode that was the Biafran civil war?’. Of course he didn’t use those words but it certainly smacked of that. Her response amounted to ‘I‘ve been inappropriately called a wee lassie before‘ but she remained entirely civil. Too often women are asked questions no one would consider asking a man. Questions such as ‘how will you sort out child-minding?’ or ‘are you tough enough to work in the world of film, physics, engineering…..[insert noun of your choice here]?’. The interview with Calderwood, I fear, smacked of that sort of thing.

Was this unconscious bias? Stereotyping? Yes to both I fear. Unconscious bias is so ingrained and I’ve written about it many times before (e.g. here,  here and here), but when the University of Sheffield’s Jenny Saul came to talk at Cambridge recently specifically about the subject she introduced me to a study I’d not come across previously which raised a new dimension. Possibly something simple that could be done easily during the interview process to even things out. Something involving biscuits, or possibly cake.

The study she referred to appeared in 2009 and is entitled ‘Stereotypes and prejudice in the blood: sucrose drinks reduce prejudice and stereotyping ‘. The authors from the Netherlands (Gailliot, Perucke, Plant and Baumeister) examined ‘ whether bolstering self-control by giving participants glucose would reduce stereotype use for an impression formation task‘. The control group were given a zero calorie drink, the ‘glucose condition’ group were given a drink containing about 140kcal 12 minutes before completion of the test to allow time for sugar metabolism. The test consisted of writing down what participants thought a day in the life of a homosexual man might be like. Separately they assessed the level of prejudice of participants using a specific but distinct questionnaire about attitudes towards homosexuality.

What were their conclusions?

Compared to the control group, the participants in the glucose condition used fewer stereotypes when writing an essay about a day in the life of a gay man. In addition, high-prejudice participants in the glucose condition used fewer derogatory statements in their essays than high-prejudice participants in the control condition.

In other words, even for those with quite strong prejudices, these negative thoughts could be ameliorated by a quick sugary drink. Of course, I am sure we all have noted our own grumpiness when our stomachs are rumbling. In this context, the Economist has reported this week a very different study, on marital relationships, headlined  ‘Low glucose levels can lead spouses to lash out at one another’, where the severity of ‘torment’ a spouse was willing to subject their partner to was correlated with blood-sugar levels.  However, the study on prejudice did not seem to be dealing with a situation where the participants were deliberately being kept hungry until given the glucose drink and I would not necessarily have expected grumpiness to extrapolate to expressions of actual prejudice.

Looking at subsequent citations to the Mailliot paper, they mainly seem to be dealing with aggression (more equivalent to the grumpiness) and how self-control is affected by low sugar levels, rather than prejudice per se.  Thus it isn’t clear to me whether this study has broad applicability to different kinds of prejudice and stereotyping. It is interesting that no one seems to have picked up on it to extend the original framework of the study. Nevertheless, maybe it is something worth trying out before some important decision is to be made. I’m not sure I’d lay in the Lucozade/Gatorade to ply an interview panel or committee with, since they might well turn up their noses, but some chocolate biscuits wouldn’t be stretching the budget too far and if appropriately fancy-looking maybe they would tempt people sufficiently to get them to indulge. It’s an interesting idea that wouldn’t obviously do any harm.

The evidence keeps piling up as to how stereotyping can harm women’s job prospects. If they are expected to be less adventurous, assumed to be someone else’s lieutenant rather than the driving force or ‘not yet ready’ for the big move before they’ve even opened their mouth at interview, then let’s ply the panel with sugar and see if things improve. However if, as is too often likely to be the case, the bias is established as soon as the name on the CV is read, then this strategy won’t be adequate. Either way, a good dose of unconscious bias training to add to the spoonful of sugar seems desirable.

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Stuff of Brains

Posted on April 12, 2014 by Athene Donald

That migraine I was waiting for finally struck this week. Amazingly it didn’t throw my life into disarray, because it hit me during a week I was supposed to be having ‘off’. Consequently it only spoiled a day of relaxation, the day I intended to sort out and take a bag of old clothes to the Oxfam shop and do otherwise virtuous but non-professional activities.

One of the odd things about migraines is what it does to one’s brain. My first action was to turn my radio down from its typical volume level, my second was to put dark glasses on to hide from the bright light when I went outside. Conversations with my husband almost felt as if I was having to deal with a foreign language. 48 hours later (long after pain and aura had vanished) I was still finding myself using the wrong words in demented sorts of Malapropism’s, except I knew full well they were wrong but the right ones had gone AWOL. What does a migraine do to one’s neural connections that so mess up the ability to join up the dots of one’s thoughts over a relatively extended period? I find it scary to observe my brain losing control in this way, even if it is transient and I am fully aware of the cause.

