Broadening Horizons

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Athene Donald

Beyond the straight and narrow of their disciplines, there is far more that should form part of what every PhD student is exposed to during their doctoral (and indeed post-doctoral) years. I was reminded of this fact when I attended a symposium last week in my department, as part of the Winton Programme on Sustainability,  which touched on many different aspects of energy efficiency. Entitled ‘Energy Efficiency…the physical limits’, it was an excellent day covering a wide range of topics and (I was pleased to see) including a significant biological component; when the programme was first set up I was concerned the emphasis might remain wholly synthetic. Here I will focus on two contrasting issues from the talks, both of which illustrate the breadth of coverage that I felt was so powerful for the mixed audience. This included students and professors from many disciplines (and also incuding David Harding,  the ex-physicist who now runs Winton Capital Management and  whose generous donation to the department of £20M allowed the Winton Programme to be set up). The full programme can be found here.

I was particularly impressed by the first talk, feeling it was just the sort of thing students should hear (and there were a great number of them in the audience) to contextualise their own specific field of research, but probably rarely do. It was given by Malcolm Keay of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and set the scene excellently for the detailed technical talks that came later. A flavour of his talk can be found in this presentation from his web pages although this obviously isn’t the set of slides he used last week.

A central theme of his talk is what I’ve now learned is known as the Jevons Paradox, namely that if you increase the efficiency with which you use some resource(in this case energy) you tend to increase the amount used. I hadn’t known this was the correct term to use, but an obvious example is what happens with improvements in technology for our computer and TV screens. As we have moved away from the old-fashioned CRT tubes to flat screen LCD devices, so the screens have got bigger and bigger. Had the screens stayed the same size, the efficiency would indeed have led to reduction in energy consumption. Instead, by substantially increasing screen size the energy use has, on the contrary, increased substantially overall.  Jevons  (1835-1882) was clearly a man ahead of his time, a British political economist before such people really existed (and probably before the label had been coined), who came to a realisation of the paradox which now bears his name by considering the use of coal. He noted that the improved design of steam engines pioneered by James Wat , markedly more efficient than Newcomen’s original designs, had led to a vast expansion of their use so that as a consequence coal consumption soared.

Keay took a much more modern example for his talk, that of efficient air conditioning (specifically with reference to the US). Because air conditioning is now efficient and (relatively) cheap, many more people choose to live in the hotter parts of the US; they live in houses that don’t have the traditional thick adobe walls of the south and west, because those were built to aid cooling and this is no longer seen as necessary;  as a consequence the thermal insulation of these new thin-walled houses is poor. These people live in sprawling urban conurbations (he used the example of Atlanta compared with Barcelona, cities with comparable populations but the former covers 26 times the land area) and hence need to use far more fuel for transportation to get them to their place of work, schools and shops. So, from introducing that first step of more efficient air conditioning as a luxury for a few, the many now use it to live in energy-inefficient houses with an energy-intensive lifestyle due to the nature of the cities they live in. Only if US fuel tax rises substantially is any reversal of this pattern of behaviour likely to be seen, with a consequent benefit from the original increased efficiency on the total energy resource needed.

For the average student in the audience studying new materials for photovoltaic devices or trying to further miniaturise some transistor design, I hope this was as startling as informative. It isn’t sufficient to be clever, one must also understand where what one is doing fits into the larger picture and for me this talk of Keay’s set the scene excellently for what came later. It certainly got me thinking about a whole bunch of stuff which I’d never mentally pulled together before.

In our training (these days I hesitate to use the word education with respect to what we provide for PhD students) we put an increasing emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurial skills. Important stuff, but we should not lose sight of the fact that beyond the invention, creation and construction that may add up to innovation, there are many additional factors that need to be considered before a product ‘makes’ it. I’m not talking here about talking to venture capitalists or successfully setting up a spin-out company, but the more political aspects. It’s not just the funding of the actual research that matters, but the economic models on which decisions to move ahead or not are based, and the consequences of different courses of action. Factoring Jevons paradox into this is probably not immediately relevant, but the other facts and figures Keay gave about what genuinely constitutes efficiency when it comes to carbon emissions (although he never actually used the phrase whole life analysis) most certainly are; keeping our students well-informed on the bigger picture should never be forgotten.

