Will ARIA Sing?

Posted on February 21, 2021 by Athene Donald

The much trailed UK version of ARPA now has a name, and it’s not BARPA or UKARPA, it’s ARIA: the Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Not, note, Innovation but Invention. Is this going to be an important distinction or simply permit the old trope of ‘Brits are good at inventing but not making money’ to come to the fore again? Before this week’s formal Government announcement, the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology had already published its Report on the proposal, initially announced in the 2019 Queen’s Speech. If I were to paraphrase their report, I would say this group was a bit suspicious of what the agency might be for and what it might look like, stating:

“It is strange that more than a year after its inclusion in two successive Queen’s Speeches, the Government has not clearly articulated the need for, or intended remit of, the proposed agency. To date, it seems to be a brand in search of a product.”

And, indeed, the announcement this week still leaves wide open what the remit will be. With £50M initially on the table (out of a committed total of £800M in the years ahead), it is clear that it will need specifically to identify one or two target areas, at least in the first instance; the field cannot be left undefined and it would be unwise for the money to be salami-sliced across different challenges. However, to date there is no ‘customer’ explicitly identified, unlike DARPA in the USA for which the Defence Department (and hence the D in its name) is key, so what areas are likely to feature is totally unclear. The remit is still to be narrowed down.

The intention is that this agency will be distinguished from other funding sources by focussing on ‘high-risk, high-reward scientific research’. In other words, just like DARPA as spelled out carefully in the book by Sharon Weinberger The Imagineers of War, failure will be a necessary part of ARPA’s success. If there are no failures, then the funding decisions will turn out to have been too conservative. That attitude does not necessarily apply more widely!

However, aside from not having specified the remit of ARIA, there are also, as yet, no details of how it will operate structurally. DARPA has operated by giving programme leaders – selected for their vision and technical expertise – much freedom in selecting the teams that get the funding, by bringing together researchers (academic and industrial) into groupings to fulfil some identified and ambitious goal, a moonshot as it were. So, the two key ingredients are visionary programme managers and funding delivered to teams brought together for a specific purpose. It is not about funding individuals (as with much UKRI funding, or the ERC), nor funding long-standing collaborations. Innovation may require significant disruption to break some persistent logjam or to think the unthinkable.

This world of ARIA should recognize the importance not just of failure – and be willing to embrace it – but also of this disruption. And at this point it seems to me it is key to recognize that this means diversity in the broadest sense. Boardrooms around the world are waking up to the fact that diversity can lead to better profits because moving away from group-think, the traditional behaviours of an established customer base and managers who may all resemble each other, it is possible to bring new perspectives that open up products and markets. A US study last year of diversity and inclusion among S&P 500 companies concluded

“Diverse and inclusive cultures are providing companies with a competitive edge over their peers.”

How does this translate into innovation in science and technology research?

The evidence here is that diversity – in the sense of encompassing the work of minorities ­– again plays a major role in innovation.  A study in PNAS of over a million US doctoral theses (so here it is the diversity background of individuals which is being considered, not teams) over four decades showed that underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty, according to the specific methodology used. This, you might think, would lead to highly successful future careers for these minorities, but this was not the outcome, as is probably rather obvious. On the contrary, novel outputs from racial minorities and women (typically the minority gender) were less likely to be cited and built upon by others. It has been well documented that women’s research gets fewer citations (see e.g. last year’s report from the Royal Society of Chemistry on gender bias in publishing) and the penetration of the work – for instance to lead to innovation in products – will therefore also be reduced, with subsequent consequences for careers. The PNAS study suggests this is equally likely to be the case for racialised minorities, with ensuing negative consequences for their careers too. However, not only their careers, but innovative developments, exactly what ARIA intends to aim at.

So, the evidence suggests, if you rely on the dominant group – typically white men – to drive innovation, you may be making a fundamental mistake. I hope that as ARIA gets going, it will create structures which enable those who make decisions about who gets the money to be visionary in many different ways, not least in looking beyond what one could call the ‘usual suspects’. This isn’t simply a matter of justice; the evidence suggests innovation will be more likely to arise if a wealth of perspectives is brought to bear on whatever target(s) are selected for funding rounds.

It will be interesting to see how the ARIA landscape unfolds, as the plans for this potentially exciting new agency crystallise and as – it is to be hoped – it finds, to quote the Select Committee, the product of which it is the brand.

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The Politics of White Lab Coats

Posted on February 13, 2021 by Athene Donald

Everyone knows what a scientist looks like. The species is easily identifiable because they wear a white lab coat wherever they go. It is almost as if, if you don’t wear a white coat you can’t be a serious scientist, in the eyes of the media. It was noticeable, on this week’s International Day for Girls and Women in Science, how few women (and girls) posted selfies of themselves so attired to prove their credentials as the bonafide scientists they were. Bobble hats a-plenty, but most eschewed the purported ‘uniform’. I don’t blame them.

Google ‘scientist image’ and you have to go through 19 images before you come to one that doesn’t involve a lab coat. And that is of an elderly Einstein, who probably (as a theorist) never in his life went near such an item of clothing – but of course the other frequently cited attribute of a scientist, that of sticking-up hair, is naturally present. That image is then followed by several more tens of images involving lab coats, plus a couple of historical images. It is true that there are far more women to be spotted in these images than a web search of a few years ago would have thrown up, but it is depressing that this is what is meant to convey ‘scientist’.

lab coat

When, more than ten years ago now, I won the 2009 L’Oreal/UNESCO Laureate for Europe award and publicity required a series of photographs to be taken by an eminent French photographer (Micheline Pelletier), it was a lab coat that was required (and purple disposable gloves too, another common part of the scientist’s uniform), as you can see. This was the photo that adorned the back page of Le Monde and the L’Oréal building in Hammersmith. Or rather, a suitably cropped version of it. Interestingly, the foreground containing the carrot and the potato were cut out. As a side issue you might wonder why they were ever introduced. The answer is simple: I have indeed carried out research on both. As the lay citation said, I was awarded the prize “For her work in unraveling the mysteries of the physics of messy materials ranging from cement to ice cream.”  – but it might as well have said from potatoes to carrots.

The reality is, of course, I hadn’t worn a lab coat for years. At the start of my career, yes I did wear one, and it was just as well I did. In those days, when I worked on metals not polymers, I had occasion to use a lot of orthophosphoric acid. This, it turned out, is very efficient at making holes in textiles (as I said in a recent post, I was a ham-fisted researcher, and too much acid fell on my person rather than doing the job it was meant to be doing of etching small copper discs). My lab coat ended up quite perforated. I was just glad it was that – supplied by the department – and not my own clothes, given the tight budget I was living on.

Why do I raise any of this now? It is noticeable that in recent days, our very own Prime Minister has adopted this uniform (e.g. here) to prove just how close he is to science and the scientists – almost one of them, you might say – and to prove his association with the production of vaccination. The PM carrying crates of vaccine, watching a vaccination or walking around a hospital – always wearing a white lab coat. In the early days of the pandemic we heard a lot from him and his ministers about being “guided by the science”, sometimes even “led by the science” or “following the science”, but he wanted the voters to believe science and scientific advice sat at the heart of his actions, whether or not that was actually the case. Increasingly it became clear that it often was not, with politics and/or the economy being even closer to his heart.

Having discovered last summer that those were phrases that were getting just too indigestible and so backing away from anything about science, the success of the vaccination roll-out seems to mean he feels it’s safe to get close to science again. And hence, provoking a plethora of photo opportunities for him dressed up to resemble a ‘scientist’, whether or not it’s an accurate portrayal. After all, he has pledged – on various occasions – to make the UK a ‘scientific superpower’ now that we have left the EU. To that extent we, the scientific (in the widest sense) community, should be grateful that he has agreed that the UK can sign up to Association with the EU for Horizon Europe.  This has the potential to make a big difference to the community, or at least not remove something that we have enjoyed, in all senses of the word, for many years.

We, the community, need to make sure this wished-for association status does not come at the expense of the previously promised uplift in spending on science; that when the Treasury finally produces its five year Comprehensive Spending Review, the money attributed to Horizon Europe (which, in previous Framework Programmes would have been simply absorbed in the overall contribution to the EU Budget) does not suddenly appear in the science budget, removing at least some of the ‘new’ money which all the headlines have implied will be forthcoming. That money needs to be additional not substitutional.

I am very glad the Prime Minister does recognize the importance of science. Daily, the whole country has reason to be grateful to scientists and clinicians in all kinds of ways. However, how many of our politicians really understand words like evidence, hypothesis-testing or modelling? I fear not as many as we need, whether or not they are dressed up in white lab coats.

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Who Has Authority Here?

Posted on February 7, 2021 by Athene Donald

Jackie Weaver may have become an internet sensation due to her calm handling of a bunch of unruly local councillors, but the behaviour manifest in the viral video is one that many a chair of an academic committee will recognize. Online calls do offer the opportunity to mute tiresome and aggressive members (not a tactic I’ve been reduced to using, at least yet), or despatching them to the virtual waiting room (as she seems to have done), but in person calmness in the face of a vitriolic storm is definitely required.

Over the years I have had the misfortune to watch many committees turn into extremely uncomfortable experiences for all but the minority engaged in bullying, harrumphing, table-thumping, waffling and dog-in-the-manger behaviour who were presumably too worked up to notice their impact on others (or simply didn’t care). Chairs themselves may not be immune to bad behaviour, as I described several years ago. Having just reread that post I stick by what I said about how not to chair a meeting.

As a committee member, you may well go into a meeting knowing you are likely to disagree with others, possibly even the majority. This is a situation I have always found challenging because knowing in advance that things are likely to go astray, does not mean that you’ve worked out how to be effective in the face of that opposition. I well remember one situation like this, where I suspected myself and Professor X would be on opposite sides. And so we were and it turned into an embarrassing spat. It was described afterwards to me by an observer as of the variety of ‘he did’…’no he didn’t’….not a very constructive exchange. Simply contradicting someone is going to be insufficient to convince others of a different mindset without more nuanced arguments and a body of evidence. On this occasion, I don’t think either of us lost our cool, but it will nevertheless have been an unedifying spectacle for the others in the room, who were less immediately involved and probably not caring very much about the issue anyhow.

However if, as a chair you are faced with the red-faced blusterer trying to dominate, or at least throw you off track, what tactics – beyond the Zoom mute – are available to you? Keeping calm is definitely one of them, as the video of Jackie Weaver demonstrated nicely, but it’s not always easy. Personalities matter, and if you know Professor Bloggs is liable to make a fuss in a pedantic way, or lose their temper, you may be trigger-ready to explode yourself as soon as they open their mouth. I’m afraid I know I may internally be guilty of this occasionally, but hope I’ve learnt by now not to exhibit my reaction quite so transparently as in the past. Over the years I have tried a variety of tactics. Sometimes they even work.

I have upon occasion albeit rarely, told someone politely that the room has heard their views – as they set off on the nth iteration of the same argument – and we need to hear other people’s thoughts. This is a pretty damning thing to do, and it does cause deflation on the few occasions I’ve gone this route, but it remains polite but firm. It may be helpful, if you are going to go on working with this person (as in a department where your paths will endlessly cross each other) to go up to them after the meeting with a quasi-apology

‘I’m sorry I felt I had to do that, but we did need to get a wider set of opinions aired’.

So far, that hasn’t provoked a complete breakdown in relationships!

It is worth thinking about what is the non-Parliamentary equivalent of ‘order, order’, the words both Betty Boothroyd and her successor John Bercow used to such good effect as Speaker of the House of Commons. Advance thinking may mean your own choice phrase will come easily to mind as required. When Professor X starts hurling insults at Dr Y, intervention is definitely needed. A good chair should be able, without really raising their voice, to point out the inappropriateness of the behaviour and – if it is basically a wholesome committee not simply stuffed with other bullies – the feel of the room should be able to bring the whole discussion back from the brink. Nevertheless, even when this is done, the net effect can be miserably bruising and unhelpful for the whole dynamic. Letting the insults continue is worse.

I still clearly remember being on the receiving end of Professor X when I was a mere Dr Y, and no one intervened. It was as if no one else noticed I had just been accused of not knowing what I was talking about by someone who certainly knew less. It took me a long time to get over this, made worse by subsequent matters. Talking to my appraiser about the situation I was told that Professor X was still waiting for me to apologise. They had a long (i.e. infinite) time to wait, but why the boot was put on that foot I never understood. Maybe my sin was being the lesser mortal.

That is of course how bullies get away with things. They make others fear and side with them and it is imperative a chair does not let matters get so out of control. In this case, Professor X – who I subsequently went on to have an entirely constructive working relationship with in later years – was not a bully. They were simply someone who lost their temper (when losing an argument) and hurled an insult at someone, me, who was standing in their way. But I hold the chair responsible for not intervening and diffusing the situation at the time.

‘I think that is uncalled for’

or

‘you’re entitled to your opinion, but not everyone necessarily shares it’,

perhaps, would have prevented the issue festering in me as badly as it did.

Table-thumping, because it is such an overt and explicit action, is easier to deal with.

‘We won’t have any of that in this room please’.

Tears are best just ignored. Whereas table-thumping is often a deliberate tactic in an attempt to dominate a situation, tears are usually unsought and embarrassing to the person concerned.  That’s not to say tears can’t be used manipulatively. Of course they can, but in my experience I’ve only ever seen that tactic used in 1:1 situations, and very unattractive it is too. I don’t respond well to it myself, although there may be complex gender dynamics at play which means it works for some people in some situations.

A chair has to retain control. If tempers get loose, if language gets nasty, the only thing to do is to stop it before it gets out of control. As far as I followed the Jackie Weaver video, the problem was that it was largely the chair misbehaving and who then got thrown out of the room (virtually). Dealing with a miscreant chair, who abuses their position and starts shouting, is of course a very different and more difficult challenge. It only works if there is a well-established cohesive group who collectively will take the chair on to wrest control. A tricky situation for which a virtual waiting room may be far more effective than anything that can be done in person.

 

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In Praise of Technicians

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Athene Donald

I was a very ham-fisted PhD student. I repeatedly broke a delicate and crucial piece of apparatus during the early months of my research, to the extent that I almost quit the whole endeavour and withdrew from the labs for a couple of weeks while I contemplated my future. I was to a large extent ‘saved’ by the skills of the workshop technician, who would smile as I entered the workshop holding the mangled piece of apparatus (a ‘tilting cartridge’ for the electron microscope) and a day or two later return it neatly reassembled and ready for use. I can still remember his positive attitude towards my incompetence; he never showed any sign of the irritation he probably felt.

Many years later, twenty perhaps, when I was running my own research group as part of a larger endeavour in Cambridge, we were interviewing for a technician, skilled in workshop work but also more broadly supporting the research group. The person we hired, eminently well-qualified but recently made redundant by a local firm who was shrinking its workforce, turned out to be the son of my early acquaintance. Like father, like son, they were both wonderful people who made so much difference to the way research could be done. In due course I attended the funeral of the father, not least to support the son.

By the time we hired the son, I was long removed from my own hands-on research, but my students used his skills in the design and production of cells for carrying out synchrotron experiments. Sometimes, I feared, they abused his goodwill by their demands and, perhaps inevitably, leaving their request for urgent work till the last moment; synchrotron beamtime is rigidly assigned so timing was crucial. He was the one who knew which kind of seals worked best to stop leaks from the cells, or which metal combination gave the best thermal contact but without mechanical distortion at temperature. The students, typically, just wanted to analyse the results, but these would not have been forthcoming without the input of this experienced technician.

We don’t celebrate all that technicians do, often without even local appreciation or recognition, nearly enough. I am delighted that the Royal Society has today joined many other organisations already signed up, in signing the Technician Commitment.  As their tagline says, technicians make it happen. The Commitment ‘aims to ensure visibility, recognition, career development and sustainability for technicians’. This is definitely something that leadership in research organisations should be bearing in mind.

It has been encouraging to hear Ottoline Leyser, in the first six months of her time as UKRI’s CEO, stress in various speeches that it’s the entire team who play a crucial part in the production of novel results and that the PI alone should not be feted with accolades, as if they acted in splendid isolation. We will wait to see how she changes the incentive system in our universities – or how she creates an atmosphere in which the universities themselves change them – so that this laudable vision becomes reality.

The technicians I have employed over my career have been wonderful, understated individuals. Those we employed as chemical safety technicians tended to have degrees, the mechanical workshop technician I referred to above, who must have worked in the group for twenty odd years, had (if I recall correctly) an HND qualification. He got infrequent increments of pay, but there was no obvious career structure for him or his like. This is an issue which the TALENT programme is very much focussed on. It is led by a consortium of eight universities making up Midlands Innovation, working with stakeholders and industry partners. Funded by a £3M grant from Research England plus contributions from its partners, it seeks to highlight the crucial role technicians play in research and innovation and improve their lot, including career progression. With the recent White Paper on Skills, and the focus on sub-degree qualifications (levels 4/5), there should be scope for a better pipeline of skilled technicians looking ahead.

But, why should those leaving school or further education consider such roles if there is no likelihood of career progression? It is important that the employers give more thought to this, despite the challenge that many technicians (in universities at least) may be employed on fixed-term grants, a problem for the research group as well as the individual. Long term funding of technicians, supported by the university itself, or at least the department, are less common than they were when I set out on my research career.

Alongside this work with the universities and other stakeholders, a TALENT Policy Commission, chaired by Sir John Holman, has also been established. I am delighted to have been asked to join this body.  This Commission will be looking at the future technical skills needs of UK higher education; there has been very little research directed at this question over the years. The Gatsby Foundation has made it clear they believe there will be a shortfall of technicians, not least because of an aging cohort and insufficient numbers entering their ranks. Back in 2016 they reported that 700,000 more technicians would be needed across all employers (i.e. not just the university sector) within the next decade to satisfy demand. Without a sufficient supply we can expect to see a direct impact on the success of higher investment in research and innovation, particularly if the skillset of those employed in technician roles is not moving fast enough with the shift towards digital technologies and a need for familiarity with data science.

As the 2016 Gatsby report said, technicians are the backbone of the economy. Equally, they are a vital part of university research teams. Both these facts are too often overlooked.

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A Throwback to Years Gone By from the Government

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Athene Donald

Back in 2019 the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Advertising Standards Authority published new guidelines about the problems of gender stereotyping in advertising. The guidelines are clear: ‘These rules state that ads ‘must not include gender stereotypes that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence’. A wide variety of ads since then have fallen foul of the rules and have been banned. Unfortunately, the Government seems unaware of any of this, and managed to produce a spectacular own goal of a poster on social media, which produced howls of derision and anger.

Gov ad

The first image of these four seems simply homely, and of course it is entirely reasonable that a woman holds a baby, reads a book with her children or does some cleaning, as long as a) that is not all she does – why is she not on a Zoom call or reading a novel – and b) the man is equally expected to be pulling his domestic weight. In these last three images men are simply absent. Are the boys down the park playing football and the men headed off to the pub, breaking all the guidelines? Have they been too keen on being strong men, like the Dominic Cummings of this world, and run off to test their eyes? That somehow the men and boys are allowed out, while the women stay at home with the kids?

It seems extraordinary that the gender stereotypes implied by these images were invisible to the layers of designers, checkers and signers-off who must have let this image pass all the stages of production. Did no one (male or female) stop to think how unsuitable these were. We all need to stay home, pull our weight in the challenges of domestic lockdown and think about the NHS. Why should men be somehow absent from the daily life of the home. The poster is as insulting to the man who is getting on with the cleaning, the childcare or the colicky-baby-holding, as to the woman who sees, yet again, her role in society reduced to domestic slave. The world has moved on. Most of us may currently not be worrying about power-dressing (at least from the waist down), or running late for the train, but men and women will be juggling the competing tensions of home and work while struggling to find a place to Zoom quietly for that call with the boss.

Unfortunately, that advertisement says a lot about attitudes to society in the present political leadership. The current minister for Women and Equalities is Liz Truss, and it is a subsidiary role to her primary focus as Secretary of State for International Trade. I tried to recall what pronouncements I recall her making on these subjects, and failed. I did remember her making some fairly (and probably overly) optimistic comments about a trade deal with Japan towards the end of last year. But have I heard  her talking about the challenges facing ethnic minorities due to their higher death rates from Covid19, or worrying about the consequences of lockdown for those trapped in a small dwelling with an abuser? Well, no. Or has she spoken up about the financial consequences for women whose juggling has been too much for them, and they have lost their job? Not a sound that I recall. So I did a quick Google to see what I had missed, but that didn’t throw up much relevant to this post.

We should not be leaving it to the Fawcett Society or the wider Twitter world to scream about the inappropriateness of an official communication. Its message is important and should be heeded by us all. But to let the artwork destroy that message by stupidity, blindness and laziness is a shocker.

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