My thoughts have anyhow been, in a very amateur way, turned to the workings of the brain. I have been reading Matthew Lieberman‘s book Social: Why our brains are wired to connect. I learned a lot from this book, even if there was plenty more I am sure I didn’t grasp or take in. I realise how much I don’t want to engage with the mere labelling of parts of the brain. I know of course it’s very important, but to me it is part of the ‘classification’ aspect of biology that bored me as a child. My mind simply glazes over with all the acronyms. But let’s put my failings aside.

One of the things that the book explored was how stimulus can lead to reward and increased connections in different ways. It led in many fascinating directions but, of relevance to my own personal interests, I was intrigued to read of studies into the effectiveness of ‘self-affirmation’. I first came across this idea specifically in the context of encouraging girls to stick with physics (a 2010 study is written up here). A year later a different but related study looked at the effect on the sense of belonging of African-American students at Yale and this was the paper discussed in the book. In both cases the students were asked to articulate some thoughts about who they were, how they fitted in and what they valued, although there were subtle differences between the two studies. In each case there were measurable long-term benefits to the ‘minority’ group (i.e. the girls or the African-American students) and there was no observed impact, good or bad, on the majority group. I didn’t understand why this strategy works when I first read about this approach and, to be honest, I still don’t.

Matthew Lieberman says ‘This is a pretty crazy finding if you think about it for a minute. Three years after spending an hour in a psychology experiment that momentarily amped their sense of belonging, students were still benefiting from it in their academic performance.’ Yes I think it is pretty crazy. The explanation?  The author implies there is a link between feeling good and the ability to think clearly and that this is at the heart of the benefit the studies identify, but that still doesn’t explain the durability of the effect to my mind and I remain baffled. Nevertheless, if this effect is real and of extended assistance in overcoming both stereotype threat and a sense of disadvantage arising from not being the same as everyone else, then perhaps we should be applying the technique very broadly. I would be interested to know if there are other studies out there that confirm the apparent advantages that self-affirmation can offer to minorities.

However, the Lieberman book, like Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (that Stephen Curry described on the Guardian blogs here) points out that we do many things that logically are illogical: we make different decisions according to how the same question is posed, we are willing to accept less advantageous propositions if they involve not gaining money as opposed to the actual possibility of losing some, and we rely on what looks like information even when all the evidence shows it’s worthless. So our brains are treacherous beasts that fool us into doing some pretty stupid things as well as some really smart ones.

The trouble is knowing what to do with this insight. We all suffer from cognitive illusions, those false beliefs that we intuitively accept as true. The illusion of validity is a false conviction regarding the reliability of our own judgment. Kahneman admits that he himself still suffers from this, that he cannot escape the illusion that his own intuitive judgments are trustworthy. We all do this; however I haven’t seen it discussed in the context of how we actually judge ourselves. It is usually pitched as something that concerns external judgements, such as choosing between two financial alternatives (which is how it applies in economics and why the psychologist Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics) or selecting candidates based on job interviews – but maybe it can also apply in how we think about ourselves. As in ‘I’m a girl and most physicists are male so I can’t be any good at it‘ whatever evidence there is to the contrary, perhaps in the shape of stellar exam results. Maybe self-affirmation is powerful because it helps to counter the implicit and invisible cognitive illusion that is otherwise internalised.

There is so much still to be learned about the workings of our brains, but even when the facts are out there somehow we have to find ways to act upon what we learn and not stick with the same old, same old. And that is something that is very hard to do when one ‘knows’ that something works, whatever the evidence.

Posted in Neuroscience | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Science and Nerves at the BBC

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Athene Donald

Last week you would have found three professors gathered nervously together in the depths of (Old) Broadcasting House waiting for the studio to be ready to air the week’s broadcast of In Our Time. Three professors who had never met before but who instantly got onto the subject of nerves in the face of the coming performance. I was one of the three; the second was Justin Wark from Oxford and the third was Andrea Sella from UCL. Andrea Sella and I each had one previous In Our Time notched up, Justin Wark was a first-timer. Given that the blurb for Andrea Sella’s Life Scientific interview describes him as a ‘science showman’ it may seem surprising that he too suffers from nerves in the face of a live recording, but we all agreed that nerves are really a necessary part of doing a task such as talking to Melvyn Bragg live to an audience of some millions (I believe; I may be wrong about that number). One needs the adrenalin to flow to help to keep focus and so do as good a job as one can. This is certainly helped by being able to look at the people you’re interacting with: those people who have done interviews ‘down the line’ i.e. remotely in some impersonal studio will know that engaging with a disembodied voice is much harder.