The other talk from the symposium I’d like to highlight briefly as being particularly thought-provoking, was that by Simon Laughlin  on ‘What makes brains efficient?’. Simon is a Cambridge University Zoologist who has primarily researched Drosophila brains. I got to know him originally through standing at the primary school gate – I distinctly remember a discussion with him about the new BBSRC when the Research Councils were reconfigured back in the 1990s – rather  than through science (after all my knowledge about Drosophila brains is distinctly limited). But he has always been interested in interdisciplinary aspects of his science. His talk was particularly well pitched for this audience, taking the mechanics of the brain function and relating it to those terms that would be familiar to physical scientists. For instance:

  • chemical circuitry is good for Boolean operations whereas electrical signals are much faster and good for long distance transmission, whilst also being much more energy intensive;
  • the brain operates very close to the noise (Landauer)  limit, just a factor of two or so above it. It is highly miniaturised, with about 3 km of neurones per cubic mm;
  • the brain uses sparse coding, sorting information into parallel low rate lines and sending the minimum information necessary because speed and precision are energetically expensive.

He illustrated all these points beautifully and by carefully positioning his biological facts in a framework familiar to the physicists in the audience, he was able to put his key messages across succinctly and clearly. It was an excellent demonstration of how to give such a cross-disciplinary talk, and it was only possible because he has been in dialogue with the community for so many years he knows what messages work, whilst still being able to put across his key biological findings.

I highlight these two talks because they both provided different types of insight from the standard fare of semiconductor physics, quantum efficiencies (even if in the context of purple bacterial photosynthesis), FET’s, MOSFET’s and other acronyms and the limits of microfabrication one might have expected from the Symposium’s title. For me it was the wide diversity of topics which made the day so stimulating, but which reminded me of the importance not only of the actual style of delivery for talks, but also of ensuring the context of one’s work is always clear. We shortchange our students if all we offer them are the technicalities without the overarching framework.

 

Posted in Education, Interdisciplinary Science | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Why is it Different for Girls?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Athene Donald

Some horrible statistics to kick off today’s post: nearly half of English maintained (state) coeducational schools don’t send a single girl on to do physics A level.  That’s right, nearly half (strictly speaking 49%).  When I was first sent this data by the BBC asking for a quote, I just assumed that something had gone astray in their interpretation. As soon as I saw the Institute of Physics’ report ‘It’s Different for Girls’, I realised that this really is correct. The IOP has just published this report, analysing the progression of girls from GCSE to Physics A level in different types of schools. Or rather, what it really demonstrates is an appalling lack of progression of girls. It makes for absolutely dismal reading. The headline figure of 49% is, in my view, staggeringly bad. If you think this might just be because the quality of physics teaching in many state schools is poor, then the expectation would be that as many schools would fail to send boys on to A level physics. That is not the case; a mere 14% of mixed schools send no boys on. Clearly, the hidden messages the girls receive about physics makes it much less attractive than for the boys in these schools.

The second obvious objection/interpretation to raise is that perhaps girls simply don’t ‘like’ physics. Maybe their brains are biologically not wired in a way that makes physics attractive to them; yes, I’ve heard that argument many times. That too can be put to rest: girls from single sex schools are 2 1/2 times as likely to proceed to physics A level as their peers from coed schools. It is something in the teaching, the ethos and the environment of many state mixed schools which somehow deters the girls. So just why is it different for girls?

These findings, depressing though they are, at least give us some evidence to work with. It has been clear for a couple of decades that the numbers of girls entering physics degree courses hasn’t increased much; the total number doing A levels has merely been creeping up and in this summer’s exams there were still 3.5 times as many boys taking the subject as girls. Now the IOP’s figures make it clear just how early on the problems start. What the report doesn’t show is why. There are a range of obvious possibilities ranging from the teachers, to parents and the boys in the classes. Clearly further study is merited. One thing that probably pervades all of those three possibilities is low aspirations and expectations by others of the girls in question when it comes to the choice of physics. That must be changed.

An earlier (2006) study from the IOP has shown that how teachers interact with girls in the classroom is crucial, and many interact very differently with boys than girls. This would appear to be another contributory factor in turning girls away from the subject. This is something that, as we have more teachers trained specifically as Physics teachers – given that Initial Teacher Training now has specific quotas by subject – may be more easily instilled into the teaching profession. But those sorts of interactions within the physics classroom are only the tip of the iceberg. Messages, cues will be being picked up all the time around the school from peers and other teachers. That is why the ethos in the school is so important and gender stereotyping, of any sort and anywhere within the school, must be actively challenged. If boys in the classroom are heard taunting that ‘physics is for boys’ it must be stamped on; if teachers in other subjects hint that physics is an odd choice for a girl, that too must not be let pass without remark.

When I finished what would now be termed Year 7 of secondary school, my French teacher told me I had a dreadful accent. As a result, I just assumed my spoken French would remain pathetic and I simply didn’t try very hard to improve the situation. Written French – fine; oral French –lousy. It only takes one unguarded remark to provoke a reaction like that in an anxious teenager. So, subtle cues that physics isn’t for girls, or a message that surely biology/English/history would be more appropriate, are likely to carry a lot of weight as girls consider their future options.  (It is well-documented that girls opt for biology over physics by a huge margin.) These messages could come from anywhere within the school or home, but this evidence suggests they are being received loud and clear. Teachers and parents alike should consider what implicit sub-texts are being conveyed to the girls around them. Changing these will probably be easier than changing the images of physicists that are seen on TV or in films, but our cultural environment surely doesn’t help.

The IOP acknowledges that, despite all its hard work over many years, their success in changing attitudes to physics in girls at school has been limited. Where interventions are ongoing, some success has been demonstrated, but overall their hard work has not paid off to date. What sort of interventions might help? There have been studies which demonstrate trying to ‘feminise’ the subject by introducing overtly feminine role models is not necessarily helpful but, on the contrary, can be demotivating. On the other hand, some very simple interventions have  been shown to have dramatic effects to overcome what is known as stereotype threat, a phenomenon in which individuals perform badly because they belong to a group (such as girls in physics and maths classes) who stereotypically are expected to do badly.  A couple of years ago a study showed that a brief ‘self-affirmation’ exercise had a remarkable effect on the grades of women doing physics at US colleges. Perhaps something like that should be introduced in UK schools to counter the negative messages that girls appear to be receiving.

When the news broke yesterday, the BBC did an excellent job of giving it coverage, from Pallab Ghosh’s write-up through many interviews local and national.  The interviews I did, both in Cambridge and London, showed me just how much the presenters (and all the other individuals I encountered around the studios) were taken aback by the figures. These people, not STEM professionals, were obviously shocked to learn what the study revealed; I found the interest encouraging and I didn’t just feel they were making small talk to put me at my ease. However, on the Today programme I came up against the standard response from my fellow interviewee, namely that perhaps girls just don’t want to do physics. I hope I have debunked this argument above, but it was depressing that this comment came from a headteacher who, in another response, seemed indignant I might have suggested teachers put girls off doing physics. I feel she proved the point rather nicely, but time (and possibly an unwillingness to get too forthright on national radio) prevented me from pointing out her inconsistencies explicitly.

So, now we have the evidence. Something is going horribly awry in coeducational state schools which actively dissuades girls from proceeding to physics A level. This means that girls are losing out. It isn’t that their GCSE grades are worse; the single sex school evidence suggests it is unlikely to be an accurate reflection of the percentage of girls who would genuinely like to study the subject in the sixth form, so what we have is a pernicious form of disadvantage. This is bad for the individuals and it is bad for our society. By allowing so many bright girls to miss out on a subject that they intrinsically might have wished to pursue, at the society level we are being discriminatory and unfair as well as losing talent unnecessarily. Having got a measure of the scale of the problem, we now have to work together with educators and parents (and ideally the media) to change perceptions and beliefs at both the national and individual levels.

Added 5-10-12 I have now written a companion piece on the Guardian’s web-pages, directed rather more at the general public – and in particular parents – than practising scientists.

Posted in Education, Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Leadership, Management and Role Models

Posted on September 30, 2012 by Athene Donald

This week I participated in a conversation on leadership issues in front of an audience of women leaders from the Museum world. The conversation, facilitated/chaired by Vivienne Parry, was with Professor Anne Johnson, an epidemiologist from UCL whom I had never met before. There is something slightly bizarre in having a frank and open discussion about one’s life with a complete stranger in front of an audience of other complete strangers, but it appears to be a format which can be effective at bringing out useful concepts.  As I described in an earlier post,  it was Vivienne Parry who first introduced me to Impostor Syndrome, and she got that idea out of the way briskly in her introduction. We did not, on this occasion, dwell upon it; it does, however, lurk underneath the rest of this post. For this conversation, though, the emphasis was on what made a leader and reflections about how Anne and I had both had got to our respective positions of implicit leadership.

I have to say, when I was pondering these questions in advance of the talk, impostor syndrome was not far from my mind as I contemplated the fact that I have never been either a head of department or a PVC, the standard senior roles in a university.  But, as Vivienne rapidly pointed out as we got going, there is a difference between leadership and management, even without straying too far into MBA-speak. Running a department probably has attributes of both, but leadership does not necessarily mean managing anything – people or bureaucracy.  When I asked a senior (male) colleague about this, he could instantly reel off a list of the attributes he associated with his own current role and how this made him a leader not a manager; things such as strategic thinking and setting the tone for his organisation. As will become apparent, I feel much less confident I know how I define a leader and am not particularly comfortable with it as a description of myself.

We were operating under Chatham House Rules, so I am not going to go through much of what was said, and anyhow it is a bit of a blur in retrospect. Vivienne summed up by suggesting that being a leader meant going out on a limb, not following the straight and narrow but being able to take a stand and stick with it. Certainly both Anne and I had, in our different ways in our research, not simply followed conventional wisdom; we had both done something a bit wacky and out of the mainstream and to some extent that had enabled our success in research. Vivienne’s description may be an appropriate description of research leadership, but I am not convinced it is adequate to describe leadership more broadly, which I think was what we were aiming at. However, if one can live with that maverick approach in research it is probably the case that one is equally able to step back and look at things from an unusual angle in other, more strategic instances; maybe it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for leadership.

Vivienne asked both Anne and myself to identify a moment when we felt that things changed, that we had – if you like – switched gear and assumed a leadership role, and said ominously to me that she thought she knew what I’d say. In fact she was quite wrong and it is perhaps worth exploring why I think her ‘answer’ for me missed the point as far as this particular discussion was concerned. We were talking about paths to leadership and looking for that instance in one’s career which tipped the balance. I identified a moment in my life, a number of years ago, when anger at things that were going on around me and to me meant I accepted a role which looked purely diversionary; it took me out of the particular route I had been on, which had hit a fairly nasty brick wall. Out of that decision all kinds of unforeseen opportunities arose, which fairly rapidly I discovered gave me an influence I had not anticipated.  So, this was a situation which I had constructed on the basis of a very conscious decision, even if its downstream consequences were not obvious to me at the time. That was the point at which I felt I changed gears, even if it could not have been described as a game-plan or a logical path to leadership.

