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In which pandemic storm clouds gather – again

Posted on 12 December 2021 by Jennifer Rohn

A hillside with trees

A number of months have slipped past since I last wrote here, two seasons under the bridge as my ramped-up academic life has consumed most of my free time. Then, it was the height of optimistic summer; now, the year trundles toward its endgame, short days of chill air and bright sunshine, followed by long nights under an icy-sharp moon. And all of it has been overseen by the ongoing pandemic, waxing and waning in neatly printed daily oscillations on infographic charts, lulling us into a sense of false vaccinated security over the warm months and now, poised to rain down on us all like poison from the heavens, blind and unrelenting.

“We can’t cope with another year like this,” the journalist Janice Turner lamented in yesterday’s Times, chafing against further restrictions. But the virus neither knows nor cares what we think: it simply gets on with the job: surviving long enough to reproduce, just like everything else on our planet that harbours greedy genetic information. It was the same in the lightning-struck, acrid primordial soup of 3.6 billion years past as it is today. We, the alpha species, can send people into space, but we can’t (yet) fight evolution.

And maybe it’s not us who are the alpha species after all; perhaps it is the microbes who inhabited this world billions of years before we swaggered onto the scene. Behold the mighty, big-brained humans with their smartphones and over-engineered cars, felled like harvest grain by a microscopic entity with only a dozen genes. When the host species conveniently failed to care enough to vaccinate the entire world effectively, the virus did what all the scientists predicted: it exploited pockets of neglect to mutate into the magic combination that now appears can evade even fully vaccinated people’s immunity. It turns out that sometimes doom and gloom scaremongering is not just a recreational pastime, a performance piece by ‘experts’ designed to ‘curtail our liberties’ – it is simply speaking the truth. And now we are almost back to square one in developed nations (and even worse off everywhere else).

Living through history is difficult: sometimes I can see the forest, and other times it’s all trees. On days that I don’t commute into lab, I take the long way home after dropping off my son at school, trudging up to the top of Windmill Hill with its spectacular view of the Estuary Thames as it winds past the Port of London Authority, flanked by Tilbury Docks. Great seagoing vessels pause there for awhile on their journeys, dwarfing the warehouses, rooftops and church spires while themselves dwarfed by the giant wind turbines dotting this serpentine zone of grey industrialisation. The morning skies have been streaked with lilac and coral, setting off the skeletal reticulated silhouettes of the horse chestnut trees. With breath fogging and fingers numb inside gloves, frosted grass crunching underfoot, the raw air reminds me of the fact that I am alive, that neither me nor my family has been rendered seriously ill, that I still have a job and plenty of money to live comfortably.

I think how the pandemic has reshaped some of the patterns of my life. In the Before Times I would never have dared to spare fifteen minutes out of my busy morning to clear my head and remind myself that there is a world outside of my work. I wouldn’t be so in shape if lockdown hadn’t encouraged me to get more serious about keeping fit, a habit that I now carve out time to maintain. And I’m eating healthier food, and trying to spend more time with my family, and I live in an almost perpetual state of thankfulness for all that I have.

Small boy with Xmas tree

Leading an undergraduate intercalated BSc course and revamping it almost from scratch has been challenging and rewarding, but it killed my summer and turned my autumn into a blur of stressful deadlines, one after the other in a relentless assault. Yet because of my enhanced pandemic perspective, all I can be is grateful. This will pass, and Britain may lock down once again, but Christmas will come and my family will be together.

This weekend, we bought a Danish fir tree and have taken down all the old boxes from the loft – more tape than cardboard by now and lined with newspapers bearing decades-old headlines (in both English and Dutch) – containing the precious family ornaments and relics. These, and the annual rituals, give us continuity, binding together our history with that of our families past. Richard ferments the eggnog and makes homemade mince pieces and sausage rolls; Joshua and I bake the julpepparkokar and play four-handed carol duets on the piano. I fashion wreathes from fir offcuts and sprigs of holly and ivy from the garden, and bring out the narcissus bulbs I’ve been forcing in the garage. We light candles against the darkness and hope for better days – but the days we have together already are almost too good to be true.

Posted in academia, Domestic bliss, Epidemics, Teaching, The profession of science, work-life balance | Comments Off on In which pandemic storm clouds gather – again

Self Confidence Amidst a Pandemic

Posted on 11 December 2021 by Athene Donald

I am sure readers share my gloom at the necessity of re-introducing tighter restrictions in our lives as Omicron spreads. It’s almost two years since the virus first swam into public view in the UK, twenty-one months since academics rapidly learned the joys of Zoom and Teams and ‘pivoted’ to online lectures. As for now, although pretty irrelevant in a university such as mine where teaching term is already over, the Department for Education wants teaching in person to continue. Who knows what the situation will be in the New Year, despite the wonders that vaccination may have done for our immune systems? Will that be enough to protect not only us as individuals, but also the NHS (and the economy)?

Whatever the details of the infectivity of Omicron, I fear there is no way we are not condemned to a continuing parade of cries of ‘you’re muted’, ‘you’re still muted’ and ‘I’m sorry, my camera doesn’t seem to be working’ in the months ahead. Even if some, possibly most, teaching is in person, I fear committee meetings will continue through the screen. The impossibility of reading body language or catching someone in the coffee break will persist, surely to the detriment of effectiveness, not to mention comradeship. I will not be alone in finding this ongoing prospect deeply depressing, just when it had seemed there was a glimmer of light at the end of the virus tunnel.

