Mind the Gap

We’ve all been there. It’s been a frenetic afternoon in the lab. You have half a dozen experiments on the go and, what with various interruptions – the rotating graduate student can’t find an enzyme; you’re the only one who knows how to fix the microscope and it’s on the blink again; the post-doc next door feels a pressing need to whinge about her supervisor – and you’re absolutely gasping for a cup of tea.

Hot stuff Newton’s Law of Cooling takes a beating

You boil the kettle, lovingly clean out the mold from your mug and make yourself a beautiful brew. You sit down at your desk, open up your computer for a bit of a relaxing email browse, put the steaming mug to your lips, and –

The phone rings: your dry-ice package is downstairs and needs a signature. On the way back upstairs you are nobbled by someone who wants you to read their latest grant; you extricate yourself quickly, but when you pass through the lab, the building manager wants to talk to you about your leaky incubator and the new post-doc needs you to work out whether that weird stuff in the bottom of his transfections is harmless DNA precipitates or in fact gram-negative bacteria. By the time you return to your desk, your mug is cold.

Repeat this entire process – several times – and you have a typical day in my lab.

But those days, dear reader, are over. I have been gifted with the most amazing gadget ever: a USB mug-warmer. Yes, friends, this little beauty has got to be every scientist’s best friend. I can’t speak for the whole genre, but after having road-tested this cheap and cheerful little model from Tesco’s, I can confidently confirm that it has withstood an entire afternoon of chaos and still managed to deliver me a hot cuppa at the end of it.

All this without actually causing second-degree burns or setting fire to my lab notebook. Bottoms up!

Many years ago when my first novel Experimental Heart was in the process of being repeatedly rejected, editors would tell my agent that its main problem was one of categorization: What cover would we put on this? At the time, the bookshops in Amsterdam were awash with geisha covers. A year later it was all Renaissance portraits of demure young ladies in pearls, hopelessly falling in love with the painter on the other side of the palette. Pink, lavender and mint-green signaled chick lit, while lad lit fiction sported primary yellows and blues. Fads came and went as my manuscript passed by desk after desk, the covers seeming to chase an elusive dream of best-sellerdom as if they could possibly disguise the quality – or lack thereof – of the words inside. Are readers really so shallow?

Tangible euphoria My advance copy finally arrives

When most people think of science or scientists and fiction, ‘science fiction’ seems to be the only category that exists. In such a climate, a non-SF novel about scientists – lab lit – doesn’t stand a chance. Or at least, that’s how it was when I started. I’ve been making a lot of noise with LabLit.com, which is finally starting to have an impact, and others, like Carl Djerassi and Anne Lackie, have been promoting similar causes for many years. With the rise of serious funding for ‘sci-art’ as a public engagement incentive, there have been numerous efforts to bring writers and scientists together. But is that enough to bulk up the number of lab lit novels out there (which currently stands at about a hundred ever written)?

The thing is, categorization and facilitation are not the only obstacles. Publishing professionals, who are usually arts and humanities trained, are not shy about confessing their aversion to science as a topic. In the past, these people have exerted sole control over what the rest of us get to read – and there was nothing that lab lit authors could do about it, except for the occasional one (usually already established in non-science topics) who got lucky and found an editor with a more open mind.

But this is starting to change. Technology is now giving opportunities to niche authors that never before existed. Just as musicians can circumvent the traditional recording industry by producing, distributing, advertising and selling music themselves, the new affordability of digital print-on-demand, coupled to websites and social networking, has made it feasible for anyone to be a published author. The chance of these authors producing a best-seller is probably as remote as a MySpace garage band reaching the top ten, but the possibility is nevertheless there, and such successes are becoming increasingly common.

