Charisma throughout a Convoluted Career

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Athene Donald

One of the joys of Christmas is having the time to reduce the number of unread books on one’s mental ‘to do’ list by a handful, although this is a good intention sometimes challenged by the gain of a few more wonderful books as presents. These holidays represent, finally, a few days when the email deluge lessens and the guilt over failing to read the paper one has promised to referee by a month ago/the paper from a collaborator/ voluminous committee papers (hurrah! no committees for a week or two) and all those other documents you’d prefer to ignore is weakened because – you hope  – no one will be reading their emails to see if you’ve done the task.

I’m afraid my personal reading style may not be approved of by all: given the chance I will read several books in parallel so that I can always pick up the one that suits my mood. I can even choose my medium, if I feel so inclined, as I switch between paper and Kindle. My diet may consist of a post-prandial lightweight volume to be read in tandem with a meatier one designed to stretch my mental powers when feeling alert and enthusiastic, both lightly seasoned with a biography or two plus a Victorian classic to give me that comfort/feel-good factor reminding me how glad I am to be alive a century-and-a-half later and not subject to diphtheria, the work-house or deprived of the vote and ability to earn an income.

Amongst my reading fare this Christmas I have, for the first time I suspect, read a biography of someone I’ve not only met but had the opportunity to interact with over a number of years, even to know a bit. If it wasn’t for the fact I didn’t believe in heroic science I could even identify this biographee as a hero, an identity the style of writing tends to reinforce. The book is the life-story of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (about whom I have written a little before), Nobel Prize winner in 1991 and a founder – if not the founder – of the field of soft matter in which I work. This book (Pierre-Gilles de Gennes: a Life in Science) was written by a French journalist, Laurence Plévert, based on many conversations with de Gennes in the couple of years preceding his death in 2007, as well as with many of his friends and colleagues.

Before I embarked on the book I had read the review by Tom McLeish (originally published in Physics World, but openly available here). His summary says

The author has identified some deep-lying themes, but somehow they never quite lead to a biography greater than the sum of its parts.

so I expected to find it a rather dry account of his life. In fact, on the contrary, I found it illuminating the man I had known, drawing out strands of which I had perhaps been only subliminally aware and it provoked quite a lot of reflection on quite why he had so much impact on so many individuals, myself included.

What follows is not a book review – there are several out there including Tom’s – but a personal consideration of this impact,factoring in the fact I have openly disavowed the heroic ideal of a scientist.  It is worth noting that de Gennes background was of French aristocracy coupled with a half-English mother who was a strong Protestant with high academic expectations (or more accurately, demands) of her son. His teenage years had the fairly foul backdrop of occupied France, but nothing seems to have dimmed his love of learning.  His breadth of interests was substantial and, although ultimately a theoretical physicist, he had carried out sufficient experimental work to have a full appreciation of experimentalists and always worked closely with them.

What I had really not appreciated until I read the book, was how deep-rooted his feelings about interdisciplinarity were, the importance of physicists working not only with chemists but also biologists. He himself very deliberately set out to study a substantial amount of biology during the 2 years of intense study which (still) comprise the ‘classes préparatoires’, the pre-requisite for entering one of the Grandes Écoles in Paris, before he was admitted to ENS (École National Supérieure). Downstream, one consequence of this was that he was also responsible for driving through the requirement for all students to study the three experimental sciences at ESPCI when he became its Director in 1976 (I discussed this breadth of education here).  However, it meant he was very familiar with the challenges of interdisciplinary working and funding – something I have highlighted here and here on my own blog in the context of the current UK climate – but he was describing a much earlier era.  For instance writing to the director of biology at the CNRS in 1978 he said:

The Orsay [submolecular biophysics} team currently depends on Committee 19 (macromolecular physical chemistry, but is somewhat marginal to the interests of that committee….This is a shocking situation, which illustrates how hard it is for biophysics to survive, with the lack of recognition within CNRS.

These are sentiments that many of my colleagues would appreciate are still applicable in many funding situations.

I was very aware that de Gennes was personally extremely encouraging about the work I did on starch during the 1990s. Visiting him in Paris at a time when some of my colleagues at the Cavendish were still being decidedly sniffy about the work I did on food physics, he and his long-standing (if part-time) partner and collaborator Françoise Brochard (he had two very public families, one with his wife Annie and one with Françoise) took me out to lunch. He tried to reassure me that I was doing important work by trying to get to grips with the interplay between starch granule structure and the biochemical pathways by which it was laid down, which could be looked at by studying different mutants. His encouragement, his seal of approval for moving away from conventional physics, meant a lot to me, but at the time I did not realise with quite what personal commitment he spoke, as opposed to simply being encouraging to a promising junior.

