Christmas and the laboratory

I like Christmas on Wednesday, because the 'natural' last day of work is ambiguous. The last days before Christmas are like a coastline, where we stop and stare across empty space at the horizon, taking stock of what can safely be left behind and what we need to carry into the new year. December is filled with parties; institutional parties, directors' parties, departmental parties, lab parties, parties in the labs of collaborators, home parties, restaurant parties. Optimistic grad students hang plastic mistletoe over laboratory doors, which are decorated with Petri dishes, bubble wrap, tubing, wires, glassware, styrofoam peanuts, disposable plastics, arranged into Christmas trees, snowmen, candy canes, reindeers or sleighs. Who should get a present? The boss, the supervisor, the alpha colleague? The students, the technicians, that lady who looks after the accounts, the guys in the storeroom, the person who sorts the mail? The IT guys who rescue you every time something interferes with your destiny of spending eight hours a day staring at a monitor, the janitorial staff who mop the halls every night, the people who run the cafeteria? Will there be an institutional Christmas card? Must we pay the postage ourselves? It's a business expense, right? Students catch the bus or the train or a plane or drive their cars held together with duct tape onto icy roads and visit their families and old friends who don't quite understand this mysterious world called the laboratory. 

We want to spend December cleaning up the lab and sorting out messes but it never happens. Everyone tries to clear their desks by finishing what needs to be finished. And then they send it to someone else who is trying to clean off their own desk. Most years, there a few hours on my own before going home, trying to decide what can be rescued from neglect, what needs to be written down so that I will remember it when the break is over. Each year, the time needed is longer, the time available shorter. Around the world, colleagues who follow different religions or perhaps no religion at all, know that everything stops in The West for two weeks and they take part in this collective deep breath. Then, like winding up a stalled clock, we all start to plan our work for the coming year, and the white boards by our office doors are covered with optimistic, colour coded to-do lists. 

Last year, one of the items on my hidden list was this blog. It's difficult to decide if I am satisfied, because I didn't know what would emerge from my own imagination and memories, or from the readers who stumble across my words. We'll see how this modest ripple behaves and if it survives after passing over the sandbar between now and the new year.

Getting things wrong

Comet ISON stumbles on after its closest encounter with the Sun (public domain, NASA, from Wikipedia).

As this is written, we are waiting to see if Comet ISON will come out from behind the sun. Two nights ago on our national news, the comet was declared dead and disintegrated, based on images taken from satellites orbiting at appropriate angles as it made its closest pass to the sun. The comet disappeared. Then a few hours later, like the dead man in Monty Python's Holy Grail who announces he'd like to go for a walk, the comet popped out of the solar glare, dimmer but at least somewhat intact. It was fascinating to watch the scientific press in the months leading up to this event.  Pessimists were adamant that the comet was doomed, while optimists anticipated the Comet of the Century. 

Is it surprising that people are confused when scientists disagree? It doesn't bother scientists much, because we live in a culture of controversy, criticism and differing interpretations of the same data. This is lost when our musings are translated for retransmittal by the media. Uncertainty, chaos and risk are elements of modern science, but much of modern society, including many science journalists and their readers, seems stuck in a binary world of plus or minus, black or white, right or wrong.

A few months ago, I read a book by Matthew Cobb called Generation, and was struck by a paragraph that accused scientists of only telling stories of success and omitting the false turns and dead ends they encounter in the pursuit of the truth. This leads to the impression that science is invariably a triumphant progression from one discovery to the next. Generation is the story of how science figured out where babies came from. It is an alternately horrifying and hilarious read, centred around two 17th century Dutch scientists, Reinier de Graaf and Jan Swammerdam. They were best buddies as students in Leiden, but became terrible enemies as they competed to work out what contribution ladies made to procreation, what Fallopian tubes and ovaries were for, and what those newly discovered squiggly sperm cells made by male mammals were about. Some scientists of the time suspected ladies might make eggs, but they imagined eggs like those of chickens, and they couldn't find anything like that in there. The vicious rivalry between de Graaf and Swammerdam shows us that 'scientists behaving badly' is not just a modern phenomenon. Both men made huge contributions, both made lots of mistakes, and they never missed an opportunity to try to squash each other.

There are many books intended for the general audience built around mistakes made by famous scientists. They tend not to illuminate the scientific process, but rather mock 'so-called geniuses' for making 'bone-headed mistakes.' John Glassie's book, A Man of Misconceptions, is a biography of the seventeenth century German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher, a polyglot and polymath who lived most of his life in Rome. He wrote huge volumes of natural philosophy before the scientific method was widely understood. Among his many interests was the mathematics of music, and he is often associated with the notorious cat piano (in German katzenklavier), a keyboard that pricked tails of restrained cats who were selected to howl in pitch. Kircher was controversial even in his own time because of his wild claims about magnetism (his explanation for most phenomena), his dubious translations of hieroglyphics on Egyptian obelisks, and his monographs on China, produced without the tedious necessity of actually travelling there. My favourite Kircher creation is his theory of everything, which states that there are 371,993,326,789,901,217,467,999,148,150,835,200,000,000 possible concepts. He derived this number from a formula involving the nine essential attributes of God, i.e. goodness, magnitude, duration, strength, wisdom, will, power, truth and glory; the nine universal subjects, namely God, angels, heaven, elements, man, animals, vegetables, minerals and numbers; and nine principles of relationship, being difference, agreement, opposition, beginning, middle, end, majority, equality and minority. He did this without an electronic calculator or computer, of course; it must have taken awhile. The book is predictably ironic and mocking, but not as funny as one might expect. The best joke is a cover blurb characterizing Kircher as a cross between Leonardo da Vinci and Mr. Bean. The book needed less da Vinci and more Mr. Bean.

Just as in life, making mistakes in science is an important part of getting things right. We usually don't go around bragging about our failures in life, and scientists usually don't dwell on failed experiments or half-baked ideas. Is this dishonest? Is this concealment? I don't think so. We tell our children about some of our false steps along the path of life, hoping to protect them from some pain, and scientists tell their students about the flasks that exploded, acids accidentally spilled, or experimental controls that were poorly conceived. We just don't talk to reporters about it.

The media don't consider that making mistakes in science is part of the routine. It is far more exciting to cast innuendos about competence, deception, or (hold on to your hat) fraud. In such an environment, throwing Italian geologists in jail for failing to predict earthquakes actually makes sense. But revised understanding is rarely a correction of fraud, incompetence or stupidity. It is usually compensation for incompleteness, sometimes because of laziness, but more often, limits imposed by existing technology. Each generation exceeds the achievements of the previous, not because of superior intellect, but because of refined technology. My most esteemed colleagues did not get everything right; some major breakthroughs were mostly wrong. But these inspired, energetic leaps brought us much closer to the truth, and emphasizing that they missed the target by a few percent misses the point. The story, as always, is ingenuity, insight and creativity. We get things right by first getting things wrong, just less wrong with each step.

PS. Sadly, regarding Comet ISON, the pessimists prevail and most of us will not have a chance to see its ghost in our evening skies this December. Unless, of course, we have access to some highly refined, modern technology.

Sacred literature

When I was a kid, my brother-in-law the chemist would often refer to "The Literature." He gave the phrase a reverent emphasis that at first I attributed to his British upbringing. He was disinterested in the mundane, lower case literature that most people associate with the word. He only read books of facts and hadn't read a novel since high school. I now know that when you mention The Literature to a scientist, or any academic, it means journals and books they absorb while drinking coffee or sitting on the toilet. Normal people cherish real literature that is read and reread, bought in hardback after first reading in paperback. Scientists have The Literature that is never reshelved because it is always being used. For each of us, there is the bible of our brand of biology or physics or chemistry. You might expect these to be well-known theoretical works such as Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but they are usually textbooks used for introductory courses, or reference books used in the lab.

In my undergraduate years, the bible of biochemistry was the textbook by Albert L. Lehninger called Biochemistry, then in its 2nd edition, succeeded by the title Principles of Biochemistry, now in its 6th. The most recent editions are no longer actually written by Lehninger, who died in 1986. Such is the power of his name that it is now incorporated into the title. Lehninger was an unusual textbook because you could actually read it; the man wrote good prose. Having had a childhood interest in real literature with a touch of dyslexia with peoples' names, when I picked up this textbook, I always thought of the famous short story Leiningen versus the ants. I imagined Albert L. Lehninger chasing giant ants, threatening them with biochemistry, or perhaps crushing them with his book. My own copy of Lehninger followed me faithfully for years, despite its heft, until I finally left it behind on one of my transatlantic moves. Then I bought another copy in a used bookstore for $1.50. It is still in the lab.

One science bible you definitely could not read was The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, now in its 94th edition. Its merit is proportional to its weight, now 8 pounds for all its 2668 pages. Owning a personal copy was a badge of honour for chemistry students. You could use it to look up, for example, the melting point of sodium chloride, or the molecular weight of molybdenum, to seven or eight decimal places. If you had this book full of tables and graphs, you might use it two or three times a year for class assignments and save yourself some trips to the library. A new edition is released every year, but I don't know anyone with two copies. Somewhere in the United States, there must be a house made entirely of copies of the so-called rubber bible. 

The absence of a big biology bible on my shelf is surprising. There are bibles for subfields, but for the broad subject, nothing. I can hardly remember the textbooks we used. They were uniformly tedious, turgidly written with boring grayscale illustrations that captured none of the glory of the living world. Biology always had a reputation for its heavy emphasis on memorization. You had to just know the answer for a test, and couldn't work it out with formulas or logic. Nowadays, with colour digital photography, ebooks and lavishly illustrated websites, the potential exists for a biology bible that is something other than a book. But first biologists need to escape their database rut and find a format that lives and breathes.