So how did I get published in the end, when the traditional route of the agent gateway failed, when even getting shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize greased no wheels? To be entirely frank, it was all through hard work and self-promotion. I founded LabLit.com to raise awareness of the issues, toiling over it almost single-handedly for years with more time and money than I could really spare. Through this, I gained enough cachet to convince Waterstone’s to run an experiment with marketing lab lit, and to convince Phil Campbell to let me write about it in Nature (after meeting him at a science/media party I blagged my way into via various contacts). This article brought in hundreds of emails, including one from John Inglis of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. We stayed in touch and discussed possible projects for several years until eventually – just when I was on the brink of publishing it myself via CreateSpace – he offered to buy the book.

The rest may be history, but the story is by no means over. Most publishers have a slim marketing budget, so even authors at megalithic imprints have to do a lot of their own legwork to get the word out. Again, I believe the internet is key here: the blogosphere is word-of-mouth writ large, and I am hoping to make more than just a few ripples. If there is any useful lesson here for lab lit authors, it is to never give up, to keep chasing every opportunity that arises. And do visit LabLit.com – we can serialize your novel, publish chapters as short-story excerpts, listen to your angst on the Forums, and do whatever we can to promote you.

Meanwhile, the book should ship any day now!

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Publisher (If you register for free as a Gold Member, CSHL Press will give you a 10% discount)

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Advanced praise for ‘Experimental Heart’:

“It is terrific…I was gripped from the first page to the last, which is unusual for me…[ the author has done] a brilliant job of weaving in so many aspects of science – experimental, social, and political – without making them intrusive.”
– Martin Raff, Molecular Biology of the Cell

“Science as it is practiced today can be conceptualized as a mystery story, or a love story, or a thriller. In EXPERIMENTAL HEART Rohn has made a brilliant synthesis of these three modes, resulting in a page-turner with depths, exploring the hope and danger of both bio-medicine and lab romance. In short, a true novel. Scientists who gave up reading fiction about science because it’s never right—check this out. Non-scientists wondering what goes on it in that weird culture—find out here. By the end you’ll be reading as fast as you can.”
– Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo- and Nebula-award winning author of Red Mars, Antarctica and Forty Signs of Rain

I’ve just returned from a lab retreat at the Convento de Arrábida, a crumbling former Franciscan monastery about twenty miles south of Lisbon. Clinging to a hillside overlooking the sea, the white stucco buildings were set in a landscape of jagged limestone, scrubby bushes, cypress and pine, oak and gorse. Life teemed everywhere: small green songbirds, tiny lizards and a pod of dolphins cavorting in the waves far below. Every morning I woke to the sun rising over the sea, luminous lavender fog hovering just over its surface.

The best-laid plans How do cells build things so well?

In some ways it was an odd venue for an exercise in information exchange. The original brothers founded the order after deciding that the missionaries who’d gone forth into the New World with the waves of Portuguese explorers were becoming irrevocably tainted in the process. Their solution was to turn inward: they lived together but were not allowed to speak or interact. Instead, they ate only bread and water, flagellated themselves and slept on the cold stone floor with minimal clothing for maximum discomfort. (Indeed, some of them ended up decamping to small, stalagmite-studded caves in the hillside, deeming the quality of life in the Convento too ‘luxurious’.)

Our mission couldn’t have been more different. We were joining forces with a Portuguese group of similar interests, and the idea was to share knowledge and generate totally new research ideas in the process: in short, to view our projects with the fresh perspective that only an outside view can bring.

We hadn’t met one another before, but fortunately we all got on splendidly, especially after the vinho do Porto and aguadente started to circulate that first evening. The two lab heads were keen to stimulate our creative sides, so in the morning we all sat in the sun on the terrace and composed posters of our work using colored pens and paints. It was actually quite challenging to summarize my work pictorially, in one snapshot, without the crutch of a ten-hour PowerPoint session or the benefit of the ‘delete’ key. And most of the efforts that resulted were a lot clearer than the sort of painstaking, over-produced presentations you see hanging in an average poster session.

