Mind the Gap

My heart is light.

Several early indicators suggest that the UK science budget is to be spared. Although a freeze on funding will correspond to a cut in real terms of about 10% after four years, due to inflation, it is far less than the originally projected 25-45%, and is also much kinder than the cuts to many other sectors.

The BBC is crediting “strong representations…by the scientific community” for the reprieve. Which I think, quite possibly, might include us.

Can it really be true? And how can we ever thank all the thousands of people who helped make the campaign a success?

I sometimes wonder if it is possible for a specialist to ever truly empathize what it feels like to walk in the shoes of the unindoctrinated – especially when it comes to the language. If you’re an adult practitioner of a particular trade, you will have had decades of training and education under your belt, and the required vocabulary will constitute your own daily vernacular.

For example, an old-school photographer, like my father, tends to throw around terminology such as F-stop, aperture, or depth of field. Now as a layperson, I know vaguely what my Dad means when he talks about F-stop. I can even deal with this parameter when handling my ancient Pentax 35mm camera. But if he asked me to define F-stop, or pick a definition out of multiple choices, I’d probably be stumped. I don’t know what the ‘F’ means and I don’t know what changes inside the camera’s innards when I swivel the appropriate ring from 16 to 22. All I know is that 22 is better than 16 in bright light. I could easily speculate why, but without looking it up, I wouldn’t be sure. And although Dad might disagree, it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of taking nice photos.

I was reminded of all this during a brief Twitter exchange with Carl Zimmer this afternoon, which began when he tweeted: “Ack! Only 18% of Americans can say what a molecule is. See p. 48 of new report, “Science and Media” Free pdf here: http://bit.ly/cmkGKg”.

My first reaction was, is that really such a surprise? If someone held a gun to my head and asked me to give the precise chemical definition, I’m not sure I’d state it absolutely correctly myself. According to my Mac, a molecule is “a group of atoms bonded together, representing the smallest fundamental unit of a chemical compound that can take part in a chemical reaction.” It comes from modern Latin molecula, diminutive of Latin moles, which means ‘mass‘. Some time back in the Eighties, I have no doubt that I could have regurgitated that definition for some high school exam or another. Today, I’m sure I could easily have picked it from the multiple-choice line-up used by the researchers in the study cited in the above link. But then, I’m a scientist, and I’ve been talking about molecules for more than twenty years. (It’s a separate point that we biologists often abuse the word ‘molecule’ and use it to refer to slightly larger entities – which is probably why I had to check the actual chemical definition. But that’s a point for another day.)

I had a look at the paper that Zimmer was citing: the key reference seems to be:

Nearly one in five American adults can describe a molecule as a combination of two or more atoms. Many adults know that atoms, molecules, and electrons are very small objects, but are confused about their relationship to each other. Four out of five adults know that light travels faster than sound, but only half know that a laser is not composed of focused sound waves.

But here’s the rub:

All these basic physical science constructs are part of middle school and high school science instruction and should have been acquired during formal schooling. If these constructs were understood during the school years, many adults appear not to have retained these basic ideas as adults and are unable to use them in reading a newspaper story or seeking to understand a television show.

Again, am I really surprised? Entire swathes of junior high and high-school lessons have long since been over-written in my memory. There was a time when I could ace tests in trigonometry, algebra and calculus, but if you asked me now to deal with a problem containing sines, cosines and tangents, or solve differential equations, I wouldn’t know where to start. I am sure that many parents who struggle to help their kids with their homework have faced a similar wall of amnesia.

The problem, I think, is in the word ‘acquire’. Initial mastery in childhood is not the same thing as day-to-day use over a lifetime. If my life had been different, and I’d gone into another field, would I still be so conversant with words such as molecules? Somehow, I’m not so sure.

Zimmer’s response to my tweet suggesting that ‘molecule’ actually was a rather tricky word, was the following: ” ‘Molecule’ in this study was defined as a combination of two or more atoms. Doesn’t seem tricky to me.”

Now, I love Zimmer’s writing, and have the utmost respect for his endeavors, but is it really surprising that he doesn’t think it’s “tricky”? He has been writing about science for a very long time. On the other hand, my father is a highly intelligent man, and his platinum prints are heart-breakingly lovely, but he hasn’t had a science class since about the late 1940s. I am not convinced that he would have been among those 18%. The real question is, does it matter? My Dad, who is interested in many other things besides art, including music and science, devours the New York Times‘ science section every week: if he couldn’t define one of science’s specialist terms, is it really the end of the world? When he sees the word ‘molecule’ in the paper, I suspect he gets the gist from context. And this, like my concept of F-stop, is probably all that matters.

It happens suddenly, when you least expect it. It is a matter of utmost urgency, and requires the entire lab to drop everything else they’re doing and pull together. No one experiment is more important than this intermittent, yet inevitable event.

I am speaking, of course, of your typical Lab Freezer Emergency. Of course we are all in denial about defrosting. We watch, day in and day out, as the ice mounts and it becomes more and more difficult to pull out drawers and closer doors. Of course we know that we should do some preventative scraping but – aside from perhaps the occasional lazy kick which sends shards of ice flying – we can’t really be bothered.

Until that fateful morning when we arrive in to lab and find that the freezer – almost always the one that contains the most precious samples – is frozen in the door-ajar position.

Battle stations. Down your lattes, ladies and gentlemen, put on your white coats and gloves, and grab your favorite implement of choice – metal spatula, 10 mL plastic pipette, Eppendorf rack. No, not you two: you guys turn loaves into fishes and actually find another freezer that has the space to accommodate all the imperiled boxes for a few hours. No, I don’t care if there’s “no room” – make some. Oh, hey: brainwave. Go flirt with that cute post-doc down the corridor and see if he’s got some space. Chop chop.

It’s cold. It’s hard work. It’s – after a few minutes – getting pretty wet on the floor. We free the stuck drawers, liberate the now moist and floppy cardboard boxes, and bang at the ice in turns until we’re all short of breath. Several dozen rolls of paper towels are mush beneath our feet. We fill trays with hot water to speed up the process. And a few hours later, the freezer is ice-free, patted dry and good to go.

All in a day’s work, ma’am. We should take this on the road.

(Note: This is a cross-post from my silly LabLit blog, LabLiteral. I’m too busy fomenting rebellion with Science Is Vital to write much these past few weeks. Which reminds me, have you signed the petition yet? And put Saturday’s rally in your diaries?)

Celebrated science bloggers are primarily male.

Discuss.

—
*Note added retrospectively: I have been asked why I have not included self-organizing, grassroots blogging collectives, or indeed Nature Network itself, on this graph. The reason is because I was interested in the composition of high-profile collectives driven by prominent media outlets who are cherry-picking a select few independent power-bloggers. Hence the word ‘celebrated’, which was used ironically. -JR, 16.35 15/09/2010

Scientists in the UK today are starting to respond to governmental noises suggesting that, in a time when other countries are investing in science to rejuvenate the economy, funding for science and innovation here will have to be slashed. Only the best will be funded, and the rest can leave the country or flip burgers.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing on Twitter about what to do, but though we all feel we have to do something, nobody quite knows what.

Sod it. Let’s march on London! No more Doctor Nice Guy, no more hiding behind our work, no more just taking things lying down like we take everything else in our profession — poor job prospects, poor funding, low pay, poor life-work balance. If they are going to bleed us dry, we might as well try to do something before it’s too late. I reckon there are thousands of practicing scientists and their allies in the vicinity — let’s make some noise.

Who’s in?

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Last updated 10/9/2010 at 21.20

– Hashtag is #ScienceIsVital

– Sign up on the official Facebook group to show your support and to be kept abreast of news about the protest and any ancillary activities (e.g. petitions). Even if you can’t march, do sign up – numbers help. We currently have 842 members as of last update!

– By the way, we don’t have a formal slogan. ‘No More Dr Nice Guy’ is just my personal rallying cry (and will be one of several T-shirt designs available). Sort of sad I even have to clarify this, but apparently I do: this campaign does NOT exclude scientists-in-training, or women in countries where the word “guy” has not achieved gender-neutral status.

– Essential background reading – please recommend more and I’ll add the links:

Dellybean on the Vince Cable speech

Me, on why cutting funding for the foot-soldiers will hinder the elite scientists

Exquisite Life wraps up the reactions to date

What is truth? After long stretches of time in the lab, I often wonder if we’ll ever really know. Science can be loosely defined as the search for truth, but this goal is often illusory. Every experiment we do hides a truth, but the problem is recognizing it when we see it – and more importantly, realizing when, despite all appearances, we actually don’t.

Seeing, you might point out, is believing. Yet as the Hare brothers wrote in their book of essays, Guesses At Truth (1827), “Though, of all our senses, the eyes are the most easily deceived, we believe them in preference to any other evidence.” To get around this problem, some sciences rely on the generation of numbers to reveal truths, and it would be a poor scientist indeed who could persuade himself that 3 is less than 2. But in my particular discipline, cell biology, we are frequently reliant on what the eye can see. Some visual attributes can now be measured in a cold, unbiased fashion by automated image analysis: is X bigger or smaller than Y? Is A brighter or dimmer than B? But for the work I do – trying to understand the ins and outs of why and how cells take up the shapes they do – the questions are far subtler.

The cell is a tiny machine. We can stain it, photograph it, separate its contents like an auto mechanic disassembling an engine into a hundred pieces onto the concrete floor of a garage. We can sometimes be awed by the sheer beauty of the visual output of a cell under the microscope, enhanced by the emerald, ruby and sapphire stains of our fluorescent probes. We can marvel at the feathery protrusions, the intertwined cables, the spidery networks of a cell caught in the act of behaving, preserved for all eternity in a frozen snapshot by our fixation techniques. And we can be bamboozled by the sheer variety: in a field of a hundred cells, all of which are supposed to identical clones, we can be treated to an infinite array of subtle variation from one cell to its neighbor. Biology’s minute-by-minute interpretations of the genetic instruction manual, and the influence of local environment, can lead to a vast array of possible outcomes.

Awe and appreciation, and even temporary bamboozlement, are fine. But then we have to work out what it all means. Of course our expectations of cell appearance and behavior do not occur in a vacuum. There will be a vast body of general knowledge on this particular topic stretching back for decades and influencing our ideas. And as for the specifics, most observers like me will have been on the hunt tracking an elusive truth for months, if not years. Our modus operandi is pure objectivity, but I don’t know a scientist alive who, like me, doesn’t occasionally get caught up in the drama and excitement of an unproved theory. We shouldn’t want something to be true, but that’s exactly what happens sometimes. Because if our theory is true, suddenly all the pieces will fall into place, forming a picture of exquisite beauty. (Some might even be subconsciously motivated by the practicalities of such resolution: the bolstering of a CV, the enhancement of a future prospect, the funding of the next grant – all of which become more likely when another paper is published.)

And this is where the phenomenon of observer bias steps in. It is well established that when the assessment criteria are subjective, a human being can see what he wants to see. So often I am looking at a field of one hundred cells under a microscope, wanting to know what percentage look “normal” versus perturbed in some fashion. Then I tweak the experiment and see if this proportion changes as a result. At the moment, I’m fixated on spiky cells: cells that abandon their vaguely fried-egg shape to take on a starfish-like appearance. But if you think this is a black and white thing, step into my lab and I’ll show you an infinite gradient of shapes between “fried egg” and “starfish”. You would, I am sure, have just as much of a hard time as I scoring cells that fall into the grey area – especially if in the back of your mind, you were being supremely unscientific and hoping that your particular tweak might lead to a change in the percentage in spikiness.

When you get to this stage, you have a problem. Most scientists overcompensate for observer bias: they think, “I want there to be more starfish shapes, so I will downplay the evidence that there really is more this time.” Which does almost as much harm to the truth as letting your desires sway you the other way. The strategy that I, and many other scientists, use to get around this is by coding the samples so you actually don’t know which is which: in researcher parlance, you are blinded. Suddenly, you are released from the awful obligations of desire and expectation, and your blind eyes can just see, as best they can, what is actually there. Believe me, it’s an incredible relief, and I travel blind whenever I can.

Some scientists might deny that what I am talking about ever troubles them. And perhaps it doesn’t: perhaps there are people out there who don’t agonize over observer bias, who just take their readings in blissful ignorance. In fact, I often suspect that in a significant fraction of the sporadic instances of scientific fraud that make the news, subconscious observer bias might be the driving force, as opposed to conscious, and malicious, intent to deceive. I think it’s important, though, to admit that we as scientists are as human as anyone else, and to take the appropriate precautions whenever we are studying material with subjective output. Our natural tendency towards observer bias might be a dirty little secret in the trade, but I believe it should be brought out into the light and discussed, and its tenacious propensities be revealed to our young trainees as soon as possible. Because more important than the narrative we weave around our work to help guide our experiments is the actual truth that underpins it – one way or the other.

Welcome to the new piece of kit on the lab block:

Isn’t she lovely?

OK, she is a bit of a prima donna. We had to sacrifice half our gel-running bench to make room for her arrival because she refused to seen hanging out with the microwave. And she arrived with an entourage – that shiny new oxygen cylinder trussed up on her right.

