Mind the Gap

In this week’s Nature, Sydney Brenner and Richard Roberts lament the ephemeral nature of online information storage, which may lead to irreparable gaps in the anthropological side of the scientific record. In passionate language, they urge scientists to save their notebooks and correspondence and donate them to historians.

Of course I agree that such materials should be preserved, which is probably why I can’t bring myself to throw away the two boxes of gently moulding lab notebooks, spanning thirteen years of research, stashed up in the loft. I’m sure these are not the papers that Brenner and Roberts had in mind, though – they want to preserve the detritus of the Watsons and Cricks of this world, not of ordinary research folk like me.

But then I got to wondering. Why not? My lab notebooks might make pretty compelling reading to some future historian starved for scraps of how 99.9% of (non-celebrity) researchers spent their days and nights in the lab. Why not document the parade of meaningless or ambiguous data that make up most researchers’ records? The ‘non-Eureka moments’, if you will? The missing bands, the sickly cultures, the yeast-infested Petri plates, the unligated plasmids, the blank films? (I am still amazed that I used to carefully, almost lovingly, trim those squares of utterly blank x-ray film and tape them in for the record, as if it wouldn’t have just been enough to write “It didn’t work. Again.”)

And let us not forget the expletives. A good Midwestern American girl, I tried to keep the notebook language polite, but some of my colleagues’ entries rivalled James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel How Late It Was, How Late, which famously used the F-word an average of 25 times a page.

And then of course there are the stains, telling their own poignant tales. I actually have tear-stained pages, produced one evening when I had to go into the lab after a major relationship break-up. Blood, of course (just paper cuts, I hasten to add, as opposed to episodes of violent post-doctoral jealousy). Various laboratory substances: Coomassie blue, methyl red, ethidium bromide pink, bacterial broth brown. I have no doubt that if you checked with a handy Geiger counter, some of the pages would still be faintly radioactive.

Seed magazine might be ahead of the game in this cultural revival. Recognizing the hidden art behind everyday experimental write-ups, one issue last year featured a two-page ‘Anatomy of a scientific notebook’ in which two real notebook pages were reproduced in full size and annotated. The only thing was, this notebook was obviously from outer space. It was written in perfect calligraphy and perfect prose. And not a stain in sight.

So let’s embrace our grungy, mediocre notebooks and preserve them for posterity, even if no historian would touch them with a ten-foot barge pole. Who knows what stories they might one day tell?

Sometimes I find myself feeling a bit old.

Last night one of our American editorial interns turned 21. Now, this landmark is a bigger deal over the Pond than here, as 21 ushers in the legal drinking age. The choice of venue is therefore obviously crucial. For some odd reason, my team – all in their early twenties as well – asked for my maternalish advice about where to consecrate her new status.

Scientific natter at Freud

My thoughts immediately turned to Freud. For those of you not in the know, Freud is a little gem of a basement bar on the northernmost end of Shaftesbury Avenue near St. Giles. When I was a post-doc in the late Nineties, Freud was a favored hangout of the foreign scientist crowd. It was first discovered by one of the German post-docs, a signal transduction biochemist with an uncanny eye for hip and unusual night spots whose antenna led him one night to wonder where the small cast-iron staircase under the pavement actually led.

Word spread, and eventually Freud became a regular hangout. Many marguerites were consumed there as we complained about failed experiments and just generally attempted to numb the self-indulgent postdoctoral angst. After about 10 o’clock, a competent DJ would appear in one of the corners, and the drinks, though as expensive as you’d expect for Central London, were made with flair and aplomb – always involving an aerial component. (I’ve only seen a Freud barista lose control of a drink-in-progress once, and it was pleasantly explosive.)

I was understandably nervous about bringing the youngsters into my old haunt, but fortunately, they were all genuinely impressed. In truth, the place has hardly changed over the past decade, which in London is a rarity and something to be grateful for. There was a bit of sniffiness on the part of our commissioning editor, a self-described cocktail snob who waxed scathing about the use of lime cordial instead of the real McCoy, and one of the editorial assistants said she didn’t trust barstaff who give change back on a silver tray. Fortunately, the guest of honor proclaimed the Long Island Ice Teas to be perfect, and everyone else was obviously enjoying themselves, so I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Tonight after knocking off work, undaunted by hangovers, my team headed off to Victoria station to take part in a flash-mob. Apparently at 18:50 this evening, synchronized to the station clock in the main concourse, a mass of people assembled to turn on their MP3 players simultaneously and dance for fifteen minutes in apparent silence to the music in their own ears. I didn’t feel up for this myself, but I did text one of my editors to ask her how it went.

“It was very silly!” she replied, in the English-perfect text language that most scientific editors, thank goodness, seem to favor over trendy abbreviations. “Funny seeing about 500 people randomly dancing around and the bemused looks from passers by. We stayed for 20 minutes and people were still at it!”

So there you have it. I’m still feeling a bit old. But also a bit wise.

It sounded like a rather teeth-grittingly uneasy mix: science geeks and speed-dating. You will meet twelve people in one hour – guaranteed! the invitation had promised breathlessly. As the editor of LabLit.com, I tend to get invited to quite a few random sci-art events about town, and my attitude is that it’s always worth a go.

Showing off the evening’s haul

It was my first time in the London HQ of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) near Chancery Lane underground station in central London.

“It looks like a space station in here,” I overheard one participant mutter as we massed out of the lifts towards the venue room where smiling young women, bathed in an eerie white glow from the futuristic ceiling above, beckoned us onward like sheep to the slaughter.

“Yesssss…there’s food and drink,” someone else crowed sotto voce as the buffet table came into visual range. Decent breadsticks and a nice Merlot, after all, can cover a multitude of sins.

A few glasses of nice Merlot and a handful of breadsticks later, we were warmed up by the MC (whose patter bore more than a passing resemblance to Patrick Kielty of Fame Academy), the whistle blew, and the blur of five-minute conversations, punctuated by frantic olive-snatching and business card exchanges, began.

The verdict? I can barely remember anyone I spoke to. I certainly can’t match a facial memory to any of the wine-stained business cards I found crammed into my handbag afterwards. I can say that it was a challenge to sum up my non-straightforward situation in 2.5 minutes (at least with those that actually allowed me to get a word in edgewise). I found myself tailoring my self-description to match the other person’s own profile – with scientists I would emphasize my scientific expertise and training or my STM publishing day-job; with innovators I’d be talking about inventorships and patents; with journalists the conversation was all freelance work and LabLit. But I suppose that’s what happens in real speed-dating; you talk about your love of rock climbing with the foxy, rugged adventurer with the manly sideburns but gush about your favorite book with the bespectacled, wispy literary type – for those few brief moments, you become the person the other one wants to see.