That Was the Year That Was

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Athene Donald

2020 is a year we are all likely to want to forget, and yet it is likely to be unforgettable. Some can make a little joke about that

For others, such as renowned professor of primary health care Trisha Greenhalgh, frequently in our news feeds, there is nothing remotely funny to celebrate. Her tweet was so poignant it stuck in the mind (but I don’t include the full tweet, which included a photograph, as that seemed too intrusive):

Goodbye Mum.
You died of Covid-19, days before you were due to be vaccinated.
You told them to give the ventilator to someone else.
I said a FaceTime farewell from a hospital car park.
You will have a Zoom funeral.
You are 2020.

Thanks to the devoted, exhausted #NHS staff.
— Trisha Greenhalgh

For all of us, life has been totally upended. It takes time and effort to think of anything good that has come out of this pandemic year. Highpoints for me include

  • During the first lockdown, being able to walk down the middle of what is normally an incessantly busy Huntingdon Road. Walking not on the pavement was a good way to keep 2m+ away from any other walkers, although initially (when we were only allowed to exercise once a day) these were almost as thin on the ground as cars. This road – one of the main arterial roads in Cambridge, passing the historic centre of power at Castle Mound and thence north, a road of great importance through the centuries ­– was busy even when I was an undergraduate. Indeed, it was an even more dangerous road to cycle along then than now. In my undergraduate days there were no such things as cycle lanes, and no M11 or A14 acting as a quasi-bypass. Juggernaut lorries hurtled past us Girtonians, pedalling furiously for a 9am lecture (sixdays a week, I should stress,  for Natural Scientists like myself).
  • Seeing both a fox and a muntjac deer strolling around outside my windows in the College grounds when everywhere was so quiet. The muntjac turned up several times within a week, then was never seen again, presumably because traffic (foot or car) built up again to keep it where it normally lives. Foxes abound in the vicinity, they just don’t usually turn up a few feet from the window, or walk along the garden wall in broad daylight, probably hoping to come across some hapless bird’s nest.IMG_2388
  • The return of the majority of the students in October. Whereas a few had stayed throughout the summer, for a variety of reasons, the College felt incredibly quiet – no doubt contributing to the freedom with which the wildlife strolled around. But it was heartening when there was more of a buzz, despite all the necessary constraints. Who knows what will happen next? We await ‘instructions’ from the Government.

That’s not a great deal to celebrate at a personal level for an entire year, but for me – as for almost all the population I’d presume – it has been a bleak and miserable year, even if not (I’m one of the lucky ones) personally actively distressing. The pandemic has wreaked havoc with all our lives, ending some, shattering others; disrupting a generation of school children’s education, destroying businesses and jobs and wellbeing. Family ties are weakened when you cannot meet, friendships are put on ice. Some loved one’s faces will never be seen again.

You could argue it has been a good year for science – except ‘following the science’ is more a slogan than an instruction in some parts of our politicians’ brains. Nevertheless scientists, from epidemiologists to pharmacists, from modellers to public health experts, have been much in demand by the voracious media wanting to understand what is happening and what is likely to happen next. As Jim Al Khalili recently discussed, many scientists have willingly stepped up to the mark to talk about their work and the underlying concepts that are so important if we are to understand this virus and get it under control. But politicians not only literally have the purse strings, they also have control of what policies get implemented for good or ill. One great scientist, even thousands of them, are not going to solve the problem in the absence of leadership of the sort Jacinda Ardern has demonstrated, and 2021 looks set to start off at least as badly as much of 2020 in the UK.

Will the current generation of schoolchildren all grow up with a burning ambition to be scientists? Many arts and humanities scholars would argue that the Government has been pushing them into STEM for years, but it is possible that COVID19 will instil a desire to understand diseases and wider scientific matters even more effectively. Alternatively, will it encourage students to think more about public health, the burdens that cramped housing put upon the disadvantaged reinforcing inequality in our society, or the policies that would be required to make it conceivable for Test and Trace to work and for all contacted to be able to afford to stay in self-isolation as long as they should? These social issues are equally fundamental if a future virus is not to run rampant in the same way, or ever be allowed to get a good grip in our population in the first place.

On the other hand, perhaps these children and young adults will instead want to turn to hedonism (think 1920s society and its ‘decadence’), to spend all the money they’ve been saving over the past year or simply focus on simple things such as caring, family and friends. But there is a long time to go – deep into 2021 I fear – before anything even starts to settle down. The choices the next generation will make will remain obscure for some time to come. The choices the current political leadership are making, on the other hand, are obvious now and will reverberate for years.

 

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Memories of Trains

Posted on December 23, 2020 by Athene Donald

What a rubbish year this has been, on different fronts. We are in a far worse state than could conceivably have been imagined this time last year and, the start of vaccinations apart, there is little light visible to cheer us up over our rather solitary – given last minute Government instruction – Christmases. However, I was set off in an unexpected direction yesterday, by a tweet, which distracted me for a little while from the gloom and doom.

The tweet took me to a brief video montage (which can be found on You-tube) of passengers at London railway stations in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. The London in which I grew up; the stations I occasionally got taken to, in order to meet family or to head off to see them. These sights from the clips seemed very familiar (although I don’t think I ever went to Fenchurch Street). There were some striking observations:

  • The pollution. It is easy to think ‘nostalgia’ when thinking of steam trains, but stations were filthy places. The grime of a Kings Cross or St Pancras has long been swept away by generations of modernisation, but the air must have been foul. But then, these were the days of pea-soupers, so probably it all seemed quite natural. I certainly remember regularly walking to primary school in thick fog, and also returning from one summer holiday to find the coal fires had been replaced with gas, sometime after the 1956 Clean Air Act.
  • The clothes. A woman in a most peculiar hat particularly struck me, probably because I feel I can remember my mother in something very similar. However, most women I spotted with something on their heads in the videos were wearing headscarves, something else my mother certainly wore, as I did too, up till I was in my early teens, I would guess, and discarded them. No woolly ski hats common yet for men or women. I was surprised how few of the men were wearing hats, trilby’s in particular, no doubt because both my father and my grandfather always did, so that it seemed ‘normal’.
  • The (lack of) health and safety. In those days many, possibly most, of the trains had carriages for 8 or perhaps 10 people, with doors that opened straight onto the outside world, although increasingly designs were changing so that they led into a corridor running along the length of a carriage. Doors that could be opened simply with a handle, no waiting for the driver to press a safety switch once the train had come to a complete stop. Consequently, the clips showed many passengers had doors open as they came into a station and people alighting while the train was still moving.
    On London buses, likewise, one could hop on and off when in motion, and passengers did just that frequently. I can remember a school friend turning up at my house bruised and battered having fallen down when they timed that wrong. Even worse, I can remember opening a door of a train (when returning to Cambridge from London, so this would have been in the early ‘70’s) expecting it to be into a corridor, only to find it went straight outside. The train was going at speed. Luckily, I got myself in again safely and managed to pull the door shut, or I would not be writing this blogpost. Another passenger helpfully remarked I needed to be more careful, but otherwise I don’t remember much alarm being expressed by anyone, myself included. Health and safety gone mad is a useful derogatory phrase, but sometimes there is some point to it.

Glenfinnan Viaduct.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.5, Link

But of course, once one starts reminiscing and looking things up on Wikipedia (prompted, in this case, by that video) inevitably memories take one into strange places. Steam trains – Hogwart’s Express – Glenfinnan Viaduct, where the iconic footage was taken for the Harry Potter films, as well as the photograph shown here – and hence to memories of several holidays in Glenfinnan in the early-mid 1960’s. There I can visualise my father and grandfather, of course in their trilby’s providing little protection against the endless rain, my mother and I in headscarves (but not, I think, my sister). No steam trains on the West Highland line by then, it was diesels between Fort William and Mallaig, a trip we would make regularly. The line was single track – just as was the so-called ‘road to the isles’, with infrequent passing places making for hair-raising trips by car – and I was fascinated by the ease with which driver and station manager would exchange tokens between platform and moving train to demonstrate the line ahead was clear and safe to enter.  Was I thinking with my nascent physicist’s mind about relative velocity when watching this transaction? At 10, I rather doubt it.

I have vague memories of a haunting story of a horse and cart falling into a pillar of the Glenfinnan Viaduct during construction. In my childhood memory I associated a man driving that cart as falling in too. A quick Google shows that the story in outline is true, but in fact it did not occur at Glenfinnan (but at the Loch Nan Uamh viaduct nearer Mallaig) and no man seems to have been involved. The wonders of careful scientific experiment in 2001, using radio waves to penetrate several feet of stone, managed to locate the horse’s skeleton and so corroborate the basic story.

Occasionally, returning from a day out in Mallaig, we would indulge – at the exorbitant sum of 2/6d, if I recall correctly – in sitting in the Observation Car, a great treat to give us panoramic views of the hills, perhaps the occasional deer or buzzard (however hard we tried to turn them into golden eagles). Rhododendrons had not yet taken over the hillsides. However, that is inaccurate. We took the train to Mallaig, not to spend the day there walking around smelling the kippers, a key industry at the time (sorry to mention fish at this delicate time in Brexit negotiations), but to catch boats to the Inner Hebrides. As far as I was concerned, the rougher the weather the better in these little vessels, although lashing rain could make it unpleasant and hard to focus on the birdlife we wanted to look at.

Twitter is a wonderful way to waste time, useful though it can also be, not least because of all the rabbit holes down which one can disappear, on this occasion prompted by that cliché Memory Lane. Still, we need good memories to get us through the current darkness and so I shall hold on to them while I wait for life, eventually, to return to something one might imagine one could call normal.

 

 

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Why Unicorns Aren’t the Answer

Posted on December 15, 2020 by Athene Donald

I’ve railed against pinkification, and the ‘gift of pink’ in the past – especially at this time of year when presents, notably toys and clothes, are to the fore for Christmas purchase. I hadn’t realised that books, too, come with gender neatly attached from an early age, not just toys and clothes. Amazon at least wants to direct grandparents like myself to different pages, and different sorts of books, depending on whether your grandchild is born with one X chromosome or two. It’s bad enough that they do it at all, worse when you look at their suggestions. Just as advertisements for toys stress power and battle for boys, magic and love for girls, there is something of a similar divide when it comes to books.  On the front page of suggestions for five year old girls you can find out a surprising amount about unicorns, as well as Fantastically Great Women who Changed the World and also a book about girls who like to fart and short stories to develop ‘girls’ confidence, friendship and happiness’. Quite a lot of the stories on this front page do have female protagonists. The only book I can spot in common in the boys’ and girls’ lists is The Witch’s Cat and The Cooking Catastrophe: A fantastical tale of magic, mischief and mishap! Good that boys are directed towards cooking too, even if only to prove that cooking doesn’t always work out right.
unicorn(I’d like to caption this book cover ‘how not to be a girl’ since cuddling a non-existent animal does not appear to me to provide any useful life-skills. It’s not even a very good rendition of a unicorn, which is what it purports to be on the cover of the book.)

However, boys of this same age, also get offered books relating to poo, a detective dog and several joke books.  But, as a scientist, what I find most disturbing is that the boys – but only them – also get offered some books undoubtedly aimed at a kid who wants to learn more about the world around them, with a book on planets and another on discovery. Why are these not deemed suitable for girls? What is it that prompts Amazon to segregate books in this way?

I’d been mulling this topic for a couple of days, without getting beyond writing a few lines, but today’s release of the Fawcett Society’s Report of the Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood, Unlimited Potential, really brings home the dangers implicit in such segregation. Their report highlights that booksellers are not particularly bad in the way they segregate their offers (at least not compared with toyshops and clothing, Amazon apart as they specifically mention), but the actual content of the books is more of an issue. A child is, according to the Report, 1.6 times more likely to read a book with a male lead, and seven times more likely to read about a male villain than a female one. I’m not really in favour of encouraging girls to break the law, but a bit of rule-bending never came amiss during growing up, so girls need to know they can do that just as well as the boy next door. Why do we need to divide a messy world so neatly into this binary distinction?

