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.<\/p>\n
\nExit Bonnie Tyler, chain smoking in a lab coat.<\/p>\n
\nI’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<\/a> latest installation Complete Hero<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n \nBut 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n \nBut the intriguing thing about contemporary scientific heroes is that, unlike other sorts of heroes one might have \u2013 famous musicians, artists, writers, political activists and the like \u2013 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. <\/p>\n \nAnd 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 \u2013 though it was mostly ‘he’ \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n \nSo 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?<\/p>\n \nAfter 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<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n \nI guess that makes me a hero too. Who would’ve thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading