Mind the Gap

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.

Novelists: who can trust them? Delicate creatures with arcane quirks, twisted souls and artistic whims, if you ask me.

In this vein, I bring both good news and bad: tomorrow’s Fiction Lab will not, as previously advertised, be invaded by a television camera crew. Despite all our best efforts, Daniel Kehlmann remains deliciously incommunicado – or as he might say in his native German, nicht erreichbar. Indeed, according to his long-suffering agent, he “occasionally goes into self-imposed exile to write in Kazakhstan”. For some reason this prospect leaves me feeling a bit more warm and fuzzy about global warming, the credit crunch, the coming apocalyse et cetera. After all, if even fame and fortune can’t draw a writer out of his garret, then the world is not completely sanitized and predicable.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the beady eye of Fame is now firmly aimed on our own Dr Gee, whose first novel By The Sea will be scrutinized, criticized and thoroughly documentized by TV cameras at the next Fiction Lab session on 3 November (of which, more later) — cue images of lionesses yanking off steaming hunks of bloody antelope with their jaws. (Just kidding, Henry: I’m sure they’ll all be on their best behavior.)

For now, I hope that those of you who are in it for the literature, rather than the spotlights, will still turn up tomorrow at the RI and help me come to terms with the ending of Measuring The World which, I admit, is still causing me some consternation.

Novelists: who can fathom them?

As I rode home on the Underground this evening, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow commuters, I couldn’t help but notice the headlines in the forest of tabloids brandished at eye level around me. No minutiae of the world of sport seemed above mention: the tortured apology of a referee for awarding a controversial penalty against Bolton in their defeat by Manchester United on Saturday; the vital statistics of the fifteen England players just selected for the Test series against India; the innermost angst of Arsene Wenger after Arsenal’s defeat by lowly Hull (an outcome which Mind The Gap, a firm Spurs supporter, can only applaud).

A game with two halves Could science survive live coverage?

As the carriage rocked with hypnotic rhythm in the rising heat and dwindling oxygen supply, I suddenly had a vivid hallucination. Did that headline in the Evening Standard truly declare,

Tenacious post-doc solves long-standing regulatory puzzle in formin regulation?

I blinked, and the words dissolved into a cautionary tale about a Brazilian driver whose chances in the Singapore Grand Prix were scuppered after he screeched away from a pit-stop with fuel hose still attached.

But imagine, Dear Reader, what the world would be like if science were put under the same media scrutiny as sport. What if our every daily triumph or embarrassing gaffe was trumpeted for all to see in the tabloids and broadcasts of the world? What if people rang up radio phone-in programs to wax lyrical about the latest paper in Nature or to complain that the big grant had been awarded to some young, brash hotshot when it clearly should have gone to the more reflective and deserving woman down the corridor, or to take their favorite scientist to task for messing up a crucial maxi-prep just when the supporters needed that plasmid to be ready Friday for the Big Experiment?

We got a small taste of that a few weeks ago when the LHC went live, didn’t we? Perched on a stool in the kitchen in my dressing gown with the dark-matter cosmologist who’d come to visit from Paris, clutching cups of coffee, we listened, rapt, to the coverage on Radio 4. Although the language for live commentary of science events has not yet been invented, Andrew Marr did a pretty good job of appropriating the vivid, engaging language of sport to paint the scene before him.

“The packets of protons are champing at the bit at the starting gate,” he joked, as in the background, the many-accented scientists emitted clipped, Star Trek-like dialogue. We could scarcely breathe as the first attempt to herd the particles into the tunnel was aborted (“And I don’t know why,” Marr said cheerfully. “Something about ‘the Dump’ “). “We are waiting for extraction,” explained a man with a Pakistani accent, not terribly helpfully, as a French voice muttered Non, non behind him. Painful seconds lapsed as the beam was restarted – then wild applause and cheers burst out as it finally “took”.

At that moment, I wondered how we could get more coverage of science into the world; not rehashed, regurgitated and mangled press-released data, but the sweaty, messy, human endeavor as it unfolds before us, outcome uncertain and all to play for. Such attention might not be comfortable for scientists, but if mere athletes can stand the heat, why couldn’t we?

Time is running out to submit your favorite blogs for the chance to be included in The Open Laboratory 2008, the annual anthology of the world’s best blogs about science. As this year’s Editor, I’d like to remind everyone that science blogs come in many shapes and forms, and the judges and I will be looking for a balance of posts that describe scientific advances in an engaging, creative way as well as those that reveal the more human and meta side of practicing scientific research.

The submissions have been being coming in all year, but with a deadline of 1 December fast approaching, it’s time to make your move. Any post after 20 December 2007 is eligible, and you can nominate your own posts as well as others’. More than one is fine – though have pity on the poor judges, who will have to plow through all of this stuff over the festive period! Don’t worry about duplicates, as we can handle this. We also encourage the submission of original poems and cartoons, and as always, we’d love to see new bloggers as well as more established ones represented.

Keep in mind that, as the posts will appear in print, a piece that has lots of links, copyrighted pictures, movies and the like may not translate well. Any images will be in greyscale and should be available as much higher resolution than what you probably put on the web (>200 dpi at the size it will be printed).

You can see all the entries so far at the bottom of Bora’s update.

As you were!

We’re all aflutter here at Mind The Gap: TV cameras are coming to Fiction Lab! Yes, our humble scientific novel salon will be invaded next month by a full crew from Brook Lapping, a London production company interested in making a pilot programme of live footage of the debate, followed by me interviewing the author (more Lawson than Paxman, I hope; I’m a big softie, really). If the pilot gets the thumbs-up from the powers-that-be, it will become part of a regular, diverse series of scientific programming for the Newton Project, a web-based based science channel run jointly by Brook Lapping, the RI and the London Science Museum.

Of course there had been talk, and some demand, for web-streaming the Fiction Lab, but I’ll be honest with you – I’m a bit nervous about the ‘observer problem’. How will a book club, which is essentially a cozy, intimate affair, cope with the bright white lights and boomed mics of destiny trained upon it? One of the Brook Lapping guys, a nice chap called Jim who’s been gamely coming along and participating for months, assured me that after the first few minutes, people get used to the cameras and become as vociferous as ever. Some of our number, indeed, need no excuse to make a spectacle of themselves (you know who are…Stephen and Philip). After last month’s session demolishing Jonathan Lethem’s minimum opus, I took a straw poll amongst the regulars during the bar decompression stage, and even the shyest, bookish-ist types seemed game. I suppose the only problem is if word gets round (oops) and a hundred people show up, eager for their fifteen minutes of fame. Well, I’ll bring my trusty cattle prod.

Details of this month’s choice can be found on the RI website. The book is Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann (Quercus, 2007), which was a rip-roaring bestseller in its native German under the title Die Vermessung der Welt. A fictionalized account of an intense meeting between mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and natural scientist Alexander von Humbold in Berlin in 1828, this book is billed as “injecting musty history with shots of whimsy and irony” by Publisher’s Weekly.

Do pick up a copy and join us on 6 October at 7 at the RI for another exciting installment; Kehlmann himself may very well show up on the night. I haven’t read the book yet and am still awaiting my copy, so I’ve cribbed this extract from Amazon as a teaser.

Don’t tell.

Mwah ha ha haaaa. My plans for world domination have just ticked one step closer to reality. Lock up your fish, chips and mushy peas, good folk of Britain – I’m not going anywhere for a long, long time.

A residence visa celebration party at Navarro’s, yesterday

I took the pilgrimage down to the ominously named Lunar House in East Croydon, a building that looks remarkably like every other immigration establishment the world over, from the Vreemdelingenpolitie in Amsterdam to the Seattle Passport Agency: shabby 1960s architecture edged with grime and fear. After parting with 950 of your earth squids and queuing with the rest of the tired, cold and huddled masses, yearning to breathe free (or at the very least, to use their mobile phones), I was finally presented a shiny Indefinite Leave to Remain certification in my US passport.

It doesn’t seem like much, but as I slipped past the bored guys at the x-ray security checkpoint, clutching my prize, and fled the gloomy edifice into the bright Indian summer afternoon, I realized that an anxiety that has been dogging me for the past year had vanished.

Now all I need is a job when my fellowship runs out. One step at a time!

It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged amongst scientists that there is a shortage of students coming up in the system to replace them. This sentiment is echoed by science communicators, fueled by trade and industry bodies and, via their press releases, disseminated by the media, spurring on schemes to attract more young people into PhD programs. In nearly every letter-to-the-editor section I read in magazines such as Science, Nature and The Scientist, there is usually at least one from a panicked researcher stressing the urgent need to attract more students into science to redress ‘the shortage’ in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. And this concern came up again at the recent SciBlog conference, as Richard Grant noted in his recent excellent summary.

In the vast majority of disciplines and geographic localizations, however, it’s simply not true. And most scientists I speak to don’t ever seem to question the assumption.

