Confessions of a (former) Lab Rat

I reviewed a book proposal last week. Nothing is remarkable about that, but there was a section in one of the sample chapters on ‘Knowing your audience’. One of the points it made was that people have a story, their own internal narrative against which all external events are measured, and into which all stimuli must be assimilated if they are to make sense.

This is pretty much why Sarah Palin said what she did, and why the usual suspects got so upset about it: she was playing true to type and understanding the isolationist leanings of the Republican faithful, and being criticized by those who have the stage instruction “Be scandalized by anything that could possibly be an attack on science” hard-wired into their DNA.

It makes me think that Palin is perhaps the better communicator: she knew her audience, while her critics fail to understand what they have to do to reach those same people.

We’ve seen this before (and please, can we forget about Sarah bloody Palin come Tuesday?), in different contexts.

When someone (anyone: I’m not pointing fingers. This time) says that religion is superstition, or that faith is believing something untrue, then not only are they displaying a breath-taking ignorance but also failing to communicate with those very people they need to reach. They are not taking into account the internal narrative.

We are, in many cases, dealing with rational people, who have had an experience (or a series of them) that makes sense. That can be explained if certain assumptions are true. Who would claim that their faith is based on evidence. Failure to understand that, to grasp that they have a totally internally consistent story (a ‘worldview’, if you must), results in a failure to understand them and ultimately a failure to communicate. These are not, on the whole, people who deliberately set out to destroy science (and in fact many of them have a great deal of respect for science; they just fail to understand how it works).

You are then viewed as arrogant, as condescending, as ignorant and irrelevant (see Jenny’s comment.) And that’s before they start to feel that you’re threatening the most important thing in their life. (You might think that this serves them right, and it’s their own lookout, and we’ll have a good laugh at their expense. Sadly, if you do think that it proves my point somewhat).

Equally, many religious people (I use the term broadly) fail to understand the nature of scientific enquiry, let alone what drives scientists. They do not realize, for example, that I do science because I like to find out how things work. That when I sit in a seminar and see the F-type ATPase and think to myself ‘How the fuck did that evolve?’ I don’t say ‘God did it’. I say ‘Let’s find out’. If God did do it, I want to know “how”:http://tinyurl.com/5wqca8.

Just as they don’t understand the scientific method (and why should they?), these are people who do not understand the scientist’s inner narrative. Indeed, looking around, they might be forgiven for thinking that scientists exist to disprove faith in God.

But maybe if they understood my inner narrative, and I theirs, we could have some meaningful discussions.

Men’s health. Apparently it’s not talked about much. My own feeling is that health issues in general are not much talked about (with a couple of trendy exceptions): the comments when I talked about “depression”:http://network.nature.com/people/rpg/blog/2008/09/14/on-depression—a-personal-perspective and cancer research are probably indicative that although people don’t talk much about them, they really want to.

So I’m putting my money where my mouth is, and because I want to save on razorblades always wanted to be a Spitfire pilot Paully talked me into it, I’ve signed up for Movember. Starting tomorrow I will forego my daily face-scrape so that I can grow a bushy ‘tache, in aid of (specifically) The Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue: the national depression initiative.

Here’s what I looked like this morning:

If you want to help (please, please do), you can donate by credit card or PayPal account. All donations over $2 are tax deductible.

(I’m not sure how this works if you’re not in Australia, but you’re smart-looking people).

Make Paully, Garth and myself (The Marconi Moustachios) very happy, and help thousands of blokes like us.

Seen elsewhere⁰:

As Faraday once said, great science communication sometimes involves
palming people off with a Wikipedia article when you’re in over your head
and just can’t be arsed.

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I’m about to go to bed, so don’t have time to do this justice (the entry I want to write has been lurking on my desk for about three weeks. Soon, I’ll nail it down).

However, it strikes me that, if Dawkins is being quoted correctly, then he has lost all sense of what it means to be a scientist.

the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure

Scientists observe, they think of a hypothesis, they test it.

That second step is crucial. If you have no imagination, if you bring all your pre-conceived ideas to the world you observe: well, you might publish lots of papers, you might write popular science books, you might even win a Nobel or get knighted, but basically, you’re a dolt.

Science consists in observing the world, and answering, but first asking, the question “How does that happen?” You need imagination to ask the question, imagination to answer it: a child-like sense of wonder in all you see and hear and feel. (Forget for a moment that children do develop a very real sense of reality).

Can a frog turn into a prince? Well, you know what, I’ve never seen it happen. But why don’t we think of an experiment to find out?

To say “No, that can’t happen, because I say so” is to murder a very human part of ourselves. And that’s child abuse, in my book.

Quick, and highly scientific (_Riiight—Ed._) poll.

Does anyone actually read journals for research articles anymore? I don’t mean does anyone read articles (I hope you do before you cite them…), but do people take each new issue of a journal (online or dead tree) and read through the table of contents? Do people read email ToCs? What about RSS feeds of ToCs?

Or do people just run PubMed searches (or Google Scholar) on their favourite keywords once a week/month/whatever? Or a mixture of the two?

And a related question: If you keep up to date with ToCs at least, for how many journals?

I’m genuinely curious. The question is inspired by the hundreds of articles published weekly in JBC and PLoS 1. A further question would be Is there a disciplinary divide in keeping up to date with the literature?

Returning from Bondi this afternoon,

Bondi, this afternoon

we stopped off at our local off-licence and found something rather special. I had to go into the lab this evening, and when I got back, it had warmed up to the perfect temperature.

Something special, just now

The blurb reckons it’s ‘perfect with smoked hams or smoked salmon’. Dammit, now I’m hungry.

