Mind the Gap

For those of you following the previous conversation about my opinion that the Times’ new science magazine Eureka is male-centric, but who aren’t likely to wade through the 100+ comments, just to let you know that its editor, Antonia Senior, has been kind enough to defend her position on that thread (near the bottom).

I’ve reproduced her comment below, and the discussion rages on over at the original post – but feel free to add your thoughts to this update if you’d find it easier.

I’m the editor of Eureka, and yes I am a woman, and a very committed feminist. I have been following your blog, and reading your comments online. It’s taken a while for me to reply because I’ve been furiously busy, apologies for that. I do want to reply because I think you all raise incredibly important issues.

I would like to just explain our thinking about the number of women in the issue. Yes, we knew they were under-represented. Yes, we agonised about it. (I’m stung by the suggestion we didn’t notice, or that the graphics are dictated by marketing!)

But I, and my female picture editor, are absolutely committed to the principle of including ideas and pictures based on merit alone. We were looking for 15 astonishing ideas, and only 4 of the ideas we loved were being championed by women – Libby Heaney, Angela Belcher, Laura Chamberlain and Rachel Armstrong.

At one point we nearly put in a few more ideas, solely to have more pictures of women in the photo essay, but rejected the idea as patronising and ridiculous.

As for the columnists being male, I make no apologies for that. We wanted Martin Rees to be our guest columnist for our launch issue, but there will be women in that slot in the future (suggestions welcome!). The Times’ environment editor and science editor are male – but as a lifelong Times employee I can assure you that this is coincidental; there are plenty of women in positions of real power here, just not any in those two jobs. Ben Miller is male, but the market for comics with a scientific background is a niche one.

In a previous incarnation I was Deputy Business Editor of The Times and faced a similar problem; women were under-represented in senior roles in business, and getting them into our pages felt like a struggle. I came to the same conclusion then: our job is to report the world not invent it as we would like it to be.

I know that many of you felt that the furniture was male, and you are probably right. We could make more effort with the graphics etc.

I have plenty of plans for championing women in science in future editions, but I’m afraid I will not be shoe-horning women into any issue in just for the sake of it.

If any of you have ideas for women whose work you think we would like to know about because the work is astonishing, then I would be delighted to hear about them. I can be reached at [email protected]

I would also like to highlight Maxine Clarke’s response:

But there are just so many women doing great scientific work – as I mentioned above, it really is not hard to find them. They are not invisible. I am afraid I absolutely do not buy the argument put forth by Henry and maybe others that it is harder to get women to write. I have personally commissioned literally hundreds of articles over the years, and have never found it a problem to publish those by women as well as those by men. I think every commissioning editor, whether of Eureka, or of a Nature or other scientific journal, or anywhere, can find people who are fully representative of the scientific world – gender, geographical location, etc. It really is not difficult. And if it takes an extra five minutes of phone calls/search to find a woman who isn’t into self-promotion bigtime but is doing superior work, then that is five minutes well spent.

Finally, I would again point out that numerous studies over decades suggest that what is considered ‘astonishing’ (whether it be a CV, a grant application or research impact) is strongly subconsciously influenced when the gender of its creator is known – and that both men and women fall prey to this.

What is it like to be a scientist in the modern world, and how does the reality measure up to the average person’s view of the scientist? I’ve been fascinated by this question for years, and now I’ve been asked to speak about it at the next gathering of Skeptics In The Pub in London, with a talk entitled Boffins and geeks, madmen and freaks: why are scientists still such a PR disaster?

What I plan on exploring is the following: scientists as a group call up very specific images in the public imagination, typically not very flattering ones. This distorted view is reflected in depictions of scientists in fiction, but also tends to spill over into how they are portrayed in more factual accounts, such as documentaries and in the news media. In a world growing increasingly reliant on the latest scientific, medical and technological advances, possibly for its very survival, the expert accounts of scientists are nevertheless often simply disbelieved, which could be due in part to the unease and distrust that the prevailing stereotypes engender. The meme of scientists as out-of-touch/cold/arrogant/mad meddlers has ancient roots and has evolved in interesting ways to the present day. But whose fault is all this – are scientists themselves partially to blame? If people knew the truth about what modern scientists are really like and really do, would science as a whole be a more sympathetic, persuasive profession? And if so, how we can turn it around – and is it even possible?

I’d like to come at these questions from a non-predictable angle and to get beyond the standard clichéd material, into territory that might be a bit more honest and productive.

I’d be happy to see many of you in the audience this coming Monday, 19 October, from 7:30 PM at the The Penderel’s Oak, 283 High Holborn, London WC1V 7HP. You need to book in advance, and entrance is £2. According to the website, 143 seats have already been booked, leaving a little more than a hundred remaining. They are very strict about these limits. Come early if you want to actually sit down!

Ever since the Guardian axed its weekly science supplement a few years ago, there hasn’t been a single British broadsheet that considered the topic interesting enough to devote more than a few sporadic column inches in the main news pages. All the major papers have magazines or sections dedicated to sport, travel, television, family, literature, money, arts and other topics, but science has been left out in the cold.

Until now. I have been awaiting the arrival of ‘Eureka’, the Times’ new weekly science magazine, ever since I first saw the advertisements in the Underground. An issue was duly procured at the newsagents, this debut morning, and I flipped through it eagerly on my morning commute. The magazine looked superficially good – lots of articles and intriguing topics, nice graphics and layout. And I was happy to see it wasn’t just a series of features about scientific facts and findings; there were many profiles of real, working scientists – most of them gratifyingly young and non-famous. But as I worked my way to the end, I slowly realized what was wrong.

‘Eureka’ was almost completely male. Of the twenty practicing scientists either featured, or asked to air their opinion, only four were women. But the masculinity cut much deeper than that, much more subliminally. The imagery, too, was almost totally male. Whenever the designers had to choose an arbitrary human figure to illustrate an article, they almost invariably chose men. There is a man’s face on the cover (appropriately labelled ‘the future face of science’, dovetailing quite nicely with the predominant gender of the young up-and-comings celebrated within its pages). There are male long-distance runners, male actors on their whimsical ‘quantum of cool’ scale, a man holding up a baby, even a male zombie. There are pictures of Robert Fitzroy, Kevin Spacey, Sam Phillips, Clarence Darrow, Richard Hammond, Charles Darwin and Bill Bryson. Aside from the four female scientists featured, women appear only in stereotypically girlish roles: a wide-eyed lover mocked up on a Mills-and-Boon-style romance novel cover; a Thirties woman playing with her nylon stockings; a scantily-clad woman in a see-through dress. The only gender-neutral sketch is of a woman yawning (probably because science is ever-so-boring to the fairer sex, isn’t it?) Oh, and there’s a snippet about how getting tromped by a stiletto packs more power than an elephant.

I am sure that none of this was deliberate, absolutely certain. And I’m not going to give up on ‘Eureka’ for something so superficial – not yet, anyway. But things like this do actually matter to me, and probably to other women scientists out there who’d like their portrayal in the media to match more closely to the situation in real life. Possibly in common with other science bloggers amongst you, I received an email from ‘Eureka’ today, asking if I would join their forums and help steer their editorial direction. This is definitely an issue I will be bringing up.

On Sunday evening I typed the words ‘The End’ after 129,488 preceding ones, thereby completing my third lab lit novel – the tale of a new group leader whose collaboration with a pair of strange epidemiologists soon leads to more than she bargained for. Having ferried my beloved scientist characters to the end of another journey, I was very aware of how the story of writing this one differed significantly from my previous experience.

Send in the fat lady

Experimental Heart took about three months to write and about three years to revise over a series of about twelve major drafts. I didn’t know very much about writing fiction when I started that novel, and I learned an awful lot on the way. As a result, the second one (whose title is currently under discussion) took only two months to write, but what came out was much closer to a finished product, meaning that I needed only about six months to revise it over three major drafts. During that process, in my waning months in the Netherlands, I started a third one with as much fire and inspiration as the previous two. By the time I reached England to kick off my new career in publishing, I was on page 122.

But then something happened. Of course I was very distracted, not only by changing countries and careers but also by a major upheaval in my personal life. To make matters worse, my then agent decided she would stop trying to sell Experimental Heart after (what I assumed was a mere) nine rejections, preferring to abandon it and focus on the second one. My opinion differed, so we parted ways soon afterwards. But the thought of producing novel after novel into the void, with no pipeline, was just too depressing to contemplate. So after tidying up the second novel, my activity more or less dribbled off.

Over the next four years, I eked out about 125 pages of Novel 3, all of it painfully. Most of my work was in fits and starts: when I was on sabbatical at the EMBL, for example, or over a few weekends when guilt drove me to at least try. But no sooner had refreshed my memory about what I had already written that the window of free time would be over. I no longer felt like a real novelist, and there were times when I seriously doubted I’d ever finish another book again.

Everything changed when I got a book deal. It was a wake-up call: I was a novelist, so I’d better start acting like one. The inertia, however, was still killing me. It wasn’t until I went on my writing holiday that something finally re-clicked for me. Slowly at first, and then with increasing fluidity, I began to produce – by the end of it, at page 347, I was writing as prolifically as any of those dreamlike times in Amsterdam, when twelve hours would pass like twelve minutes. In short, I had got my mojo back.

So what now? Lots of revisions on Novel 3, and the germ of an idea for a fourth. I am toying with the notion of writing about scientists from the point of view of a non-scientist character, which will offer an intriguing perspective on this singular profession that I so love poking and prodding from every possible angle.

Mired as I am in manuscript revision, the conversations of other people in the group office often float past unnoticed, deflecting off the bubble of concentration I try to maintain around my computer. But sometimes, the things people say are so unexpected that I can’t help listening in.

“Let me guess,” one of our post-docs said. “You want to borrow my rack again.”

“Yeah,” said the Ph.D. student from down the corridor, rather sheepishly, as he leaned against the door frame. “Mine hasn’t been working.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“I did buy exactly the same thing,” the student hastened to add, “but yours seems to be lucky.”

“Well, there’s nothing special about it,” she replied. “But help yourself.”

Now, it’s science’s little secret that many of us, despite our rational veneer and extensive scholarship, are actually quite a superstitious lot. I’ve had a colleague who insisted on using a particular pipettemen because he was convinced it was imbued with a mysterious lucky charm; yet another insisted that her reactions worked better in blue Eppendorf tubes. There was even one lab mate who felt he had to wear lucky pants for that big experiment. But the student in question did not strike me as that sort of bloke.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’ve come here to borrow her test-tube rack because you think it’s lucky?”

They both just looked at me pityingly. And so it transpired that I was confusing rack

with Rac

My mother always told me not to eavesdrop.

Yes, I have finally surrendered to the inevitable. After seven days straight sitting at my desk welded to ImageJ, the public domain, Java-based image processing program, my chronic repetitive strain disorder is starting to seriously impair my ability to use a computer. (I’ve long since lost the battle with both a right- and left-handed mouse, so when even the trusty tappable trackpad starts to hurt me, I know I’m in trouble. It’s the computer equivalent of vancomycin-resistent tuberculosis.) ImageJ is free, and lovely, and damned good at turning even the most proprietary of evil corporate image formats into tiffs, but it’s very laborious and click-intensive to zap your photos into anything you’d feel proud exposing to your boss, let alone a referee or two.

So after a long day doing the same 27 actions over and over again, joints throbbing in protest, I started to think about making a macro. Now, we used to be able to sweet-talk our dearly departed French post-doc into crafting these for us, mostly I think because he enjoyed the challenge more than some of the things he had to do in the lab. When my bioinformaticist collaborator was visiting and I started complaining about my hands, he suggested we take a bash at one ourselves. Recording the 27 actions was the easy part – ImageJ is great for that; the difficult bit was working out how to ask the macro to visit every file in a given folder and, most importantly, to give the output file an intelligent name. I got some advice from our microscope guy, who suggested pillaging other pre-existing macros for ideas, which got me a long way. Then the bioinformaticist added a few more touches. But I couldn’t get the damned thing to run. I was quickly frightened off the few geeky forums I tried to scan – like most of that ilk, they seemed ludicrously scathing and quite happy to wipe the floor with any newbie who might have missed something while RTFMing. Finally, I showed it to Richard and he immediately saw that I was missing a few braces at the end, thereby failing to close the subroutine. One hour later, while I was drinking tea in the common room, the brand-new, shiny macro had unpacked all 7000-odd tiffs, tidy as you like.

For want of a brace, the battle was almost lost. (Well, at least that’s what we Americans call them; the British prefer the lovely phrase “curly brackets”.) And it all reminded me of how much I used to love programming. I’ve never been formally trained, but I taught myself a bit of C during a summer stint at the NIH in the Waste Management Services. Desperate to work in a lab but unable to secure a research position, I fell into a sort of weird troubleshooting internship, just doing whatever needed to be done at a moment’s notice. Looking back, it was one of the most interesting jobs I’ve ever had, for sheer variety. I remember having to learn how to program a bar-code reader, to set up and train people in an ingenious new toxic waste biosensor employing fluorescent micro-organisms, and essentially teaching myself C from the Kernighan and Ritchie bible so that I could set up a database of all the chemicals on campus and what you had to do to neutralize them in case of emergency.

Not one day after my database was up and running in beta version, our WMS headquarters got the call: there’d been a massive chemical spill on campus, and the emergency services wanted to know what to do. I could hear sirens in the background, and everyone was staring at me. I asked someone to phone in the names of the chemicals, and I looked them up in my database and called the guys in moonsuits and told them what the recommended containing procedure was.

Disaster averted, faster than you can type ‘grep’. Looking back, it seems ludicrous: did they really base their actions on the advice of a 20-year-old intern? It doesn’t seem possible, but that’s actually how it happened. Since then, I haven’t done any more programming, but having inspected my 7000 tiffs, and seeing immediately that each is going to need an additional 5 actions to make them perfect…well, brace yourselves.

I need a hero. I’m holding out for a hero ’til the end of the night. He’s got to be strong, he’s got to be precise to three decimal places and he’s got to be fresh from the tissue culture suite.

Exit Bonnie Tyler, chain smoking in a lab coat.

I’ve been thinking a lot about scientific heroes over the past few days. These musings have been prompted by my participation in artist Martin Firrell’s latest installation Complete Hero. It’s a deceptively simple concept: participants from a variety of backgrounds are filmed by candlelight answering the artist’s various questions about what heroism means to them, with the edited end result to be projected outdoors onto the Guards’ Chapel in Birdcage Walk for a week in November (nightly from 4th-10th). Many of the people taking part are soldiers, as you’d expect, but I was certainly pleased that science was not to play its usual invisible role in popular culture on this occasion. So as I was walking through sheets of rain towards Firrell’s Rosebery Avenue studio this past Tuesday, I tried to think what I had to say in terms of scientific heroism, how I could represent my profession to best effect.

But I found the exercise worryingly difficult. When I was younger, I could easily have rattled off a dozen names of scientists that I would consider ‘heroes’. There were the usual virologist suspects from history – Jenner, Koch, Salk, along with women like Curie, Franklin and McClintock. And then there were the scientific celebrities that I grew up with during my training: those famous luminaries whose papers you read, keynote speeches you soaked in and labs you dreamt of doing your post-doc in.

But the intriguing thing about contemporary scientific heroes is that, unlike other sorts of heroes one might have – famous musicians, artists, writers, political activists and the like – your chances of meeting them are virtually assured. Science is an enviably democratic, flat structure, and at conferences, the lowliest student can at least try to chat with the most exalted Nobel laureate.

And so it was that as I rubbed elbows with the best and brightest in cell biology, I underwent a series of grave disappointments. This one was astonishingly arrogant; that one blanked me and looked over my shoulder when I tried to introduce myself; yet another pinched my backside at the conference bar. And although I have met a few wonderful exceptions, by and large the more heroic the subject was in my estimation, more unpleasant he or she – though it was mostly ‘he’ – turned out to be in real life. What’s more, as I began to author papers myself, it became clear that the bulk of stellar work ascribed to the luminaries is actually down to the inspiration and hard graft of an unsung number of younger people – and that a lot of the major successes can be chalked up to very good luck that courage really had little to do with. Now, Galileo – he was courageous. But death is no longer on the line: the most that we risk these days is being forced by circumstances to become a sales rep.