His own research path was indubitably as unconventional as his personal life. Having started off by making a name for himself in the field of superconductors (on which he wrote his first book), he reached a point where he felt he had done all he, as a theorist, could at the time and consciously switched fields to liquid crystals in the late 1960s, after a brief but largely unsuccessful foray into the field of polymers. His group at Orsay substantially switched with him (famously they tended to publish as ‘the Orsay liquid crystal group’ rather than under individual names, an idea pushed by de Gennes although it wasn’t always helpful for the career development of members of his team). Much of the mechanistic understanding of how liquid crystal displays work arises from this work, summed up in the book  he published on the topic in 1974. When I started working on liquid crystalline polymers in 1983 this was one of my bibles, although much of the analysis was hard to carry over to the longer chain versions of such molecules.

But, not content with making an abrupt change in research direction once, he did it again when he switched to working on polymers a second time. This time he stopped trying to work on the problems with the normal exactitude that French tradition expects and developed the approaches now known as scaling laws (encapsulated in his third book ‘Scaling Concepts in Polymer Physics’, published in 1979), which allowed him to relate physical properties, such as diffusion coefficients, to the length of polymer chains without having regard to what happens to each individual monomer, let alone each atom. He likened his approaches to Impressionist art, in that he was seeking a broad-brush approach, something that would probably be termed coarse-grained in the modern parlance.

The book was written when he was at Cornell University as Professor-at-large.  This was a time when I too was at Cornell, albeit I was in an Engineering Department not Physics and hadn’t yet started working on polymers. But, I did hear him speak there in about 1980 – by which time I was just getting to grips with polymer physics – and my over-riding impression was ‘what a hideous man’, a strange reaction, but I suspect his science went over my head at the time. When back at the Cavendish after 1983, I read this book many times, trying to get to grips with the subtleties of what are often rather heuristic arguments. I did not find the way he thought easy to follow, and I was always defeated – as an experimentalist – when I wanted to know not just the scaling, but what the prefactors ought to be. But, struggle though I might, I could nevertheless appreciate the elegance and power of what he did.

The biography spells out just how much he disliked the rigorous French tradition of theoretical physics, with its narrow concentration on mechanistically solving problems rather than actually thinking about how to approach and solve them. But equally he disliked the French system of patronage and the emphasis placed (and, I suspect sometimes is still placed) on where someone’s first degree/PhD comes from. In 2004 he wrote

The universities are run by a council on which the biggest labs are the best represented. Their objective is self-perpetuation rather than scientific renewal, so, for example, they recruit their own students, students who did their PhD’s through the laboratory rather than outside candidates. The result is you get the same research topics over and over again, however obsolete. This system is killing university research.

[Aside: Some might feel that applies to the UK’s Golden Triangle too, but I believe they would be wrong now, although it may have been accurate in the past. In my experience over the past decade or so, my own department has rarely hired an internal candidate, with many of our recent posts going to individuals from various European countries. ]

After the award of the 1991 Nobel Prize massively increased his public visibility, de Gennes became more ‘political’, engaging with ministers in an attempt to change those parts of the system he most disliked and to get the best deal for science. He was not afraid to be outspoken. Although he far from always got his way, he was certainly listened to, not to mention lauded. Which takes me onto my final theme of ‘heroes’.

As I have said before, I do not think it is helpful to consider science as a heroic endeavour done by lone individuals. De Gennes most certainly always surrounded himself by a team, particularly of experimentalists who he hoped would prove (or disprove) his latest theory. He worked best by bouncing ideas off others, talking problems through and being stimulated by conversations during chance encounters to provoke him to delve into yet another rich seam of problems.  However, I don’t think it is inconsistent to think of individuals acting as personal heroes, if that is the word you prefer to use instead of mentor, role-model or inspiration. I have previously stated that for me de Gennes – along with his Cambridge friend and my senior colleague Sir Sam Edwards – was very much a role model and mentor for me personally, although I would be slightly chary to describe him as my hero.