Holding a committee meeting by Zoom is bad enough, but one thing I probably find even more perturbing, disorienting even, is to give a webinar, speaking to a screen which only displays my own set of slides.  In other words, no audience is visible as you talk over your slidepack. Even if multiple screens are set up so there is a gallery of tiny faces visible somewhere within one’s field of vision, it is impossible to make much sense of reactions. It is as bad as talking to oneself, except you aren’t and you know there is an audience responding out there, but you have no idea how. In the early days of this blog I wrote about how essentially the same talk can be received in substantially different ways (for instance as judged by the percentage of the audience who appear to go to sleep or, conversely, who nod sagely). I can’t always work out why a talk does or doesn’t go down well, but in this remote world of Zoom, I often don’t even know which has happened. Sometimes the very fact that no (virtual) hands go up at the end is an indicator the talk hasn’t landed well, but at other times you get a smattering of questions and you’re still none the wiser.

At this (late) stage of my career this may not matter too much, but I feel for those starting out who have to try to find out what works solely in this virtual world. Without audience reactions, how is one supposed to learn the tricks of the trade? I do not think this is good for self-confidence. The ultra-confident will no doubt believe, correctly or not, that their brilliance has gone down a storm. The less confident will, on the other hand, have nothing to go on to build up their confidence, to convince them that their arguments were coherent and their conclusions received rapturously.

Self-confidence is such a tricky beast in academia. We spend our lives putting out ideas, waiting for them to be shot down.  Indeed, scientific progress is only made via that process. Throughout our careers, the worry that a new pet theory has some gaping hole in it which will only be manifest after giving a presentation, may be ever present. In my experience, talking to a bunch of familiar people (one’s former supervisor or boss, for instance) may be even more nerve-wracking than talking to a bunch of strangers. I can remember various occasions when nerves felt much worse because my late mentor Ed Kramer was in the audience. On one of those occasions, at a major international conference – at a time when I was no greenhorn – my hand shook so much when using the laser pointer I realised I needed to hold it in both hands to steady the beam, to make sure it hit the slide where I wanted it. (Of course, Zoom removes that particular problem, but it’s a minor recompense.)

I guess one take-home message is that, when attending a webinar given by an ECR, kind words by email (if appropriate) might be appreciated to provide reassurance from the otherwise empty feedback. Self-confidence needs to be nurtured in those for whom it’s in short supply. However, it isn’t always easy to tell whose does need bolstering. Those obnoxious characters who appear to ooze it, may just be good at covering up. My own experience is that students/postdocs who, in one-to-one situations appear to be very timid, may nevertheless come across forcefully. Less commonly, those who seem in private totally on top of things, may end up mumbling to their shoes (although I’m not quite sure how that might manifest itself on Zoom, since eye contact is not something easily done in the best of circumstances through a screen).

Thinking back to my own early research career, when a research fellow and a young lecturer, I remember just how much my confidence was dented by others who appeared to know it all, have it all, even if they were actually more or less my contemporaries and didn’t particularly go on to the stellar careers they no doubt envisaged. In my case it was less criticising my presentations, more in criticising the somewhat eclectic materials I chose to study. Was it physics, was the implication? I took that message to heart, worrying for years I should have stayed put in the materials science departments in which I’d done my postdocs. I shouldn’t have worried. Straying into food physics back in the 1980s and 1990s was an uncomfortable thing to do, when physicists didn’t relish such a topic. Now it’s become rather fashionable, a point I noted several years ago, but – as ever – at the start of a career it is so much harder to be sure one is on a good track, not somehow going down a pointless blind alley. I can look back now and realise I was essentially ahead of the game, but it didn’t stop the anxiety at the time.

The advent of yet further delays in normal meetings due to Omicron, may make the anxious more anxious – about their science as well as their daily lives – and may prevent the healthy interactions with peers and gurus that help further scientific discoveries. It is not surprising, whether lacking self-confidence or not, the winter feels a little greyer for – I would guess – all of us, as the news about infections gets grimmer.

Posted in Communicating Science, ECRs, Omicron, Science Culture, seminars, webinars, Zoom | Comments Off on Self Confidence Amidst a Pandemic

Level Up and Multiply

Posted on 2 December 2021 by Athene Donald

As we await the delayed Levelling Up White paper, to my mind it is encouraging that Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Levelling up, Housing and Communities) is drawing together a cabinet committee to focus on these matters, drawing membership from across different Government Departments. If regional inequalities are to be reduced, it obviously cannot be done by one department alone, as so many different facets of life and the economy are involved. Integration matters.

In the arena of research and innovation, a key paragraph in the October 2021 Comprehensive Spending Review stated that

“the government will ensure that an increased share of the record increase in government spending on R&D over the SR21 period is invested outside the Greater South East”.

All eyes will be on UKRI to see how this may be achieved, and particularly so when it comes to the significant and ring-fenced uplift in funds directed towards Innovate UK. How will they bring place into their decision-making, and how will they ensure it is the ‘right’ place in this context, i.e. outside the Greater South East?

Another relevant statement in the CSR document, albeit not one that has had as much publicity as maybe it should have done, refers to a new programme called Multiply. This is described as

“a new UK-wide programme to equip hundreds of thousands of adults with functional numeracy skills to improve their employment prospects.”

This statement does not specify the actual skills level that is being referred to, but presumably this is more likely to be at level 2 than anything higher. There are, after all, large numbers of adults who never passed their GCSE in maths. Improving their functional numeracy will help them both in their job prospects and in managing their personal (not least financial) affairs more effectively.  It is with regard to programmes like this that it becomes clear why Gove is right to bring different ministers together to work out how levelling up can be supported as an overarching agenda. Both the Department for Education and BEIS should be interested, as well as Gove’s own Department and, one assumes, the Treasury, in the Multiply programme.

