Uncertain Times

Posted on July 21, 2020 by Athene Donald

We live currently in a world of great and sometimes terrifying strangeness, where the rules and customs by which we have lived for so long have been turned upside down. Some people may be focussing on whether they need to don smart shirts and make-up on their Zoom calls (the media seems very hung up on our changing dress code in the virtual meeting world), and others whether ‘science’ is going to get the blame for the unfolding crisis in the face of Covid-19.  As you might expect, I would be closer to the latter camp. I put ‘science’ in inverted commas since it isn’t ‘a’ thing, a unitary discipline which in and of itself contains all the answers. No, sadly not. There isn’t going to be a single way of tackling a disease that has, as fellow head of house and former Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies said at a meeting in Cambridge ‘upended the textbooks’.

This is not a disease which manifests itself in a single way, nor one whose course can simply be predicted, as those who had it apparently mildly but then have suffered protracted symptoms and after effects can attest. Epidemiologists and modellers are still trying to make sense of its progression through the population (and models are only as good as the information you can feed in and the assumptions you make); biomedical researchers are working flat out to come up with a viable and safe vaccine; and all of us have to make decisions each day about how to live our lives safely – for ourselves and for others.

The situation is uncertain, the ‘science’ is far from ‘known’, fixed and definitive. Around the world we are all battling the same uncertainties and it is crucial those without a scientific training are not misled into thinking that there is a unique right answer which will rapidly fall from the scientist’s lips and which will enable us all speedily to return to normal life. That this strange beast known monolithically as ‘science’ regardless of discipline (or possibly even ‘Science’, to give it appropriate gravitas with a capital letter) will suddenly provide a solution which enables us to put Covid back in its vinegar bottle and move on.

Thinking like this, I read with dismay the following sentences (written long before the pandemic) in Clarissa Farr’s mainly excellent, if slightly structurally contrived, book The Making of Her about her life as a headmistress at a leading private girls’ school. “If art helps us understand and express ourselves, helps us lead an ethical life through respecting and recognising the essential fragility of human nature, its exploratory nature also allows us to accept and live with the fact that some aspects of life are unknowable. In a world dominated by STEM, we are less comfortable with that which cannot be predicted and measure, yet so many of aspects of our lives are set about with uncertainty.”

As is so common with the media, this non-scientist who makes very clear throughout her book that she was a dunce at science and never cared for it as a pupil, is tempted to stray into seeing the world of education as a binary divide: STEM versus non-STEM. Worse, she believes that STEM subjects are all about certainty, fixed answers and the knowable as opposed to the unknowable, ineffable and creative domain that, to her, represents the arts and humanities. This false division of our education is a dangerous trap, made all the more treacherous in the current uncertain world in which scientists are barely allowed to say ‘we don’t know’. And, manifestly, we don’t.

The disease we are facing is new and hence inevitably unknown. We, the scientific community, may collectively have tools and frameworks in which to set to work to learn more of the virus’s secrets, but we know how much we don’t know. Scientists – unlike Farr’s beliefs – are comfortable with the uncertainty, of not knowing facts, because our job is to devise ways of discovering them. Science is not some cold, organised way of getting from A to B. Albert Einstein expressed it as ‘To these elementary laws there leads no logical path, but only intuition, supported by being sympathetically in touch with experience.’ Would Farr associate sympathy and intuition with scientists? I somehow doubt it. Of course, school science is not like research science. School science does tend to be taught as if the facts are all known, and as if there is nothing to be curious or creative about. But good school teaching should still be able to introduce the ideas of the amazing, the uncertain, the curious and the limitations of what we know. If we cannot instill these emotions in the student, we are failing.

Too many people believe like Farr that there is always a right answer and if a scientist can’t provide this, they are in some sense failing. This was as true in the days of ‘Mad Cow Disease’, when the science profession was hesitant to put a firm number on how many deaths would ultimately derive from the human version vCJD. More than ten years after the first death in the UK in 1995 as a result of this disease, scientists were still debating what the final tally of deaths might be. In fact, the second wave feared never seems to have materialised, at least as yet.  A politician can use the fact that scientists are understandably reluctant – when they lack hard facts and evidence – to give a precise number of future expected deaths (as I recall, the predicted ranges covered at least two orders of magnitude from the less than two hundred that have actually so far occurred to tens of thousands) – to suggest they are somehow incompetent. Not to ‘follow the science’, as we have heard so often in recent months, but to blame the science.

There is another interesting analogy between the current pandemic and Mad Cow Disease: the absence of test and trace. When a few animals were found to harbour the disease, via post-mortem brain studies, their calves were not initially tracked. They were instead allowed to breed further, thereby potentially spreading the disease across the farm population. There were those who, at the time, spoke up about keeping records – and they were ignored. Sound familiar? With Covid, things moved at a much faster rate in the (human) population, but this country did not follow others’ lead in isolating the early sites of infection. We are all now paying the price: literally and emotionally, if not with our lives, and almost certainly for years to come.

Politicians who don’t understand the science are too prone to do what is electorally convenient. It has not passed unnoticed that Germany, with a leader trained in science to PhD level, has performed significantly better in dealing with the current crisis. We, as a nation, suffer from a culture that makes science only suitable for alleged eggheads (and not for typical politicians), and which believes that science is some sort of monolithic, rigid set of rules that don’t teach us about uncertainty, or allow us to respond with compassion and flexibility. It is dispiriting to see our leaders and our education system failing us all, not least by casting science in this inappropriate light.

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Is Bigger Always Better?

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Athene Donald

Social distancing may have been reduced to 1(+)m – whatever that may mean – but that is still going to impose significant constraints on what a bench scientist can do. Fume cupboards in a line – how many of them can be accessed in a given session? How many shifts can you safely fit in during a day, with appropriate technical support to hand? How easily/safely can you clean a microscope between users, each of whom may only require a short time on the instrument? Can you train a new user to use some fancy piece of kit by Zoom and be sure they will have mastered all the intricacies so that the data gathered will have meaning?

Group leaders around the country will be pondering these questions – and many more of a similar ilk – as they try to reopen labs safely and ensure all their team can get back to the bench so the papers and theses can be put on track. There are many extremely anxious researchers anxiously waiting to get properly underway again. Theorists/computationalists will be in better shape. They may miss the evenings down the pub, the daily chatter and social contact that a departmental environment may provide scientists of most types, but they are probably – broadband permitting – still able to get on with their research. Zoom/Teams/Googlemeet (according to taste) works fine for exchange of ideas, even for sharing data or sketching diagrams (stylus or fat finger permitting), but I’m not convinced drinks (alcoholic or not) and chat over these same platforms offer great satisfaction. We are, after all, social creatures and human contact means more than viewing through a screen.

But, for experimentalists, the challenges remain severe. As labs start to reopen in Cambridge, the restrictions on who can enter a building to do their work remain substantial. So, which groups will find this hardest? And, if the coronavirus is not going away anytime soon, in the medium term, which groups will continue to be affected? In other words, can we get away from the fact that some large groups may find their students can’t get to the bench as often as anyone would like.

I would like to propose that – sticking with the adage not to waste a crisis – now is a good moment to think about whether bigger really is better. Journal impact factors – as a figure of merit – have become devalued, but group size and group income remain significant in decisions about people’s careers and, the tendency has been that bigger must mean more successful and therefore better. However, the evidence does not particularly back up that assumption. Maybe universities should reconsider policies at a fundamental level. Not just because of space limitations, not just because universities are going to be in financial straits and most research intensive universities have substantially relied on international students to cross-support their research teams, but also because the most original work does not, in practice, come out of the biggest groups.

Think about what is arguably the most successful lab in the country, Cambridge’s Laboratory for Molecular Biology, colloquially known as the LMB. I believe it has more Nobel prize winners than any other establishment (although not everyone would agree that that in itself is a useful figure of merit), but it has always restricted the size of group any group leader could operate.  Research also shows that small groups tend to be more innovative and disruptive, whereas large groups may do work that could be described as incremental. This finding may be seen as counterintuitive, since often large groups are conceived as being more productive, but I guess it depends on how you measure productivity: sheer numbers of papers written may be an inadequate measure.

It is also worth noting that the incoming UKRI CEO, Ottoline Leyser,also based in Cambridge and up till now Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory (studying plant biology) has recently told me that under her leadership this lab also sets a firm upper limit on group size. Maybe, as she takes up the reins at UKRI she will want to implement a smaller is better mantra across the funding bodies. She has a long track record of being concerned about well-being and support for researchers, and I look forward to seeing this awareness of the needs of the individual translate into policies around research culture that in turn translate into better support (pastoral rather than financial) for early career researchers.

I worry that large research groups allow bullies to flourish, because there is less oversight. The bully may be a fellow PhD student or postdoc who hogs equipment to the detriment of others; the one who sneers at someone because their first degree came from a ‘lesser’ university or exhibits egregious racist or gender attitudes in unseen ways. The bully may be the supervisor who expects a researcher to be at the bench 24/7 and refuses to admit that work-life balance has any place in a scientist’s life. But even without bullying, a large group may mean few opportunities for support, advice or mentoring to be given to each member individually.

I once had a postdoc who told me of his PhD supervisor who typically managed to catch up with him once a term. The trouble, I was told, was that the supervisor was so charming that all the list of grievances and problems stored up during that term were disarmed by the smile and words, without any rectification ensuing. That sort of charismatic remote figure is not particularly likely to deliver a useful training programme, albeit a layer of first-rate postdocs in the team might be able to substitute something of worth. Nor is such a group leader apparently giving any consideration to mentoring. In this particular case, once removed from his supervisor’s charm, the postdoc became very bitter about the treatment he had received and the lack of support.

Now, as labs reopen and thought must be given to how every group member can literally be fitted in, it seems appropriate to reflect on the larger existential question: is bigger really better for either science or the scientist?

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Echoes Down the Years of Education in a Pandemic

Posted on June 18, 2020 by Athene Donald

Recently, the Prime Minister announced an ‘apprentice guarantee’ saying ‘I think it’s going to be vital that we guarantee apprenticeships’.  Sounds good. How should that be translated into practice? Certainly, at the moment apprentices are having a tough time of it under the conditions of the pandemic, with businesses going under and on-site learning massively disrupted if not impossible in many industries. What might be better in the autumn?

I started to write a blogpost on this, wondering what, if the Government ever finds time to think about it, is going to be done about the Augar Review and Further Education Colleges. Philip Augar himself has written recently, the part of the Report recommending cutting university fees should not happen (at least as he originally suggested) ‘owing to the financial impact of the coronavirus crisis’, but that still leaves wide open all he wrote in his review about further and technical education.

However, the more I thought about it, the more bothered I got by the basic premises. Where should money be expended to make most difference? As I’ve written elsewhere, our current apprentice system does not compare favourably with some other countries. Germany, notably, has a far better system for these intermediate, vocational qualifications. Some of the apprentice schemes on offer currently in the UK really don’t advance careers effectively. However, more than that, most of the useful ones require a certain number of GCSE qualifications.

Then I started reflecting on a child’s early years. Some children are so disadvantaged at school, to achieve such GCSEs is well-nigh impossible without additional – and often not forthcoming – support. For instance, the evidence is there to show just how much difference there is in the fundamental area of vocabulary development, starting from the earliest years, for underprivileged children. A Department for Education’s report shows that by the age of three, the most disadvantaged children are already about 1 1/2 years behind more affluent children, and at five years around 40% of disadvantaged children have not reached the expected literacy standard for their age. If you don’t learn to read at the expected time, school life thereafter is bound to be a struggle and – almost certainly – unappealing. Education is not going to feel as if it’s ‘for you’. These early years are a vital foundation for everything that comes thereafter.

There are exceptions of course, people who manage to catch up despite appalling early years’ experience. Think of the extraordinary story of Tara Westover, documented in her book Educated, that I discussed here. Or the book I’m currently reading by Hashi Mohamed – a Somalian refugee who has become a barrister – People Like Us. A few people ‘make it’ but, as Mohamed spells out, it isn’t just about education but about much wider issues including cultural capital. Nevertheless, without education, much is closed off – although with it, that can still apply. It is for this reason that a college such as my own puts so much work into widening participation (severely limited by the pandemic right now).

Now we are in this cataclysmic pandemic, offering an apprenticeship guarantee is no quick fix for success. However, worse is to come. All the evidence shows that the ability of children in low-income families – maybe only possessing a single smart phone between the entire family and no laptop – to access lessons will have been severely limited. Contrast that with happy families in leafy suburbs whose parents can provide personal laptops with ready broadband, books, conversation….the attainment gap will only widen under these circumstances. The inequality we already can see so manifest is going to get worse. In five or ten years, those children who missed months of schooling and whose parents were in no position to home-school effectively or – through no fault of their own – enable access to what schools themselves may have been attempting to provide, are only too likely to ‘fail’ in all the targets the DfE may choose to set. University will seem an impossible dream, and even an apprenticeship – or at least a useful one – may be beyond their reach. Today’s ONS figures demonstrate how household inequality is growing due to the pandemic, and these figures too will echo down the years. The snapshot of today is not miraculously going to turn around as soon as social distancing ends.

There are so many places of failure in our education system. Universities are of course hugely vulnerable right now, despite the high prestige the UK higher education establishment has traditionally enjoyed. There is no sign of a Government ‘bail-out’ although the importance of scientific research – substantially carried out in university labs – is constantly referred to. If the promised uplift in funding for research and income is both forthcoming and maintained for years to come, where will the scientists, technologists and technicians of the future come through if we’ve lost a generation of talent?

Serious thought needs to be given to the fault lines in access and education the pandemic is exposing and how they can be counteracted in the months and years ahead, even though cash will be so tight. Education, access for all, needs to get much more attention than the odd day for the odd year group. I look at the losses to our present children and fear for their futures.

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Where’s Your Place in the World?

Posted on May 30, 2020 by Athene Donald

I don’t suppose there are many people in the country who currently feel grounded, confident they know how their lives will unfold and happy with that trajectory. At the moment, uncertainty seems the name of the game, responsibilities multiply and jobs – assuming you still have one – are changing radically. Not so long ago, wfh was an acronym that would have conveyed nothing and Zoom more usually meant camera shots than staring at a computer screen.

In lockdown, it would be nice to think I would have more time to read – think of all those journeys I’m not making, the cycle rides to the station and endless crowded tube trains. However, the reality is the day job does not cease. Rather, it seems on the contrary to be more intense and more difficult. However, I am finding a little time to dip into the book Clarissa Farr wrote when she stepped down as High Mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School, The Making of Her.

Her book ostensibly follows the school calendar, and so it starts with a chapter about starting the new academic year, specifically as a newbie. Of this period she remarks

‘a [more] fundamental and lifelong human need: to feel ourselves located, grounded, placed in relation to the world around us. To lack that – and sometimes in life if we are untethered from our moorings and face periods of confusion or loss – produces a feeling very like the homesickness we might recall from childhood.’

I don’t know how many of us feel homesick, it isn’t how I’d describe myself, but that feeling of being untethered is perhaps a more apt analogy, as each of us has to cope with new and unexpected circumstances. There is a loneliness in making difficult decisions with only a disembodied colleague on the screen to confer with; a loneliness of never meeting anyone beyond your household, which might consist of you and no one else; a loneliness from not being able to hug grandparents or, in my case, grandchildren. We are social creatures however much scientists may also – at times – work single-mindedly in a bubble of lengthy and isolated late-night lab sessions or hunched over pen and paper searching for the hypothesis that joins the data dots metaphorically together. All of us value company, friendship and a lightening of spirit through conversation and jokes.

What is our place in this brand-new world, and will things evolve back to where they were? I suspect most of us appreciate only too well that the ‘new normal’ in a post-COVID world (assuming we emerge into one any time soon) will not be BAU (an acronym it took me some time to work out meant business as usual, as opposed to the German for building when working my way through planning briefs). As an appropriately academic example, let me turn to the traditional Cambridge way of conferring degrees, with a clasping of hands of each individual graduand. This is not something it is easy to imagine being re-instated in the foreseeable future, if ever, however much the other parts of a ceremony in the Senate House may return in due course, once social distancing has become such a distant memory that a full cohort of students can process along the Cambridge streets and stand shoulder to shoulder in that building.

That is, in one sense, a trivial example, affecting such a tiny minority, but it is illustrative of how small, familiar and reassuring actions may vanish. Will the traditional ‘how-do-you-do’ shake of the hand of English society, already fading fast, ever reappear? Given that it has already tended to be replaced by hugs and air kisses, even in relatively austere circles, we will have to think of new ways of greeting: the elbow knocking that briefly became de rigeur in early March perhaps. We are without a social script going forward, adding to the sense of being untethered that Farr mentions in her book. Only here we are all newbies, fresh to the COVID world where there are none of us who knows the rules any more.

So, homesickness may not describe us, but perhaps nostalgia for a sort of lost innocence before every contact became suspect, including through the very air between us as we go about our daily business. Our lives are at risk in a way I, as an English native, have never had to fear before and the consequences for our mental health are significant. Anxiety dreams may be common to many of us, whatever illogical form they take, but the waking reality can be at least as disquieting, if more logical.

As businesses, universities included, work up their plans to come out of lockdown the tension between safety and ‘getting on with it’ is worryingly present. We each have personal responsibility to think of others as well as ourselves, whatever some highly placed people may choose to think, and many decisions cannot be taken unilaterally. I will not digress into a political diatribe, tempting though it may be, but every member of a community – as a Cambridge college would happily describe itself – will need to be aware of how their actions impact on everyone else around them. We need to find ways of instilling this new sense of shared responsibility into the community without the introduction of draconian measures.

How a lab can reopen requires one set of underlying principles, which will determine how many of any given research team can set foot in the lab at any time – and how all surfaces will thereafter be cleaned before another shift arrives. I am old enough to remember the days when library books had notices inside them about what to do if someone in the household who’d borrowed the book fell ill with a communicable disease (mainly measles and mumps, I suspect back then, as polio and smallpox were certainly on their final way out). As research gets going again, how will books be quarantined for researchers wanting to use a library when a digital version is not available? How will colleges provide catering for returning students without infringing social distancing for anyone? The questions are many. In my own university – as no doubt in all around the world – these questions are being urgently worked up; solutions are not always going to be obvious.

So, if my blogposts are comparatively infrequent, you can assume my brain is not only trying to adjust to whatever our new normal is, but also it is engaged in virtual meeting after virtual meeting, wrestling with some of these very problems. Simultaneously, I need to try to ensure that the general feeling of ‘knackeredness’ that my colleagues and I are getting more comfortable admitting to (that phrase seems now to be in common parlance, at least locally) does not get overwhelmed by anxiety levels high enough to disrupt my sleep. The challenges for all of us getting through these grim weeks is immense. I wish my readers success in finding ways to remain, as Farr put it, ‘located, grounded, placed in relation to the world around us’, and if that feels as yet impossible, at least to see some way back to your moorings in the not too distant future, with the help of some virtual friends Zooming away.

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Just Getting By: Coping and Learning

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Athene Donald

The pandemic is teaching each of us individually many things. Some may be things we might not want to know about ourselves: how resilient we are; how well we cope with four walls and a screen, perhaps with no other adult in sight; and how to stay optimistic in the face of global uncertainty. Other things may be more immediately useful. In that category I would certainly include mastering a range of different platforms for holding meetings, teaching, exams and just social chitchat. Personally I haven’t yet had drinks on a Google Hangout, but did do something similar with a few other heads of house over Zoom. I have also had to appreciate the complexities – and difficulties – of MS Teams when you have more than one identity, or perhaps I should call it affiliation.

That attending committee meetings (or indeed, any other kind of meeting) via Zoom is exhausting has been frequently remarked by many. Chairing a meeting over such a platform is indeed a challenge. All the things I’ve written about chairing meetings on this blog go west when body language is largely hidden (can you see that someone is tapping impatiently on the arm of their chair? No, of course not.) Nor is it easy to see who is trying shyly to contribute. Although the mechanism of a virtual Zoom hand raise is helpful, someone has to have sufficient confidence to activate that and not just sit there looking anxious and trying to catch your eye.

Indeed, I find knowing where best to ‘look’ is difficult, when the camera isn’t centre-screen but off at the top. You can’t really make eye contact, as another way of gathering subliminal messages. I’m afraid, however, that making eye contact is really most cheering when someone is rabbiting on endlessly and you want to share a conspiratorial smirk with a colleague who you know shares your views on said irritating colleague. That’s gone west. Anyhow, I really haven’t solved the lighting in my room. Sidelighting from the window whenever there is bright sunshine outside always puts half my face into deep shade which the miserable desklight I have cannot correct. Of course I could turn my ‘office’ metaphorically upside down and move my desk and everything else, but the ‘60’s built in bookshelf and desk makes that incredibly hard. A kitchen table might be easier for this specifically.

However, these new skills, such as they are, are likely to be needed for a long time yet. I remarked in my last post about the need to think much harder about the differential impact on careers for different groups of people. Since then, another carefully researched article has highlighted the pandemic challenges for academics working from home coupled with domestic responsibilities, highlighting women of course. Thinking harder about the skills we are needing to practice now and how value them on CV’s absolutely must be a focus of those drafting advertisements (when jobs finally start to appear again) and sitting on appointments or promotion panels when devising their criteria. I was interested to hear a discussion recently amongst university leadership concerning postdocs in different disciplines who had volunteered to help during the pandemic with e.g. testing facilities. The skills they were learning in order to operate, for instance PCR machines, may have little to do with their formal research projects, but surely they should get credit for good citizenry, diverse skills and – quite possibly – clearer thinking about logistics? The new normal we all know we are going to have to face, should include a radical rethink of what behaviours in an academic should be incentivised. Business as usual just won’t be good enough on this, as on so many fronts.

Logistics. A topic which this government appears to be struggling with. I am, in the spare time conferred by not travelling up and down to London as usual, working my way through Andrew Roberts’ massive and impressive biography of Winston Churchill. Reading of Churchill’s attitude towards waging war (I’m sure I’ve heard that metaphor used more than a few times in the case of COVID-19, although for Churchill it was only too literal), his eye for the smallest detail of naval positioning, the supply chains or scientific developments in radar or bombs, is obvious. Somehow we seem to have lost the ability to think through logistics adequately. Someone in my university suggested maybe we will need to think harder about setting up a future course in logistics to help leaders of tomorrow’s pandemic. Certainly, without former captains of industry – those who understand just-in-time manufacturing, or the need for local as well as national control – at the centre of decision-making, the supplies and testing so badly needed during these dark days are failing badly in the UK.

We all know these are dark days, days of fear, uncertainty and little sign of chinks of light in which we can believe. We have our good days and our bad days, neatly summed up by journalist Gaby Hinsliff over Twitter.

Tempting though it may be (and it’s a failing I’m certainly guilty of) of trying to deduce why today feels so much worse than yesterday, we really shouldn’t do this. The sun may be shining but one’s mood dark and one’s productivity low. It may pour with rain but some urgent task actually manages to absorb sufficient attention that one emerges feeling something has been accomplished successfully. I need to internalise the wise words I can write – but not necessarily believe – as we all struggle on through uncertainty.

 

 

 

 

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