I know I owe him many a debt of gratitude. He was always enthusiastic and encouraging to me when he passed through Cambridge, as he did quite regularly and, as I mentioned above, invited me to talk at the College de France where he worked. Beyond that, rumour has it that the year I applied for promotion to Professor (in 1998) the Faculty Board made what sounds like an extraordinary decision: that all candidates had to have a reference written by a Nobel Prize winner, something I have never heard of happening in any other year and certainly not something that would (or could) happen now. I wasn’t told of this until after I knew I had indeed been promoted (this was a time when there were still only a handful of promotions made across the entire university each year in Cambridge), and I was duly grateful that in my own case there was a Nobel Prize winner who would have known me sufficiently well to write a meaningful letter. I also knew that this was purely fortuitous. Others would have fared much worse; it was simply something of a lottery and I was fortunate.

This meant that by the time I had sufficient seniority to be of some use to him, I felt something of an obligation to agree to his requests. Three times he asked me to take on a job for him: the first was when he was in the process of setting up a new journal in soft matter (EPJE, launched in 2000) and he rang me up out of the blue and asked me to be one of the first editor-in-chiefs. Having always kept away from serious editorial responsibilities, I nevertheless didn’t feel I could say no, although I did stick to my inviolate resolution of not agreeing to anything major on the phone. I spent at least a weekend considering my decision. Secondly, within a very short space of time in 2002 he asked me to be on the panel that selected his successor as ESPCI’s Director and to serve on the jury for the first L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science panel in materials science (the 2003 round of laureates). Again I said yes to both these invitations, resulting in some extremely pleasant trips to Paris. I felt it was the least I could do for this amazing man.

As a biography I would strongly recommend this book, even if soft matter is not your discipline and you know little about the field – or indeed French academic life. The book makes a good job of making de Gennes’ science intelligible to the non-expert and puts the French system into context. Tom McLeish’s book review was entitled ‘Soft Matter’s charismatic pioneer’. Whether that was Tom’s heading or a sub-editor’s, I think it accurately describes de Gennes. He was charismatic, because he was full of energy, charm and enthusiasm. When talking to you in his fluent English, you felt that he was simply focussing all his attention on you, on what you were saying in the moment, even if other matters of great importance must also have been lurking in his mind. I was undoubtedly charmed and warmed by him. Not a hero, but certainly a charismatic inspiration. I feel the book made him come to life for me, reminding me of many of his obvious attributes and fleshing out those parts of his character of which I had little inkling.

 

 

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Christmas Letters and Acronym Soup

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Athene Donald

It’s the time of year for writing those Chrismassy round robin letters – or rather it’s a week or two past it, but I am late as usual. I never write simply a single letter and copy it, but try to make sure it’s personalised. Friends from school, friends from university, colleagues I worked with in the US, each need rather different kinds of letters. The latter will inevitably be more familiar with the life of an academic, even if modulated by the different US culture, so remarks about the REF or the iniquities of one or other of our funder may seem parochial to them and are best avoided. But it is the school-friends who cause me the most soul-searching about how to describe a year’s worth of academic life. Of course I can write something totally bland which says nothing about what is actually going on, but these are friends who have stood the test of 40 odd years, and that would seem a bit silly.

So I struggle with trying to summarise what I’ve got up to, but if I was trying to make it brief, it could end up like the following: (For a translation of what follows see below*, in case you’re struggling yourself; you might like to score points for how many of the included acronyms you can spell out in full. Even I struggle with the details and may well have not got them all precisely correct!).

I could say that I enjoy my work as a Trustee of the NMSI but we’ve now renamed ourselves as the SMG and I’ve just had my first trip to MOSI, which the Group has recently taken over; that I have just been appointed to the ERC ScC which will mean far more foreign travel than simply my annual trip to ESPCI; that the REF is causing me stress; that I enjoy working with SCORE and ACME through my RS Education work, but joint STEM Ministerial meetings with DfE and BIS officials aren’t always as productive as they might be when the Ministers don’t turn up; then of course there’s all the work I do with E+D and HR and I’m optimistic GEG and our new SGEN will continue to make inroads into the Cambridge culture.