The report spells out many areas in which this divide impacts on child development and growth. This isn’t simply a case of some snotty female scientist on her usual high horse making a fuss, the fact that boys aren’t encouraged to talk about their feelings or cry when they are hurt – morally or physically – would seem directly to feed into the higher suicide rate amongst young men than women. Girls on the other hand, with their steers towards worrying about their bodies more than their brains are the ones to suffer eating disorders as their body changes shape and they start hitting the mating game. These aren’t healthy directions for boys or girls, men or women. Right now, when conditions around the pandemic mean that well-being is more than ever on our lips and in our minds, we should recognize the problems our society creates for all, with their roots starting in the earliest years.

Booksellers are just a bit-player in this context in our society, representing only a small part of the delivery of messages relating to how our young grow up facing the world. The Fawcett Society make it clear the overall responsibilities are shared amongst many. A particular finger is pointed at the Department for Education (DfE) to do more to support practitioners, through training and CPD, to counter stereotypes in the classroom. Teachers are apparently supportive of this, even of there being regulatory oversight to check it happens. Another recommendation is that those professions associated with early years’ care and teaching should have their status raised through appropriate pay, training and qualifications for their workforce. If girls in nurseries weren’t directed to the dolls and boys to the bricks then who knows what changes would be consequent in later years? Story book publishers and educational resources are encouraged to make sure gender stereotypes are not reinforced, with challenges provided in their pages to prevailing norms.

The DfE is also recommended to pilot interventions to see ‘what works’ in countering stereotypes, so that those that do can be rolled out more widely. It certainly isn’t sufficient to focus attention solely on secondary schools – as, for instance, is often done both in the UK and their equivalent in the USA – for instance to try to get more girls into physics. The evidence is that ideas about what is ‘possible’ for girls and boys set in extremely early, as in the study which showed that by age 6-7 girls believe that it’s boys who are ‘really, really smart’ not girls, and consequently they avoid games that require the smarts. Interventions must start early. At home, in the media, through play and, of course, through every interaction with both their parents and other adults, children learn what their place in the world is, or at least seems to need to be.

If we want all our children to develop their full potential, lead rich lives, and feel able to express their emotions, their creativity and their imagination across the full gamut of human endeavour, we need to stop putting them in gender strait-jackets. Our Christmas gifts should reflect our own diversity and our dreams for them to become exactly the person they were born to be, not the one society imposes on them.

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The Need for Bounce

Posted on December 6, 2020 by Athene Donald

What would you feel if someone described you as a ‘demoralised pile of pulp’? I was distinctly taken aback by this extreme phrase, describing myself – by myself. It referred to the ‘me’ I had been a year previous to the moment of writing, during the time I had been a spectacularly unsuccessful postdoc. The phrase turned up in one of a large pile of letters written to my mother – perhaps I wrote a couple of times a week when I was in the US; email had not yet been invented – which I had rescued from her house after her death four years ago. I’d read many of the ones (curiously also in her house) that she had written to me at different stages, but I hadn’t worked through most of my own. After all, I thought I knew what had happened to me.

However, those visceral words written at the time have to be more accurate than the memories of that period forty years later. My first postdoc was a disaster for all kinds of reasons, ranging from culture shock at arriving in the USA to a project that couldn’t turn out the way intended because the crucial equipment (the Cornell Synchrotron) was not yet ready. The electron microscopy project I did instead did not suit me, and personnel issues left me feeling stranded.  I was, in other words, a failure, completely lacking in motivation.

I read with interest the recent THE article touching on failure by Joe Moran, in which he says

‘A CV of failures is a sweet and generous idea. But still it relies on the redemptive arc that treats failure as something that can always be spun into success. CVs of failure tend to be produced by tenured scholars. They make their failures public to inspire their more precarious junior colleagues to shrug off disappointment and continue their ascent to the professional heights.’

I’m sure I’ve been guilty of using my personal failure as an indicator that it is possible to pick oneself up from a crash, although I don’t think I learned a great deal directly from the experience, including how to avoid a similar disaster again.   Instead, in the case of my postdoctoral experience, it was a change of project and supervisor that transformed me almost overnight. I have letters to my mother from that period too, which confirms the incredible speed with which I (finally) fell in love with research, and the papers started flowing. In the letter from which I quote above, I am reflecting that it is only a year since I was that demoralised pile of pulp, yet now people had started talking to me of an academic career. I was trying to get my head round that and its implications.

What I do think I learned from my failure was a recognition that researchers can struggle for all kinds of reasons which may have little to do with innate talent. I hope that has made me more sympathetic to struggling students over the years. It may well be that their skills are not well-suited to the uncertainty of research, or that a specific project is in some way – as it was for me – ‘wrong’, not playing to their strengths. The motivation may be lacking – perhaps because their extracurricular activities excite them more, be it being an amateur DJ or getting involved with Pint of Science or other interactions with the public. And if it is the latter maybe academia is the wrong career in which to use their science. There are so many ways in which a scientific training can be used, and pursuing the uncertain trajectory that is an academic career may be an entirely mistaken path for any given individual. I wish more would enter politics and policy-making, because I’d like to think recent decisions around the current pandemic would have been better judged if MPs actually knew what ‘following the science’ meant, and how evidence, risk and modelling could be wisely used.

However, while Moran is undoubtedly right that

‘Failure is not always the stepping stone to success’,

the ability to pick oneself up from failure is a skill we all can benefit from, whatever the nature of that failure and whatever we choose to do next. It does not mean that perseverance will necessarily get you to that prize you thought you were aiming at – e.g. a permanent academic position – will transpire, but it may mean you can enjoy whatever does come along. That is a lesson we need to (re)learn all through our life. That grant rejection – whatever position of eminence you have achieved – will always hurt; the editor who turns down your carefully crafted manuscript may come across as if they have just blighted your entire life. After one particularly painful career crash on my part, my husband wisely said ‘you never know what’s around the corner’ as he whisked me off to Southwold for some windy and cold but calming sea-watching. And he was right – even if it turned out to be something very different from what I thought I was aiming at.

Picking oneself up is, unfortunately, not a one-size-fits-all activity. Every crash, every failure, will have its own pain, knock-on effects and way past or through. What got me through breaking delicate equipment early on in my PhD, causing me to walk away from Cambridge for a couple of weeks while I contemplated whether I wanted to keep on battling, was very different from what kept me going following my rejection by my department when it decided it didn’t want me to be their head.  What kept me going during those first two disastrous post-doctoral years at Cornell was, in part, nothing less than I needed a job to cover my visa while my husband completed his PhD (which was also the reason for finding a further postdoc to keep me legitimate during its third year). It was not great strength of character or having cracked the resilience barrier.

Resilience is a lesson one constantly has to relearn, perhaps now during dark, foggy and cold early winter pandemic days more than ever. Coping with current uncertainty, the lack of normal human contact – including literal contact in the form of familial hugs as well as the pleasure of a gossip over a cup of tea or a scientific brainstorming session at a (physical) whiteboard – is tough for just about everyone. Finding conversation topics that aren’t Covid-related, Brexit-related or damning politicians around the world, seems a challenge. Jokes about how Zoom conversations can go wrong have lost any amusement value they may once have had. It isn’t quite like an everlasting replay of Groundhog Day, because changing Government regulations move the chairs around a bit to keep us on our toes, but it feels as if we’ll never get out of the recurring loop of breakfast, Zoom all day, supper, sleep, occasionally leavened by a moderate alcohol intake and a bout of some sort of exercise – ideally not concurrently. I hope you can all find your way through this mire. 2020 will be a year to forget, except that for most of us it will be unforgettable.

 

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Sex, Gender, Research and Fairness

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Athene Donald

It is a daily matter to look around a typical laboratory and note the imbalance of the sexes in different roles. In a lab using animals, there may be a fair number of female technicians, but the PI is more likely than not to be a man. In a computer laboratory, women are in short supply at all levels, despite the prevalence of women as ‘computers’ in the early days of the subject. Read Programmed Inequality by Mar(ie) Hicks for a stark description of how the roles of women, in what would now be called data science, were systematically downgraded and men were inserted at the top levels, for instance in the UK’s Civil Service in the 1950’s and ’60’s.

What about the sex of the animals being used? Or the cells? Too often these aren’t recorded. HeLa cells – derived from Henrietta Lacks originally, as described so vividly in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks –  are clearly female in origin. So, equally obviously, are another classic cell-line Chinese Hamster Ovary cells (CHO), but too often the sex of the cells and the animals used in life science experiments are unreported. Too often this may matter.

These issues have been highlighted for many years by Londa Schiebinger, leader of the Gendered Innovations project, as I’ve discussed before, and many of them have also been covered in Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women. In biology and medical matters, the importance of getting this right is clear. Many drugs have been tested on healthy, young male patients and on these alone. Indeed, sometimes it has been argued that women’s hormonal cycles make them unreliable for carrying out such trials, despite the fact that women will continue to have such cycles when using the drugs. The disaster that was Thalidomide unfolded sixty odd years ago, and yet the lessons still are barely learned. I don’t want to turn up at a hospital with a heart attack and be sent home because I’m exhibiting nausea, shortness of breath and dizziness rather than the ‘classical’ symptom of chest pain; but apparently the presentation of heart attacks may be different between women and men. That women have different problems, such as endometriosis, that get very little attention from the established medical profession, mean that they can suffer for years without a diagnosis.

The European Union, through its Horizon2020 programme, has insisted that applicants should ‘integrate, where relevant, sex and gender analysis into research content’, and it most certainly isn’t just in the area of life sciences and healthcare that these issues matter. A new report from Schiebinger’s project was released last week. Gendered Innovations 2: How inclusive analysis contributes to research and innovation. It contains a range of case studies ranging from facial recognition to fair taxation, from making urban planning fit for all to smart energy systems.

The ERC also, and possibly coincidentally, hosted a one day symposium on Sex and Gender Dimension in Frontier Research last week, again covering a wide range of topics. The videos of all the sessions can be found through the link to the conference. The session considering the importance of thinking about gender issues in algorithms and AI really struck home. There are so many ways in which designers are liable to introduce bias into programming that then lurks beneath the surface, perpetuating the failings of people. Failings that are probably easier to spot in real life than hiding in an algorithm, and yet even then they are frequently ignored. The issues about facial recognition software, and their failings in particular over identifying faces of those with darker skin colour, have been well-documented, including the dangers when used for profiling. Intersectionality – for instance in the case of women of colour – may compound these inherent problems.

But there are wider issues about data-driven decision making, problems which may arise from the initial data collection – are all genders and skin colours collected equally for instance – and also from the modelling based on that data, skewed or not. Additionally, biased assumptions may be made about what is ‘appropriate’, as in the case of the demographic targeting of advertisments by algorithm. Studies have shown, for instance, that women are less likely to be shown adverts for highly paid jobs than men and – although some improvements have been made – images for scientist etc on search engines were initially overwhelmingly white and male, typically of Albert Einstein.

Those involved in designing software packages, machine learning etc need to be constantly reminded that biases are subtle and pervasive. Policy makers also have a role to play in driving change. And it was for that reason that, at the end of the ERC day’s programme, I was asked to lead  a discussion with two MEP’s – Marc Angel (Luxembourg) and Lina Gálvez Muñoz (Spain) – the video of which can also be found at the conference site given above. I will admit I found conducting such a conversation via Zoom was a challenge. That platform didn’t lend itself well to the normal give and take of such a discussion, the more so as Marc had to absent himself on important Parliamentary business for part of the discussion, at which point the ERC’s Acting (and former) President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon joined us, sharing his experiences.

I do feel – as I’ve written before – that the ERC has itself set a sterling example of how to collect longitudinal data to examine gender statistics in their grant funding. The graphs below show how, after taking a variety of steps to ensure fairness at every stage of the process, success rates for men and women are (in Horizon2020) essentially indistinguishable, something that was certainly not the case in the earlier Horizon programme as can be seen. I feel the constituent parts of the UK’s main funder, UKRI have a way to go in ensuring they have both the data and the processes to demonstrate the same satisfactory endpoint. Over the years, the different Research Councils have been tardy in data collection and, as I wrote about recently, I feel collectively UKRI need to do more to reassure the community that their processes are both transparent and fair on a range of fronts.

Policy-makers and funders, as well as individual researchers, all have their own part to play in ensuring that sex and gender are appropriately fed into the design of cutting-edge research programmes, and that fairness in the award of such grants is maintained, with constant vigilance over each stage of any process.

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