Mind the Gap

I must say I’m starting to get excited about the prospect of being trapped on the Roof with the likes of you. Resistance is futile, but at least there will be Beer. As always, a stonking big thanks to Mendeley for their generous sponsorship.

We still have 18 places left, so if you’re a science blogger, twitterer or otherwise spend way too much time in the scientific virtual sphere, do consider joining in on the fun! And spread the word: the hashtag is #fringefriv10.

Everything you need to know about the event, including how to register, can be found on the FringeFriv forum topic on Nature Network. (Please don’t try to register on this comment thread, or my head will start spinning and smoking like one of those robots that Captain Kirk was always able to annihilate by sheer logic.)

Here’s who’s on the list so far. If you can no longer make it, please drop me a line.

Jennifer Rohn
Richard Grant
Frank Norman
Matt Brown
Steffi Suhr
David Kavanagh
Lou Woodley
Eva Amsen
Erika Cule
Joe Dunkley
Martin Fenner
Austin Elliott
Jim Caryl
Graham Steel
Alexander Knoll
David Dobbs
Sara Fletcher
Viktor Poór
Mark Hahnel
Dan Hagon
Kaitlin Thanay
Sarah Kendrew
Andrew Walkingshaw
Stuart Taylor
Jen Melinn
Pedro Parraguez Ruiz
Peter Murray-Rust
Jen Atkins
Bob O’Hara
Grrl Scientist
Alasdair Allan
Edward Gomez

All scientists probably remember their first day in a real lab. Not the pretend lab of a high school or university, with its staged classroom practicals and fait accompli outcomes presided over by harried teaching assistants – but a living, breathing, grown-up lab full of actual scientists and genuine experiments-in-progress. You may have aced that pop quiz on gel electrophoresis or been the best of class at identifying mitotic figures under the microscope, but in the brave new world of biomedical research, you suddenly felt completely out of your depth.

My own first research stint, at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, is now mostly a blur of memories. I recall that the antiseptic soap was especially pungent – once every few years or so I encounter a similar odor, which never fails to propel me back to my eighteen-year-old self feeling nervous and awkward in that chill, six-story brick building crouched on the edge of the NIH campus. I recall a frosty male post-doc with a moustache who seemed to hate the very idea of students in the lab. Instead, he wanted to use me as a personal secretary to photocopy his massive reading list down at the library – the lab head eventually acceded to his strident demands, probably just to keep the peace, and it took me four resentful days to complete the task. I recall misdialling a pipetteman and dispensing a hundred times more reagent than was called for, and getting into serious trouble because the substance was derived from human tissues and difficult to replace. I remember spilling radioactive isotope on my blouse and having it permanently confiscated by the authorities, and having to go home in a lab coat that evening.

But of course it wasn’t all bad – in fact, it was incredibly fabulous. I recall the intense excitement of getting my own data for the first time. I was working primarily with fluorescently labelled cells analyzed on a FACS machine, and can still feel that thrill of triumph when the histogram of the experimental sample moved conclusively to the right, demonstrating that my manipulations had had the hoped-for effect. I remember the wonder, too, of the sheer unfathomable depths of the unknowns we faced. The lab was studying the role of human papillomavirus in cervical cancer. But this was back in the 1980s, that grey period in time after the discovery of the viral proteins E6 and E7, but before anyone had the remotest idea how they exerted their pro-cancer functions. Now, of course, it’s all so simple: but then, I wondered if we’d ever really know. There was an awe-inspiring pathos about our sheer ignorance, as if the secrets of biology would never fully yield to our onslaught.

Today, all those newbie feelings have come back to me. Starting today, I’ve been hosting two lovely high school students in the lab for a week, Alex and Alan. This is inspiring me to see the lab through their eyes – not as a familiar, beloved landscape, but as that slightly scary world of endless possibility that it was for me more than twenty years ago. Alex and Alan are keeping a diary about their daily experiences over on the LabLit blogs, and we’ll soon be putting up some video clips of them in action as well. Feel free to follow along. Meanwhile, I’ve got my fingers crossed that the RNAi experiment we set up today will yield gloriously beautiful phenotypes under the confocal microscope on Friday – wish us luck!

Last week the BBC asked me to go along to a press screening of the film Splice to give my opinions on the science. It was great fun to be sitting amongst all the other journalists in the small Soho theatre; I could even make out the distinctive quiff of horror film critic Mark Kermode down in the front row, silhouetted against the screen. Meanwhile, the NPG journalist Adam Rutherford offered around sweets (politely refused in most cases), and my BBC companion and I exchanged snide comments throughout the film.