The topic of the week was States of Matter, and you can listen to it here. I won’t pass comment on the actual event since you can judge for yourself whether we acquitted ourselves with aplomb and accuracy but my guess is that signs of the lurking nerves will not have been audible (I can’t bring myself to listen to it so I can’t be sure). Apart from anything else, once the conversation starts there is no time to think about anxiety or terror; that is part of the act of concentration to erase all such extraneous thoughts. I think the programme team had done an excellent job of getting a diverse bunch of us together, one chemist (Sella) and two physicists but with totally dissimilar research interests. We each could bring something very different to the table. In fact literally we each brought a page or two of jotted notes in case of temporary memory failure of some critical fact.

When I was first approached a couple of weeks ago I thought this was an excellent topic and my mind immediately flitted, not to the obvious states of gases, liquids  and solids, but to the states that I feel are more interesting because less familiar. In my case, as a soft matter physicist, I wanted to discuss liquid crystals (familiar to you all through the screens on which you read this post) and gels and glasses, non-equilibrium states which couldn’t be described as phases in a thermodynamic sense. In practice, we didn’t get very far with these, or other, more unusual states.

With hindsight I think this topic was simply too large to make a satisfactory programme. Looking at the list of topics covered in the past I see that whole programmes have been devoted to a single book (including Silas Marner, Brave New World and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man) or a single individual, Bishop Berkley and Spartacus being recent examples. Taking a relatively well-defined topic such as a single novel means that there is space to discuss many interesting issues in some depth, whereas (at least in my view) the problem with the topic of States of Matter was that too much of the programme needed to be devoted to the basics of the phase changes themselves. As a physicist I may take boiling and melting for granted but it takes a long while to explain what is going on (I tried) to a general audience. Anyhow I still think the liquid state is pretty mysterious!

Andrea Sella did a great job of describing the nature of a phase diagram with words alone (likening it to a map of Africa with the phase boundaries denoted by the borders of different countries). Being the showman that he is described as, he brought along an audible toy: dry ice, to use as a prop for discussing sublimation by placing a lump of it against some metal to hear it squeak and crack as the gas sublimed. (Privately, we joked about the health and safety implications of travelling with a Dewar full of it. I should add he didn’t use the BBC lifts.)

The trouble was that so much of the programme had to be devoted to basic definitions because the audience could not be assumed to know them, possibly not even to know the difference between an atom and a molecule.  I may think that distinction is a piece of basic science literacy like knowing the outline plot and context of Silas Marner (a book I love), but unfortunately that is not how science is perceived.  This media perception that science is somehow ‘different’ as well as probably ‘difficult’ was reinforced by a curious set of images in this weekend’s Guardian of ‘secret scientists‘. The people featured ranged from the obvious and much-cited examples of physics-trained Brian May and Dara Ó Briain to the less well-known ones of Harry Hill – who practised as a doctor – and biology-graduate Lisa Kudrow. By using the word secret it was if they were expected to be trying to keep their early love of science quiet. It is hard to imagine a newspaper running a similar set of photos of ‘secret lawyers’ or ‘secret modern linguists’, so it is rather hard to understand the motivation for the photo-gallery beyond the apparent assumption that to be a scientist is to be peculiar.

I applaud programmes like In Our Time which include science as a major feature in their chosen topics: I am encouraged to see that, with 180 episodes classed as science on their available downloads it is the largest of their 5 categories. Nevertheless, it is difficult to go into the depths that other topics do because one has to assume a general unfamiliarity on the audience’s part. Looking at their top 10 in the science category I note that it includes Genetics. (It also includes Macromolecules, the programme I featured in previously so that is something I feel rather pleased about). How could they expect to cover a topic as vast as this in a single programme? I suspect it will have had to be very superficial not least because of starting from a standing start. How does this contrast with two episodes variously on Aristotle’s poetics and his politics and does this make the balance right?

I am delighted that In Our Time has invited me to participate (twice) and share my love of science with the non-scientist at home in their living room. I would hope one day they might do follow-up programmes solely touching on one of the exotic states of matter we could barely touch upon this time, such as liquid crystals. There is plenty of history there, which seems to go down well, plus modern applications familiar to all so there would be no shortage of material. The problem remains that in our media (as in our schools), science is regarded too often as other and alien and its basic vocabulary still does not sit comfortably with people in the way that historical and philosophical facts do so that they can be taken for granted.

It is encouraging that science does get its look-in on Bragg’s programme, billed as discussing the history of ideas. But across the board it is too easily perceived as a specialist interest, including in the BBC’s own workforce. Science is fundamental to our lives and ignorance of basic scientific facts should be regarded with as much unease as any other kind of illiteracy. We are a long way from that position yet.

Posted in Communicating Science, Education | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments