Mind the Gap

Who doesn’t love a good conference swag bag? Yes, I know it’s frequently full of useless tat destined to go straight into the hotel bin. But what jolts the adrenalin as you paw through the bulging canvas sack in your jet-lagged haze is the promise of maybe one really, truly cool item: the gadget or gizmo that you’d be happy to swap precious luggage space formerly reserved for cheesy American snacks like Cheetos.

Your future is full of...foam

And so it was at Science Online 2011 last week that I eagerly unwrapped a Magic 8-ball-style fortune teller from Sigma. Finally, something that would give a straight answer to whether I’d be able to stay up until past 10 PM to get drunk with the oceanographers!

As I shook the cube and peered into its viewing window, I was dismayed to see that whatever fluid Sigma had chosen to immerse the magic plastic answer dice was so foamy that it was impossible to make out the words.

Now this is a sad state of affairs. If Sigma, which bills itself as a premiere purveyor of fine chemicals, can’t come up with an appropriate fluid for this purpose, then honestly, who could? (If I could read the reply, the cube might tell me “Reply hazy: try again”.)

Or maybe the entire thing was deliberate on Sigma’s part, an attempt to deliver the ultimate metaphor for scientific inquiry. We might think we’re unraveling the secrets of the universe, but in actual fact, we’re just staring fruitlessly into a window of obscure murk.

Science: it’s not just a profession, but a way of life.

And sometimes it’s hard to switch off the all-pervasive geeky filter through which we view the entire world.

Of course, the UK press’s habit of weirdly juxtaposing nouns as adjectives in headlines certainly doesn’t help. Although it was always too good to be true, I was strangely disappointed when I grasped the real essence of the story to hand.

Is it Friday yet?

In my secret heart, I have always longed to live in the Victorian era. Through the rosy-tinted glow of idealized histories (the sort that neglect to mention things like head lice), I’ve imbibed stories of poets corresponding with ornithologists about the precise cadences of particular birds, or of carriage traffic jams in Albemarle Street before public lectures at the Royal Institution, or of the first print run of On The Origin of Species selling out in two days – of a time when science seemed to be a valued, respectable and essential part of all civilized laypeople’s repertoire. But as much as I like the notion of science’s elevation in popular culture, it’s the idea of interdisciplinary correspondence that for me holds the most romanticism.

My second novel, The Honest Look, is officially released on Saturday. During the course of finalizing the copy, I embarked on a few Victorian-style adventures in correspondence of my own, all involving poetry. The scientist protagonist in my novel is a closet poet, and the book is peppered with references. When I received a casual email from one of my contacts at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in summer that we needed to start working on seeking permission for all of the quoted poetry not yet in the public domain, I had little idea how problematic this might be. We were about six weeks from going to press, and my contact set about the job with cheerful optimism. And soon slammed into a brick wall.

It turns out that many major publishers stipulate that permissions requests must come in writing – through the post – and that turnaround can be several months. When it comes to poetry, there are often scores of publishers peddling various editions, and of course we needed to secure multiple rights (US/Canada, UK, World etc.), which often are held by different publishers. When you send off a letter and no one answers, you start to wonder if anything will ever happen. As my contact reported back that she was having problems with four of my poems, even mooting the idea of possibly swapping them for older ones, I started to get very worried indeed. Some of the quotes were actually integral to the plot, and I didn’t see how I could replace them at such short notice. Coincidentally, that very week, Tony Woodlief wrote a wonderful piece in The Wall Street Journal about how publisher obstructionism – and high cost – had caused him to cut song lyrics from his book. In his words, “Modern copyright practices spur artists to unmoor our work from what has inspired us. Art–along with many artists supposedly protected by these laws–is arguably poorer for it.”

As a scientist, this was uncharted territory. When you need permission to reproduce a graph or figure, you just email a friendly person at the journal in question, and it’s all sorted easily. But scientists are also used to recalcitrant theories and obstacles. Perhaps that is why, ultimately, I enjoyed the challenge of cracking each of the poems in turn:

Quarry 1: Edna St Vincent Millay, Dirge Without Music
Essentiality, on a scale of 1 to 10: Enters the plot at a pivotal moment, contains key messages. Also, provides the title of the book. Although in one moment of panic I actually considered rewriting the scene so that the heroine is shown reading the poem but only paraphrasing from it in her head, seemed a last resort. So, a 9.

My father once had dealings with Edna’s sister Norma, who was looking after Edna’s estate when he sought permission to photograph Edna’s garden for the cover of an edition of her Complete Works. Sadly, Norma had long since passed away herself, so we had no personal leverage. After exhausting all leads with publishers of various editions, my contact at the Press did a bit of intense Googling and came across the Millay Society website, which turned out to hold the copyrights. A few emails later and permission had been granted – free of charge, an unexpectedly generous bonus.

Quarry 2: José Angel Buesa, Poema del Amor Ajeno
Essentiality, on a scale of 1 to 10: Absolutely pivotal to the plot – used as part of a romantic stratagem by one of the characters. So, a 10.

Buesa was an obscure 20th Century Cuban poet, so obscure that the only Wikipedia entry about him is in the Spanish version of the encyclopedia. Hours of research on further Spanish language websites failed to produce even the name of a publisher for various poems reprinted on the internet. Indeed, I was starting to worry that Buesa did not, in fact, actually exist. And then one morning, one of my Google searches threw up the name of a professor at Columbia University, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, in scholarly connection to Buesa. Pérez Firmat replied immediately to my email, telling me that the poem had originally appeared in Oasis, self-published by the poet in 1943. “I have a xerox copy of the book,” he wrote, “and there is no copyright indicated.” His view was that there was no potential liability in quoting from this poem, and that many collections had reprinted it freely over the years. Afterwards, we engaged in a pleasant exchange about the poet and his work, and he even checked over my translation of the poem – which fortunately was deemed sound (aside from one phrase which I’d subtly tweaked for the purposes of the narrative).

Quarry 3: Miroslav Holub, The Moth (translated from the Czech by D. Young and D. Hábová)
Essentiality, on a scale of 1 to 10: Not important for the plot, but featured in a key emotional moment – an absolutely stark and beautiful stanza, as well as humorous. Replaceable, but at a cost. So, a 6.

Having had zero luck with Faber & Faber, the publisher of my edition of The Rampage in which the poem appeared, and with Holub deceased, I decided to stalk the translators for clues. Lo and behold, David Young turned out to be an emeritus professor at my alma mater, Oberlin College. (Any Obies out there will know of its strong bonds of loyalty, and could imagine my sudden optimism.) Young replied to my email straightaway: “Well, shame on Faber and Faber for dragging their feet like that. They don’t even own it! Their book is out of print.” And, as luck would have it, Oberlin College Press itself had published Young’s translation of _The Moth _ in a collection entitled Intensive Care (1996). As the publisher and translator, Young was delighted to give us permission to quote the entire poem, for free. A few quick emails with OCP sealed the deal.

Quarry 4: Margaret Atwood, More and more
Essentiality, on a scale of 1 to 10: Utterly irreplaceable. Is delivered at a romantic climax of the book, and is one of those poems so eerily suited to the situation that one could not imagine anything else in its place. A definite 10.

This was the one poem I was sure I couldn’t crack. The publishers were monolithic imprints, their silence deafening. Unlike university professors and poet societies, one can’t just email someone like Margaret Atwood – although I did try to track down an email address of an agent, with no success. And then, as I sat there, utterly stumped, I suddenly thought: is Margaret Atwood on Twitter?

The answer was yes – with followers approaching 100,000. If I addressed a public tweet to her, asking for her help and intervention, how on earth would she ever see it in such a raging torrent of a timeline? Nevertheless, it was worth a punt. I put a lot of thought into those 140 characters, waited for when she was likely to be awake in Toronto, and then fired it off.

Within minutes, this:

Followed by a direct message, and then a lively email exchange in which I explained why it would be a crime to replace her poem with some ancient effort from a Dead White Male. Her reply kicked off with: “Just go for it. I will deal with the flak.” She explained the complicated copyright situation, sympathized with the impossibility of permissions quagmires in general, and then told me just to have my publisher her send a cheque for an appropriate amount and she’d divvy it up to the right places personally. A few further emails with her personal assistant secured the transaction.

The novel involved other bits of correspondence, too: the native Spanish and Dutch speakers who helped me select phrases to add color to the text – I speak both languages, but not very proficiently – and who helped persuade me to drop the accent mark from one of the character’s names, because that’s what long-term ex-pats tend to do. Then there were the scientists I consulted on the molecular biology of Alzheimer’s disease. And of course, the many dozen volunteers who read through various drafts, skewering me with heavy criticism and tough love. (My favorite line of marginalia, from Professor Clare Isacke, is still “Ludicrous! That is to say, utter tosh.”)

It’s been a great adventure, and a deeply satisfying meeting of minds. And all of it was greatly facilitated by methods of communication beyond the Victorians’ wildest dreams.

—

The Honest Look (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press) is now available:
Direct from publisher
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Amazon.de

The word ‘feminist’ has ugly connotations, so much so that I often hesitate before pointing out gender inequities. Does it do any good to state the obvious, given that it is unlikely to rectify injustice, and indeed risks riling up, or boring, those who are just not bothered by that sort of thing?

For some reason, my system refuses to become sensitized. It rankles every single time. Every time I turn the pages of a newspaper and see that the majority of serious stories are about men, maneuvering for positions of power in government, finance, business and sport. Every time I read the statistics about how women still almost universally receive lower pay than their male counterparts for doing the same job. Every time I switch on a BBC quiz or comedy show and see that the three people arrayed on either side of the host are all, or nearly all, men.

It gets worse when we venture into science. Let’s leave aside the obvious figures about the scarcity of female scientists above the post-doctoral level. I’d like to focus on the public face of science. It bothers me every time a science documentary employs all or mostly male scientists as expert talking heads. Every time ‘the best’ science bloggers are published, and most of them are male. Every time I run my eye down a long-list of science book prize candidates and see one women, or page through a science magazine and see that few of the pundits are women, or listen to a science podcast and hear only men’s voices, or watch science programs on TV and see mostly male presenters.

What rankles me most of all are cases when, instead of getting a few female scientists to join with their male counterparts on the quiz show, panel or magazine, the producers prefer to ask male celebrities who have become known for being “science-y” even though, actually, they might have only done a science degree long ago, or have written a book featuring a bit of science – or have just confessed to being a little bit “geeky” because that’s rather trendy at the moment. The message is clear – it doesn’t matter who fills those slots, as long as they’re well-known (and, possibly, male, though that’s not as clear, as I’ll discuss in a moment).

I think we can agree that in the world of popular science, women are largely invisible. I have, of course, heard the usual arguments: there really aren’t any well-known female scientists. Well, except X, Y and Z, who get trotted out again and again as if they are the only interesting, talented and articulate women in the country. Where is the female Stephen Hawking, the female David Attenborough, the female Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones, Martin Rees, Brian Cox? Why is nearly every up-and-coming television science presenter (who doesn’t even have to be a practicing scientist) a man? Why does no one seem to care about the opinions of female scientists, or female non-scientists with past science credentials, or think that audiences wouldn’t want to listen to them?

I suspect the answer is not deliberate sexism. I suspect that it is all down to the cult of celebrity, and that men are just better at becoming famous in traditionally male-dominated fields like science. Given a choice between filling a seat with an unknown female scientist or a non-scientist rock star, anyone worried about audience numbers is always going to go for the celeb. You could also argue that science needs all the glamor it can get, so it would be madness not to snag a famous comedian if you can swing it, to make your production more palatable to the masses. I respect these reasons, but I don’t think it has to be this way.

And this is why: there is no such thing as a celebrity who did not take his first step out of obscurity. Physicist Brian Cox may right now be the most sought-after talking scientist head in Britain, but there must have been a time when someone took a punt and gave their platform to an unknown quantity. I assume that, for whatever reason, unknown male scientists are more likely to push themselves into the spotlight than their female counterparts – so if an insightful or broad-minded producer or editor wants to discover the next female Brian Cox, he or she needs to give them a hand up. If you don’t put any thought into the line-up of your program, you’ll just end up with the usual bunch of men.

The non-scientific media can occasionally be good at this. I’m thinking of something like BBC News Night Review, which often features obscure young female pundits on the sofa next to their established regulars. Someone, in this case, is obviously putting some effort into researching, approaching and fostering new talent. Alternatively, established male scientist pundits might occasionally recommend articulate and outgoing female colleagues to their producer contacts. All it takes is a little thought, and a little extra work. I know scores of fabulously funny and insightful women scientists and science-related folk who could genuinely engage with a broader audience, whether in print or broadcasting: why do we seldom hear from these people?

I guess the more important question is this: is it actually a problem that our ambassadors for science are all or mostly men, as long as they are talented and the message gets across? Some people don’t think so: for example in a recent Twitter exchange about the absence of women on the inaugural episode of the podcast Strange Quarks, although Martin Robbins expressed regret, Alice Bell tweeted “…I’m not too fussed abt numbers tbh, it’s quality + context around these things that matter”, although she also allowed “I think it’s worth noting big gap like that b/c often people don’t think to ask.”

But I’m afraid it is problem for me, because I do know these wonderful but obscure female colleagues who would love the chance to reach a broader audience, and the glaring injustice overshadows everything else. It might also be a problem for young women interested in science, who have little more than starving models, footballers’ wives and singers in rehab for role models and who see or hear little recognizable as themselves in the science-related media.

I don’t know. Is noticing the gap and appreciating what may be the perfectly valid reasons behind it, as Alice suggests, enough, or do we actually want to change things? It is important to stress that I am not advocating getting mediocre women involved for the sake of looking balanced: that’s anathema to me. I am stressing that I would like to see more excellent women, women who are as good or better than the men that routinely appear, involved in the science media world. They exist, and many of them are willing. If they don’t put themselves forward into a world where they can see little or nothing like themselves, can you blame them? Would getting more women involved break the vicious circle of no women being routinely seen leading to no women worthy of being asked, because nobody knows who they are, or even notices their absence?

I think it just might. Why don’t we do the experiment?

As a force of nature, you can’t get much more powerful than a first-year rotating graduate student: one part youthful stamina and nine parts unrelenting enthusiasm. This year in our institute I took part in a new experiment for dealing with the annual crop of incoming PhD candidates. Previously, before embarking on their first placement, they would have been subjected to a month of lectures and a series of practical demonstrations. These demos used to take place in the unused half of our laboratory, supervised by one of the more dynamic lab heads: brand-new boxes of gleaming Gilsons and tips and a series of out-of-the-box experiments designed to flex virgin thumb muscles and get feet wet. Although it was always heart-warming to see the troupe of white-coated fledglings following their instructor around the lab, I often wondered how useful – or interesting – these exercises actually were.

This year, though, someone came up with the idea of putting the students into teams of two, assigning them a gene and asking them to find out as much as possible about it, both through literature searches and direct experimentation, in a three-week period. Their first task would be working out who in the building would be most appropriate to give them a hand, based on the identity of the gene, and then identifying which people would be the best expert advisors for any given task. Of course the bulk of supervision would fall on the person whose pet gene had been assigned to the pair, but the idea was to spread the load of supervision across the whole building while giving the students the skills they needed, including the fine art of schmoozing and scrounging – which in some ways might be just as important as ace pipetting for long-term success.

One of the genes from my screen was selected as student bait (with my blessing, of course), and soon a twin whirlwind had blasted into our lab. The great thing about having students around, even for a short time, is that it forces you to dust off that important task that’s been languishing because you simply haven’t had time to deal with it. You might think you’re busy, but when two pairs of puppy-dog eyes are staring at you imploringly, you really have no choice but to make time to help. Every time you agree to supervise someone, you run the risk of putting in a lot of effort for very little tangible output for your own project, so you always hope that it will be worth your while.

Dear reader, the students exceeded my wildest dreams. In only a fortnight, they’d made two DNA constructs, performed a key rescue experiment in cells and made a preliminary foray into inspecting the effects of gene knockdown on RNA splicing. A few nights they even worked til midnight, and I had to physically restrain one of them from doing more experiments the evening before their big report was due. They were so autonomous near the end that I often had to chase them to find out what results they’d actually achieved. And they weren’t half coy about their accumulating data: one afternoon I came back to my desk to find this tantalizing little heart-breaker:

The postdoc is always the last to know.