You can read my thoughts in today’s piece, but the executive summary is that the film was so bad it was almost good – Frankenstein with Oedipal issues. I’ll also add that it’s seldom a brilliant sign when an audience keeps laughing at things that are quite clearly not intended to be funny.

I was billed as a “DNA expert” on the front page of the BBC News this morning, which earned me a lot of ribbing from my colleagues:

After seeing the film, I was surprised to read in the press pack that its director, Vincenzo Natali, thought his film was not about hubristic scientists playing god and meddling with things that man was not meant to know – that he did not, in fact, actually intend to make a cautionary statement about the dangers of unrestrained biotechnology. As this was indeed the overriding message coming through, I can only assume that Natali lost control of his own creation.

A little over ten years ago, I left academia to work in a small start-up biotech company on a rural industrial park in the Netherlands. I can hardly believe so much time has passed: memories of my first day are vivid and immediate. I can still remember the feeling of trepidation when the CEO – a tall, amiable Dutchman in a suit – led me through the flock of chickens scrabbling for corn outside the door. The company, as it happened, worked on a chicken virus protein, and I was suddenly convinced that this was one of the experimental cohorts.

“Don’t worry,” the CEO said cheerfully, sensing my unspoken concern. “They’re just pets.”

Other memories stand out like still shots in my mind: those same chickens, suddenly bedding down to sleep in the middle of the day during a total eclipse of the sun; the look on the CEO’s face when he came into my office to inform me that the World Trade Center was falling down; sunlight shining off the windows of the nearby lunatic asylum as I killed incubation times gazing out the window of the radioactive B-lab – feeling I might go mad myself with boredom, as it was too much trouble to decontaminate and degown just for those five-minute spins.

But the project was highly stimulating, and I enjoyed some of the most fruitful years of my career, making discoveries, writing patents, publishing papers, liaising with the German pharmaceutical company with whom we had a lucrative research contract. The company, although it was trying to diversify, had only one key finding: an apoptotic protein that seemed to have exquisite sensitivity for tumor and transformed cells. It was one of those too-good-to-be-true phenomena that no one else was working on nor, therefore, seemed to believe – I didn’t really fully believe it myself, at the job interview, though the magic worked as advertised in my own hands. (The field has since taken off, with Big American Labs stepping in – the sorts of labs that people believe automatically given the same evidence.)

Having recently finished writing Experimental Heart, I started thinking that it would make an interesting premise for a second novel if someone like me – a new employee from outside – got hired by a company like this and accidentally discovered that the whole scientific premise behind the company was fatally flawed. Who would she tell? Would people believe her? Would employees with a financial stake in the company try to suppress her findings? What if she was romantically entangled with one of these stakeholders – how would that effect her choice to go public or keep schtum?

Later, when my own company went under (due to shareholder squabbling, not scientific mishap), I was on the dole in Amsterdam and had the chance to write that novel: The Honest Look. And on 19 November of this year, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press will publish it.

As a mammalian cell biologist adrift in a Drosophila genetics lab, my contact with flies is fairly minimal. Through the thin wall separating my desk from the fly room, I can hear the loud repetitive thumping that accompanies the transfer of one colony of flies to a new vial, punctuating the laughter and music of their human supervisors. About once a week the oxygen depletion alarm goes off from excessive use of the carbon dioxide employed to anesthetize the insects, and the PhD students have to troop out with long-suffering expressions and wait for the oxygen levels to go back to normal. It’s not just noise, either: you can always tell when a new undergraduate helper is maintaining the stocks because runaway flies will suddenly appear everywhere in the lab and office, crawling over keyboard and bench in a bewildered search for the big yeasty blob in which they happily pupariated – or failing that, a ripe banana.

Fruit flies may have a long and illustrious history as a model organism, but they aren’t exactly the heavy-weights of the animal kingdom in terms of robustness. Unlike worms, cell lines and the embryos of higher organisms, you can’t freeze them down. Hence, any new transgenic flies have to be passed once or twice a week in perpetuity: there are strains in our incubators still knocking around from Thomas Hunt Morgan’s time. So our lab’s fly collection is massive: thousands of vials full of mutated insects with extra limbs, warped wings and all shades of phenotype in between, lined up in tray after tray. Needless to say, the task of keeping them going is incredibly tedious and the half-life of any young helper is only a few months.

Also, flies don’t weather travel very well. It’s a sad truth that more than half of the flies sent to us by American colleagues, or by the all-important Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, arrive DOA. It’s all down to UK Customs: the last Fedex shipment of flies we received was held for four weeks at Heathrow, which is presumably how long it takes a Home Office bureaucrat to work out that a fruit fly highly crippled for life outside the yeasty vial is actually not harmful. But even a few days in the post can spell the death of these frail little creatures.

Which is why I was surprised this morning to find an intact Drosophila corpse inside an Eppendorf tube, itself inside a beaker full of clean Eppendorf tubes that had been sealed and autoclaved. Now that’s what I call a sturdy exoskeleton.

They’re at it again. It isn’t enough that scientists imperilled our very economic existence by pointing out that a variant of flu remarkably similar to one that slaughtered a hundred million people in 1918 was spreading around the globe like lightning, and – worse – by urging us to invest in pharmaceutical precautions just in case it mutated into something worse. Nor is it sufficient that that they advocated being a bit careful with how much radiation we allowed our nuclear power plants to emit, as they weren’t sure “it was entirely safe in the long term”. One could even forgive the misguided, money-grubbing buggers for daring to suggest that an unprecedented amount of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere might very well cause aeroplanes to “fall out of the sky”, and that it might behove us to run precautionary tests before opening airspace.

Any arts graduate could have told you at a glance that Swine Flu would come to nothing, that radiation does wonders for the complexion and that ash is perfectly safe. But next to this latest debacle, such previous examples are laughable. I am referring, of course, to that upstart Polish ingénue Nick Copernicus and his suggestion that the Earth actually “rotates around the Sun”. Yes, you read that correctly. Predictably, the Royal Society – credible mugs to the last – have embraced his idea hook, line and sinker. Any suggestion that the Sun obviously rotates around the Earth, rising as it does every morning and setting in the evening, is met with swift and violent knee-jerk derision by the “scientific community”. Brave dissenters are subjected to ridicule, death threats and even the odd custard pie, while followers of Copernicus’s insane world view are back-slapped by their peers and showered with public money to take things forward. What next: modern astronomy, CERN and the invention of the Internet?

Scientists often take the lofty high ground, sneering down from their Ivory Towers and proclaiming that they are “only interested in Truth”. But the scales have fallen from the public’s eyes now. A few dozen bad apples have rolled their putrefying spheres out of a barrel of millions of working scientists, telling it like it really is. Yes, white-coated untouchables, I’m afraid we no longer buy that pathetic “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” get-out-of-jail-free card. Oh no: we know why you really went into science. It wasn’t so you could delay getting a real job for ten years as you laboured in one low-paid post-doctoral training job after another. It wasn’t so you could work eighty-hour weeks in the lab, struggling to find the time to spend time with your family while your friends in finance earned megabucks in the City. It wasn’t even so you could live in the perpetual uncertainty of the scientific job market, with the horrific spectre of – despite all your training and hard work – having to drop out and become a biotech sales rep. Oh no – it was so you could get lots of money. Lot of money, and free plane tickets to swanky conferences in Birmingham.

Oh, I forgot: it’s not all about the money, is it? We’re neglecting one crucial ingredient. You also crave with every polyester fibre in your pristine white coat the undying, uncritical worship of the BBC. Why, only yesterday, those slavish proponents of science devoted an entire two minute segment to an interview with Copernicus, squeezed like an eyesore between a Front Row re-run and the Archer’s Omnibus. And was the presenter even remotely critical? Not a bit: she fawned over him as if he’d somehow “enriched society” – it all had the air of a Gardeners’ Question Time on lithium. And as a mellifluous soundtrack to Copernicus’s unchallenged poppycock, I could hear the dulcet tones of our BBC licence fees spiralling down the plughole. Meanwhile, what was axed to make way for the hastily arranged pas de deux with the Polish fraudster? Being an important media insider, I happen to know: an in-depth profile of Manchester bad-boy sculptor Max Megafreud and his new installation of Paris Hilton composed entirely of his own ear-wax.

People often point to journalists as being fallible, and I’d be the first to hold up my hands and admit, yes, what I write isn’t half bollocks. But ever catch a scientist criticizing one of his peer’s talks at a conference or – God forbid – recommending the rejection of one of his manuscripts in a scientific journal? When that happens, we’ll know the Earth really does rotate around the Sun – and the end is nigh.

(A post in honor of Spoof Simon Jenkins Monday)

(Scroll to bottom for Official SpoofJenks blog aggregate!)

Those of you not immersed in the UK science media scene are missing out on a national treasure. I mean, of course, none other than the Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins who, although he clams no special expertise or experience in science, feels free to denounce it on a regular basis. No area seems exempt from his scorn: whether scientists are involved in analyzing climate change, ash clouds, BSE or swine ‘flu, they are probably up to no good.

In the past, at least one nature Network denizen – Stephen Curry – has attempted to counter Jenkins’ rants with a published rebuttal, but he told me today that he doubted it made a difference.

On Friday, Jenkins was at it again, issuing a confused and diffuse attack on the institution of science. He slammed the outgoing President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, for defending the Large Hadron Collider and the importance of science to society in his Reith lectures. He heaped vitriol on the new UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation building going up in London because it is apparently a “cathedral of science, justified by faith, not reason”. He actually said scientists, and I quote, “just want money”. Money, folks, is the only reason why we’re in the science game. (Someone just told me how much Jenkins earns for writing his columns, and I can assure you that it’s far more lucrative than my post-doctoral stipend.)

And most bizarrely, he lavished scorn onto the BBC for “cramming” its airways with too much science content. When I tweeted this, Nicolas Fanget helpfully googled up the BBC iPlayer’s factual category items that day: Art, culture, media=122, History=49; Science & Nature=70. If you keep in mind that “nature” is not really science, including as it does stories about pandas being born in zoos and the like, then accusing the BBC of doing too much science is pretty baffling. I listen to Radio 4 a lot at random times and the chances of hitting anything about science is pretty slim – it is almost all drama, history, news, literature and the arts. In other words, the stuff Jenkins thinks is most important.

So I’ve been thinking to myself, can I really let Jenkins get away with painting me and all my colleagues as no-good, money-grubbing evil boffins? In the relaxed Saturday morning Twitter stream, some of us talked about how we might, yet again, try to rebut. Stephen opined that humor might be the best approach, building on the wonderful spoof post of UCL physicist Jon Butterworth. I then proposed making Monday “Spoof Jenks” day, with bloggers taking the opportunity to write an anti-science post in the style of Simon Jenkins. And I’m pleased to report that the idea has taken off.

So take a look at the original offending Jenkins post, as well as Butterworth’s reply. If you’re a blogger and fancy having a go, please do so and then deposit your link in my comment stream, or otherwise let me know, so I can aggregate the responses. If you’re not a blogger but think it’s a good idea, please spread the word. The official hashtag is #SpoofJenks; if you link to this post at the top of your spoof, it might help stave off any confusion about your state of sanity.

We don’t have to take this lying down. Let’s see if Jenkins can take what he so much loves dishing out.

Official aggregate (last updated 29 June 08.14 BST)

Get over it, scientists: your cushy days are numbered by me! – UCL cell biologist Jennifer Rohn

Urgent new priority for UK science by Imperial College structural biologist Stephen Curry

A Mammoth of Research by UCL physicist Jon Butterworth

Jenks from tectum to rectum by UCL biologist Steve Moss

Perpetual Poetry in Motion by “resident New Age values proponent and spiritual thinker” Boris Cockpop on the skeptics webzine The Twenty-first Floor.com

Not a guest post and not by Simon Jenkins by student of astrophysics Philip Stobbart

Simon Jenkins collects his tithe by science writer Brian Clegg

A day in the life of Simon Jenkins by blogger Martyn Norris

We know too much by “full-time nerd” and blogger John Kennedy

Cancer: Scaremongering ‘Scientists’ Ramp Up The Fear by blogger jdc325

Bloody scientists think they know everything by blogger Rantarama

Dictatorial scientists want us to marvel at their “magic” by post-doctoral astronomer Niall Deacon

Please help Simon by blogger Telescoper

Whicker’s world by science communicator and Nature Network blogger Richard Grant (I knew it was only a matter of time before someone brought cheese into it!)

Journalists, you are fallible. Get off the pedestal and join the common herd by statistician and Nature Network blogger Bob O’Hara

The mammoth in the room by Matt Parker at StandUpMaths

Fifth column by University of Manchester physiologist and NN blogger Austin Elliott

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: Lord Paul of Oberhausen FRS by Imperial College London particle physicist Tom Whyntie

The trouble with science by skeptics blogger The Heresiarch

That’s why I am in it, for the money by Kings College London biophysicist Sylvia McClain

I am giving up science by Queen’s University Ontario neuroscientist Carl Jackson

Science education? Humph! by blogger Sonia Furtado

The other day I was part of a rapt audience, listening to the seminar of Dr Big Shot. As Big Shots go, this man was immensely likeable: coherent, humorous, persuasive but – above all – modest. The way he introduced his story was particularly effective, following a narrative formula that, when I started thinking about it, is actually very common.

It goes something like this: a researcher is in the dark, having just discovered that a particular Gene X is probably involved in his pet biological phenomenon. But he has no idea where to start to work out how. So the researcher turns to the literature, does some searches and uncovers forgotten papers A, B and C, which collectively point towards a potential link. The link is followed up and – lo and behold – the secret of the new biology is stripped away to reveal a shining Truth. Cue fame, glory and a high-profile article in Nature.

But what of obscure little papers A, B and C? Let’s look a little bit more closely at them. Are they top-tier papers as well? Actually, no. One’s a classic cloning/sequencing paper from the early Nineties published in Nucleic Acid Research (impact factor 6.88). One’s a small bit of biochemistry on a very bitty, incremental problem that appeared a few years ago in FEBS Letters (impact factor 3.26). And the third contains comparative microarray data deposited with little fuss in BMC Genomics (impact factor 3.76) last year.

I think it’s safe to say our likeable Big Shot would be the first to admit that without Papers A, B and C, his research would not have proceeded as smoothly – and in fact, without Paper B in particular, he might never have made the connection at all. And this is precisely why I worry about initiatives that advocate pyramid schemes to foster the Elite at the expense of the second-tier researchers that underpin them. Of course one could argue that there are thirty-plus years of obscure papers in PubMed for the Elite to text-mine, so failure to generate a future supply of solid but relatively trivial results will make no difference. But that supply won’t last forever, especially as techniques advance and the need for new edifices of knowledge will start eating into the supply of old bricks. When we drive all but the top-tier out of research, who will provide the necessary foundations? The more we uncover about the natural world, the more complex it seems to become. These days, great papers open up more questions than they answer, and the job seems to expand infinitely.

This is why I put my dignity on the line and suggested in public that the scientific profession needs metrics that also reward effort as well as luck. I presume similar passions inspired Stephen Curry and his kids to make a wonderful film explaining that not all scientists are, or have to be, geniuses to contribute. I think we should think carefully before ignoring the efforts of – or worse, doing away with altogether – the host of valuable foot soldiers in the scientific profession.

Sometimes you can be so involved in your own obsession that it starts to seem vastly more important and all-encompassing than it truly is. Like a cave-dwelling beast stepping out into the light of the greater world for the first time, sometimes the only response is to blink in bewildered awe and marvel at what you behold.

On Tuesday afternoon I was holed up in a conference room in Bern, Switzerland with about a dozen other people, all with various interests and expertises in science communication and public engagement. We were thrashing through a brand-new model for promoting science to the masses. It was tiring but satisfying work, identifying the issues that keep scientists from communicating their work and figuring out just how they might be offered incentives to not only do it, but do it well. We all brought to the table different perspectives – from teaching, from philosophy, from theory, from practice, from funding, and our collective experiences spanned methodologies from digital media and museums through to science festivals and the classroom.

But that’s not what I want to write about today. What I want to write about is what happened afterwards, when the session closed and I stepped out into the early evening light. A gentle drizzle was falling over the city, slicking the cobblestones and muting the sounds of passing traffic. At the same time, I was aware of a peculiar tension, as if the entire city was holding its breath.

Before long I came across a crowd of people massed around a shop window, peering at a bank of flickering, large-screen televisions for sale. Had something happened in the world while we were busy setting it to rights – a war? A plague? When I got close enough to make out the screens, I clocked red-shirted men swarming around on an emerald-green pitch and it all became clear. I reached the periphery of the crowd just as the Swiss national football team beat Spain one-nil. Within seconds, the entire city had erupted into absolute mayhem – cheers, shouts, embraces, flag-waving, horns, honking, and a spontaneous street party that was to last long into the night.

It is indeed all relative: in the face of this, what hope have we of truly interesting people in something as trivial as science?

Tipsy science bloggers on the roof: need I say more?

Just a quick note to say that I’ve started a new forum topic for the Fringe-Frivolous 2010 science blogging unconference running alongside Science Online 2010. Use this forum to register your interest in attending, to let us know which evening works best for you and to suggest topics for consideration.

SUMMARY: Building on last year’s successful Fringe event which ran (wonkily but enthusiastically) alongside SOLO09, we’ve again secured the lovely Mendeley rooftop venue for a repeat Unconference! This will have an emphasis on science blogging but we’re likely to stray all over the online board; as long as it’s quirky we won’t quibble. We haven’t even been organized enough to choose which evening, but let’s get the ball rolling. Thursday evening is out; Friday 4th Sept. is the most likely but we are also considering Saturday the 5th.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m on about, watch the official bootleg video from last year!

If you want to spread the word, the official hashtag is #fringefriv10.