Earlier this year I was asked by the Wellcome Trust to be the official rapporteur for an international science education conference they co-hosted with the US National Science Foundation, attended by the best and brightest in science education and policy from 30 countries around the world. (My final report is freely available here, from which I paraphrase and quote below.) And the puzzling, incredibly sticky ‘we’re running out of future scientists’ meme was one of the main issues that the delegates hoped to debunk.

Demographer Michael S. Teitelbaum, Vice President of the Sloan Foundation, has done years of careful research on this topic, with actual numbers and statistics instead of vague fears and feelings. And his work, which was presented at the conference, clearly shows that in most cases we don’t actually need more scientists. In fact, with only a few exceptions (such as subspecialties like engineering, or in particular countries, such as Korea), we are producing far more, in every discipline, than the system can absorb. The specialist delegates at the conference overwhelmingly agreed with Teitelbaum’s assessment, from their own experience at the coal face. (Teitelbaum’s arguments and hard data are elegantly summarized in his recent testimony before the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation Committee on Science and Technology of the US House of Representatives this past November.)

Teitelbaum has been broadcasting this warning over the past six years, but clearly the message is not penetrating. For example, as recently as March 2007, a report from the Confederation of British Industry called for a doubling of science and engineering graduates over seven years to prevent skilled jobs from going overseas, and similar proclamations have been made in the USA, Europe and elsewhere. But Teitelbaum’s research shows that surplus is the reality now and, although forecasts can never be certain, there is scant evidence of a future shortfall either. Meanwhile a generation of PhDs face a “nasty hard landing”. Any of you who has recently applied for a position and found yourself jostling with several hundred other candidates will have viscerally experienced this glut first-hand.

Teitelbaum is not in any way suggesting that science education is not important – but it is “an annoying fact”, he said, that scientists and engineers make up less than 5 per cent of the global workforce. So from an economic perspective, we need to ensure that all STEM graduates and PhDs can make a meaningful contribution even if it is not to do research. This is not necessarily difficult: he called science knowledge “as essential as literacy was to the 20th century” for the general skilled workforce today, and showed evidence that STEM graduates doing non-STEM jobs still earned more money than their non-STEM counterparts. So whereas channeling education solely to create even more of a surplus of specialists would be inappropriate, good science education for all children will lead to an increase in national productivity, wellbeing and informed citizenry.

I think all scientists who feel that their field is threatened by shortfalls should arm themselves with the facts pertinent to their own geographic region and discipline before being swept away in the mob. There may well be areas (certain subsets of the hard sciences perhaps) that could grow thin in future and need to be watched more carefully, but at the same time, I believe it is immoral and cruel to encourage young people to enter a field where in the end, no job awaits.

I think there is no pain more acute than that of unrequited love, especially unrequited love that devolves from a formerly happy relationship. And the more perfect the love rival, the more painful the love object’s indifference. But what do you do if your rival is the result of a physics experiment gone awry, a stabilized absence in space? What do you do, in short, if your love is seduced from you by a sentient black hole?

Misplaced passion A clever story of scientific obsession

For those of you interested in that queasy period of time when love slips through your fingers in slow motion, I can heartily recommend the novel As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem (Faber and Faber, 1997), the book choice for our next Fiction Lab at the Royal Institution this coming Wednesday evening. This short, tidy, beautifully written campus novel is a lab lit classic about an English professor whose girlfriend, Dr Alice Coombs, falls destructively in love with a space-time anomaly she has dubbed ‘Lack’. But this modern-day Alice is dealing with an entirely different sort of rabbit-hole.

As always, an excerpt to tantalize you:

Alice cleared the room of observers, locked the outer doors, and began the experiments that would etch her name forever in the history of physics.

_The first was a paper clip, I think. Just a curled steel wire. She slid it across the table, pulling her hand away just short of the calibration that indicated Lack’s edge. The paper clip slid across the table, through Lack, and dropped to the floor on the other side. _

Alice retrieved the paper clip and tried again. Again it fell to the floor behind the table. She fished in her pocket, brought out a dime. The dime slid through and fell. So did a penny, and so did a ballpoint pen. Alice emptied her pockets into a pile on the other side of the table, and each item clattered to the lab floor, refused.

Alice went and gathered her belongings. One was missing. She searched the floor, frisked herself, reloaded her pockets, conducted an inventory. It was nowhere.

Lack had gobbled the key to our apartment.

In my real-life social circles, I am known for being fashionably late. So it’s only fitting that I mention the recent SciBlog 2008 conference a scandalous three days after the event, even though the hangovers have faded, dozens of reports have been duly uploaded and the blogospheric buzz has moved on to Open Science, Non-virtual interactions and trouser-eating aliens.