In contrast Vivienne had expected me to name the time in 2009 (which was some time after my own nominated transition point) when I was awarded the L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science Laureate for Europe. She was absolutely right that that prize has made a phenomenal difference to my visibility. I have never forgotten the seminar organiser who introduced me with the phrase that appearing on Desert Island Discs in the aftermath of the prize was my ‘main claim to fame’. Nevertheless, if that were so, it would be very sad! I’m a scientist not a celebrity.

Aside –  a quick gender test. On the Desert Island Discs website, my luxury is listed (or was when I last looked) as a bat. This is, I hasten to say, a typo. My chosen luxury was actually a bath, to wash all that sand off. But….when people read it there appears to be a bifurcation in the population. I read ‘bat’ as that mammal that flaps around at night; others read it as a cricket bat or perhaps a pingpong or baseball bat. My impression is that women take the former position (as did the women in the Museum room because I did a quick check), but men tend to see it as a sports’ accessory.

I disagree with Vivienne that winning the prize was a true transition point, at least (to use that horrible phrase) on my own ‘inner journey’ to leadership or anything else.  Of course the kind of visibility it temporarily conferred was very powerful and useful. Nevertheless, winning a prize is an external phenomenon; it says nothing about my own internal path. In talking to the women in the room last week, I felt we were discussing things within their control and which they could harness usefully. Having a prize tossed in your direction hardly fits that bill! I had a huge amount of fun associated with the prize – L’Oreal certainly know how to give a girl (and her husband) a good time in Paris for a week and put on a spectacular show for the prize-giving ceremony. I got lots of opportunities to get relaxed talking to the press and not grimacing in photographs, but I do not believe it had anything to do with whether or not I’m intrinsically a leader, only with how people perceive me.

Having tried to make a distinction between management and leadership, I suppose the point I am trying to make is that there is also a difference between being a leader and a role model. Being visible, as the L’Oreal prize made me, may have facilitated my becoming a role model to more women. I am aware that when I appeared on Desert Island Discs I got over 100 emails from total strangers giving me really positive messages about how the programme had affected them. It was very moving. As a leader, I think it did nothing because there is no follow through from such an event, no chance to check whether actually a difference had been made or how to take the next step to ensure there is. Celebrity (and being a role model is a pale imitation of this; see my earlier thoughts here) is being put on a pedestal as some icon, not doing anything that translates into change. I have just been reading an interview with Caroline Thompson, ex-Chief Operating Officer of the BBC, who says

That’s almost the most humbling and striking thing I have found in the past few months – the number of women in the BBC who have said they are sorry I am leaving because I had been a role model. When I didn’t get the job, I was sitting in a room on my own, and I was quite surprised by how much I felt that it’s such a shame to not have a woman. It was only then I realised it might have been important as a signal, rather than just thinking I would have done the job well. But I didn’t want to be appointed because I was a woman, I wanted to be appointed as the best candidate.

I think that sums up so much of what I feel. There is the passive, sitting there being a role model aspect and then there is the job well -done side of things. Being a leader absolutely needs the latter. I am aware I have become a role model. There is nothing I can do about that and if it helps women earlier in their careers to have an existence proof that women can rise up the ladder, that’s great (although take a look at this piece  on role models by Curt Rice, where he cites evidence showing that ‘elite women are not the best role models for early career women’).  However, this whole topic of role models is a dimension that I think will not resonate with most (white) men since such individuals exist all over the place for them. It is only for minorities – which includes BME men as well as women in STEM – that this issue is important and role models may need to be identified.

However leadership is something else. After last week’s discussion I know I am none the wiser myself – so probably the audience aren’t either – about paths to leadership or indeed whether I am a leader or not. I don’t have a formal job with a neat labeI, such as being a Head of Department confers, to which I can relate as ‘leader’. So, whatever my actions may look like to outsiders and however much possessing (or not) a label won’t affect how I act; regardless of whether I posess influence or not, the upshot for me is that leader is not a word with which I am comfortable.

