{"id":6985,"date":"2026-02-25T19:38:36","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T19:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=6985"},"modified":"2026-02-25T19:38:36","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T19:38:36","slug":"the-doing-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2026\/02\/25\/the-doing-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"The Doing of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my retirement I have more time to read than ever used to be the case, and I enjoy reading books about science, scientists and the way they have, both in the past and currently, approached their science and their lives. There are comparatively few autobiographies out there; I understand \u2018memoir\u2019 is not a popular genre with publishers right now, so we aren\u2019t likely to see a flood of these hitting the shelves any time soon. Few books like Venki Ramakrishnan\u2019s personal account of unravelling the ribosome, Gene Machine<\/a><\/em>, or the somewhat harrowing account of her early life by Lindy Elkins-Tanton, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman<\/a><\/em>, describing how she surmounted many odds. Nor others like the sad story of Erin Zimmerman essentially being forced out of science by circumstances beyond her control in Unrooted<\/a><\/em>. I find these books fascinating reading, but clearly publishers feel there is no money in them so, for scientists young and old, there are few accounts to get their teeth into, nor narratives to impart to non-scientists about how scientists go about their life and work.<\/p>\n

I like picking quotes out of these books that either resonate with me or strike me as telling. This proved very helpful for quoting in my own 2023 book, Not Just for the Boys<\/em><\/a>. In Venki\u2019s book there is the wonderful description of the excitement and joy of research going well (in this case placing a protein in the 30S subunit, for those fascinated by the ribosome), that it was \u2018like eating crisps. Once he did the first one, he couldn\u2019t stop.<\/em>\u2019 Visions of a tube of Pringles spring to mind, to keep one going while dealing with some knotty problem. Or Donna Strickland\u2019s slightly tongue in cheek description<\/a> after winning the Nobel Prize:<\/p>\n

“It is truly an amazing feeling when you know that you have built something that no one else ever has and it actually works. There really is no excitement quite like it \u2014 except for maybe getting woken up at 5 in the morning because the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation also think it was an exciting moment for the field of laser physics.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Looking to a much earlier literature, I am currently reading the book Gary Wersky wrote in 1978, The Visible College<\/a><\/em>, describing a \u2018collective biography\u2019 of five famous left-wing\/communist scientists who flourished both before and after the second world war. In this book he spells out part of his motivation at the time:<\/p>\n

“Scientists, by contrast, are almost complete strangers to most of us, because we do not know where they come from or how they spend their time. Indeed, having been denied access to their history and culture, we are often tempted to regard them as pretty uninteresting people.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems to me that the general public gets little opportunity to gain insight into a scientist\u2019s life: what makes us tick and what keeps us going when the going is (inevitably) tough, or spurs us on the way when finally things start going right. We probably do seem like \u2018complete strangers\u2019 to the majority of citizens. I think this is a gap in the published world. I believe it is a mistake, both because so much tax-payers money is put into science in one way or another, and democracy demands that people understand why this is money well spent (and it\u2019s not just because science has to be instrumental), but also because science is a central part of our culture. Books on history, geography and allied topics are allowed to get quite technical, relying on much background knowledge to be fully understood. Yet somehow they are still regarded as suitable for mass markets (I would cite both Peter Frankopan\u2019s The Earth Transformed<\/a><\/em> and William Dalrymple\u2019s The Golden Road<\/a><\/em> in this category). Science isn\u2019t treated in the same way. The publishing world seems to hold science to a different standard, or perhaps I mean holds the public to a different standard of knowledge so that only \u2018popular\u2019 science, assuming little prior knowledge, gets published as a trade book.<\/p>\n

Science is a human endeavour, done by humans with all their faults (think Jim Watson, for instance) or virtues (Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a shining example of someone who gave away a vast prize \u2013 the Breakthrough Prize \u2013 to support scientists of the future who lack means to pursue their dreams). Why should the reading public, the typical citizen, not have access to accounts of what actually goes on in the lab to help them understand if it\u2019s a career for them or their family? Science is too often treated as a strange place inhabited by nerds.<\/p>\n

The mantra of \u2018follow the science\u2019 used during the pandemic by those who almost certainly had a poor grip of any of science\u2019s constituent parts, was a somewhat dangerous mantra in that there is no \u2018the\u2019 in science. The uncertainties that accompanied early advice, the continuing lack of clarity over Long Covid, highlights that following \u2018the\u2019 science can be of limited use when knowledge itself is limited, but pushing against those limits is exactly how science progresses. Scientists today need to keep fighting against those who rail against, for instance, vaccinations and climate change. (This brings to mind another salutary recent book I\u2019ve read: Science under Siege<\/a><\/em>, which highlights the challenges scientists in those fields face as politics and money trumps knowledge and expertise.)<\/p>\n

But if science is to be bundled away in the technical press, not opened up to the wider public as history so readily is, then much of the way that science proceeds \u2013 with taxpayers\u2019 money \u2013 will be rendered obscure and therefore potentially \u2018suspect\u2019 or \u2018not for me\u2019, or just plain odd and irrelevant. I wish there were more books out there that talked about the actual \u2018doing\u2019 of science, that a teacher could read to enthuse their classes with some reality not some curriculum-based dry facts implying science is a solved problem not a wonderful puzzle. (And yes I know there are some fantastic books designed for young learners in the classroom about the science itself.) But we need more books that bring to life the life of science, that tell it like it is in the career of a researcher and which are accessible to the non-expert.\u00a0 However, to date my own approaches to agents to try to pitch a book to help to fill the void have so far fallen on stoney ground. I will keep trying….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my retirement I have more time to read than ever used to be the case, and I enjoy reading books about science, scientists and the way they have, both in the past and currently, approached their science and their … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,10,5],"tags":[1433,1278,1741,1743,1742],"class_list":["post-6985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communicating-science","category-research","category-science-culture","tag-books","tag-donna-strickland","tag-the-visible-college","tag-thrills","tag-venki"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6985"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6987,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6985\/revisions\/6987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}