After one particularly hard day of scientific discussions about cell architecture and development, we were put into multiple groups and given thirty minutes to build towers using only drinking straws, envelopes and tape, strong enough to support the weight of eight candles. What resulted was a glorious mess of unintelligent design; just as evolution has had to overcome various physical laws to lay down the amazing array of structures that occur in multicellular organisms, so our towers ran the gamut of possible design strategies. Interestingly, the biologists did a lot better than the small bevy of physicists, who’d smugly clubbed together convinced that they’d win hands down. The best solution, in the end, wasn’t as intuitively clever or complicated.

Did we achieve our aims? I think so. A number of collaborations were initiated, and I got some fantastic ideas for my own project after being inspired by a few of the zebrafish crowd. As the line of cars lumbered past the main gate of the old monastery on that last morning, I suffered a twinge of sadness thinking about those long-dead monks, consigned to a life of silence and non-interaction. I am sure that their spiritual universe was rich and fulfilling, but I for one am happy to live in a world in which I can reach outward as well as in.

In a few hours I’m off to a lab retreat in Portugal for the next four days, so unfortunately will be missing a wonderful opportunity to do some public engagement. But for those of you who live in or around London, relish a lively debate and want to feed the public’s interest in scientific research, do check out Science and Truth on Tuesday night at the Dana Centre.

Democratic Mikey mans the table (with his brother David, right, looking on)

This has already been plugged at LabLit by my friend, scientist David Weinkove, who is one of the organizers. He said it a lot better than I would have, seeing as how all of my neurons are currently absorbed in coordinating the throwing of random items frantically into a suitcase chez Rohn, so I reproduce his brief piece below. It’s free but you need to book – check out the first link above for all the info!

For now, adeus.

_______________

Scientists face a problem. On the one hand they want to persuade society that the scientific approach is the best way to understand the world, to provide rational solutions to the world’s problems and to use technology to make our lives better. But on the other hand, practicing scientists realise that science is full of uncertainty, that there is much more about the natural world that we don’t understand than we do, and that there is a limit to the predictive power of science.

To some extent society forces scientists into this difficult position. To win funding, to publish papers in high profile journals and to get prestigious jobs, scientists have to convince others of the certainty of their research and its utility to society. They have to sell their science as the best.

Academia perpetuates a hierarchical system. There is a common belief that if you need to know the answer to something you have to talk to the most distinguished professor in the most prestigious university in the land. Lecturers like their students to believe that they and the textbooks are the authority. Of course good teachers explain the uncertainty of the scientific process to their students, but often the students are expecting their erudite professors to provide all the answers.

Despite the increasing importance of technology in the world, there is growing support for movements that reject science such as religious fundamentalism and mysticism. Scientists, government and universities have responded by promoting public engagement in science: getting scientists to talk to public. However these events are often informal replicas of the academic lecture or the conference talk. The learned professor is invited to share his or her research and opinions with the obedient audience in awe of its invited guest. Often the public attending these events expect answers from their expert. The scientist feels the pressure to oblige, especially if they are representing the institution they work for. Discussions end up being tutorials. Just like in class, many people are afraid to ask questions in case they look stupid.

Like a good scientist, I’m now going to present the solution – or at least an alternative to the public engagement event. Let’s get scientists and non-scientists together on an equal footing, where everyone is there just because they want to, not to represent a particular organization or being labeled with any authority. And anyone can ask anyone anything.

This is the plan for an event at the Dana Centre at the Science Museum in London on 11 November called ‘Science and Truth’.

Over a decade ago my brother, then a recent art school graduate, invented Talkaoke, a portable chat show in which he sits in the middle of a circular table passing around a microphone to people sitting around the edge. The image of the person holding the mic is projected on a big screen – a transient chat show guest. The conversation has no bounds and is allowed to go wherever it wants. Soon total strangers are sharing their inner thoughts in ways they never expected. Over the years this show has appeared in large variety of settings. Most recently Talkaoke was at the Dana Centre where it played a small part in a more structured event. Now we are removing the structure, inviting loads of scientists, non-scientists and all those in between to come round the table and see what happens.

Please join us.