 

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Jobsworthiness and Horror Stories in Equality

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Athene Donald

The policeman at the centre of ‘Gategate’, who may or may not have been called a pleb by the Conservative Chief Whip, has been called in the press a ‘jobsworth’, a term certainly not complimentary even if not in the same league as the presumed ‘toff’s’ alleged insult of ‘pleb’ (Isn’t our class system wonderful!). I spend a lot of my time talking to and working with our university’s HR (Human Resources) Division, whom I am sure in the eyes of many in the community are seen as no better than ‘jobsworth’ people themselves. HR is too often seen as that annoying bunch of people who insist on you filling in endless forms and who waste your precious time apparently just for their own whim and pleasure. The reality is rather different, and I do get frustrated listening to the moans of colleagues who should know better.

Undoubtedly our UK governance structures, loosely interpreted, require academic institutions to fill in a depressingly large amount of paperwork. Take visas for visiting students and scholars, for instance. These were always a nightmare and have become increasingly so under current rules. However, I need say no more than London Met to make my point that correct form-filling is necessary for the protection of all. That is not to say I agree with government policy on this, of course I don’t (my University Council  – to which I belong – has issued a statement about these issues); removing students from the migrant quota is the obvious logical thing to do and one with which BIS almost certainly would agree. The battle is with the Home Office and as long as they remain obdurate, doing anything other than complying with the insane paperwork is daft. That is not HR’s fault, so don’t blame the messenger.

What about all that paperwork associated with appointments? Surely that could be dispensed with? But that is exactly where there is some hope – if anyone reads the paperwork and monitors the statistics – of tracking whether equality law really is being properly followed. A recent, shocking, study published in PNAS looked at how identical CVs, submitted under either male or female names, led to very different outcomes, with the ‘male’ applicant being significantly more likely to be offered the job than the ‘woman’. The study demonstrated that there is an ongoing need to monitor what goes on when jobs are on offer. This US-based study revisited the problem of how much individuals – male and female alike – are unconsciously affected by the gender of applicants in ways that colour their decision-making because they implicitly believe women are less ‘competent’. The following is taken from the study’s abstract:

In a randomized double-blind study (n=127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student – who was randomly assigned either a male or female name for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.

The putative position in question was therefore at the most junior end of things, for which a graduate student was being recruited, but there is no reason to expect that things would have been any less skewed for higher-ranking positions. Indeed I would argue that things are liable to be only worse for hiring in the higher echelons. The authors concluded that

Rather, some women may persist in academic science despite the damaging effects of unintended gender bias on the part of faculty.

I suspect many of my readers may be nodding in agreement at this point. The challenge for an HR department is to work out what to do to overcome such gender bias. My PVC with responsibility in this area has already asked just that question having read the PNAS paper. Some years ago, courses were run in my university called ‘Responding to Merit’ in which some of the underlying issues about unconscious bias were raised and discussed. I attended one of these (they were of course voluntary), but I fear that most of the attendees were people like myself who were already fairly aware of the pitfalls that gender bias can produce. Monitoring statistics for every job: number of applicants by gender, number shortlisted/interviewed etc plus the final outcome is at least a step in the direction of providing hard evidence with which to work. It is insufficient and of course the conditions are far less controlled than the study itself, making the results so much harder to interpret.

However, if academics in universities just shake their head every time a directive turns up from the HR department demanding a set of forms be filled in for every vacancy, clearly little progress is going to be made. Nothing short of a culture change, a realisation at every level in the organisation that problems persist, is likely to improve the situation. This is not a question of conscious discrimination, which makes it all the harder to root out.  The study authors conclude with the statement that

These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.

They do not specify what such interventions might look like. Lining up all the professors in a hall and talking at them is unlikely to be successful. Nor is an online training programme, I fear. But constant reminders – verbal reminders probably work best, from heads of department or equivalent – to be on guard could help. So could mentoring and training for newly recruited faculty, to make sure that before they ever get involved in hiring they’ve had any unconscious prejudices and preconceptions drawn to their attention. Note, these remarks are addressed to women just as much as men. Somehow, our societal expectations, ingrained from our earliest years, cause us to believe that young women are less ‘competent’ overall, when it comes to a scientific job, than the identical individual masquerading under a male moniker. This is prejudice, plain and simple.