Many scientists hope to write their own bible some day. Most of us shuffle along scribbling scientific pamphlets and comic books, or obscure blogs. But the ultimate dream is to produce such a staggering work that our successors continue to update it in perpetuity, including our name as part of the title as they have done for Prof. Lehninger, ensuring our productivity from beyond the grave.

Lack of control

Randy's desk was closest to the lab door, so he had the first chance to say, "Hi!" to anyone who peaked in. There were many female visitors attracted by his skillful, equal opportunity flirting. He believed in the seductive possibilities of backgammon, introducing each new challenge with, "Surely there's time for one game. You can be white for purity and innocence. I'll be black."

One unusual day, the visitor was male. "Are you Randy?" he asked.

"I could be under certain circumstances."

The man held out his big, worn hand. "I'm Fred. Gerry McIntyre gave me your name." Randy relaxed, relieved that this was not a slighted boyfriend in search of revenge. "I've recorded an album," Fred said. "I need someone to do an experiment to prove my music is good for plants."

The university was famous for its population of young people who liked to involve themselves in experiments with biology and chemistry. Fred was older, at least fifty, with a grey ponytail, a tie dye T-shirt, dull eyes, an unsmiling mouth, and long delays in his conversation.

"I recorded the album myself," Fred continued. "I played all the instruments. I can think like a plant, man. All that time, I was thinking about plants and sunshine, and the plants growing towards the sunshine, making flowers. The music captures the spirit of plant growth, man. If I can get a scientist to endorse it, it will sell like crazy. Can you help me? I need a quote for the back cover."

"Why don't you leave the album with me and I'll give it a listen?" Randy suggested, hoping for a quick escape.

"No way, sorry. I've only got one copy."

Randy sighed, realizing there was no easy way out. "How do you think we should do this?" he asked. "Have you thought about the experiment?"

"Just grow a plant with the music, man, and you'll see how great it grows."

"What kind of plant?"

"I was thinking beans. Scientists are always doing experiments with beans. I think I could get some."

"Beans would be good. But how many replicates do you want? And you'll need some kind of control."

"Replicates? Just one, man. Anything more would be a waste. I don't want to waste the beans, man."

The conversation degenerated into a circular argument. There was no way that Fred was going to waste resources on a control, and replication was a hard sell. He finally reluctantly agreed that two plants would be acceptable. Randy tried to convince Fred that without controls, that is, plants not exposed to music, it would be impossible to interpret the results. Nor could he understand the need to measure the dry weight of the plant as a measure of growth. "It's enough to just see if the plants grow better," he insisted. "Use a ruler!"

"Better than what?" Randy shouted. "How will you know the music worked?"

"Don't dry the plants," Fred concluded. "I want to make a salad with the beans."

Satisfied that he had made his point, and that we would do the experiment the way he wanted, Fred left the album behind. It was unlistenable, full of random flute sounds, bongos and what appeared to be singing. Fred was tone deaf with a indefinable sense of rhythm. But of course my opinion was irrelevant; I am not a plant.

Eventually, we found an empty growth chamber (a refrigerator-like chamber with controllable light, temperature and humidity), plugged in a record player, and put the album on automatic replay. We planted the two magic beans, grateful that Fred didn't require a second, music-less growth chamber for controls. The plants started to grow. Then they died.

"I can only conclude that your music killed the plants," Randy told Fred. 

"Did you even remember to water them, man?" Fred hollered. He grabbed his album and stomped out, mumbling that he would find another scientist to do the experiment properly, or better yet, endorse the album without wasting any more beans.

Controls are the trickiest part of experiments. If you follow research on human health, disease, or diet, the most common criticism of published studies is inadequate controls. Proper controls allow the interpretation of results to be unequivocal and unassailable. Improper controls leave you wondering whether you have proven anything at all. In science, to use a cooking analogy, if you want to be sure you've improved the cookie recipe, you have to make them the old way too so you can compare the original and the modified version side by side.

Poor Fred. We never heard from him again, and there were no rumours of a fortune from marketing his record to enhance plant growth, whatever kind of plants it was he was really interested in.

No bell prize

Last week was Nobel week, with daily announcements of the honourees. Not all of them are for science, of course. The last one was Economic Sciences. Really?

The Nobel Prize holds a prominent place in the public imagination when they think of science, sort of like the Academy Awards, the Olympics, or the World Cup. Although the prizes are considered the height of achievement, most scientists have no chance of winning one, not because they are not smart enough (we are of course all smart enough), but because they do not work on the right thing. No one in my field has ever won a Nobel Prize, although we sometimes claim reflected glory for a couple of prizes awarded to people who happened to do some experiments with organisms in the same Kingdom. Actually, there is no specific Nobel for biology like there is for physics or chemistry, but instead a narrowly defined focus on Physiology or Medicine. Others need not apply.

Every field has its awards, however, some more prestigious than others. It is not unusual to hear these major awards marketed as, "The Nobel Prize of <insert field here>." Those who win these awards, however, are not interviewed on the national news in their countries, possibly not even on their local news. It might get mentioned to the in-laws as an aside over Thanksgiving dinner, bringing an abrupt end to casual conversation, spoons frozen in mid air. Then the prize winner will again have to explain what it is he or she actually does, expecting that the niece's new boyfriend will try to score some points by quipping, "You get paid to do that?"

In Canada, real Nobel Prize winners in science do become celebrities of a sort. We don't get a lot of them here, so it's always exciting. If they have any hint of an interesting personality, Nobel laureates do well in the media by talking about things other than science, or by demonstrating that they know how to play the violin. They attend formal galas, drop the opening puck at hockey games, appear on the news when a scientific pundit is required, and complain as much as possible that there is not enough funding for scientific research.

At the Fictional Scientific Conference I attended a few months ago, I was presented with an award that no one could characterize as anything close to a Nobel Prize. The Master of Ceremonies whispered beforehand that they would prefer I not try to say anything while accepting the plaque so they could maximize the time available for the fundraising auction. I had been hoping to pretend to be a pundit for a minute or two, and say something profound, or perhaps play the guitar, but no luck there. A few friends congratulated me afterwards, but everybody else either looked embarrassed or ignored me. Even in my own esoteric field, our intellectual passions are so fractionated into subfields and subsubfields that it sometimes seems that no one is interested in anything that anybody else does. We're polite about it, but when you win the "like the Nobel Prize of <insert subsubfield here>", you won't be toasted by the King of Sweden, and the President of the Society might try to rush you off the stage.

Postscript: A proud tip of the beaker to this year's Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Canada's Alice Munro. 

Not that kind of doctor

My PhD does not get me much respect outside the workplace. The acronym supposedly means Doctor of Philosophy, but I've never taken a philosophy course in my life, so this feels wrong. We've all heard the 'Piled higher and deeper' explanation, but I always liked the interpretation of a Finnish colleague who transcribed it as 'Doctor of Photocopying', which I suppose must now be adapted to 'PDF hoarding Doctor.' The stereotype, of course, is that PhDs are clueless about the broader world, their brains having been vacuumed into a dark, narrow tunnel from which they rarely escape. The leading newspaper chain in Canada adopted the editorial policy many years ago that PhDs were not 'Dr.', but just 'Mr.'  Even professors, who in some countries are exalted as 'Prof. Dr.', or even 'Herr Prof. Dr.', are reduced to 'Mr.' by journalists who do not have university degrees.

When I first got my PhD, I was surprised by the hostility of friends and family who assumed my ego was about to inflate like a hot air balloon. They considered it necessary to constantly puncture my self esteem before I floated into the academic stratosphere, where I would gaze down condescendingly at the rest of mankind.

From the beginning, I did not use the 'Doctor' label much out in the real world. Some perverse stubbornness makes me use the title when interacting with others who use the same word as a social or intellectual stratifier, such as MDs (medical doctors), DVMs (vets) and DMDs (dentists), who mostly have fewer years of schooling than I do. The receptionists at my dentist went along with it for awhile, calling me Doctor for a year or two. They never quite believed I was a real doctor, possibly because I never wore a tie or stethoscope. Eventually, they started using just my first name, not even bothering to call me Mister. I don't mind, really, although at the end of this month l will be introduced to a new MD who will do unspeakable things to my body. His web reviews suggest an arrogant, imperial personality, certain to introduce himself as Doctor if he bothers to introduce himself at all. I'm sure I will introduce myself as Doctor in return.

I immersed myself in universities for nine years to get my PhD, but it still feels odd when people outside my field call me Doctor. It's a symbol of something, an accomplishment, the development of expertise that really is unique, but it is not something I did because I wanted the title. It was a side effect, not the reason, a signpost hammered in along the road, now far far behind me. After awhile, people stopped caring about the letters after my name, whether they be PhD or CSP (Clown Science Practitioner). What is important, now,  is how well I do the job, not whether I have the academic credentials to make you laugh.

The thesis defence

Tomorrow, I sit as an examiner in a Master of Science thesis defence. The student worked for two years on a complex, original piece of research, and a month ago delivered 100 pages of text and figures and tables for dissection by committee. His defence is imminent, and he is probably now descending into the bowels of panic, and may not sleep until it is all over. We cannot give any indication, right now, that he has done a splendid job. The sweat is part of it. 

The thesis defence is a narrow doorway that most in science must squeeze through at least once, the hounds of academia snapping furiously at their butts. To earn a PhD, you may have to go through it a second or even a third time. It is terrifying. You work for two years or five years or ten years on some obscure topic, transcribing results from lab books or post it notes, refabricating what you neglected to write down as it happened. Then you stand in a room before a group of professors whose job is to attack. Attack you and what you wrote. Attack all those years you worked. Attack your logic and your ability to express yourself. Attack the way you look, the way you speak, your clothes, your friends, your ...