Such phrases do indeed sum up much of my year, but would make absolutely no sense to anyone outside a very narrow sphere. Even my US colleagues, professors though they may be, might struggle with much of it because it’s simply UK academia and politics. We live in a world where the soup of acronyms is incomprehensible to any but the real insider. A few years back I was in the unfortunate, or at least confused position of dealing with RCUK (Research Councils UK), CRUK (Cancer Research UK) and the UKRC (UK Resource Centre for Women in SET). That three such very different organisations should have permutations of the same set of initials just seemed designed to confuse.

Every time I join a new committee or organisation a new batch of abbreviations will be thrown in my direction. You start off reeling, confused and not entirely sure what’s going on. Rarely is a glossary of the relevant terms provided but somehow, by osmosis and deduction, after a while it becomes more or less second nature – at least if you’re paying attention – and then you can start tossing those acronyms around yourself with gay abandon. I have been on committees which were so unalterably dull that I never did concentrate enough to become an expert in their shorthand, but for that I should be ashamed. But those are also the committees (naming no names) where I have remained in a permanent fog as to who half the other members are, or what their roles might be. I hope I don’t do that very often, but those groups that meet only occasionally, do not provide name badges or the ‘Toblerone’ name tags that sit on the table in front of everyone, and that have a high degree of turnover (probably particularly of the Secretariat or observers), do provide scope for extreme uncertainty over the identity of some present.

Acronyms do of course serve a useful purpose, but it probably is desirable to induct all new members in the full suite of terms they need to know and to do that sort of introduction as soon as possible to stop the fog descending. In the list above I mention the ERC (European Research Council); that I am joining their Scientific Council has only recently been publicly announced, but I have known – subject to the Commissioner’s approval – that this was on the cards for a long time. Indeed, I have in fact attended one of their meetings recently, albeit as an observer only (if you thought I was rather vague about what I was doing on top of a hill abutting the Mediterranean in a recent post, that is why; I couldn’t say I was attending an ERC Scientific Council plenary session at Erice on Sicily). That experience means I have some idea of the plethora of abbreviations and labels (B1, D2 ….that sort of thing) that are associated with the various supporting parts of the Brussels machinery. No doubt in time this will all seem totally obvious, but as yet….no, I have a lot to learn about the structures associated with that particular batch of labels, structures which are no doubt indispensable in making the whole operation run smoothly.

I look forward to getting to grips with of all of this. Perhaps even more, I am relishing the opportunity this group offers to engage with people from disciplines way beyond science. Don’t be fooled by the title of the group: ‘Scientific’ here means far more than the STEM disciplines; it implies science in its broader meaning of ‘knowledge’ and includes humanities and social science disciplines too. That will be an exciting new departure for me. The ERC plays a very substantial role in the European funding landscape and I hope the current EU-wide budget negotiations will bring a satisfactory conclusion for it so that the group has full scope to continue to fund excellent individuals, wherever they may be.

*Translation: I could say that I enjoy my work as a Trustee of the National Museum of Science and Industry but we’ve now renamed ourselves as the Science Museum Group and I’ve just had my first trip to the (Manchester )Museum Of Science and Industry, which the Group has recently taken over; that I have just been appointed to the European Research Council Scientific Council which will mean far more foreign travel than simply my annual trip to the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chemie Industrielles; that the Research Excellence Framework is causing me stress; that I enjoy working with Science COmmunity Representing Education and Advisory Committee for Maths Education through my Royal Society Education work, but the joint Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics Ministerial meetings with the Department for Education and Business, Innovation and Skills officials aren’t always as productive as they might be when the Ministers don’t turn up; then of course there’s all the work I do with Equality +Diversity and Human Resources and I’m optimistic the Gender Equality Group and our new Senior Gender Equality Network will continue to make inroads into the Cambridge culture.

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So You Don’t Know What You Want To Do Next?

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Athene Donald

You are not alone! I suspect that most PhD students are uncertain, and if they think they know, it is probably because they assume, without necessarily considering the question at any length, that they will just continue on the academic conveyer belt. A few will, but the overwhelming majority will, sooner or later, leave the world they have grown familiar with. But what do PhD students know about the world beyond academia? What should they know and what information should be put in their way? Too often the assumption is made that if students aren’t aiming for academia they are aiming for industrial research, so give them a placement in an appropriate (and usually large) company and they will learn all they need to learn beyond the purely academic. Life, of course, isn’t like that, and it’s a very short-sighted view both of what students might wish to learn about and what destinations they might want to explore, probably largely driven by senior academics who haven’t much of an idea themselves about the motley world of work that surrounds us. (This is a point also made in this week’s Times Higher Education by Colin Blakemore.) It’s a world which can undoubtedly utilise scientific training, but often in more indirect ways than pure research.