In fiction, there seems to be an instinctive belief that anything mentioned by characters in dialogue is automatically rendered casual or unobtrusive – that the puppet strings of authorial intent are rendered invisible by speech. I say instinctive because, of all the problematic stories we receive for consideration at LabLit, informative dialogue is the biggest offender. Here is a genuine example of a passage in a piece we had to reject (with animal and transgenic product changed to protect the innocent):

%{font-size:7pt}Scientist A: “Have you cloned that gene yet?”
Scientist B: “What, you mean that little piece of DNA, which is a string of chemicals that serve as the body’s blueprint, that we’re using to make a protein so that our genetically engineered chickens will express chocolate eggs? No, not yet.”%

This exchange is unpleasant in at least two ways. First, it is an example of informative dialogue: in real life, scientist A would know that Scientist B knows exactly what a gene is, and A’s question also betrays that she already knows what the project is about too, so being fed it again is tedious. Second, the scientific explanation is long and clunky: what is known as exposition or, more colloquially, as an infodump.

A better way to treat the same information might be:

%{font-size:7pt}Scientist A: “Have you cloned that gene yet?”
Scientist B: “No. It’s really frustrating: I’m sure I’ve got the chocolate gene working, but I can’t get the chickens to express it in their eggs.”%

It’s true that in this example, if you didn’t know what a gene was you’d be none the wiser. But does that really matter? The passage gives you everything you needed to know for this story: the ultimate goal of the project, and the emotional aspects of its continued failure. Letting go of informative dialogue is a way of forcing yourself to simplify, which is always a good thing.

But what if you really do need to transmit what a gene is? Ignorant characters are very useful, but you need to beware of those Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you’re beautiful moments: the lofty scientist lecturing to the lovely young assistant. I like to use this device in small doses, and I like to use more than one character over time: the student; the husband; the pub mate; the colleague who isn’t a specialist, all providing a sounding board and a slightly different angle. The scientist should never lecture the ignorant character; it should instead be a lively exchange of science and non-science. You can also use radio broadcasts, newspaper clippings and snippets from fictional talks to slip in information en passante. If you have spent some time delivering complex key information in a scene in this piecemeal fashion, it can help to gently reinforce any key messages near the end with non-pedantic, unobtrusive summary.

Once you free yourself from the curse of exposition and informative dialogue, an entire world of possibility opens up in the form of metaphors, analogy and similes. I think one of the best parts of writing about science in fiction is the chance to view the profession through a more poetic lens by comparing it to the everyday. Here’s a more light-hearted passage from my first novel, in which the protagonist is frisking the baddie’s office for clues:

I have always prided myself on my steady hands. After all, I was a man who, fuelled only by vending machine snacks, could go for two nights without sleep and still operate a pipettor skilfully enough to string together chains of DNA into bold new configurations. Yet as I looked over my shoulder at the closed door, went around to the other side of the desk and crouched there opening one drawer after another, my hands were shaking uncontrollably, fumbling and dropping things like the greenest undergraduate who ever decimated a lab’s supply of glassware.

And here’s one that’s more serious, from my second novel, in which the protagonist is thinking about why she became a researcher:

Claire could still remember the first time she saw living cells under the microscope, in her introductory undergraduate biology practical. Textbook photos had not prepared her for the reality. How could this strange carpet of luminous bubble-wrap equate to the smooth surface of someone’s skin, or the curve of a heart or the cornea of an eye? It was as if she’d walked on the featureless expanse of the beach for years before bothering to kneel down and notice that the sand was actually a chaotic mix of impossibly tiny rocks and shells and bits of organic matter, as rugged as a boulder scree to an insect struggling across it. It was this miracle of scale that had grabbed her by both shoulders, shaken the sense out of her and made her fall in love with biology. With the vast and unknowable beauty of life, if she was honest. Corny and romantic, perhaps, but she didn’t care

Only a few more weeks now until Experimental Heart is published. Next time I’ll talk about some of the barriers to getting a lab lit novel published, and a possible way around them. In the meantime, you can pre-order the book now!