At the first PhD defence I attended, wanting to witness such a confrontation before enduring it myself, the candidate was asked, "Can you relate your results to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany?" After agonizing hesitation, the student found the right answer, a respectful "No." Then he faced a second examiner who was clearly drunk, who thought the whole thesis was based on flawed ideas and a complete waste of time. After several hours, most behind closed doors away from the public eye, the student emerged successful. He had just 24 hours to make the required changes to his 400 page opus because he had a nonrefundable flight to return to his wife and kids. This was before word processors. He had to retype complete pages, or insert previously typed pages into the typewriter and wriggle them around until the letters lined up so that he could type over the original lines, which were painted over with White Out. He did not have the luxury of sleep after his defence.

My own MSc thesis defence is not even a blur, it is obliterated from my mind. I only recall standing in the hallway afterwards, waiting for the profs to pass judgement, a condemned man waiting for the gallows. Other students passed me in the hallway, but none made eye contact. I realize that I must have gone through the standard routine and given a ten minute summary of my research. The examining committee took turns grilling me, twice around the table. I don't remember the questions or the answers, only the overwhelming feeling that it needed to be over as quickly as possible.

The memories of my PhD defence are much clearer. In Europe, it is a public event attended by your family, friends and colleagues. The formal rituals, processions of professors in robes and mortar boards, my own tuxedo and the dresses of my female colleagues, amused me greatly. Unlike Canadian defences, which go on for hours, the six examiners had only 48 minutes to attack me and my work. After my brief presentation, I used up ten minutes with a verbose, meandering answer to the first question, to the horror of my supervisor, who was signalling me to shut up. The next examiner focused his interrogation entirely on details from one page, obviously the only one he had read.

Since then, I've been the supervisor, the ordinary committee member, and the external examiner. As supervisor, you are defending your academic child, aware that the quality of your mentorship is being evaluated by the board more than the quality of the thesis. As a committee member, you usually don't understand the thesis very well, and try to ask questions that won't reveal to the student or the supervisor that you are a complete ignoramus. The external examiner function is even weirder; you were not involved in the research at all, and are invited to provide an impartial assessment. You are an expert but a stranger; the reputation of the university, the department, the supervisor, the committee and the student are on the line. If you don't praise the thesis, they will hate you.

Everyone sits in the examination room, playing their role. The student is the focus, everyone is actually on his or her side, but the student believes everyone is the enemy. They emerge feeling attacked by lions in a coliseum, academic limb torn from academic limb. Rationally, they know that if the thesis was inadequate, they would never be allowed to defend. But that doesn't count for much when you hear teeth snapping in your face and smell that rabid academic breath.

Tomorrow, everyone but the student knows that this thesis will pass, and that a Master of Science degree is certain for this bright and happy young man. Hopefully, the trauma will not discourage him from a life in science. I hope he will join us on the dark side, but don't expect an invitation to the party afterwards.

How I became a biologist

Long ago, I was recruited by a colleague to talk to grade seven and eight students about my work. I prepared a nice talk full of snappy colour pictures, neglecting what my Little League coaching experiences taught me about the attention span of the average thirteen year old. There were no new converts to biology that day. 

The next year, obviously because this particular teacher wanted to involve real scientists with her students and couldn't find anybody else, I was invited back. This time, I spoke about the travel opportunities provided by the scientific life, the three universities I attended, and my science friends around the world who could provide a free bed for the night. This riveting personal narrative was mixed with talk about the involvement of observation (I threw a ball at a wall and it came back), experiment (I threw a ball against a wall ten times and it came back nine times; I missed the wall once) and theory (balls thrown at walls tend to come back) in the scientific method. I obviously scored more points this time, and a pretty redhead asked my first question in two years: "Have you always been a nerd?"

Always quick on my feet, I answered, "Why? Am I nerd now?" Before the girl could give the obvious reply, the teacher scolded her and the next student was asking for the name of my friends who might put him up for the night in London. I was not invited back a third time.

Like most high school students, my approach to the future was aimless, and I chose my first university because two of my sisters had gone there. Our guidance counsellor in high school was useless; in one of his awkward attempts at bonhomie, he once asked me, in a loud nasal voice, in front of all my friends in the lunch room, "Why are you eating that banana?"  During our only interview to consider my future, he berated me for not knowing what an engineer was, evidently the top choice on my aptitude test. I still don't know what an engineer is.

I enrolled in science because this is what all my sisters did. I enrolled in the advanced class for each subject of the holy scientific trinity, biology, chemistry and physics, because I had the marks. My secret desire was to become a biochemist (not an antibiotic, as my Italian construction coworkers understood) or an astronomer, or possibly even an astronomical biochemist. I needed to keep all options open, especially because this university offered neither a biochemistry nor an astronomy degree, although you could double major in an infinite combination of subdisciplines.

Physics was the first to fall. I didn't like pure physics much, but had a pleasant initiation to astronomy through the club hosted by the local university, who let us use their observatory and mini-planetarium. The group was overseen by a kind but absent-minded Jesuit priest, for whom the purpose of astronomy was to sing the glory of God's universe, not an excuse for complicated mathematics. The first lab exercise in my advanced first year physics course involved lenses, mirrors, beams of light, trigonometry and logarithmic tables. I was way over my head and knew it. I dropped down to the regular physics course, which eliminated any chance of an astronomy double major later. When I retrieved my only assignment for the advanced lab, just to see how bad the grade was, the teaching assistant couldn't believe I had dropped the course. "You're the only one who passed the lab," he said.