This week I spoke at an event organised by Philip Moriarty, in his capacity as Chair of the IOP’s Nanoscale Physics and Technology Group. Now anyone who has read some of the comment chains between Philip and me on previous posts will know we don’t always see eye to eye, but when it comes to careers we clearly both share a belief that very often students are let down by the quality of information and experience they gain during their PhDs. The event was entitled So you have a PhD in Nanoscience? What now? and it offered students an opportunity to find out, first-hand, from those who have relatively recently received their doctorates what their jobs were like, what they wished they’d known during their doctorates, what skills they used or needed and – perhaps most importantly – how they’d ended up where they are now. They also heard from me (clearly not a recent graduate) and IOPP’s Margaret Harris, who has recently written on this same subject and who also succinctly articulated the problem: on average only 0.45% of PhDs go on to become professors, based on the Royal Society’s 2010 The Scientific Century Report  (see its Figure 1.6, which is as stark a picture of career destinations as any PhD student is likely to want to see).

After Margaret and I had given brief formal talks, the recent PhD’s (panellists let’s call them) each had about 5 minutes to talk about their career paths and experiences, before the students were split up into small groups who rotated round the room, quizzing each of the recent PhDs in turn. This format offered the students the chance to ask those burning questions about decisions, skills and the relevance of the PhD to later life individually. As I sat in on different groups, it became clear it was a format that worked well in extracting the kind of insight a careers advisor might be less well placed to provide.

I came away with some overarching impressions, although I only participated in the morning session, when all the panellists came from industry (the afternoon session had 5 academics and additional messages may have come across from them). First and foremost, none of the panellists seemed to have set out to be where they are now but had, by various mixtures of luck, serendipity, stumbling around and moving on ended up in a position which they felt suited them at the moment. One had completely retrained as a lawyer now specialising in IP issues, but the other 4 had perhaps moved once or twice post PhD (and possibly also after a postdoc or two) to find something that they felt really fitted them. Luck featured quite heavily in career paths, an topic I’ve discussed before.

In my own talk I highlighted those questions individuals should ask themselves as they progress that the Athena Forum identified as crucial:

  •  Are you on the right career path?
  •   Are you ready for the next step?
  •   How’s your life/work balance?
  •   Why do you enjoy what you do?
  •   What are your strengths?
  •   What motivates you?
  •   What is your next step?
  •   What skills and experience do you need?
  •   How can you gain these?
  •   Where can you go for objective guidance?

But although these were echoed and embedded in what the panellists said, they tended to be formulated in rather more personal ways, and complemented by other questions:

  • Are you driven and passionate?– if you don’t feel like that about research, don’t attempt to stay.
  • How much do you value job security?
  • How much do you value job security?
  • Do you need deadlines?
  • Do you find the focus of your PhD too narrow for your interests?

Emphasis was also put on how to ‘sell’ yourself when applying for jobs, both in covering letters and at interview, highlighting the importance of thinking through what your skills are and how they are relevant to the job in hand. Many skills are transferable, even if initially performed with a narrow focus during your PhD, but need to be translated into relevant language. This might mean using broad-brush language with phrases such as analytical skills, programming, team-working, oral communication etc rather than the nitty-gritty detail (at least until asked at interview). But it also requires an ability to stand back and give the context of why you are doing what you are doing, how it fits into a bigger picture of whatever field you’re in, and not assume its importance is so obvious it doesn’t needed to be stated.

Finally, the dreaded word GUILT was mentioned. I heard one student ask a panellist point blank if they felt guilty at having quit academia. The answer came back a swift no. How have we, as a community, reached a point where guilt is the predominant emotion when anyone is considering not staying in research, when the truth is we have a crying need for well-informed scientists in so many other spheres? Becoming an MP may be a particularly unusual choice for a PhD scientist, although my own MP Julian Huppert shows it can be done and I believe the country would certainly benefit from more scientifically literate Members of Parliament. But there are other places for the scientifically-minded to get involved with policy, places such as the Civil Service and think-tanks. What about scientific journalism or the media more generally? Teaching at every level from Primary to FE? Banking and other types of financial services have, of course, long been seen as a destination of choice, because of the importance of quantitative skills and critical thinking when it comes to making money (for yourself or others). Technical sales and instrumental application work, technical programming and scientific publishing, all these offer different possibilities in which to use a PhD in science in ways beyond pure research. So why is guilt the predominant emotion when people look at such jobs? Something needs to be done to eradicate this guilt and encourage students to appreciate how valuable the skills they’ve learned during their PhD are in an incredibly broad and diverse range of jobs. But that requires them to let go of the minutiae of their current projects and see the bigger picture.