I have to admit that up until yesterday, I wasn’t really sure what plasma even was – aside from the sort of substance that was always mucking up the Warp Core with its constant fluxing on Star Trek. But that’s what this machine is for. Making plasma. How cool is that?

I haven’t seen it in action yet, but I am reliably informed that when she struts her stuff, the little viewing window will fill up with swirling, glowing blue clouds, like some sort of celestial laundromat. I have a firm picture in my mind of what this might look like, and am almost afraid that the reality will be a bit of an anti-climax.

What is the golden ticket to scientific success in an oversubscribed, under-funded field? In my previous post, I set out my thoughts and fears about the final year-and-a-bit of what is likely to be my final fellowship opportunity in biomedical research. Fellow UCL colleague Stephen Moss left a thoughtful comment at the dreg ends of the discussion which deserves further scrutiny:

As a fellow cell biologist I understand the challenge of getting those big hitting papers into the top journals, and you’re right, with 14 months remaining this is definitely the time to start pedaling faster. Having been through all this some 20 years ago, I’m afraid the truth is that for all but the luckiest or green-fingered, it is extremely difficult to produce the volume of data (never mind the quality) for those papers if you don’t work weekends.

I would never ask this of my own post-docs (I’d probably end up being charged with constructive dismissal) but they all know the importance of plain old graft. Many ask “why should we have to work like this when advancement in most professions is achievable on a 37.5 hour week?”. This is a fair point, but your peers and competitors who do weekends are setting the pace.

In my case, those 20 years ago, I was simply obsessive about science. I couldn’t get enough. And the culture in the lab was such that every Saturday and Sunday morning a group of 4 or 5 of us post-docs and PhD students would meet for coffee at a cafe near the British Museum, and then work full days, sometimes nights too. We all loved it, we were totally hyper. It doesn’t have to be like that forever, but for a few years charged by the energy of youth it might be worth it.

So what are we to make of this specimen of tough love?

Although it’s bound to be anecdotal, I can report that I behaved precisely as Stephen described for more than ten years when I was young – that was 20 years ago now for me too, so I assume I am about the same age as Stephen. In any case, during my PhD, which spanned six years, I worked 80-hour weeks. For this graft (which I also would also label as “obsessional”) I achieved six first-author papers. Only one of these was worthy of submitting to a journal like Nature, and needless to say it was not successful there or at other publications of its ilk. This had nothing to do with lack of hard work or passion, and everything to do with the sort of system I was working in and the culture of publication associated with it: the hypothesis was a wide-open question, so it wasn’t clear at the outset what sorts of things would fall out of it, and the topic – virology – was frankly not one favored by the top-tier journals, unless it had anything to do with AIDS, pandemics or bioterrorism. And anyway, my boss assured me this didn’t matter, as virologists felt that Journal of Virology was the best place for research to be seen – and so it was back in the early Nineties, when publishing in the top-tiers wasn’t quite as crucial for one’s career success.

In my first post-doc, in a high-power London lab in an even higher-powered London institute, I kept up the youthful work ethic. My colleagues and I weren’t into the breakfast scene, like Stephen’s; instead, we burned our candles at the other end and worked til 2 a.m. before flocking to the illegal speakeasies in Hanway Street for well-earned drinks, and watched the sun rise from night buses. But again, the project had its twists and turns; I was scooped badly at the last moment, and then my boss decided to move his lab to America, leaving me with some tough choices. Yet again those top-tier papers eluded me. In my next stint in Leiden, I was just as productive, paper-wise, working very efficiently in the 40-hour-a-week framework that the start-up company insisted on – wonderful results I’m very proud of, and yet another submission to Nature, but still no magic golden ticket.

So would it truly be worth my while to try to mimic the eighty hour week work culture of my youth in a last-ditch effort to land an academic position? My own experiences suggest that that correlation between crazy hours and top-tier success is tenuous at best. I know post-docs who’ve managed it during normal working hours, and they have been the first to admit that their secret was not turbo-gunner mentality, but sheer luck: the right hypothesis in the right system at the right time.

We can leave aside the obvious point that, at my current age, I’m not even sure I could pull it off with any degree of efficiency. When I think back to those mad PhD years, I recall that my boss was the same age that I am now (possibly a little younger). She worked 40-hour weeks and was tremendously successful: possibly in large part because she had eight young turbo-gunners doing the hard graft for her. Like her, at the start-up in Leiden, I supervised a dynamic team of eight people, and we were amazingly productive. At my age, I don’t think I’m designed to act like a 20-year-old any more.

Since I last posted, I had a meeting with my funding body. They regretfully informed me that there is no further funding available for career re-entry fellows, like me, who are too old to secure a standard fellowship; their next level up requires a tenured position, program grant success and corresponding authorship. Which even a super-human 25-year-old couldn’t score in 14 months, or even, I suspect, in the full four fellowship years.

So is this it? The death knell?

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but on this occasion it is not an entirely welcome one.

It’s the time of year for this sort of reflection. The institute is in the process of awakening from a long hiatus: people are slowly trickling back from holiday; the abstract deadlines for several autumn conferences are drawing nigh. The ash tree towering over the courtyard outside our building has started to shed golden leaves onto the pavement, and there is a definite coolness in the morning air as I walk to the Tube under pale blue skies, and in the evenings as I cross campus for the commute home.

I’ve realized, with a little jolt of shock, that I only have fourteen months of funding left. Fourteen months seems a lot less than the “year and a half” I’ve been carting around in my head all summer.

Suddenly, it seems like the right time to take stock of what I’ve achieved to date, and to start formulating a sensible end-game plan. The past three-and-a-bit years in the lab, of course, are easy to document. I am second author on one published paper, and a minor co-author on two additional papers, one published and the other in preparation. Of these three papers, two are in collaboration with other labs. I have also been an author on two review articles, one in first position and one in second. And of course, I’m currently writing up my screen and putting the finishing touches on the biology I’m showcasing as an example – although the end result will be submitted to a solid publication, not a top-tier one, and the person listed second will be noted as having submitted equally to the work.

I’m proud of what I’ve achieved to date, but it is nowhere near enough. How can I best work these final fourteen months to my advantage?

As with many things like, it all starts with a list. What am I working on, and how are these little projects shaping up? There are, I realize, far more threads than I had thought. But I no longer have the luxury of chasing after dozens of leads, the glorious let’s-try-everything-and-see-what flies mentality of the person with three or four years of exploration ahead. No, I can see all those enticing doors closing in front of me, one after the other. I have to reckon like a cold-minded economist: which projects have the most time invested in them already? Which are most likely to lead to a high-profile paper – if the theory pans out? What, in fact, is the likelihood that the biology will be novel enough to give me that sort of paper at all? Would I be better off investing in just one main blaze, or keeping one or two other flames kindling in the background just in case? Is it really true that the recruitment panels would rather I’d gambled and won on one big payoff instead of three solid papers that might fall more safely into my grasp? Even if it means I might end up with nothing to show for my time? Everyone I trust about things like this assures me that this is the case: in the current funding situation, it’s top-tier or join the dole queue.

And then my particular situation leads to the toughest question of all. I have been a post-doctoral researcher for nearly ten years, not in real time but in elapsed research time (if you don’t count my career break). It is highly unlikely that I would be able to score yet another fellowship, even if I wanted to. So another part of the equation is whether any of my current projects seems interesting enough, or mature enough, to found a new lab on, if any university or institute will have me. It is one thing to write a paper on a topic; it is quite another to spend the next 30 years pouring my passion into it.

As I take stock, I am forced to admit that I am still rather far from the area of specialization that has always been closest to my heart, and which – up until now – I have spent most of my research career devoted to. When I started in the lab I was under the impression that the lab was firmly ensconced in that field, but the day-to-day aspects of my screen didn’t ever seem to end up there. I always intended to get back to it, to bend one of my projects in that direction – but this is the sort of activity that requires head-space, and time to read and reflect, and in that glorious let’s-try-everything-and-see-what flies mentality, there never seems time to do more than the conveyor-belt of experiments that follow logically one after the next. I have a bright swarm of new ideas in my head, but have yet to forge them into the solid research plan of my future dreams. And even if I had, new research plans require preliminary results – and when would I squeeze those in? Shouldn’t I be devoting all of my energy to get the paper I need just to survive and, eventually, to searching for a position and writing the grants I’d need to underwrite it?

So you can see, I’ve got a lot of hard thinking ahead, and a lot of difficult decisions. I will try very hard to stay positive, but I know it will not always be easy. I battled fiercely to get back into the lab, and I will be broken-hearted if I have to give up the dream. But equally, if it becomes clear that I cannot win after a protracted siege, I will not shy away from walking away either.