Elsewhere on NN, Anna Cath takes issue with the framing of cancer as a ‘bioterrorist’. Personally, having sat through another hour-long talk on jun and fos, I’m going to take issue with the framing of cancer as something to be cured.

We have been trying to find a ‘cure for cancer’ for more than thirty years. We don’t have a single cure, and nor are we likely to, because ‘cancer’ is a word that describes many, complex and different conditions. We might then suppose we could come up with multiple cures–but after thirty years of serious research we don’t seem to be getting anywhere: the increase in long-term survival after radio- or chemotherapy is still disappointingly low. The state of affairs with regard to therapy was brought home forcibly to me this week: today was the funeral of a member of this department. She died on Monday night, of pancreatic cancer.

Why is this happening? Why is this still happening?

When you look at the genesis of cancers they all follow pretty much the same pattern. A mutation in a gene causes a protein to go wrong, which in turn releases the brake on cellular proliferation. There are numerous oncogenes, myriad pathways, all telling the same sad story.

But there was a telling moment in the seminar when the speaker justified his research (he’s working for CRUK, after all) by overviewing a transcriptional regulation pathway and talking about ‘pharmaceutical opportunities’. If we could find a control point in a cancer cell that differed from normal cells, and use it to turn the cell ‘off’, that would be an obvious place to throw a drug. Much effort and money has been expended in trying to understand different cancers, so that we might be able to do just this. And, actually, we don’t seem to be getting very far.

The problem is that we’re trying to do the equivalent of reducing the number of people killed in road accidents by building faster ambulances and more hospitals. This is completely arse-backwards. The only way to significantly reduce cancer mortality is to prevent cancer, not to cure it. There are attempts to do this–eat less meat, more vegetables, stop smoking–but not only are they rather half-hearted we don’t even know the mechanisms by which lifestyle and diet cause cancer (except for smoking and exposure to known carcinogens), so how can we advise people what to do?

So shouldn’t we devote more effort into researching causes rather than cures? So that we can treat the source, not the symptom? I think so, but here we run into trouble. There is intense political and economic pressure to not find out what causes cancers. I could say that drug companies have no interest in curing cancer, because they want to sell drugs–but that would be a cheap shot and might mark me out as a nutter. But I think it’s fair to say it’s easier to point to thousands of scientists working on a maze of twisty biological pathways, all alike, and say we’re doing something, rather than examine our manufacturing processes and the like. When the companies that support the Pink Ribbon campaign might actually be contributing to breast cancer, wouldn’t it be best just to keep quiet?

If the incidence of cancers in the developed world is increasing, what does this say about our lifestyle, and about the products that our consumer society insists on having? Even if there is no link, wouldn’t it actually be a good idea to find out?

Is it time to say that cancer research–as we know it–doesn’t work? Is it time to divert the majority of scientific effect towards identifying and preventing–or repairing–that initial mutation?

Oooh, why, you—

cheater!

As scientists, communicating what we do and why we do it is important. We communicate with other scientists—what we’ve done, in papers; what we’re doing, in poster sessions and seminars; and what we’re about to do, in dark alleys at night with a baseball bat. We also talk to lay people, possibly in slightly simpler (and sexier) terms.

Part of this is to encourage children to become scientists—or at least convince them that science is important—other times it’s to secure our funding, or explain why there’s no link between the measles vaccine and autism, or why GM crops are better for us and the environment. Other times it’s because we want to persuade people with treatable diseases to take this drug and live, rather than go to a homeopath and die.

Another part of this is to persuade normal people that scientists are just like them, really (we eat, breathe, love, read, watch TV, have children, lose arguments, get depressed), but that our years in training help us to understand the natural world and give us some insight into how it is that everything seems to so nicely fit together.

Sometimes our Department encourages us to do this, sometimes we’re lucky enough to have a Faculty office with trained communicators. I’ve even been sent on a course run by the Medical Research Council.

Still, most scientific papers are written in reasonably formal, stiff, walking-as-if-there’s-a-carrot-up-his-arse passive voice and third person something-that’s-not-quite-English.

Here’s an example:

[Butterflies] were subjected while being held by hand to hindwing removal. (The hindwing was severed with scissors along a line just distal to the point of articulation of the hindwings with the thorax, so that only a small triangular flap of each hind wing remained)

Here’s the same sentence, rewritten so that my daughters can understand it:

We cut the back wings off butterflies.

Apparently this was to prove that Hindwings are unnecessary for flight but essential for execution of normal evasive flight in Lepidoptera.

In other words,

If you cut the back wings off butterflies, they can still fly, but can’t duck, dive and weave.

Is anyone else here thinking you utter, utter bastards?

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A perennial problem in our lab is that of labcoats. It’s probably fairer to say that the problem is the people, not the labcoats: a few people do wear them regularly, most do not. This may be due in part to the labcoats themselves: polycotton medic style, with sleeves that dangle into your coffee media and actually very little protection against full-frontal splashes.

I managed to sneak a Howie – style coat when I left the UK. These are pure cotton with side-fastening studs (not buttons, which can be fiddly with gloves and are much easier to undo when that hot postdoc from next door if you need to get out of it in a hurry) and have elasticated cuffs that don’t dangle in your et ceteras. I know that Fu Manchu, among others, suffers from labcoat envy, and on Friday we were able to do something about it.

In front of the entire stuctural biology group I presented him with the first in the Summer ’08/’09 collection of the Exton label of designer lab wear:

This coat, designed uniquely for the MMB, is manufactured from the highest quality cotton drill. It incorporates all safety features that our discerning customers demand, together with breast and hip pockets. The bespoke tailoring is guaranteed by our unique manufacturing process and warranty.

Contact us directly to quote for your needs or to discuss available patterns and materials with our designers. Due to high demand, we anticipate a lead time of approximately three to five months.