Second year started with the biochemistry dream still alive. The dreaded mandatory Analytical Chemistry, with good reason usually abbreviated as Anal Chem, stood in the way like a chainsaw waving mass murderer. The course had a six hour lab each week but no lectures, instead of the normal three hour labs that weeny courses offered. You started at 2:30 and kept going until 8:30, and if you went off for a snack or quick supper, you weren't allowed back in the lab.  Unlike other lab courses, you could never finish; the lab manual had an endless series of meaningless experiments that even the most gifted student could never complete. Like a game of Angry Birds, you could not advance to the next experiment until the first one was completed with a passing grade, but you could repeat the same experiment over and over until you got a grade you liked.

At the beginning of the first lab, the senior demonstrator, a demonic woman who seemed chemically bonded into her greyish lab coat, told us, "The other demonstrators and I are not here to help you. We are here to make sure you don't kill yourselves or blow up the building."  Before we could begin actual experiments, we had to learn to clean glassware properly. I spent three hours cleaning one flask for the first experiment, until triple distilled water dripped without leaving mini-rivulets indicating invisible specks of dust. To this day, I hate cleaning glassware. The teaching assistants sneered like sadistic egg-stealing pigs at the anxious undergrads scrubbing away at their beakers. By the end of the six hour lab, I had botched the acid-base titration twice, finally scraping by on the last attempt to earn a tepid single star. I stumbled out of the lab, my mind mush, my stomach growling.

There was only one way to escape Anal Chem; drop any thoughts of a biochemistry major. The agony and uncertainty of that decision, made on the last possible day for rearranging courses, still frighten me. It amazes me how a choice made on one day of life can determine everything that happens to you; where you live, how you live, who you love. These life-altering days cascade through the lives of those around us as they tumble through such seminal days of their own.

My story is less dramatic than that of a colleague who fell asleep in a lecture after a long partying night as a surfer dude. He woke up in the wrong lecture, his life changed forever. For me, biology was always there on my family's agonizingly slow flower and bird meanders in the woods. I was a kid who liked running around, mud, splashing in puddles. I was always more interested in the worms, beetles and skinks that the dog unearthed during her manic excavations of dirt and rotten wood. 

With physics already off the table, there was only one soft spot to land: Biology. Finally settled into the pursuit of a real degree, I resumed my bad first year habits, reading student newspapers and science fiction magazines during lectures, checking the blackboard now and then to take notes. Along the way, mostly during Introductory Ecology lectures, I read Lewis Thomas's wonderful The Lives of a Cell. But some of the courses were magic. Dropping out of Analytical Chemistry, I dropped into a course that I would only have taken by force. It unexpectedly directed me toward my life's work, and the adoption of the study of the science of life as a philosophical basis for living life itself.

Live blogging from the 75th Annual Fictional Science Conference, Part 6

Note: The final instalment from the floor.

14 August 2013

An hour before my talk began, I realized I had forgotten my shoes at home. Do Crocs count as informal business attire? I started marching between different meeting rooms, staring at people's feet, especially those of people I knew. When I saw a likely pair, I asked, "What size are your feet?" People are used to strange questions at conferences, but this was a new one. Eventually, I located a usable pair that I could borrow in exchange for co-authorship on my next paper. With the lectern in front of me, no one could see my feet anyway, but I was able to deliver the seminar with confidence. Only afterwards did I wonder about the possibility of catching athletes' foot.

The press was present in force at the closing ceremonies, searching for catchy phrases to scatter in their reviews, so that when the symposia are published, they might be quoted on the covers. “A Shocking Minute By Minute Account of the Most Significant Scientific Conference of All Time.” “The Stunning Seminar that Silenced the Critics.” By an overwhelming vote, it was agreed that the next congress should be held at Port Penguin, the idyllic site of the International Antarctic Scientific Observatory. Only the British delegation was against the proposal, because they thought it would be difficult to find warm beer.

Afterwards: Drinks, laughter, songs, hugs until the next time.

Live blogging from the 75th Annual Fictional Science Conference, Part 5

Note: The penultimate post from a conference that at first hoped to break new ground, but ended up just patching up a bit of worn grass.

13 August 2013

After supper, a crowd of us including my former undergrad professor left the restaurant and meandered on an indirect route towards our hotel. Most preferred a three block detour to avoid a crowd of neo-Nazis stamping on a burning Scientific Society of America flag but my former professor was not to be deterred. Concerned that we would soon have to have his video camera surgically removed from his forehead, we tried to pull him back. After filming the hooligans, he invited them to the hotel to watch his videos of leaf cutting ants. Alerted by the concierge, the police arrived during a video of Himalayan monks harvesting bamboo and the thugs, by then thoroughly sedated, were easily overpowered.

Tomorrow is my talk. The powerpoint is already loaded onto the conference computer system, where it can be automatically corrupted or lost by the best technology society funds can afford. I am planning a high carb, high caffeine breakfast, hoping to make it through my talk before my blood sugar plunges through the floor, leaving me babbling and incoherent at the microphone. Not that anyone will notice, unless they happen to wake up.

Live blogging from the 75th Annual Fictional Science Conference, Part 4

Note: After several days of lectures, attention starts to wander and focus shifts to the restaurants and bars around the conference site.

12 August 2013

The "Meandering Musicianist" has become the favourite hangout of the scientific crowd.  There is no great mystery to this.  Fill a town full of middle aged professionals of any stripe and they will locate the establishment with the most beautiful waitress. I wonder how many invitations this poor woman has received to assist with investigations of meta normal phenomena.  

Over a supper of tempura and a substance I was unable to identify, I shared a fascinating discussion of heteroprobabalistic interflamability in yeasts with a geneticist from Peru. In the ardour of the conversation, I began to confess my own true feelings about the role of 6-dihydroxyplenderphytine in the phenomenon of conjugation tube rejection. The intense mood was shattered when one of the pieces of sushi she was about to chew proved to be not quite dead, and bit her finger. This traumatic event quickly spoiled the atmosphere, and it took four waiters nearly half an hour to clean up the mess.

Live blogging from the 75th Annual Fictional Scientific Conference, Part 3

Note: The latest post from this post-modern scientific conference.

11 August 2013

The theatre was filled to capacity and thousands were turned away disappointed for Wii’s plenary address on “Archeological relics of the Greater New York City Subway System.” Amidst the chanting and throwing of rolls of toilet paper, Wii ascended the state to deliver a stunning multi-media presentation that proposed that nothing of interest to an archeologists could be found in the Greater New York City Subway System. It is a remarkably bold theory, but Wii’s subtle reasoning was persuasive. There is great anticipation of his proposed follow-up investigation of “Certain archeological aspects of the London Underground.”

I was trapped during the poster session by a fanatical amateur scientist who is convinced that aardvarks evolved from armadillos because they are so close together in the alphabet. With quivering eyebrows and shaking hands he cornered me so that I could not approach the coffee stand. He delivered a forty-five minute monologue on this theory, which came to him in a dream after consuming three kilos of Blood Wurst in a single sitting. "Please wait here," I told him when I was finally able to get a word in, "I must introduce you to the President of the Society so he can hear these amazing ideas directly from the source." For all I know, he is still standing among the posters, waiting.

Live blogging from the 75th Annual Fictional Scientific Conference, Part 2

Note: The second entry from this groundbreaking scientific conference.

10 August 2013

During the general meeting of The Society, an official Subcommittee of the International Union of Federated Scientific Sciences, Research Division, was established to examine the role of the Multinational Society for Interdisciplinary Organic Biology's plans for a symposium on Biogenetic Resource Management in Industrial and Third World Nations proposed for Honolulu, Hawaii in January 2014.  Concerns that granting agencies might interpret a winter conference in Hawaii as a thinly disguised excuse for a tropical vacation were dismissed by members of the subcommittee, who preferred to ensure that their members get a fair share of the delegates.

A hysterical mob of groupies stormed the opening session, easily overpowering the guards, who did not even have enough time to load their weapons. Krantz was promptly surrounded and thrown to the floor by a gang of screaming teenagers who immediately began trying to extract his pocket protector, while nearby Hugenot was backed into a corner by five girls wearing too much lipstick who demanded his forceps. Someone ran past yelling, “I’ve got Oskarmeier's objective!” We were rescued at last by the police force dressed in full riot gear, who shouted through a megaphone, “Please leave the scientists alone or there will be no more monographs.” At this, the girls seemed to lose heart, and order was restored in time for Welworth’s keynote address on, “Lead guitar for the world class Scientist.”

Live blogging from the 75th Annual Fictional Scientific Congress

Note: For the next five days I am at this conference, and will attempt to give you my impressions of the landmark event each day.

9 August 2013.

3:00 PM. Somewhere over the United States. At last, the journey begins! Weeks of preparing the powerpoint, days of rehearsal behind a closed office door. At this very moment I am on my way to the USA, flying away from polar bears and igloos towards buffalo and wigwams, away from snowdrifts towards the unbearable heat, bound for the 75th Annual Fictional Scientific Congress. The 20 kg weight restriction on baggage constrained my packing. Surely I will be able to purchase shaving cream, envelopes, ping pong balls and decaying vegetables from the Americans themselves. Last night, my packing focussed on the more difficult to acquire items such as whoopee cushions, joy buzzers, false nose and moustache glasses, squirting boutonnieres, and fake blood. I hope that the customs authorities do not open my suitcase; it will be big trouble. If only I could be assured of a supply of rubber spiders, I would have no worries.

