All Human Life is There (Happy 1st Birthday OccamT)

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Athene Donald

The first part of this statement was once the proud motto of the now deceased and unlamented News of the World. In a friendlier vein, compared with many of the ignorant witch hunts they pursued and the dirt they used to dish, I would like to think Occam’s Typewriter – and my own personal microcosm within it – similarly covers much of the Life Scientific (as Jim Al Khalili would describe it). We happy band of bloggers cover everything from the unidentifiable object/stain malingering at the bottom of the lab freezer to the aspirations of postdocs; from animals and birds living in our back yards to the creatures that populate high level committees and departments; from the joys of working in interdisciplinary science to the shortage of women in all our fields. Happy birthday OccamT, it has been a fun year!

For myself I have learnt a lot about the readership as well as my fellow bloggers. I have learnt the most read posts are often those which provoke fewest comments; that the ones dashed off in a mild alcoholic haze have (so far, on the statistically meaningless count of one) been rather more successful than ones which I have laboured long and hard over; these latter don’t necessarily generate much interest.  It is clear that if I raise issues around gender, or personal experiences in which gender has played a part, there is much more likelihood of getting my posts retweeted than if I stay with a purely professional bent. And the couple of times my argument has been sloppily presented I have been hammered in the comments for apparently implying things that were far from my intent.

So, as I enter into OccamT’s 2nd year with my fellow bloggers, I can perhaps pause to think if I want to change my style, my persona or the content. I could choose to use more photos if I were more adept with either camera or software, but as I’m not I think that one is out. I could devote myself entirely to gender issues, but then that would be very narrow and negate a lot of my other experiences. Furthermore, I’ve never considered myself a feminist in the way I was reared to understand the meaning of the word which – to one of my generation – smacks too strongly of bra-burning, even if it generally conveys something rather different now, so I doubt I’ll do that either. As I get sucked up into the maw that is the REF I could write exclusively about impact, but in that case I suspect my readership would dwindle to single figures and I’ll be thinking enough about that during the working day to warrant clearing my brain when ‘off duty’ as it were, so that too I’ll give a miss. In fact, I suspect my blog will continue to be the same sort of random pot pourri stimulated by whatever I’ve read, participated in or been vexed by recently.  As a compliment from a reader, I rather liked the tweet I received recently, which stated one of my posts had ‘provoked thinking+giggles as ever.’ If  I’m managing that, I think I’ve probably achieved as much, no actually a great deal more, than I ever anticipated when I set out in this good company last December (strictly speaking I joined a day or two after OccamT’s birth, but I’m not going to split hairs).

So, here’s to our 2nd year. I raise a metaphorical glass to all of us and am delighted to find myself in such convivial company.

Posted in blogging, Science Culture | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Lecture Theatre Habits

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Athene Donald

Last week I attended Anniversary Day at the Royal Society, during which there was a discussion meeting for Fellows, as well as the President’s Annual Address given in an open forum. This venerable body is 351 years old now, and Anniversary Day always falls on November 30th. The discussion was held in the Society’s Wellcome Lecture Theatre, a large room and as the number of fellows present by no means filled it up  we distributed  ourselves all around the place – except near the front. FRS’s are no different from any other group of people populating a lecture theatre; the students we teach will recognize that habit of lurking near the back, the feeling that there one is out of the line of sight of the lecturer but somehow the front rows are dangerous and one is in danger of being noticed.  For myself,  I tend to leave the students to skulk where they feel most comfortable, but not so Paul Nurse (as President) who beckoned us all to move to the front – which we dutifully did.

Crowding round the back of the room is only one of many bad habits that students tend to exhibit in the lecture theatre, not all of which I think could have been seen last week amongst the fellowship. Some of these traits I find more disconcerting than others.  I am not sure if there are cultural differences in behaviour between the humanities and the sciences, or even between different strands of science but some, such as the tendency to avoid the front few rows, I am sure are the same everywhere and whatever the subject.  Likewise, the habit of coming in late I’m sure is ubiquitous. I suppose one could shut the door on the dot of the hour and exclude everyone else, but that seems a bit harsh, particularly for the 9 o’clock slot.  I know there are those who choose to humiliate latecomers by drawing the rest of the class’s attention to them, or insisting they must come and sit right at the front, but humiliation is not necessarily a good way of encouraging either a love for the subject or the act of learning, so I have never resorted to such tactics.