Luvvies, divas and tears before bedtime Richard and Henry run across the beach bar towards each other in slow motion, while Matt chaperones

As Ben Goldacre mentioned in his keynote speech, the fame aspect of the conference was intriguing. One of the first things I noticed during morning coffee was that there was a lot of love in the room; you could hardly move for people swooping down and squealing things along the lines of Ooo, you’re X! (where X = hip, trendy well-known A-list blogger with a five-digit Technorati sperm count). A few obviously confused people even subjected yours truly to this treatment, no doubt mistaking me for some other D- or E-list celeb. To add to the general furore, the paps and journos were out in force, including microphone-waving podcasters and a very persistent newshound from the Times Higher who stayed til the bitter and drunken end trying to get someone, anyone to divulge something suitably salacious.

One of the things I have always liked about science is that we have relatively easy access to our celebs. While you might go your entire life without ever laying eyes on the likes of Paris Hilton, the movers, shakers and Nobel laureates in your discipline are within easy striking distance at the major symposia. If you approach one up at the podium or in the bar, you will usually not get the brush-off. If you’re bold and persistent, you can have a scientific discussion about your project with one of the finest minds in the field.

And if you’re really lucky, you might even pull one at the conference disco.

In some long-forgotten undergraduate anthropology course, I learned that our primitive ancestors spent no more than twenty hours a week on sustenance activities. The logical extension was, of course, that our forty-hour-plus work ethic was a sort of modern madness. Now that I am older and wiser, I’m not so sure I believe this theory. During my recent camping trip, for example, we tried to do most of our cooking over a fire, and spent a surprising amount of time just starting and maintaining the coals, boiling water, and cooking and cleaning up – and this was with food we’d bought at the local Safeway (except for one trout).

The good life Non-supermarket food in Zone 2

There is, however, something undoubtedly attractive about the idea of our noble savage ancestors living hand-to-mouth in the lap of the land – with plenty of time left over for naps, games, sex and whatever stone-age equivalent of TV and surfing the internet happened to be big in the cave. How close can city-dwellers get to this sort of lifestyle?

Anyone who gardens in subtropical Central London knows that the local snail and slug populations are almost unstoppable. But this just makes any successes that much sweeter. After a few years of trial and error, I’ve worked out that semi-poisonous plants work the best, so it’s the Solanaceae all the way: chili, tomato and potato, and a garden-full of snails with serious gut-ache. The tomatoes and chili have been a bit of a disappointment this year; apparently the UK honeybee population is succumbing to Colony Collapse Disorder, which could explain the poor yields. But the spuds are indestructible, and it’s a wonderful feeling, unearthing these tubers like pale white treasure from the ground and eating them soon afterwards, preferably steamed with a bit of butter, salt and home-grown herbs.

Come the apocalypse, could I feed myself and a family hunting and gathering in Russia Dock Woodlands, the 35-acre green space which runs along the back of our garden? Possibly. One of my favorite books, an SAS manual called Survive Safely Anywhere by John Wiseman, is full of useful tips about living off bugs and rainwater. We’ve got firewood, foxes and squirrels, doves and magpies. We’ve got canals, ponds and the nearby River Thames full of fish and the makings of canard a l’orange — without the orange. I might be able to train the cat to bring in his various rodents and amphibians instead of devouring them outright. There are copious edible nettles and other weeds and fungi, the odd wild apple tree. And of course, a superfluity of blackberries, which I’ve been gathering and eating several times a week during this peak season.

Is there an evolutionary imperative that makes gathering especially attractive for me, as the female of the species? Although I am not brilliant at reading maps that are reversed towards the direction I’m facing, I am extremely good at navigating back home by remembering where I’ve come from. This, yet another university lecturer informed me, must be the heritage of my gathering ancestral sisterhood. And it’s true that I go into a bit of a trance when I’m picking berries: the hot sun on my back, the dreamy buzz of insects, the prick of the thorns, the sticky purple juice on my skin and the way it feels when a ripe fruit falls into my fingers without even a tug on the stem. It’s addictive, the urge to gather just one more berry, and I often have to force myself to stop. But equally, I like the thrill of the chase; I have never hunted anything other than fish, but I think I would quite enjoy it (with something sporting like a spear or arrow, not a gun), and I do chase the foxes when I scare them up on my runs, imaging what it would be like to corner them and go in for the kill.

Is this all in my genes, or just a myth of imagination?