So as I became increasingly jaded about scientific celebrity, another realization was creeping up on me, chiefly fuelled by reading the real-life stories behind the great discoveries I had so ardently admired: frequently, the name attached turns out to be misleading. We know Spemann but not Mangold, Fleming but not Florey, Virchow but not Remak. We know, in short, the people who got the credit because they were the most vocal, or the most famous already, or in some cases because they were the male part of the team. In the face of this, what hero could I truly believe in?

After discussing all of these idea with the artist, I think he finally teased out my real scientific heroes. They come in two categories: the people I know intimately who are firmly in control and own the great work they do, like my Ph.D. supervisor Julie Overbaugh, who fought through a lot of political bullshit in the early days to achieve her current position and whose molecular biological and translational research on HIV in Africa is making a real difference. And then there are all the people who will never be scientific luminaries, but who work hard and care passionately about knowing the truth and don’t mind being an incredibly tiny cog in a churning, inefficient, soul-devouring, often bitterly hopeless machine.

I guess that makes me a hero too. Who would’ve thought.

Every time I walk by, I feel guilty and look the other way. Not that this helps: I can somehow detect that my neglect is noticed, even when I deliberately take a different route to avoid detection. I can almost sense the wistful disappointment pressing against the back of my head as I carry on down the corridor, the silent pleading for me to turn around. Just once. Just for a little while.

I have not done any serious lab work for nearly three weeks, and my empty bench is breaking my heart. There is a glass partition between the lab and the hallway to my office, you see, and my bench in the closest one to the window. I can see it all there, waiting: my four Gilsons, ranked in order from p1000 to p2; my beakers of sterilized Eppendorf tubes, my stacked boxes of tips. My lucky forceps and my ravishingly beautiful platinum loop. My row of solutions, gently aging now to a fine vintage, their nominal pH gradually decaying into poetic license. My microfuge, my vortex mixer; the long grabby nameless contraption I use to fish out tubes from the liquid nitrogen tank. Timer, pens, calculator. Boxes of fresh polished microscope slides and coverslips; the crusty old plastic lids I use over and over to wash filters. The stained white coat, shapeless and discarded over the back of my stool.

Of course what I am doing instead of benchwork is also called science. I have been finalizing a co-authored paper for publication, fiddling with text and an evil Adobe product that shall remain nameless. I have been processing images for another co-author which involves doing the same unspeakably boring series of commands on ImageJ over and over and over for hours on end. (Note to self: learn how to do macros. Further note to self: freeing up enough time to learn how to do macros will require setting up some macros: entire chain of logic explodes.) I have been dreaming in the dark confocal room as the microscopic eye slices through my fixed cells with glacial slowness and I twiddle dials to alter false-color pixels of gain and offset. And I have been watching timelapse movies of my cells seething across the screen, throwing up blobs and speckles of actin in bizarre configurations. Soon, I will have to start finalizing my screen annotation for publication, which will weld me to a spreadsheet for a good few weeks.

But in the wings, I have a new gene that is begging to be understood better. I have made wonderful tools that need to be played with, and I have an intriguing hypothesis that I would like to test. But I need to finish what I’ve started, tie up loose ends and clear the decks before I can dive back in.

So for now, I sit at my desk with a cup of bad coffee and try to ignore the singing. Maybe someone should lash me to the mast.

It’s a pretty rare Fiction Lab that sees us reading brand-new lab lit novels two months in a row, but fortune has smiled upon our Royal Institution book group for September and October. (And thank goodness for the odd economical reality that can make hardcover books roughly the same price as the paperback on Amazon – and often cheaper. What is that all about, anyway? Probably the same fluctuation in space-time that priced my last eBook purchase at £3 more than the hardcover price. Yes, they saw me and my Sony Reader coming.)

Could this be the start of a genuine trend? Let’s hope so. Nonetheless, in our September gathering, last Monday, a good many people had a lot of less-than-flattering things to say about Turbulence by Giles Foden, the tale of a randy meteorologist who rather unconvincingly becomes a mathematical genius to help predict the weather for the D-Day Landings – oh, and he also, bizarrely, garrotes someone with a weather balloon along the way. The premise, based on real events, couldn’t have been more promising, but the main complaints were about craft: foreshadowing about as subtle as a solar eclipse, clunky transitions between present-day and flashbacks, and characters that you just didn’t quite believe in. And as is common for some science novels written by non-scientists, the overarching science-as-life metaphors were just a little too breathless.

If the previous novel put our heads in the clouds, the next promises to embed them firmly in the sand. Or at the very least, shale. On 12 October we’ll be discussing Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chavalier, yet another novel based on historical reality. In this case, the fictional lens is turned on two Victorian fossil hunters (huntresses?), Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, as they struggle to be respected as natural scientists in a man’s world. If the previous book was one for the lads, this is definitely something for the girls, and I have high hopes because this author is usually very enjoyable.

If that’s not enough excitement for one post, I can report that we’ll all be heading over en masse on 5 October to the Royal Society to hear Ms. Chevalier discuss her book with Richard Fortey, paleontologist extraordinaire, thereby getting us properly warmed up for the discussion to follow. There might, also, be the odd libation afterwards at my favorite post-RS watering hole. Do join us if you can!

Tonight as I sit at my writing table, a lopsided moon hangs over the choppy waters of Greenland Dock, the wind pelts at the window and I only have about twenty-odd pages left to wrap up my third, yet-to-be-named science novel. It’s the eighth and final day of a designated writing holiday that started, appropriately enough, within sight of one of the points of interest in the story:

Squalls over Sheerness The Isle of Sheppey, as seen from the beach at Seasalter

Sheppey was originally chosen for narrative convenience: I wanted to set some of the action in Estuary Kent, and the infectious disease plot required an island. But on various research trips to this remote and desolate locale, I became captivated by its brooding atmosphere. The names alone are evocative; for example, the body of water that separates the island from the mainland is called The Swale, and the acres of mudflats between are known as The Oaze. The marshlands on either side of the Swale are full of rippling grasses, semi-wild horses and skylarks tearing overhead like an aerial bombardment.

After rocking up muddy and exhausted at the Marine Hotel in Whitstable with a heavy pack on my back, feeling rather like Harriet Vane in Have His Carcase, I spent a few days swimming in bracing cold high tides and typing busily in my room. After returning to London, I spent long days and nights at this table. It’s been slow going now because I have dozens of threads that need to be tied together; as most authors know, writing is the easy bit and it is the detailed plotting that takes up most of the time. Nevertheless I am very happy with the 21,000 words I’ve managed to get down.

When I wrote my second novel, I was on the dole in Amsterdam. Life then took on a very strange cadence; I would write for twelve hours a day and the rest of the time, wander around in an almost semi-permanent daze, a state of mind that felt more like convalescence than anything else. The biotech company in Leiden where I’d been happily employed had gone bust and none of my interviews for academic positions were going anywhere. Surviving on a generous government handout and sporadic freelance journalism, I had no idea where and when my career would restart, or even what profession that would entail.

And so I wrote, and I walked. I used to pace a houseboat-lined rectangular stretch of the Amstel near my house: across the Stadhouderskade Bridge, down the Weesperzijde, back across the Berlagebrug and home along the Amsteldijke. Sometimes I’d frequent cafés and obsess over plotting: Kapitein Zeppos, de Jaren, Zotte, Café Sarphaat, De Ysbreker. This week, I found myself falling into those same solitary patterns when I needed a break in reality: I strolled along the Rotherhithe Thames or though the meadows and woodlands of Russia Dock, witnessing the precise moment (I believe) that summer morphed into autumn. I can report that the blackberries are withering on the wine, the sloes are ripening, the cow parsley blooms have curled into perfect, violet-tipped green cages and the rose hips have swelled to the size of plums.

Tomorrow I’m back in the lab, but at this moment, it doesn’t quite seem real.