From the publisher
(If you register for free as a Gold Member, the fine folks at CSHL Press will give you a 10% discount)

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Amazon.co.uk

Egg hunt clue: vlqpss

Sometimes training can become a way of life. When I was a graduate student in Seattle, I once left a nightclub at two in the morning to grab a burger at a nearby fast-food establishment. With hindsight, walking through the Denny Regrade area alone at two in the morning in a very short skirt was a pretty stupid thing to do, but when the man came after me, my body responded before I even had time to think: I blocked his outstretched right arm by swiping it with a left-armed parry and punched him in the gut with my right. Not a wussy girl punch, but a proper one: starting from the resting position with fist facing palm upwards and elbow crooked at my waist, then corkscrewing anti-clockwise so that the punch would concentrate the force precisely on impact. Needless to say it was the last thing he’d expected and when he doubled over in pain, I was able to run away.

The incredible thing about this incident was that I was only a white belt in karate. I had been training in my local dojo for just six months, but somehow, all of the endless kata and sparring exercises had made something foreign become instinctive. When the call came to act, my muscles no longer needed to consult the boss.

I feel this way about scientific thinking: it’s instinctive too, and hits me even when encountering scenarios that have nothing to do with the lab. I thought about this yesterday as I stood in a crowded Jubilee Line carriage on my way home from work. In one of the free papers, the headline Ban ‘works’ caught my eye:

The British Transport Police today revealed how many passengers have been thrown off the Tube for breaking Boris Johnson’s booze ban – a grand total of zero.

After a brief explanation of the law in question, the rest of the piece set off all of my scientific alarms:

But since the ban’s introduction, not a single drinker has been forced off a train. A spokesman for Transport for London said: “This shows that the alcohol ban is self-imposing and working.”

It does no such thing! The logic here is, of course, fatally flawed. Yes, that is one hypothesis, but there is another one: namely that the law is not being enforced. Indeed, anyone who has been on the London Underground around pub closing time or before and after major football matches will know that many people are still drinking. Either they are hiding the containers from view when they negotiate the barriers, or no TFL staff can be bothered (or dares) to stop them. Once inside the carriages, there are no conductors to tell them to stop, so the merriment continues unabated. Of course, I am open to the possibility that the hypothesis mooted by TFL is the right one, but I’d need to see enough evidence to counter that which I’ve harvested with my own eyes.

As a scientist, I process my entire world through an open mind filtered with a screen of severe skepticism. There are, of course, other professions that teach critical thinking: I reckon lawyers, for example, would have spotted the article’s logical weakness immediately. But what about everyone else? For me, this ability to see and analyze is probably the best legacy of a sound scientific education, even if the students go on to do something else. Otherwise we are at the mercy of the media and spokespeople who trust that we will believe everything we read without question.

As a scientist, I am always thinking about the best way to discuss my work with the wider community. And as a novelist, I’ve experimented a lot with a related problem: how to transmit scientific ideas or atmosphere in a work of fiction without scaring or boring the audience. I was charged with discussing this very topic in a workshop with my friend and fellow author Ann Lingard at the Manchester Literature Festival last Saturday. In the third of this series of blogs during the run up to the publication of my first novel Experimental Heart, I’d like to highlight some of the strategies we discussed for succeeding in this delicate balancing act.

Talking fiction The lablit session at the Manchester Lit Fest was good fun [photo credit: Jon Atkin/MLF]

First and foremost, it’s important to keep technical details as simple and as spare as possible. I talked last time about “the Scotty effect”, and how jargon can enrich the atmosphere without impinging on pace, provided the author gives appropriate cues that it’s not meant to be comprehensible. What I’m talking about cutting down on now is necessary information – things that the reader does have to take on board. Many authors who know a lot about a topic – or have done hours of painstaking research – will be desperate to share it all with the reader. But they must resist. Counter-intuitively, it’s really hard to explain something simply until you thoroughly understand it. So you have to do your research, but then you must somehow distil it into simplicity. Or in other words, dumb it down.

Details can actually be glossed over quite easily in fiction. In Experimental Heart, my narrator often does this during the ‘beats’ between dialogue. This darkroom scene features a good example:

So while I extricated the first film and fed it to the machine, I gave her the abridged version of my major findings.

‘That’s quite good, isn’t it?’ she said, after digesting my explanation for a few moments. ‘I’m impressed. But how do you know that your protein is directly responsible? Maybe –’ and here she unleashed a pointed, intricate salvo along the same uncompromising lines as her seminar question. Although I had done a large number of experiments, it was still formally possible that my hypothesis could be explained by a much less intriguing possibility. The only way to answer this criticism was with the experimental result that was about to come out of the developing machine – and I was amazed by her insightfulness all over again.

Here, all the boring stuff is off-camera, and the readers get the gist without needing to be told anything about signal transduction. Instead, they learn a little bit about the scientific method, and get an insight into the personality of the narrator’s love interest. At the same time, it will not alienate scientist readers, who will be able to work out exactly what the narrator is talking about from previous and subsequent context.

I do think, by the way, that it’s important not to irritate readers who might know something about science. A good lab lit novel should take lessons from The Simpsons, which does an amazing job of appealing both to children and adults simultaneously. The kids love the slapstick humor and mad capers, while the adults get a secret kick out of all the sexual innuendo and obscure pop culture references. Do you remember the episode in which Homer finds himself in a windswept row of aircraft hangers? Inserted into the plot is a two-second mini-scene that you might easily look away and miss. Homer passes a hangar door marked ’18’. When the door is opened, we see an alien pursuing a crazed-looking official who blurts out, Look out, he’s got his probe! I am sure most children wouldn’t know what to make of it, or understand why their parents were collapsing in hilarity, but it’s so quick and zany that they take it in stride. The story is enriched without impinging on the basic plot. In a similar way, lab lit authors who play to both laypeople and specialists can create a two-level experience that will expand a work of fiction’s appeal.

Next time, I’ll talk a bit about the beauty of scientific metaphor and simile, the loathsomeness of informative dialogue and excessive exposition, and some other handy strategies to get around them. In the meantime, don’t forget that you can pre-order my novel now!

From the publisher

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Amazon.co.uk

General fiction with scientists as central characters plying their trade is rare: the number is probably close to a hundred or so novels ever written (we’re keeping a list over on LabLit, if you’re curious). Unlike science fiction or crime novels, lab lit will never be common enough to earn its own section in the bookshop, but coining this phrase has proved useful for exploring the phenomenon and nucleating like-minded readers and writers. As part of a series of blogs in the run up to the publication of my novel Experimental Heart, I’d like to talk about the art of using science and scientists in fictional but realistic scenarios.

Almost there My bound page proofs shipped from America, yesterday

There are probably a number of reasons why lab lit is so uncommon. Many writers won’t be familiar with or like science, so perhaps the pool is small to begin with. Publishers might not think the science will sell, which I’ll talk about later. But the difficulty involved in balancing complex subject matter against narrative pacing must also be a key factor. Because it isn’t easy; not by a long shot. If the scientists in your story are doing their thing, and if some science impinges on the plot, at some point you as the author will have to deal with detailed information. The question for today is, how deep do you go? And the next post will deal more with the strategies of how you achieve it once you’ve decided.

Some authors might be interested in using fiction as a science communication tool to teach science facts and figures. In this case, transmitting the necessary information accurately will be a very important goal. Others, like Carl Djerassi, author of the classic lab lit novel Cantor’s Dilemma, has used fiction primarily to educate people, as he puts it, about “the tribal culture of scientists, rather than dwelling on the science they do.” My friend Ann Lackie, author of several lab lit novels and founder of SciTalk, is even more relaxed: she favors ‘subtle science’, where you’re using characters who happen to be scientists, and using the rich backdrop of science to enliven a story that could be about something else altogether. I fall somewhere in the middle: I want to show people what being a scientist is like, but I’d like them to be actually doing science on camera. Nevertheless, I don’t feel that the readers have to completely understand this science, and the main point for me is entertainment and atmosphere, not education. The story has to be a real human story, one that anyone can get drawn into – because a novel is ultimately about people, not facts and details.