I know that Philip Moriarty is keen to see this sort of event be run again in the future. It is obvious that it is not just the nanoscience community who can benefit from it, and the enthusiasm the students manifested during the day for the opportunities offered demonstrate that many groups would profit from a similar ‘hands-on’ sort of day, when those already in gainful employment share their wisdom and experiences with those anxiously pondering the future.

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Splattering Cream across Tradition

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Athene Donald

The Royal Institution is a venerable organisation: dating back to 1799, it is situated in an amazingly impressive building on Albemarle Street in London. This was the road that became the original one way street in order to cope with the press of carriages depositing the eager public, who turned up to listen to the likes of Humphrey Davy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge give public lectures during the first years of the nineteenth century.

My first experience of the building was as an 11 year old, when I was fortunate enough to be given a ticket to the Christmas Lectures, given that year by Desmond Morris on Animal Behaviour. Hearing him did not turn me into a Zoologist, nor even make me determined to be a scientist of some other hue, but it certainly has stuck in my memory ever since (although I wouldn’t like to take a test on what he said) and I’m sure it involved a chimpanzee at some point.  Much more recently I used to watch the lectures with my own children on TV, and I have an abiding memory of watching my friend and colleague Tony Ryan, who gave the lectures in 2002 on Smart Stuff (ie soft matter, polymers etc) being chased round the lecture theatre by a penguin, although why he had a penguin there to do the chasing escapes me.

I’ve been in the building at various times over the years. It was the venue for one of the IOP’s Schools Lectures back in 1996, which several of us (Richard Jones, Ruth Cameron, Adrian Rennie and I) took around the country, the RI being one of the easier venues to reach from Cambridge. For the lecture we had a well-honed set of demonstrations, as we discussed polymers under the title of Building with Snakes; some of these demonstrations are still going strong.  Subsequently I’ve been there for various meetings, discussions, L’Oreal For Women in Science Awards and, most recently, for a discussion with David Willetts and Jenny Rohn in a debate hosted by Evan Harris, which took place in one of the elegant rooms on the ground floor.

Last week it was my opportunity to give one of their famous Friday Evening Discourses  –  lesser events than the Christmas Lectures, but requiring me (and the audience) to don evening dress and (just me) to produce a slew of demonstrations. It is no mean challenge to set up a series of demonstrations swiftly in that iconic lecture theatre, now equipped with purple plush seats, a great deal more comfortable than the hard wooden benches I recall from my first visits. To perform these experiments in a long gown just seems asking for trouble, but at least the RI kindly provided me with a white lab coat (albeit rather large) to protect my clothing. I think that was just as well.

The topic of my talk was Goo, and I definitely had plenty of messy stuff to get my hands stuck into and with which potentially to splatter my clothes. It is a topic that lends itself well to demonstrations to non-specialists, and I had little idea in advance what to expect of my audience. To be told it would consist of ‘members’ was not particularly informative (since anyone can pay their dues and become a member) when it comes to assessing what level of knowledge can be assumed. In the end, my audience may not have ranged quite from 8-80, but certainly from about 10 to over 70, and there was a group of 10 or more 6th formers – I never gathered from which school – who were indeed in black tie as required (and a suitable dress for the solitary girl that I spotted amongst them).

Goo is not only good for sticky demonstrations, it also allows me to discuss some basic polymer physics and in particular polymer chain motion, known as reptation, as developed by those ‘inspirational gentleman’ Pierre-Gilles de Gennes and Sam Edwards I wrote about before. The way polymer chains move, entangle and so affect viscosity not only offer varied opportunities for entertaining show-and-tell, but also have important consequences for practical matters: the role of polymers is crucial in thickening up water for manufacturers to sell in more sophisticated forms – shampoo, cosmetics, manufactured foods etc.  In other words, reptation lies at the heart of homely matters such as why shampoo doesn’t simply fall straight off your hair.

Sam Edwards once moaned to me about the fact that Unilever was celebrating his theoretical ideas at their research centre – with a large poster about the toilet cleaner Domestos, which (as you will recall from the adverts) clings for longer than other brands. He felt being remembered for helping Unilever understand the way to go about thickening up a toilet cleaner was perhaps not the best claim to fame. Another scientist who also played his role in the story of reptation started off in the field of cold atoms – for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1997 – and ended up as Obama’s Energy Secretary. This was Stephen Chu who, in 1994 published the set of experiments which allowed the first direct visualisation of reptation, by using optical traps to twist and tie long fluorescently-labelled DNA chains, which then slowly unwound so that their trajectory could be directly imaged.

Goo as a topic, also allowed me to sneak in a bit of biological physics in the form of spider silk (have you seen this gorgeous example of what you can do with the silk from 1.2 million golden orb spiders?) and what  happens when you denature proteins by mechanical energy in the form of making a meringue from egg whites. At this point I moved on to real ‘cookbook’ stuff, separating the whites of several eggs and giving them a good whisk. It was as I moved on to whipping the cream that the goo really flew – as Gail Cardew (Director of Science and Education at the RI) remarked, she was glad she was sitting in the 3rd row. I didn’t see the young, bow-tied youth in the front row and therefore in direct line of sight and cream, quail or flinch as I whipped away. Clearly he was made of sterner stuff – and still had the courage to ask me a question about snot at the end.

It was an interesting evening from my perspective, and I hope from the audience’s too. I was impressed by the wide-ranging questions (from plant science, to polymer characterisation, to snot, to the future, to cooking and to my personal research activities), not to mention exhausted by their enthusiastic curiosity at the end of a long day, during which I had also attended Anniversary Day at the Royal Society (where I attended their Council in the morning, having recently been elected back onto it). I have two regrets about the evening. Firstly, that I wasn’t given more time and opportunity to look around the building, its artwork and its archives, which are clearly fascinating.  And secondly, that the RI’s strong sense of tradition still requires formal evening wear – which seems beyond anachronistic when attempting to demonstrate science – and entails various ancient rites, such as that the speaker mustn’t start off their talk by saying ‘Good Evening’. I found this instruction merely made me unable to think of any other way to get going, in the way being told not to talk about gorillas makes all other topics vanish from the brain, and the directive certainly served to increase the butterflies in the stomach as I waited outside the lecture theatre for the clock to strike 8pm and the doors to be ceremonially opened.

Posted in Biological Physics, Communicating Science, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Just How Bad Is It?

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Athene Donald

It is easy to think that science is uniquely bad amongst the academic disciplines in the problems that some women may face. In the past few weeks I have visited various Universities to discuss some of the relevant issues and give their management a nudge about what needs to be done regarding Athena Swan submissions. During one of these, to the University of Sheffield, I was delighted to meet Jenny Saul, whose research includes the study of stereotype threat and unconscious bias, issues that undoubtedly feed into the problems that many women in STEM may face. But Jenny is a Philosopher (indeed she is Head of the Sheffield Philosophy Department) and she has drawn my attention to the difficulties in her own subject, which is also male-dominated at senior levels (although not amongst undergraduates). It seems that this is another discipline in which there are endemic issues making things difficult for women, with some close parallels to the sciences but also other significant differences.

Since that first meeting a few weeks back, I have followed up with Jenny to learn more about the experiences for women in philosophy and how they compare with women in STEM. I will also be exploring any particular issues affecting Cambridge female philosophers with the local Women in Philosophy Group since, as Gender Equality Champion in Cambridge, my brief extends far beyond science: I need to appreciate what the stumbling blocks are in the Humanities disciplines just as much as in my own. (It is worth pointing out that my university is split into six Schools, four of which relate to the STEM disciplines including medicine, plus the Schools of Arts and Humanities and of Humanities and Social Sciences.)

Before I get into what seems to be the same and what different for Philosophy, let me start with a stark question. One of the first things Jenny asked me completely stopped me in my tracks.

‘Is sexual harassment rife within the sciences? It is in Philosophy.’

My immediate answer was: no, it isn’t widespread. My more considered answer is: perhaps I don’t know. Is it? If you are a young female researcher, are there senior researchers and faculty who prey on you in lecture theatres, laboratories or at conferences? Just how bad is it? I have asked other women in the intervening weeks and they have also said no it isn’t bad. But then they’ve gone on to qualify their responses with some anecdote which would seem to say the opposite.