There is, needless to say, little detail about how Multiply will operate. Who will deliver Level 2 qualifications in maths? It isn’t likely to be schools and the obvious candidates will be the Further Education Colleges. However, that leads us straight to the absence of the long-awaited response to the Augar Review. Maybe this will turn up soon, as promised, but that promise has been on the cards for a very long time. Unless the issues associated with funding of FE colleges get resolved, such a large-scale programme aimed at ‘hundreds of thousands’ of adults will be hard to get off the ground. Of course, if the money is separately available as of now, perhaps some tweaking round the edges along with this injection of cash will suffice, but it won’t solve the bigger picture of all the additional Level 3 and 4 qualifications needed or renewed focus on adult upskilling in areas other than numeracy. And such upskilling is of course vital to the levelling up agenda, as repeated announcements make clear, even if there is less clarity about how and what this means.

According to a House of Commons Library briefing released last week, money is committed to the new programme, stating that Multiply

‘will be funded with £560 million from the UKSPF’,

in which UKSPF is the United Kingdom Shared Prosperity Fund, whose shape is still ill-defined. This briefing makes for very interesting reading regarding UKSPF, not least spelling out how long it has been in gestation and how little is still known about it. Yet it must have a crucial role to play in the levelling up agenda, not least in acting as a quasi-replacement for European Structural Funds.  This is what it was badged to do way back in 2017 when it was first announced in the Conservative Party Manifesto and restated in that year’s (now rather forgotten after Greg Clark’s departure) Industrial Strategy White Paper.

Over the past years, Structural Funds, amounting to around £2bn pa predominantly came from two separate funds: the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the European Social Fund (ESF). (There were two other smaller funds which contributed relatively little to the UK.)  ERDF funding mainly went to research and innovation, enhancing the competitiveness of SMEs and, to a lesser degree, supporting the shift towards a low carbon economy in all sectors, whereas the ESF was directed towards getting people into the workforce or helping them to improve their skills. Under EU rules, this money went to regions according (inversely) to the level of their economic development, as measured by GDP per person. Regions which were classified as less developed received proportionally more funding, so that – in terms of funds received per capita – Wales received the highest level of funding of the UK regions. How – and by whom – will money be distributed from UKSPF in the future remains unclear, since it certainly does not need to follow this pattern?

The House of Commons Library briefing makes for illuminating, if distinctly depressing reading about the UKSPF, as to how things have, or rather have not, progressed since the early announcements in 2017. Consultations about the shape of the Fund have been repeatedly promised ‘soon’, but have not yet materialised. In the 2020 Spending Review it was stated that

‘the total amount of funding made available will “ramp up” until it at least matches “current EU receipts”.’

Finally, in this autumn’s Comprehensive Spending Review, the details of the funding profile were released: £0.4 billion allocated for 2022/23, £0.7 billion for 2023/24, and £1.5 billion for 2024/25. This review also confirmed that

‘that the Fund would “at a minimum match the size of EU Funds in each nation” of the UK’

as well as making the same promise for Cornwall. However, there is clearly something of a shift towards skills development with less emphasis on wider economic factors compared with ESIF.

Having chaired a recent Royal Society roundtable in Coventry on investing in regional research and innovation with key local leaders in the West Midlands, one relevant message that came through clearly was the importance of not segregating funding for skills and infrastructure, but to think about the innovation landscape as a coherent ecosystem. Other clear messages were the crucial need to reduce bureaucracy and not impose artificial geographical boundaries that work against clusters of firms getting together to innovate. This approach to thinking about the criteria for the UKSPF in terms of integrated actions and not piecemeal, in order to deliver the most bang-for-their-buck I hope is a message those designing criteria for the fund bear in mind.

So, a long gestation and still no certainty about how most of this money will be distributed and on what. In the meantime, there has been an interim allocation of £220M to the UK Community Renewal Fund, controlled by Gove and his Department. This allocation has not been entirely smooth sailing, with the regions selected to bid for funds not necessarily being those regarded as the most deprived and with the outcomes of the bids not released until the start of November, yet with the money meant to be spent as soon as March 2022; a tall order for many of the projects. However, this pot of money clearly as yet nowhere near approaches the sorts of funds that the Structural Funds used to do or, that one hopes, the UKSPF will in due course.

Many questions. So few answers as yet forthcoming.

 

 

 

Posted in education, Levelling Up, Science Funding, UKSPF, upskilling | Comments Off on Level Up and Multiply

For my mother

Posted on 30 November 2021 by Stephen

Black masked, weighed down by grey grief,
We carried you into the church
To be wrung out of our sodden farewells.
But you had already gone.

It was a slow journey to that sombre altar.
In the last years the traces that bound us
Stretched and frayed
As Nature’s cruelty took hold.
We had already said the longest of goodbyes
While your mind darkened and your hands stilled.
There was time enough to remember happier days
Surrounded by grandchildren,
Bustling in a kitchen warmed by the smells of baking.

In that same kitchen you tended to us,
Your children, with the food of love.
Through laughter, anger and tears,
You were our constant consolation.

Your body spent, consumed by the devotion
That bathed us all our lives,
You have departed this love-dimmed world.
But your star shines on
In every one of our hearts.

 

Mum

Posted in Scientific Life | Comments Off on For my mother

Launch

Posted on 26 November 2021 by Henry Gee

My latest book A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth has now come out in the US and Canada. Actually, it came out 17 days ago, and it’s available from St Martin’s Press and the proverbial All Good Bookstores, but I haven’t had a moment to carve a word on this until now. It was pipped at the post by versions in Dutch and German; a Spanish edition is now available for preorder; and of course the UK edition, from Picador, has been out for a while.