There is the habit of reading a book that I have encountered, both before and – sad to say – during a lecture I have been giving. Not very flattering to a lecturer to find a student prefers someone else’s written word to the pearls of wisdom they are uttering.  Again I can imagine ways of humiliating the perpetrator, marching up to them and flinging the book to the floor, but that would strike me as merely histrionic. If a student is too engrossed in someone else’s text, be it Wittgenstein or Barbara Cartland, ultimately it is their choice – and their course work which is likely to suffer. Turning to sins of concupiscence, there are those who persist in snogging throughout a lecture, though thoughtfully those guilty of this have, in my experience, located themselves to the side and back so it isn’t too intrusive. It does seem unnecessary and I am pretty sure there was none of this going on at the Royal Society last week. Commoner than this is the frequent occurrence of drowsiness exhibited by students. One year I had one particular student who did sit at the front, right in front of me, but then dropped off half way through each lecture. I asked them what was going on and it transpired each day they got up early to go rowing (this is Cambridge after all, and someone has to do the rowing), and exhaustion just caught up with them before the end of each lecture. At least that was an honest answer by someone who wanted to engage and learn, but just didn’t have the stamina to do it.

Despite the lack of attention that some students may endow upon their lecturers, it doesn’t stop them voicing an opinion when it comes to the end of term. This may be physically demonstrated or through the medium of the student questionnaires. When I gave my very first undergraduate lecture I had received precisely zero training in the art. It was before even I was a lecturer, but still a mere Royal Society University Research Fellow standing in for a staff member who had left at relatively short notice. The lecture theatre technician greeted me with words of ‘encouragement’, telling me how at the end of the previous course the lecturer (who was a senior professor and therefore presumably pretty experienced) had been subjected to assault by more than 100 paper darts but that that was regarded as pretty unusual and he doubted I would match that.  Indeed, this is a record I have yet to get close to.

Some students see the course questionnaires as a way to get their own back on a lecture course they may have hated, or simply failed to understand, by answering the questions with vitriol or what they perceive as wit. One freeform answer stands out in my mind about my lecturing style some years ago. Or rather, it was not about my lecturing style but my clothes style, the comment being ‘Where does she get her clothes from, the Oxfam shop?’ Even if true, this was hardly relevant to my ability to put ideas across. I would like to think my sartorial style is less likely to provoke comment now, but I suspect those were the days when my clothes were subject to regular bouts of baby vomit or mashed-up food casually flicked in my direction by a child learning to wield a spoon for the first time. I am spared those indignities now, and maybe my clothes are the better for it.

It is unfortunately the case that we can’t all be charismatic lecturers who hold the whole class in thrall all the time. Maybe  if we were the lecture theatres would be empty at the back not the front. We rely on honest answers from the students in order to help us improve our act. But, facetious answers from students who have slept, snogged or read throughout my lectures are unlikely to be very helpful to me – or to them and their successors.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

The Greatest Engineer?

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Athene Donald

Isambard Kingdom Brunel may only have been trumped by Winston Churchill when the BBC prepared its list of top 100 Great Britons, based on a public vote, but I wonder if most people’s perceptions were as hazy as mine were about this man before I read the biography of him by  LTC Rolt. This is a very old book, published originally in 1957, so some interpretations of events in his life have evolved over the last half century, as detailed in the book’s Introduction. The basic facts of his life are indeed remarkable, but less straightforward than I had naively assumed. It is easy to see him indeed as a Great Briton, one of the stellar engineers who contributed so much to the making of the world as we see it today, but in reality his life was full of an enormous number of far from insubstantial setbacks, financial, personal and practical. One can admire the beauty and elegance of the Clifton Suspension Bridge without appreciating that he never saw his ground-breaking design realised in his lifetime; be aware of his role in the construction of the Great Western Railway and overlook the fact that he built this to a gauge of 7 foot which ultimately lost out to the standard gauge (after a protracted and bitter battle that lasted many years) adopted by, for instance, the Stephenson’s in the north of England; looking over the amazing iron ship that is the SS Great Britain one can fail to remember the spectacular SS Great Eastern which topped it in size and in just about every other dimension, figurative and literal, and yet was a disaster of immense proportions due to all kinds of meteorological adversities as well as a catastrophic business partnership with Scott Russell, in which each saw the other as fundamentally at fault. These tribulations just make the success of Brunel and the legacy he left all the more remarkable.

This biography* was written by a fellow engineer, who was clearly in love with the intricacy and innovation captured by Brunel’s designs and the skills he brought to bear as an engineer. But, since the book was written for a general audience, it is simply written in prose. I would have found the details of the different designs much more comprehensible if diagrams had been inserted at frequent intervals to explain what was going on. OK, I’m a physicist not an engineer, so perhaps I am less able to visualise what was described in the text. But as the intricacies of linkages involving flanges, pipes, stopcocks and heaters were discussed the kid’s rhyme Dry Bones irreverently came to mind:

With the leg bone connected to the knee bone,
and the knee bone connected to the thigh bone,
and the thigh bone connected to the hip bone.

Just as a neatly annotated sketch of a skeleton makes all clear, so I felt I could have got my head round Brunel’s innovative designs more easily with a few labelled diagrams.  Nevertheless the scale of his concepts, the breadth of his imagination – ranging from canals, to railways, to shipbuilding, to transportable hospitals for the Crimea and new dock arrangements – comes across loud and clear and is truly formidable.  Frustrated though he often was by lack of financial backing, lack of matching imagination by those he needed to invest in his projects, or endless bureaucratic hurdles (sounds all too familiar; Rolt also specifies another familiar modern situation: ‘that the lunatic fringe is a hardy perennial and not a phenomenon peculiar to our day and age’.) he still managed to achieve more in his relatively short lifetime than is easy to conceive. He was, as this book makes clear, not driven by greed for material possessions or money, but by an insatiable curiosity and an ambition to make innovative things happen. He clearly did it at the expense of what we moderns might call work-life balance. His family gets very short shrift in this book. Or at least his father, Sir Marc Brunel, and his own engineering schemes  – notably the tunnel under the Thames at Rotherhithe – are described in some detail, as a backdrop to the effective apprenticeship served on this project by IK Brunel as he battled against the incoming water which several times all but defeated the scheme. But Brunel the younger’s marriage hardly appears at all; one gets no sense that he enjoyed playing with his children or spending time with his wife.  Indeed given how much time he spent travelling on horseback to survey a route for a new railway line, or how much time cajoling financiers, partners and politicians to progress his plans, it is hard to see that his family could often have set eyes on him. He presumably felt this was a price worth paying, and one has to hope that they did so too.

His was, very obviously not a life without setbacks but he had the indomitable spirit which enabled him simply to keep building more castles that must have seemed for so long simply suspended in mid-air – until suddenly he became a successful and feted individual with more work than he could really handle, and upon whose shoulders so much rested personally. Of his early life Rolt says ‘these must have been discouraging times for Brunel… diary concerned with day-to-day happenings [which] affords us only an occasional hint of the frustrations he must have felt.’  For all of us who have ever felt discouraged his life should be an object lesson in picking yourself up, dusting yourself down – even after nearly fatal explosions and fires,  the kind of setbacks that most of us will hopefully never have to encounter – and continuing to think big.

I did not find the book a gripping read, as I indicated above, but I did find the man amazing.  His drive, his vision and his ability to keep going despite appalling problems stand out as well as his sheer technical innovation and engineering imagination. He truly was a Great Briton whose legacy remains as a fundamental plank in the industrial landscape of Britain today.

*Another review can be found here on the Some Beans blog.

Posted in History of Science | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Cultural Differences?

Posted on November 26, 2011 by Athene Donald

How does the French academic environment differ from the British, particularly for women? Each year a group of us convene at ESPCI  (the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris in France) in the form of the International Scientific Committee (ISC). Our role is to assist the Director by providing advice about their research and education. The Governance of ESPCI is to my British eyes arcane, but it apparently operates as a Régie Administrative and is closely linked to the Parisian political structures but with some autonomy.  I have been a member of this group since its inception and, with the exception of one year I had to miss, have attended the November meetings annually since 2007. Over the years I have begun to understand the very different organisational structures that ESPCI operates under, and the different education system which has many attractions as well as challenges. I wrote about the impressively broad education the undergraduates receive last year after my previous trip, and that post gives a lot more background to the institution. This year I want to focus on a different aspect, one I feel strongly about, that of gender.

I have always seen France as a country that was ahead of the UK in terms of the numbers of women in science. My reason for believing this was that in my own field of soft matter, that pioneered by Nobel Prize winner Pierre Gilles de Gennes the erstwhile Director of ESPCI about whom I wrote last year, there did seem to be a significant number of prominent women. Women like Dominique Langevin, a winner of the L’Oreal/Unesco FWIS Laureate for Europe in 2005, the late Claudine Williams, Liliane Léger and Francoise Brochard-Wyart. These were women I  knew about as an early career researcher and whom I could see had progressed successfully. Undoubtedly de Gennes himself was immensely supportive of women and would have ensured that the women in his field were mentored and encouraged. I had taken this piece of anecdotal ‘evidence’ as typical without really considering the matter. If I thought about it at all I thought that women had an easier path because childcare arrangements worked better in France than the UK, again without giving the matter much thought. (Both Dominique and Francoise have children, 5 in the latter case.) Nothing in my years of visits to ESPCI so far had caused me to reconsider this belief. But this year, several things highlighted that perhaps the French academic scene wasn’t quite as rosy as I believed.

During the first day of our visit we were told about the impressive work carried out within the Institute Langevin, an institute within an institute, which concentrates on ‘Waves and Images’. We had lunch with a number of their scientists, 27 to be precise, so that the 9 committee members each sat at a table with 3 of them, when we talked about their work, their views of the institute and its good and bad points, as well as introducing ourselves and our own work. I mentioned that I put a lot of time into gender/diversity issues in the UK and asked if this was a problem in France. No, the man across the table said to me, most emphatically. I looked round the room and noticed a not unfamiliar dearth of women; although 4 of our committee of 9 were women, there were only 2 other women present out of the cohort of 27 Institute scientists. Maybe this was unrepresentative, I’ve no idea, but the man across from me agreed that in his subject, by which I assume he meant physics, of course women were few and far between. Despite this, he seemed completely unable to see that I might think that was an issue. I made no headway with him at all and it perturbed me.

Later on in the meeting we were discussing the constitution of some committee and I mentioned that it would be important to have at least one woman on it. Consternation in the room. Why? asked the French woman from industry. Her reaction astonished me. I had always assumed that the fact that the ISC had a good proportion of women on it was due to a sensitivity to this issue in France just as much in the UK, but this reaction sounded as if it was not an intentional act to have nearly equal numbers of men and women on it (the actual numbers are 4/10, as one man was absent this year).  At the final dinner – held in the opulent surroundings of the Pompadour Room at La Meurice, a Michelin 3* restaurant as a reward, I guess, for all our hard work – I talked to one of the (few) senior women at ESPCI about my unease about what I’d discovered. I had clearly struck a nerve. She felt very strongly that women collectively were not having an easy time in science in France these days, and that included herself. Indeed, she believed that things had gone backwards in recent years. Her generation, essentially the same as mine, had known they had to work hard to progress and had been willing to do so. She felt the present generation of young female scientists had much less drive and many simply wanted to stay at home rather than actively pursue a career. Whereas I have always felt that women who want to put home before family are to be supported not vilified, I nevertheless find it disturbing if this generation are collectively opting out. Is this societal pressures or genuine free choice? Is it because they can’t bear to keep on fighting or truly what they want to do? In other words, is this the leaky pipeline as I use the phrase, of women who are giving up the good fight because it’s too difficult for them to wish to keep battling, or is it simply that maternal instincts are getting stronger?  So, let me ask, do readers believe there is a similar change in attitude in the UK, and that young women now are less willing to aspire to careers than a decade or two ago? Or is this something that is peculiar to France?

Posted in Equality, Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

On Lechery and Other Failings

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Athene Donald

Recently there has been some discussion about ‘what do professors do?’ in the press, with comments from fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry (and on my own blog here), with a major emphasis on leadership, mentoring, teaching and the desirability of not putting oneself first. Another key function, which intersects with those attributes but that was not highlighted, is writing references. For one’s students and postdocs this should be easy: one should know their strengths and weaknesses, have advised them how to improve the latter and be aware if they are likely to be able to overcome some flaw such as poor speaking ability, or overenthusiasm to the point of sloppiness. What is not so often talked about are the enquiries that are often made of senior academics about their colleagues in a much less formal way. If asked to write something down one can agonise over nuances of phrasing and be careful about what is omitted, even if hoping someone will read between the lines as to what is missing in the reference. But what should you do if you are asked for an off the cuff verbal response?