A friend of mine, a prominent scientist in his early eighties, recently finished reading my second novel and was terribly worried about the level of scientific detail I employed, fearing that non-scientific readers would be completely lost. But I wasn’t too concerned: I’ve done the experiment. In revising my fiction, I rely on an army of volunteer readers to help assess and tweak the inevitable imbalances: non-scientists who flag up every paragraph that leaves them uncomfortable or derailed, and scientists who warn me when I’ve dumbed down a concept right out of existence. The manuscript in question was perused by about 45 non-scientists, all of whom now say they are comfortable.

Interestingly, non-scientists are not as concerned as you might expect about “understanding” the science. For them, the experience of hearing about science – including the lingo – is part of the atmosphere, and is absolutely fine as long as they can follow the human story. Think of Scotty on the original Star Trek, babbling on about “plasma reflux in the warp core interfering with the delta configuration of the dilithium crystals”: we never needed to know what that meant: all we needed to know was that the ship was in danger and that Kirk had only ten hours to fix it. It is part of the setting, the scene, the milieu. Provided it’s made clear that this detailed content is not required for understanding the characters’ motivations and actions, it’s actually irrelevant whether they get it completely.

Of those 45 non-scientist readers, about three quarters said they just went with the flow and didn’t worry about things it was clear they didn’t need to know, and about one quarter were inspired to look up stuff when they wanted to know more – novel readers tend to be curious by nature, and enjoy mysteries that they can solve offline. I respond exactly the same way when I read novels with lots of non-science technical details – for example, novels set on the high seas rife with sailing jargon. I don’t really want to know more about the details, but I appreciate their being there, adding color and verisimilitude.

Interestingly, in the pool of about 40 scientist readers, most were concerned that the science was too much, and that the poor lay reader would be demanding more explanation. I think this is interesting and shows that it’s almost impossible for a scientist, including myself as the author, to judge how a non-scientist will react to science presented in fiction. Road-testing then becomes really important.

In recent years the craft of “science in fiction” has become a lot more sophisticated, veering away from the old-fashioned strategy of using dear old Auntie Jane from Tunbridge Wells to dump information on readers. Modern readers see right through these strategies and resent the idea that the book is trying to educate them; devoting more chapters to teaching is not what my readers say they want. What they say they want is permission to navigate through a scientific scene while receiving the appropriate cues to let them know when letting things sliding over their head is perfectly acceptable.

It is finally happening. Roughly seven years after I first sat down at the iMac in my airy flat in the Oud Zuid quarter of Amsterdam and typed the words “Chapter 1”, my first novel is about to be published.

Under cover Writing one’s first novel is often a secret, hidden act

It has been a long and eventful journey, Dear Reader. And over the course of the next few posts, I’d like to share it with you. During those many years, when my evenings and weekends of mad creation were kept wholly separate from my real life in the lab, I learned, of course, a lot about writing fiction. But I also stepped into an entirely new world of science in literature, with all the issues and struggles that this unusual mixture entails. I embraced the arduous task of finding an agent and a publisher who might believe enough in my work to take a risk on an uncategorizable subgenre. I’ve learned how to promote myself, how to nucleate like-minded people in the name of the cause, how to follow up every connection and opportunity that might bring my goal one step closer. I’ve met an amazing array of close friends and staunch allies along the way. And I’ve learned how to take harsh criticism and multiple rejection letters, until now I don’t even blink at negative feedback – I relish it, because it’s far more useful than praise. In the process, I learned that writing the first draft of the book is the easy part, a matter of a few months: it is the revising and the selling that takes the time.

All stories have a beginning, and I remember this one well. I was working as a group leader in a start-up biotech company in Leiden at the time and had returned home as usual on the 18:31 Intercity to Amsterdam Centraal. As I walked home from Weesperplein metro station along Centuurbaan, trams clanged their bells, the River Amstel glinted in the sunset and the boats and barges were just putting on their lights. My partner at the time was working late in the lab, so I had the flat to myself. I can still see the vase of tulips on the pine desk, their dusky orange-rose color in the blue glass vase seeming to harbor some indefinable sense of expectation. I’d sketched out a plan, and I knew, somehow, that it was time to start typing. The first chapter flowed effortlessly, and the rest followed. For three or so months, I lived in another world: my characters felt more real to me than the flesh-and-blood people around me. And in truth, it was a sort of part-time insanity, one that my colleagues and acquaintances had no idea was unfolding. It was, in fact, an awful lot like falling in love and having a secret affair – only far more intense and passionate.

Experimental Heart is my first novel. Since then, I’ve completed another, and have a third half penned. I am proud of Experimental Heart, which was short-listed last year for the Dundee International Book Prize, the world’s largest contest for unpublished novels. But equally, I know that writing it was a necessary step towards improving in the craft, so in some ways it is almost painful for me to see it go live now, knowing what waits in the wings. I am assured by other authors that such squeamishness is an entirely normal reaction, and I am trying not to think too hard about how it might be received. It is enough just to know that I have finally made it.

I will write more about the interesting psychology and strategies required to incorporate science into fiction, and later still about my adventures in trying to sell the novel, along with all the hurdles that literature with a scientific bent seems to face. It is my hope that sharing what I have learned may help other authors who want to incorporate scientists and science into their fiction – because I am convinced there is still plenty of great lab lit waiting to be written.

For now, I would be honored if you would order my book.

Logistical note:
If you’re in America, you have a choice between purchasing directly from the publisher or Amazon.com. In the UK, you can order from Amazon.co.uk.

The book will probably ship sometime in the end of November – I will keep you posted.

I have written before about my admiration of the roll-up-your-sleeves ingenuity of scientists who, when faced with an obstacle, choose to create a solution with materials to hand. But truly great things have been afoot in my laboratory last week.

It all started on Monday with the buzz of a power drill emanating from a disused bay on the other side of the room, still heaped with the junk and detritus of its decamped former inhabitants. When I followed the noise to investigate, I found that a space has been cleared amidst the broken equipment, expired plasmid prep kits, bottles of solutions with dates from the 1990s scribbled on their faded tape labels, and the bashed-up old pipettors of another era.

At this improvised workbench, one of our Italian post-docs has been modestly and methodically crafting a microfluidic chamber from scratch, the sort that is normally machine-tooled to allow the study of living cells subjected to laminar flow. Preparing moulds for the tiny chambers is usually expensive and fussy. But our post-doc found another solution on the internet that he was keen to try. Apparently you can use Shrinky-Dinks, a substance that, as most Americans will recall from their childhood, can be cut out and then baked in the oven to produce smaller, hardened, clear-plastic ornaments. (To get the full effect of the unfolding story, you have to say the word Shrinky-Dink with an Italian accent. Hint: the word Dink has two syllables.)

But some clever engineer who didn’t have the budget for a clean room recently discovered that you can make perfectly serviceable microfluidic chamber moulds using “only a laser printer and a toaster oven”. The ink patterns – or something that you score onto the proto-Shrinky-Dink polymer yourself – shrink to a microscale relief with heating. Thereafter, you pour polydimethylsiloxane onto the mould, cure it and – allora – peel it off.

Our post-doc has been experimenting, drilling, baking and gluing for days now, and just yesterday he finally got his prototype – cobbled together with a few bolts and some sawed-off syringe barrels – working well enough to create the required turbulence-free flow of cell culture medium into his chamber. We crowded around in awe, watching the pink fluid ooze into the tiny little canals on the plastic. I felt a stab of envy, being wholly unable to imagine myself ever creating anything like that. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

But I am just happy to be around people who do.