In thirty years of writing books, this is the first to have made any impact at all. For some years I have subscribed (through Amazon) to a service called NPD Bookscan. This gives me weekly sales of all my print books (so, excluding Kindle and audio) sold either by Amazon or in more than 10,000 US bookstores – some 85% of the bookstores in America. Most weeks I sell one or two. I have never sold more than six in any given week in the past two years. Last week, I sold 536 – this week it’s down to 284. Almost all were of the new book. And this is in the near absence of US print reviews of the book (so far … though the Wall Street Journal did recommend it as a gift book, which can’t have done any harm).

OK, so hardly Harry Potter, I know, but it means a lot to me. My UK publisher tells me that the UK editions has shifted 7,500 copies in all formats and it’s gone into a second printing. They say you have to toil in obscurity for years before you get to be an overnight sensation.

One reason for the visibility is that the book really is available in stores. My previous books have generally be confined to more academic outlets, and this tends to restrict availability. Another is that I have a whole team of people working for me. Not just my marvellous agent, but the publicity people at both US and UK publishers, and, crucially, a PR firm. Through them I’ve got excerpts of the book out in variously visible places, bookings on US radio shows, appearances by Zoom at various events and quite a few podcasts. I’ve been keeping a list here, if you’re interested … but it’s not over yet. There’ll be quite a few more things happening as we slide down towards the festive season. Suffice it to say that rectangular gifts are easiest to wrap. Although I’ve heard that although cylindrical gifts are easier to consume, one shouldn’t let the rectangularity of a gift put you off. Just start nibbling away at the corners.

Posted in a very short history of life on earth, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Launch

Did Humphry Davy suffer from Impostor Syndrome?

Posted on 25 November 2021 by Athene Donald

When I think of Humphry Davy, I think of a scientist, someone who became a star attraction during the early days of the Royal Institution and inventor of the eponymous Davy Lamp (although at the time others accused him of plagiarising earlier designs). Of course, the word scientist did not exist in his day and, as Jan Golinski’s book The Experimental Self makes clear, Davy had a range of personae during his lifetime which reflected different aspects of himself and which he played up to different extents at different periods. (Undoubtedly he also thought of himself as a poet and someone who knew a thing or two about fishing.)

Don’t we all have such multiple personae? Golinski indicates how, in Davy’s lifetime, the concept of a ‘man of science’ was only just emerging. Part philosopher, part ‘enthusiast’ – which was verging on a term of abuse at that time, as overdoing things a bit and potentially dangerously radical – part discoverer (and also, part dandy and part traveller to complete Golinski’s list, although these are less relevant to a scientist). A fair degree of issues of class crept in too when people contemporaneously passed judgement on Davy: he came from a poor family in Cornwall but made a very advantageous marriage to a rich widow. (Incidentally, on Radio 3 a local Cornish group sang an amusing folksong about him as I was writing this post.)

The various epithets that might be tossed in the direction of a scientist these days might be different, although philosopher/philosophical might still be directed at some of us, but the fact that we exhibit different personae in different groupings is as true today as then. Take impostor and impostor syndrome. Many of us suffer from this, but many of us equally know how to cover it up and may come across as confident, even overly so by way of compensation, so that the underlying condition is hidden from view. I was amused to hear a mutual (scientific) male friend described to me by a woman as typically male-confident, when he was someone I knew perfectly well hid his own insecurities under an effective mask. Don’t we all? (Or nearly all.) This woman herself I’m sure would come across to the external world – and she is very much visible to the world through her writing and interviews – as confident, but she knew internally how different she was. The same mistaken belief, no doubt, could be applied to me.

When I wrote about impostor syndrome in the early days of this blog, implying women suffered from it more than men, one of the people who publicly responded over Twitter to my post, suggesting that men too, himself included, were very prone to it, was David Spiegelhalter. The pandemic has been full of his writings and pronouncements about the statistics of death, vaccination etc, all so beautifully clearly set out. He seems on the surface to be confident and willing to speak up in extremely public fora, despite his admission to feeling a fraud, an impostor. Equally he is willing to admit to his failures. I was amused by a recent tweet of his

 

indicating how he’d failed to unmute during a live interview – something else we are all liable to do in different situations. I did it very obviously in a meeting with the last Minister of Science, Amanda Solloway; it’s always the stress of a high-profile moment when these things go wrong. It would seem to be a natural tendency to feel a fraud, but then to put on a different external persona; those people you think are arrogant may indeed be quaking inside. I would suspect that Davy himself suffered from impostor syndrome, and hence he ‘invented’ these different personae to mask what he no doubt felt to be inadequacy, not least because of his humble roots.

David Spiegelhalter is a colleague of mine, on the Fellowship at Churchill College (not that I knew he’d become a colleague back in 2012 when I wrote that particular blogpost; I didn’t join until 2014).  But the College perhaps has surprisingly strong links to Davy himself, or at least to a current AHRC-funded project on the Davy Notebooks, on whose Advisory Board I sit. This is a fascinating project aimed at transcribing all his notebooks via Zooniverse, a crowd-sourcing platform (or citizen science if you’d prefer). They are, incidentally, always looking for new people to join in the transcription project, no previous experience required!

I learned a lot of what I know about Humphry Davy from the wonderful Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, an alumnus and Honorary Fellow of Churchill (again long before I joined the College).  He too is on the Advisory Board. I have written previously about the past and present meanings of ‘impact’ in science as discussed in an earlier book by Jan Golinski, a Professor in the History Department at the University of New Hampshire who held a postdoctoral fellowship at the College; he is also on the Advisory Board. The fourth member of the Board associated with Churchill is Alice Jenkins, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow who is an alumna.  For a college so heavily associated with STEM subjects I find this grouping of the four of us on an AHRC-funded project fascinating. I hope it illustrates that, despite being also the College of CP Snow (he was a Founding Fellow) we absolutely don’t believe in the two cultures being distinct and never speaking to each other. I am proud of that.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Alice Jenkins, History of Science, Humphry Davy, Jan Golinski, Richard Holmes, Science Culture, Zooniverse | Comments Off on Did Humphry Davy suffer from Impostor Syndrome?

A Reckoning with Huxley’s Legacy

Posted on 23 November 2021 by Stephen

Recognition and Redistribution for Imperial College’s Community

This is a guest post by my former colleague, Dr Rahma (Red) Elmahdi, in which she lays our her reaction to the Imperial College History Report, and in particular the recommendation to rename the Huxley Building. I am grateful to Red for allowing me to share her perspective.  

Red-Full-Flow

Red in full flow

As a former student and member of teaching staff at Imperial College London, I was excited to finally read the Community Report from the College’s History Group, released earlier this month. Despite no longer studying at or working for the College, I consider myself a continuing member of its community, having spent over a decade (including some of my most formative years) learning, teaching and researching there, even spending five years living and working at the College as a subwarden in student halls of residence.

In the last few years of my time at Imperial, I became increasingly involved in ongoing efforts for progressive change for equity, diversity and inclusion, particularly working with Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups in the College to increase representation and foster a stronger sense of identity as members of the college community. Efforts such as these are usually uncontentious and considered a reflection of an institution’s commitment to improving the lot of the underrepresented groups who study and work there.

In keeping with these efforts, and following the lead of many international universities in exploring the roots of structural discrimination in their own institutions, Imperial commissioned the work to “report on the current understanding and reception of the College’s legacy and heritage in the context of its present-day mission”. Among the recommendations of the report, which was supported by two independent external Russell group advisors, was the removal of a bust of Thomas Henry Huxley (first Dean of the Royal College of Science, renowned 19th century naturalist and principal defender of Darwin’s theory of evolution) and the renaming of a building which currently bears his name. This recommendation was made because Huxley used racial divisions and hierarchical categorisation in his work that might now be called ‘racist’. Despite being only one of many recommendations put forward by the report, this stirred the most media attention and the strongest criticism of the History Group and the College as a whole. Headlines in online newspapers from across the political spectrum accused the College of giving in to wokery, erasing its history and effectively besmirching the name of one of the UK’s greatest scientists and educators who was even a known slavery abolitionist.

Making sense of the criticisms of recommendations such as this are never easy. Even for those of us who are genuinely trying to engage in our shared history with the intention of learning from the past for progressive future change, it often boils down to an issue of ‘recognition or redistribution’, to quote Nancy Fraser. After all, how can the renaming of a building or removal of a bust of a man (who most students and staff only have a vague notion of anyway) help with the challenges experienced by black and brown students today?

Speaking as a black woman, (and I think my identity matters here) I think that this has everything to do with these challenges. If Imperial does not honestly contend with its history of racism, it makes it easy for Black students and staff to continue to feel excluded, and othered in their own institution. I appreciate and value the work of the History group and take its recommendations seriously for this reason. Providing more opportunities for talented Black students to gain good degrees from a university with a history of racism, without acknowledging the deeply exclusive historic (and ongoing practices) of that university, does not allow us to move forward honestly. Therefore, I believe that between recognition and redistribution, a reckoning is necessary for reparation.

The challenge in the criticisms here can be surmised as two questions. 1) Is it morally correct for the College to continue to honour Thomas Henry Huxley (and by proxy his racist views)? 2) How do we contend with the fact that the bricks and mortar of the building (regardless of what it is called) is part of an intellectual legacy of dehumanising Black people at Imperial that cannot be undone?

I admit that the latter is far more important for both the education of all staff and students and for fostering an understanding of minority staff and students’ struggle in the correct context. We cannot change where the money to build our institution came from or what the product of the research undertaken in it has meant for the lives of countless people deemed scientifically inferior by the likes of Huxley. We can however attempt to highlight the legacy of the Huxley’s work and the role Imperial has had to play in creating ‘evidence’ for racialised exploitation under empire, through the lens of those affected.

The first of my two questions is an easier one for me. The purpose of naming a building after someone is to honour that person. It is paying homage to their work, what they contributed and what they stood for. Whether that is ever a good idea is another question, and I think Gary Younge has made a very persuasive case that it isn’t. There is no one person in history who has held perfect morals by modern (and changing) standards of acceptability and so perhaps there is no use in honouring anyone with a statue, bust or by naming a building after them. Racist views however are clearly not something we should want to honour at the College “in the context of its present-day mission” and I think it is an insult to the Black people who continue to work and study in a building named after a person who was so adamant in questioning their capabilities and equality.

We all understand why the Imperial College Business School was renamed from Tanaka, so why is it so different in the context of Huxley? No one accused the College of ‘Cancelling Tanaka’ but isn’t this the same thing? We are not obliged to preserve, in reverence, the names of slavers, oppressors or racists and if we do so in the name of ‘history’, we are doing a deep disservice to those who suffered because of Huxley’s views and the work he produced. What is worse, we are contending that, at one point in time at least, racism and sexism were fine. Just because some views and actions were historically commonplace, it does not mean they were correct and they were certainly never correct in the minds of those who suffered because of them at the time (or continue to suffer because of their legacy). This line of argumentation only serves to continue to normalise sexism and racism by insisting that they were once acceptable. Acceptable to whom? Certainly not to me or to those like me who Huxley deemed inferior.

One of the more interesting and surprising critiques of the report came from Kenan Malik in an Observer article where he likened Facebook’s recent rebranding to the recommendation for renaming the Huxley building. This parallel is unhelpful for many reasons, but particularly because the arguments for maintaining the building’s name and the place of the bust essentially boil down to ‘white supremacy was normal in Victorian England’. In itself this is unimportant for Black staff and students living with Huxley’s legacy at the College today. The interests of intellectual classes of Victorian Britain fall outside of the remit of the History Group. Malik also reasons that Huxley was not as big a racist as say, 18th century slave trader Edward Colston, and that by “damning both equally as racists who do not deserve commemoration is to abandon historical evaluation for a crude mode of moral judgment”. This argument in particular misinterprets the entire notion of racial equality. Just because Huxley’s work or views did not directly subject black people to violent degradation and exploitation in an utterly dehumanising system for economic gain, does this mean that they were not racist? It is the same argument that those who misunderstand calls for equality make when they equate bigotry and racism, disregarding systemic contributors to the discrimination experienced by Black people every day.

Huxley’s contribution to scientific racism has arguably had a far more profound and longer-lasting impact on racial discrimination than slavery alone. Although Huxley disagreed with the application of his work to Social Darwinism, and was no advocate of eugenics, his belief in the deterministic significance of his system of classification of the “higher and lower races” (which he states in his essay Emancipation: Black and White), were undoubtedly significant contributors to the formalisation and normalisation of scientific racism and its subsequent applications. It would have been much harder to create and maintain systems of racial domination without the validation of scientific racism that men such as Huxley helped create and perpetuate.

Ultimately, I am not only in support of the work undertaken by the History Group but also in agreement with their recommendations. Whether or not Huxley’s name remains attached to the mathematics and computing department building, the College must actually identify, disseminate and educate on Huxley’s legacy through the lens of those harmed by his work and that is the reckoning. Without this, there can be no recognition, and the value of redistributive efforts will not be fully realised. These efforts, which include increasing access to Black students from disadvantaged backgrounds to the opportunities that an education from an institution like Imperial can provide, as well as improving retention and career progression of the existing Black staff in the College, are absolutely essential. We need both to address historic legacies of injustice.

You can’t have a true attempt at reparation of institutional discrimination without doing the uncomfortable work of explaining why it was necessary to start with, who lost out, who was exploited and who continues to be excluded as a result of scientific racism. This means exposing Huxley’s contribution to racist injustice and acknowledging how Imperial benefited from this. It is one knot among many to disentangle in the complex web of historical injustice across British society that we all remain caught up in today. But it is at least one knot less.

Red is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. She can be found on Twitter as @RahmaElmahdi.

  

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Why p-values should be interpreted as more than p-values

Posted on 22 November 2021 by Bob O'H

Last week some of us published a paper trying to improve the way p-values are interpreted by suggesting this be done on a more continuous scale (here’s another link to the paper: hopefully one will go to a readable version). This caused a lot of activity on twitter, and a response from Daniel Lakens, who is a 20% statistician (and is therefore not significant). His post is a strange beast: the main message is diluted by the way he contradicts himself.

Our paper was an attempt to make an improvement in one (small) part of scientific inference: how p-values are communicated. Our argument was that when we write our results sections, we shouldn’t use the dichotomy of “significant” or “not significant”, but instead communicate a continuum of interpretation of p-values as evidence, e.g. rather than writing “The effect of x on y was significant (P = 0.03)”, we suggest “There was (only) moderate evidence that x has a (positive/negative) effect on y [(give effect estimate), P = 0.03].” We though this would be a useful, if small, step to improve the interpretation an reporting of significance tests in practice.

There was a lot of reaction on twitter, most supportive, but not all. In particular, Daniel Lakens did not like this at all:

After some discussion (which went around a bit, as twitter discussions are wont to do), he wrote a blog post to clarify his views. I think we actually agree on the main point of disagreement, but if we get there by different routes.

Lakens’ argument goes roughly like this:

1. p-values only make sense when the null hypothesis is compared to the alternative hypothesis
2. p-values should be treated as p-values. But as p-values in the Neyman-Pearson null hypothesis statistical testing framework.
3. There are a variety of coherent statistical frameworks that are used, and people should be able to use them.

The incoherence between point 2 and 3 should be clear (not all coherent statistical frameworks use the Neyman-Pearson appraoch), especially as I have over-simplified it. But aside form the bit about Neyman-Pearson null hypothesis statistical, we more or less agree. Lakens sees disagreement because, I think, he is taking a narrow view of the inferential process, and so sees our way of looking as p-values as incoherent. Unfortunately for him, he can only make his argument by destroying the “p-values should be treated as p-values” slogan.

Let’s walk through this. First, what is a p-value mathematically? As we say (and I assume Lakens agrees), it is the probability of observing a specific data summary (e.g., an average) that is at least as extreme as the one observed, given that the null hypothesis (H0) is correct. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone argue that that is incorrect. The way it is used is (informally) is to say that if the p-value is low then we decide that the null hypothesis is wrong, and instead we accept the alternative hypothesis. This developed into the formal Neyman-Pearson approach:

1. specify the null hypothesis, H0
2. specify the alternative hypothesis, H1
3. Calculate your statistic, and thus p-value
4. If p<0.05, declare it significant, reject H0 and accept H1

Our argument maps nicely onto this, but rather than accept/reject, we are suggesting we move towards a more graded way of describing p-values, as summaries of evidence, e.g. “There was no evidence that x has an effect on y [(give effect estimate), P = 0.53].”, or “There was very strong evidence for a (positive/negative) effect of x on y [(give effect estimate), P < 0.001].” (both of these are from our Table 1). Note that the examples, indeed all our examples, are couched in terms of the evidence for/against the alternative hypothesis.