That qualification I suppose ties in with my own experiences. On this blog I have previously posted stories about situations in the not too distant past which have made me very uncomfortable (e.g. here  and here, although in both cases they should probably be called ‘mere’ sexism rather than sexual harassment). I have tended to shrug these off as unpleasant but not really representing a fundamental problem in my discipline. But maybe I am being naïve, because I am to a large extent protected by my age and standing. Nevertheless, I do not hear more than the occasional horror story, and those usually occurring at conferences rather than in day to day workplace experience. Alcohol excuses nothing, but I am sure reduces barriers so that offensive behaviour is more common at the end of a heavy day of conference talks rather than when just going about one’s daily business in the lab or office.

So, my blunt question is – how bad is sexual harassment (as opposed to sexism of which there is plenty) in the sciences? I’d be interested to receive comments so that we can build up a snapshot of how people perceive things, in case I am just missing the hell that some people are being put through. I am particularly interested in the UK experience, since that is where I am based and where the schemes I am familiar with  – Athena Swan and the IOP’s Project Juno – offer scope to improve the climate at least at work (though conferences may be another story). For Women in Philosophy there is a website where individuals can post their stories anonymously – it makes for grim reading. For anyone who doesn’t want to add a comment on my blog because of concern around confidentiality issues, please feel free to email me ([email protected]) your experiences so that I can add them as comments to this post without disclosing names or institutions.  If harassment is still rampant, it should be possible to discuss it collectively. Zero tolerance should be the policy everywhere, but it is hard for individuals on their own to achieve or enforce for all the obvious reasons. However harassment will thrive on secrecy and fear.

So that’s the heavy, depressing part out of the way! Moving on to consider the similarities and differences between the sciences and Philosophy, there is a useful status report prepared jointly by the British Philosophical Association and the Society of Women in Philosophy UK last year. It highlights the fact that, unlike in STEM where the problems for women have been discussed and explored for a number of years and initiatives such as Athena Swan and the IOP’s Project Juno developed to try to improve the culture, nothing similar exists so far in Philosophy. Indeed, the problem does not seem to have received much attention at all. As with Chemistry, the undergraduate population is fairly evenly balanced between the sexes; numbers fall off rapidly thereafter, with only 19% of professors being women (not much above the value in Biology, although this starts from an undergraduate base consisting of more women than men).

One factor that seems to be significantly different in Philosophy is the heavy dominance of male authors on typical reading lists and whose work is being cited. Or rather, that in itself isn’t different, but it matters in a much more deep-rooted way because these texts are analysed to a degree that would be unusual for a scientist reading a research paper or standard text. In general it isn’t the language or the manner of expressing an opinion that matters to an aspiring scientist, it is only the facts and the equations. So as scientists we are probably less likely to be influenced by or sensitive to the gender of the writer. A second factor is that philosophers – apparently – use styles of argument and language that are stereotypically male. To quote the MIT philosopher Sally Haslanger (and this is a quote I’ve lifted from a very informative and illuminating article  by Jenny Saul on her website)

As feminist philosophers have been arguing for decades, the familiar dichotomies with which Anglophone philosophy defines itself map neatly onto gender dichotomies – rational/emotional, objective/subjective, mind/body; ideals of philosophy – penetrating, seminal and rigorous; and what we do – attack, target and demolish an opponent, all of which frame philosophy as masculine and in opposition to the feminine.

I don’t personally think the language and process of science operates within such a linguistic and gendered framework. Although I have seen ardent feminists object to the language of physics, because concepts such as force are ‘clearly male’, for me this seems an artificial objection. A force is a force. But, I can see how a philosopher being told their argument is emotional or subjective might feel they were being devalued at a personal level, and it could be sufficiently off-putting to contribute to their desire to quit the subject. Thus it would appear that the very structure of philosophical thought and argument as currently practiced constantly reinforces potential gender differences and so contributes to stereotype threat. The report on Women in Philosophy I mentioned earlier suggests that this is both unnecessary and could be overcome, offering some practical suggestions to facilitate a culture shift.

I wish the philosophers all the best in their attempts to level the playing field. If, as is currently being considered and piloted, Athena Swan extends its remit to subjects other than STEM, then maybe philosophy will be a discipline that can particularly benefit.

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