So, next time HR sends a form in your direction, think not just about the probable tedium of having to fill it in, but about the underlying reason for its existence. It may be to satisfy some unsatisfactory government policy, it may be to try to identify where problems lurk in local decision-making, but the chances are there is some underlying rationale. Maybe in a perfect world these forms would be unnecessary (I’m sure readers will be keen to nominate instances where they really do believe there is no point in this or that HR directive), but I for one think HR serves a hugely important purpose and I’m delighted to be doing my bit, as the University’s Gender Equality Champion, to champion the work they do against those charges of ‘jobsworthiness’ to which they are so often subjected.

If you want to read a fuller discussion of the implications of the PNAS paper take a look at this post and fellow OT blogger Jenny Rohn over at Occam’s Corner.  I am sure there are others out there and I have not attempted to discuss the findings per se here. Suffice it to say I find it shocking and none of us should ignore the implications. I have also begun to see analyses suggesting how the study protocols could have been improved, though only so far through informal routes so I can’t post links. Nevertheless, all analysts I have come across seem confident that the evidence supports the overall conclusion of the existence of unconscious bias in the study.

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Heroic Genius or a Distraction from Reality?

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Athene Donald

This week I strayed from my occasional home on the Guardian blogs to a mainstream print newspaper, writing a piece for the Telegraph to follow on from the Stephen Hawking Grand Design programme launch I wrote about briefly before. My given brief was to write an article prompted by the programme, which provoked me to consider the lone heroic genius of popular imagination. I would like to congratulate the Telegraph for, not only providing a title which was totally appropriate – How many Scientists Does it Take to Make a Discovery? – but also, by choosing one of the standard images of Einstein to illustrate the article, they absolutely demonstrated the point I was trying to make.

For many members of the public, whether they are considering a Newton or an Einstein, the popular imagination envisages a singleton beavering away in splendid isolation until that lightbulb moment when all is revealed. I don’t believe science is typically like that now, and one can question whether it ever was. Furthermore, I think it is the kind of myth that is liable to put youngsters off entering the profession because it confirms the image of a scientist as a geek/nerd (for an eloquent discussion of these terms see Richard Jones blog), someone who is a bit odd, a bit of a loner, and that these are the necessary characteristics for success in the profession. However, if you want to find a cogent argument counter to this view, I suggest you go and hear Roger Highfield give the Wilkins-Medawar Prize Lecture  at the Royal Society next Wednesday, in which he argues (according to his abstract) about heroes:

Scientists love them. Historians of science can’t stand them. The view that science rests on the shoulders of heroes and on them alone cannot be defended. Nonetheless, the public are moved and inspired by the stories of astronauts who’ve risked their lives, mathematicians who crack enemy codes or laboratory scientists who make life-saving medical discoveries. Science still needs their illuminating stories to engage with the public, even if that does distort the depiction of the way real science is done. Not only should we reinstate the heroes of science, we need other kinds too – heroes that are not even made of flesh and blood.

(And if you can’t get to hear the lecture, I believe he will have his own article on the subject in next week’s Telegraph, which could be read in juxtaposition to mine.)

My own central thesis in the Telegraph piece was that, given the way science is currently being done, the ‘lone genius’ of the Newton and Einstein variety was unlikely to be the way major discoveries will be made now or in the future. I cited examples, not only from my own field of physics (the Higgs Boson and accompanying huge teams at the LHC), but also from biology in the form of the Human Genome and ENCODE projects, as well as the story of decoding the structure of DNA. My remarks were interpreted variously by commenters as a kind of denigration of the single-minded genius, an Ayn Rand scare story or ignorance of work beyond my own sphere (which sphere was that?). However, I think when we consider how science will move forward, we have to look at the problems that face us so that we know what it is we want of science today, and think about what success might look like. That isn’t to say it is impossible that some individual will indeed make a breakthrough which can be solely attributed to them. I just think it is unlikely.