Lakens didn’t notice this, probably because we didn’t spell it out. In our Box 1 we presented p-values as being about rejecting H0 (a Fisherian approach). Which, strictly, is all they are. The alternative hypothesis does not (usually) appear in the calculation1, so if you want to interpret p-values as p-values, then you shouldn’t refer to H1 at all. At best they become goodness of fit tests: with a single test a low p-value suggests that the model for the null hypothesis is unlikely to have produced as extreme a value.

Even though he wants us to interpret p-values as p-values, Lakens doesn’t actually discuss what a p-value is. Instead he explains the Neyman-Pearson approach, which is a framework for hypothesis testing built around p-values. In other words, he is arguing not that one should interpret p-values p-values (i.e. a statement about the improbability of more extreme data given the null hypothedsis), but only as Neyman-Pearson p-values, i.e. as a formal comparison between two specified hypotheses. If one is using a Fisherian p-value, you can’t interpret your p-values, because… what? They are not p-values? And if you are actually carrying out a goodness of fit test, where the null hypothesis is what is of interest… what? In this case, the alternative hypothesis is that the null hypothesis is wrong.

So one has to be Pure of Heart and accept the Teachings of Egon and Jerzy (revised edition). Except:

I will go out on a limb and state some things I assume most statisticians agree on. First, there are multiple statistical tools one can use, and each tool has their own strengths and weaknesses. Second, there are different statistical philosophies, each with their own coherent logic, and researchers are free to analyze data from the perspective of one or multiple of these philosophies. Third, one should not misuse statistical tools, or apply them to attempt to answer questions the tool was not designed to answer.

All of which I would agree with: there are different approaches, and specifically I am not arguing that the Neyman-Pearson appraoch is wrong. But Lakens seems to be arguing that all ways are right, as long as we follow the Nayman-Pearson approach. Given that p-values don’t explicitly answer questions about H1 2, one could even be naughty and argue that one shouldn’t use them to answer questions about H1.

In reality, I actually think we are not so far apart from Lakens, and he missed the importance of what was in our tables (and we overlooked the importance of them in making a complete argument). We all agree on the mathematical definition of a p-value. We also agree that a small p-value should be interpreted in the context of support for the alternative hypothesis. The difference is that we didn’t explicitly state it. I think the excuse we’ll use in public is that we were only focusing on one part of the use of p-values, so didn’t go into details about the others. But our examples did, at least fairly explicitly, put them in the context of the alternative to H0. So we make the leap from rejection of H0 to evidence about H1 in the informal interpretation of p-values, rather than put it in a formal framework. That reflects the way we see p-values being used in practice: not with null and alternative hypothesis being explicitly stated, but with them often being implicit, but clear.

In summary, what we were doing was a reflection of how we saw p-values being used, for example, in Schools of Psychology, whereas Lakens is more interested in the sort of formal framework that emanates from Mathematics departments. In general neither is really wrong, I think, but when talking to one audience one has to sacrifice aspects that the other might think important.

1 OK, OK. First, some tests are set up so that H0 and H1 are directly compared: essentially, likelihood ratio tests do this. Also, the test statistic usually reflects H1, e.g. if H1 is that the means of two treatments are different, then the difference in the means makes a good test statistic.
2 See footnote 1.

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It’s out! Today’s Curiosity is Tomorrow’s Cure

Posted on 21 November 2021 by Steve Caplan

IMG_9114

Today’s Curiosity is Tomorrow’s Cure: The Case for Basic Biomedical Research is now officially published and available from Routledge/Taylor & Francis/CRC Press on their website, from Amazon and all the regular book sellers, including Barnes & Nobles, Waterstones, etc. I’m not sure what this means, as this is an academic book, but it’s been a #1 hot new release on Amazon (the paperback version) alternately in “Biotechnology” and “Medical Research” as well as “Cell Biology” and “Biochemistry” these past 10 days since being published.

It’s been on my mind for the last 5 years, and in active writing since early 2020. For the last 12 months it’s taken up every free minute of my spare time, the writing, editing, tweaking, modifying, re-editing, figures, references, glossary, proof reading ad nauseam–so that now that the book is finally published, I feel a little lonely, a little lost, and not quite sure what to do with myself. Fortunately I have a new young dog to keep me busy…

Overall, it’s been a marathon of sorts–a marathon I started as a book to lobby for basic biomedical research, but in the course of writing became enamored with the history behind some of the greatest discoveries. I really loved the researching and writing of each of the 24 chapters in the book, and the biggest take-home message is that “it takes a village of scientists” and usually decades between the initiation of a great discovery until some clinical fruits might be gained from the research.

Another important point relates to perspective. Researchers are continually trying to “sell” the science and highlight the “significance” and “impact” of the research. But historically, it hasn’t been an easy task to always predict what impact a discovery might have in the future. For example, Chapter 24 addresses the discovery of the green fluorescent protein (GFP)–arguably one of the most impactful findings that has had a monumental influence on the course of research’s allowing scientists to study proteins, organelles and living organisms more readily. However, when the protein was first isolated from jellyfish in 1962 by Osamu Shimomura and his colleagues, the initial publication was a rather understated paper in a modestly-ranked journal–not really providing a hint of the massive impact the GFP protein would later make.

Indeed, what is “impact?” I once was asked to show a group of donors some microscopy studies on a confocal microscope, perhaps 15 years ago. After a lot of preparation and working to explain things to laypersons, I realized that the group was entirely fixated on—the notion that the microscope had two computer screen (at the time this was a relatively new thing) and they were amazed that I could drag images and icons from one screen to the next one seamlessly. The actual biology held no interest for them. And thus, “impact” can be a very subjective concept. Just ask any scientist whose paper has been rejected without review for “insufficient impact…”

In any case, for anyone interested in the stories leading up to the great discoveries, or in search of a holiday gift for a scientist, please check out this book. There’s even a discount for my friends…

KEA21SCI010

 

 

Posted in angiogenesis, antibodies, basic research, DNA, education, genetic code, genetic engineering, GFP, great discoveries, penicillin, proteins, Research, RNA, science, science history, stem cells, ubiquitin | Comments Off on It’s out! Today’s Curiosity is Tomorrow’s Cure

The Huxley Question

Posted on 19 November 2021 by Stephen

Writing in The Observer a couple of weeks ago, Kenan Malik cast a sceptical eye over a report published by the history group at Imperial College that had been asked to reflect on “the current understanding and reception of the College’s legacy and heritage in the context of its present-day mission.” Linking the report’s controversial recommendation that that the Huxley Building be renamed because of Thomas Henry Huxley’s views on race to the recent rebranding of the Facebook parent company, Malik wondered if Imperial’s historical self-examination was more of a PR front than a serious attempt to address race inequalities.

Huxley-bust

Thomas Henry Huxley – keep clear?

I have long been an admirer of Malik’s newspapers columns and books. His rigorous and thoughtful analyses of the questions thrown up by identity politics are almost unparalleled in the mainstream media and his superb book, The Quest for a Moral Compass, is one that I turn to regularly when thinking about equality. So, it is uncomfortable to find myself somewhat out of alignment with him on the Huxley question.

But I think I can illuminate the gulf between us and venture to suggest that is may not be as wide as it first appears. I should start by declaring my hand: although I am writing here in a personal capacity, I am presently the Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Imperial College and served as an advisor to the history group alongside a diverse range of colleagues and a couple of historians who are external to the university. I have worked at Imperial College for over twenty-five years, several of which were spent in an office in the Huxley building without giving the great man a great deal of thought.

Malik raises important challenges for Imperial in his article. He cites Nancy Fraser’s warning that too often “cultural recognition displaces socio-economic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle” and goes on to ask “in what way would removing Huxley’s bust and renaming the hall improve the lives of minority students at Imperial College?”

That’s a fair question. The answer comes in part from Fraser herself. Addressing her own warning, she writes: “we should see ourselves as presented with a new intellectual and practical task: that of developing a critical theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality.” In essence, if I have understood correctly, Fraser is arguing that the cultural and practical impacts of inequality must be addressed together and this is the approach that, in my view, Imperial is striving to achieve. Malik has overlooked the fact that the history group report is part of a broader effort at the university to identify and dismantle barriers to race equality. This includes ambitious targets to address the under-representation of Black undergraduate students at Imperial, which supported by substantial financial investment, and serious commitments to a slew of practical and cultural actions in support for ethnic minority staff and students (e.g. on recruitment, career progression, curriculum development) that have been developed using the Race Equality Charter (REC) framework.

The REC action plan has been worked up through lengthy and wide-ranging discussions with our community and the leadership team. These will now continue as staff, students and alumni enter into a period of dialogue on the recommendations of the history report, which will inform the College’s final decision. Together these strands of work have given the university a clearer view than ever before of the race inequalities that persist at Imperial, but it has also helped to raise awareness of the issues of race and racism right across the organisation. Ultimately, the university should be judged on the success of the actions taken to build a truly inclusive environment for staff and students.

For now, much of the discussion remains centred on Huxley, whose case raises the thorny matter of how figures from the past should be judged by modern standards. Malik rightly highlights Huxley’s scientific standing and his progressivism on many issues: he was a proponent of women’s education and avowedly anti-slavery. He revelled in taunting the white supremacists of his day even if he clearly believed in their racial superiority: “no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. […] The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.”

In Malik’s view, the recommendation to rename the Huxley building because such views “fall far short of Imperial’s modern values” is to damn Huxley “primarily as a racist”, “to warp both the past and the present” and to “abandon historical evaluation for a crude mode of moral judgement.” Respectfully, I would like to challenge that assessment.

To remove a name from a building is not to damn someone. We will remember Huxley; he is an inextricable and ineradicable part of our history. It’s just that his part in our history is more complex and has troubling resonances with members of our minority communities than we had previously appreciated – and I think we must address that. For what it’s worth, I would favour keeping the bust of Huxley within the building but in a glass case as part of a display that discusses his history and a narrative accompanying the renamed building, should that be what the College eventually decides to do.

I agree with Malik on all the difficulties that attend the evaluation of figures from history by today’s standards. But we should not discount the power of their reach into the present. Huxley is a figure I have long admired – I have even described him in a public lecture as one of my scientific heroes. I came across his views on race years ago when I read Adrian Desmond’s magnificent biography, but what strikes me now, after listening to Black colleagues and students talking about how Imperial’s honouring of Huxley impacts their sense of belonging to the university, is how little I was struck by them at the time. My Black colleagues’ views on history are inflected with the power of experience and need to be heard. As one put it pithily in questioning the argument that Huxley’s views on race cannot be judged by 21st Century standards because they were commonplace in Victorian Britain, “it does not mean they were correct (and they were certainly never correct in the minds of those who suffered because of them at the time)”.  For white men like myself and for institutions like Imperial, an honest confrontation with history must entail a letting go of power, a greater responsiveness to the legacies of European racism, and a willingness to tackle its enduring cultural and economic effects.

The aim of the university must be to present a more complete picture of its history to everyone in our community. The controversy over the proposal to rename the building has had the happy effect – thanks in part to Kenan Malik – of raising the matter for discussion in the public domain and drawing attention to aspects of Huxley’s history that have been overlooked. But no one is being cancelled here, however difficult the ongoing process of grappling with the past. Our conversation with history has sprung to new, argumentative life and this is exactly the sort of free and critical enquiry that universities were created for.

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