I was reminded of this recently when asked for my thoughts about a group of people whose names had been put forward for a senior advisory role. My first response to one of the names on this list, an eminent senior academic (though not a physicist) was ‘lecher’. Not a phrase I would want to utter in an unguarded moment even though I had had first hand experience of this chap’s behaviour. To be greeted, at a reception in a royal palace, with the comment ‘Oh I do like kissing games’ , followed up by attempting to act this out, means that I know what I’m talking about on this front. (He ignored my response that ‘I didn’t’.) It was clear from asking colleagues that his failings in this direction were well known but, as far as I could tell, not challenged despite – or perhaps because of – his seniority. So, when asked what I thought about this guy taking on a role in which lechery was unlikely to be a relevant criterion, it’s difficult to know how to respond. Maybe honesty would have been the best policy but in a semi-formal situation I preferred obfuscation, possibly the coward’s way out. Nevertheless it was obvious my body language conveyed I was unimpressed and the name was dropped.

This situation of being asked for an unwritten but honest opinion about colleagues at a comparable level is not so unusual, but I sometimes find myself worrying if my personal views are colouring my professional thoughts in ways that are themselves unprofessional. If someone has done bad science that is fine, then it’s easy to say that you feel they are too blinkered, or claiming too much or whatever your view may be. If someone is being considered for a headship of a department and you have seen them be dreadful committee chairs, falling into one of the less attractive character patterns I’ve described previously, it is no doubt reasonable to point out their failings in this direction. It is equally clear that, despite one’s firmly held conviction that someone is a paranoid, lying toad such words should never pass your lips. But what about if you are asked to comment on someone with whom you have had a long-standing run-in in vitriolic ways but without resolution? Even that can be dealt with straightforwardly by stating the case in a matter of fact way: ‘I don’t agree with Professor X and we have a substantial ongoing scientific disagreement,so I am probably the wrong person to ask’. But if someone has spent their life patronising you, carefully patting you on the head till you are fed to the teeth with it, even though you feel they are themselves just second rate? How do you describe them in ways that are honest without allowing personal annoyances to creep in? Or what about the person who is being considered for a senior leadership role but you feel is totally self-serving if brilliant? Their inability to support junior colleagues is relevant to their ability to lead, but your views may be coloured by the particular junior individuals who have moaned at you about said behaviour and not a truly representational cross-section of the individual’s behaviour. In that case – in which I have found myself – I feel one really must raise the issue, and the circumstances in which you know about it, to allow the institution to make formal enquiries or at least make their own mind up.

The trouble is, none of these sort of questions fall under normal HR rules. This isn’t a case of a search committee gathering letters of recommendation, this is the kind of thing that can occur at a much earlier stage, and you can start blackening someone’s name completely accidentally. Sitting next to an overseas professor once at a conference dinner, someone who is a good friend of mine, we were having a lively conversation when he snuck into the conversation a question about a professor we both knew. Being suitably lubricated with alcohol and talking, as I thought, to a friend, I told him my views. The next day he came clean this person was being looked at by an institution he was involved with. I was livid. I felt I had had been tricked into an openness I would never have expressed if formally asked my views, and I told the person that my views obtained under these circumstances should be disregarded. Of course, comments once heard cannot be forgotten, asking for them to be disregarded is unlikely to mean they are struck through mentally, although I was subsequently reassured other people’s views had coincided with mine. But imagine life where you couldn’t dissect colleagues over a glass of wine with a friend in case your remarks were going to be used in a more official capacity at a later date – it could become very boring!

I may feel my comments are always justified, whatever the circumstances, I hope I never make malicious or in some sense unsubstantiated remarks. But they may still be personal remarks about character rather than purely professional statements, and hence bound to be more subjective even if still highly relevant to many roles. But I can see another aspect to this issue. The men who say of women they aren’t, for instance, tough enough to cope with some role because they (quite possibly unconsciously) assume that women simply cannot do some task merely because they are a woman. The remark may be made with the best of intentions, perhaps protecting the sweet little woman, but…..the damage may be done on totally unreasonable grounds. Is that so different from what I personally feel justified in saying about individuals (of either sex)? I would like to think it is, but it may sometimes be hard to know where the line is being drawn.

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 14 Comments