Let me take the example of Alzheimer’s Disease, which was (yet again) in the press this week. Currently one of the main targets for this disease is the protein amyloid beta, which is known to be involved in the plaques found in post mortem studies of victims of the disease. But the drugs so-far designed to impact on this target have not been shown to have beneficial effects in clinical trials on humans. Maybe one day some single someone will have a genuine lightbulb moment and identify some other protein that is actually the trigger for everything that happens thereafter, or home in on some viral factor or something else totally different and currently unimaginable. But, even if this is true, this will only be recognizable as success in the public’s eyes once a huge further swathe of work has worked out how the relevant pathways can be interrupted, and what molecules can be designed to interfere with the pathway without horrendous side-effects in patients. How many individuals are likely to be involved in getting any such putative drug onto the market, accepted by the NHS and NICE etc etc? A lot. I doubt we are going to end up remembering that it was Professor M – or more likely their student – who had that breakthrough moment.

This is not a value judgement, it is a reality check. Do we do our young any favours by telling them that they need to be ivory tower thinkers waiting to leap out of a bath when inspiration strikes? Unfortunately the Primary School National Curriculum seems to be heading off in a direction which will tend to reinforce this message, with the biographies of men such as Darwin, Copernicus, Linnaeus and Neil Armstrong (I quote) intended to be introduced from the tender age of about 6, according to the draft released this summer. I foresee the Ladybird series of White Men of Science (replacing the heroic endeavours of the Walter Raleigh’s of this world I was brought up on) if we are not careful. For those who worry about such things, I can reassure you that the (lack of) diversity aspect in this list has already been drawn to the attention of the Department for Education at a ministerial meeting I attended.

I think dwelling on lone researchers is not a healthy way to teach science, and highlights to me all the more the need to remind people that ‘teams’, even if this team might number no more than 2, are a valuable and exciting way to proceed when it comes to solving problems. (Is this a gendered argument? Women are collaborative, men are competitive sort of thing? I don’t know and I really don’t want to go down that path). I was amused by one commenter (through Twitter) who named a slew of great scientists whom he claimed were of the lone genius variety. I’m ashamed to admit I hadn’t heard of all of them, but it was obvious to me that Huxley (as in Andrew, not Thomas) was intimately tied to Hodgkin so I felt this was a poor example. I tweeted back to this effect, whereupon he seemed to pair all the others off. By this point I’d lost track of his argument. The bottom line for me, though, is that big science – as exemplified by the LHC – or science done in more moderately-sized teams, is not intrinsically better or worse than lone genius science. It’s just different, but possibly more relevant to the present day. And it may be more honest to say so to the children/students we are purporting to educate.

I think what is usually required of a scientist is the ability to communicate, to listen to other people’s ideas and chip in with your own. If you go off and do your own experiment you may nevertheless be part of some big picture, particularly if you’re working in an interdisciplinary project such as must be the case for drug discovery (as with the Alzheimer’s target). But even if you’ve made a breakthrough, the road of translation into reality (be it slamminorg together elementary particles to look for the elusive Higgs, or getting a drug to market) is tortuous, may involve policy as well as technology and science, and is unlikely going to be done by that individual hero in splendid isolation.

Heroes may once have been important in science. Now their importance is as a myth, but my argument is that the utility of such a myth is dubious; it may do nothing to inspire future generations or instruct them in the reality of a life in science.

In my original piece submitted to the Telegraph, there were a number of paragraphs about policy and politicians and the importance of their role in relation to scientists. The editors decided to cut all this out to make room for other science stories of the day. I’ll save these ideas up for another time.

Posted in Communicating Science, Education | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments