I’ve just returned from a lab retreat at the Convento de Arrábida, a crumbling former Franciscan monastery about twenty miles south of Lisbon. Clinging to a hillside overlooking the sea, the white stucco buildings were set in a landscape of jagged limestone, scrubby bushes, cypress and pine, oak and gorse. Life teemed everywhere: small green songbirds, tiny lizards and a pod of dolphins cavorting in the waves far below. Every morning I woke to the sun rising over the sea, luminous lavender fog hovering just over its surface.
The best-laid plans How do cells build things so well?
In some ways it was an odd venue for an exercise in information exchange. The original brothers founded the order after deciding that the missionaries who’d gone forth into the New World with the waves of Portuguese explorers were becoming irrevocably tainted in the process. Their solution was to turn inward: they lived together but were not allowed to speak or interact. Instead, they ate only bread and water, flagellated themselves and slept on the cold stone floor with minimal clothing for maximum discomfort. (Indeed, some of them ended up decamping to small, stalagmite-studded caves in the hillside, deeming the quality of life in the Convento too ‘luxurious’.)
Our mission couldn’t have been more different. We were joining forces with a Portuguese group of similar interests, and the idea was to share knowledge and generate totally new research ideas in the process: in short, to view our projects with the fresh perspective that only an outside view can bring.
We hadn’t met one another before, but fortunately we all got on splendidly, especially after the vinho do Porto and aguadente started to circulate that first evening. The two lab heads were keen to stimulate our creative sides, so in the morning we all sat in the sun on the terrace and composed posters of our work using colored pens and paints. It was actually quite challenging to summarize my work pictorially, in one snapshot, without the crutch of a ten-hour PowerPoint session or the benefit of the ‘delete’ key. And most of the efforts that resulted were a lot clearer than the sort of painstaking, over-produced presentations you see hanging in an average poster session.
After one particularly hard day of scientific discussions about cell architecture and development, we were put into multiple groups and given thirty minutes to build towers using only drinking straws, envelopes and tape, strong enough to support the weight of eight candles. What resulted was a glorious mess of unintelligent design; just as evolution has had to overcome various physical laws to lay down the amazing array of structures that occur in multicellular organisms, so our towers ran the gamut of possible design strategies. Interestingly, the biologists did a lot better than the small bevy of physicists, who’d smugly clubbed together convinced that they’d win hands down. The best solution, in the end, wasn’t as intuitively clever or complicated.
Did we achieve our aims? I think so. A number of collaborations were initiated, and I got some fantastic ideas for my own project after being inspired by a few of the zebrafish crowd. As the line of cars lumbered past the main gate of the old monastery on that last morning, I suffered a twinge of sadness thinking about those long-dead monks, consigned to a life of silence and non-interaction. I am sure that their spiritual universe was rich and fulfilling, but I for one am happy to live in a world in which I can reach outward as well as in.
Looks beautiful, Jenny.
_ It was actually quite challenging to summarize my work pictorially, in one snapshot, without the crutch of a ten-hour PowerPoint session or the benefit of the ‘delete’ key_
Hah. That should be a required exercise. Less is more (except on RedHat, where it’s not even a symlink).
I actually caught myself wishing for ‘custom animation’ at one point. Might be time to take a PowerPoint leave of absence!
It’s too late. Run! Flee! Save yourself!
Someone gave a talk today and, after carefully previewing all of the movies inserted into the slides, not a single one actually worked during the talk (precipitating that embarrassing scrambling around on one’s desktop trying to find the source files amid holiday snaps amid deafening audience silence).
I think that PowerPoint can smell fear.
HAHAHA.
I refuse to use PP. It’s pants, innit?
Getting back to the point (well, one of them) of your entry, Jenny, that picture of the tower reminds me of a lovely talk I saw years and years ago, to do with the dynamics of cell shape. I’m trying to remember the phrase used, but there were a few papers about it as well, I’m sure, where the cell could be modelled as a meshwork or scaffold of supportive struts (actin fibers), and the fun thing was that as you pushed or pulled on one node of the mesh, the entire structure changed and responded in much the same way a real cell does.
Things have moved on since then and I’m out of touch with the field now, but it was fascinating to see, and to think about how biology has solved the problem and compare it with macro engineering.
Flagellation. Nice.
I just put together my first PowerPoint poster in years. I might have done better with a big sheet of paper and coloured pens – design and layout are not my main strengths.
One of my fellow students in Glasgow once answered a question (from the head of department) about cell migration with what was basically interpretive dance – “well, John, imagine you’re the chemoattractant, and I’m a cell, and I’m like this [acts out pulling himself through the air with his hands, towards the questioner], and [protein of interest] concentrates in my finger nails, and that helps me reach you faster”. Gutsy and very effective!
I am jealous about the retreat. For our upcoming Christmas party I get to demonstrate to three assembled departments why Team GB doesn’t do too well in ice-skating related events at the Winter Olympics. I’d much rather drink wine and sit in the sun and talk science in Portugal.
Jealous… Jealous of Portugal and of building things with straws and envelopes and of lab heads keen to stimulate people’s creative sides.
I vaguely remember someone illustrating convergent extension, using a tube of toothpaste and a deserted country road, but all of us were rather drunk and the details are very hazy. I would like to represent the three-neuron pathway that transmits pain information to the cerebral cortex, using three student volunteers, a plastic brain model, and a box of matches.
PowerPoint is the required format for lectures, but I not-so-secretly detest it, and loathe the animations, chartjunk, and special effects backgrounds. I can hear the screams and sighs of dying neurons, every time I prepare a PP lecture, and I miss the days when I could draw everything on chalkboards or overheads.
Your seminars sound like fun, Kristi.
I would like to represent the three-neuron pathway that transmits pain information to the cerebral cortex, using three student volunteers
Taken out of context, that phrase is rather alarming, Kristi. Don’t tell Health and Safety.
Yes, I’m not used to be creatively stimulated in the lab either. But some of our discussions really started to range far and wild as a result — the tendency toward wild speculation is usually beaten out of us during our training (and reinforced by caustic referees), so it’s nice to rediscover your inner mad scientist.
Sounds like the retreat was a big success. It’s very healthy to break the mold now and then – mixes up some juices that don’t normally flow!
And I applaud the temporary abandonment of Powerpoint as part of that process. However, Powerpoint and Keynote are useful tools; many of the complaints about their use—from audiences—derive from misuse by the presenter. Richard’s “less is more” remark is on the money – but why do so few people get it? Perhaps forcing people to use an alternative mode of presentation is a good way to get them to think anew about how to get their point across…
Stephen, of course you are right. I’d be lost without PowerPoint, especially the animation function when I am introducing complex cellular processes or pathways with graphics. If you hit everyone with the entire picture, people just switch off. Yesterday I gave a talk to the institute, which seemed to go rather well. I tried to keep things simpler than usual — especially, keeping the text to a minimum.
I’ve never tried KeyNote; is it good?
I’ve probably recounted this tale before. Those who have already seen it have my permission to drop off.
A few years ago we NPG editors had a retreat in Bournemouth. We were all required to give a presentation, and I was one of only two people not to have used Powerpoint (me and the other guy not having bothered to find out, being too lazy).
My presentation was to be only 5 mins long, and, knowing the moderator to be a stickler, realized that there’d be no time for digressions. So, the night before, I wrote out my presentation longhand and learned it. I knew my presentation from top to bottom, inside out and backwards.
Or so I thought.
About two minutes into the actual presentation, with nothing between me and the audience but a radio mic, I realized – too late! – I needed a histogram. Oh cripes, I thought, what do I do now?
With no time to stop to even think about it, I came up with the Henry Gee Human Histogram(TM) in which I used my body as the bars, whether standing at full height, kneeling, or (to demonstrate the long-tail effect) lying down on the floor.
After the meeting, everyone recalled the Human Histogram(TM) even if nobody remembered what I was talking about.
Great story, Henry! What did you do for the error bars?
Happily none were needed. It was simply a tabulation of the number of page impressions (_y_ axis) attracted by different papers in Nature.
The second student in the pathway has to cross his or her arms, before linking up with the other two, as this is the neuron whose axon crosses the midline (for both the pain/temperature and touch/proprioception pathways). For the touch/proprioception pathway, the first “neuron” can hold an onion or balloon to represent a Pacinian corpuscle.
No worries about the matches, though. Even when I light my alcohol lamp, which I use to flame tungsten needles for microdissection, some nosy person usually rushes into my lab to inform me that “something’s burning”. Oh noes!
@Jenny – I’ve never tried KeyNote; is it good?
It’s not quite perfect but is streets ahead of Powerpoint in ease of use and stylishness of the final product. Plus, if you use movies regularly, Keynote does a much better job of integrating them within the presentation. It’s Mac-only though, so if you’re going to use it at conferences etc. you’ll probably need to take your own laptop. Don’t think it can be run from an iPhone (yet!)…
Keynote is lovely. Although it’s still possible to do a powerpoint presentation on keynote, IYSWIM.
Agreed – the “driver”:http://network.nature.com/people/U2929A0EA/blog/2008/11/13/i-thought-i-wanted-to-be-normal#comment-21915 is all-important… 😉
IYSWIM? Not come across that one before. In Your Swimsuit With Imaginary Muffins…?
If You’re Stuck WIth Microsoft?
In Yemenite Shameez with Ismail Merchant?
Kristi, I was thinking it would be more fun if you were clobbering the students over the head with a mallet to test pain responses.
Do you have trouble attracting students to your lab, Jenny?
Heh heh. We make them build their own lab benches out of drinking straws.