7:00 PM. In the hotel room. Every time I step into a strange airport, I scan the signs held  by limousine drivers, hoping that by some miracle one of them will bear my name. This never happens, of course, because there is no guardian angel looking after my travel. So it is a shuttle bus or sometimes a taxi ride into the city, praying to be delivered to the right hotel, praying that the reservation will be intact. There are always colleagues loitering in the lobby, some desperately trying to make eye contact, others just as desperate to avoid it. This is of course why I bring the false nose and moustache glasses.

Journal-istic integrity

I remember sitting at my parents' dining room table, holding my first personal issue of a scientific journal. The opening paper was the annual Presidential Address, a review article that slotted right into my first lab job, and my planned work in grad school. I reread the article many times, and that particular gentleman became a hero of mine because I learned so much. I met him eventually, a shy, quiet man, uncomfortable with any kind of adulation. I read every word in that issue, and in every other issue of the journal for years.

In grad school, I subscribed to more journals, but when it was time to move back home, there was a problem. Journals are printed on heavy, glossy paper, and each issue might weigh a kilo. I had the chance to put some of my belongings into the crate of a friend who was also moving back to Canada. I loaded two strong shopping bags with journals and lugged them onto the train to bring them to her. The German border guard was very suspicious. He paged through the issues for several minutes with their incomprehensible jargon and enigmatic scanning electron micrographs, and finally asked, "Is this some kind of pornography?"

Journals are magazines, most with perfect binding like paperback books. They get filed onto shelves, which sag from the weight. Individual issues droop into strange möbius-like shapes during their years of storage, so that it is impossible to open them flat. The famous magazine of scientific humour, the Journal of Irreproducible Results, published an article predicting that California would suffer massive mud slides and eventually slide into the ocean because of the accumulated weight of issues of National Geographic stored in peoples' basements. I blame my hernia of several years ago on helping a colleague move his National Geographic collection. Following this logic, surely the accumulating weight of scientific journals, which truly are never thrown away, must endanger the entire planet.

This love affair with scientific journals is difficult to break, especially for those who believe that a well stocked library equals wisdom. One of my colleagues subscribes to every journal in our field, only 20-30 of them, but he is a bachelor and doesn't need to negotiate for shelf space with anyone but his banker. In 2011, there were about 25,000 scientific journals. Web based journals have exploded since then, with many traditional journals switching to web-only publishing. Instead of receiving a paper brick every two months in the mail, we get a table of contents that might accidentally be routed into the spam folder by our over zealous email filters. 

The truth is, I long ago stopped reading each issue of every journal I received. For awhile, I read all the abstracts, then only the abstracts of the papers in my narrow area. Then I just read my own papers to discover what horrible errors had slipped through the editorial process. Now, I hardly look at the tables of contents. Students no longer desire paper journals and are content to browse articles on-line. It is more convenient to download a PDF than walk into the lab and locate and pry an issue off the shelf. They can sample far more of the >25,000 journals on offer this way, but obviously something is missing. They don't read journals over lunch or before they go to bed. None will want to inherit my tons of journals when I retire, any more than I will want to move them. And despite the price I paid, most used book stores wouldn't touch them and the cost of postage would defeat any attempt to sell them on E-bay.

The journal as a representation of a broad, coherent field of study is disappearing, although most are still edited as if that mission holds true. The omnivorous curiosity of  fledgling scientists cannot be satisfied by the prevailing psychology of web surfing. My own hoarding instinct remains intact, though, as I file PDFs on my computer, and carry them around on my iPad. It's still faster to relocate specific articles on-line than on the hard disk, but at least I have them in a tangible form that feels like a possession. And I will never, ever be able to push the DELETE button.

The Science Fair Letter

How many adults who eventually become scientists get their start as children at science fairs? Or more likely, how many are scared away permanently? Like the championship game for the sports guys, the school play for the thespians, the science nerds enter science fairs in the name of school spirit. Even after experiencing this horror once, I actually submitted myself to it a second time, and with all the self-delusion of a TV show contestant, actually expected to win.

My first exposure was in grade eight, when science fair projects were mandatory. My father, who had never entered a science fair when he was a kid, suddenly became a Science Dad. I had some vague idea about constellations, poking holes in cardboard to be held up to a light so you could see something like the real thing. Before I knew what was happening, my father assembled a metre wide globe from poster board, cut a hole in the bottom for people to stick their heads into, painted the inside black with several coats of non-reflective paint, painted the outside sky blue, transformed the entire night sky into its reverse image and stencilled it onto the outside, somehow got ahold of a dentist's drill and bored the stars into the appropriate pattern, the brightest ones getting the largest holes, while I stood by and watched. He cut a hole in an old card table for the planetarium to rest in, and you crawled under, stuck your head into the globe and experienced the night sky. In these days, long before the Internet provided instructions for everything, this was almost a miracle. 

At the school science fair, the vice principal ran down the stairs, shouting to me, "Did you make this?!!" with enormous excitement. Of course, afraid that I would get a lousy grade, I lied and he was fooled. But at the city championships it was obvious to all the judges that there was no way a 13 year old could have done this. I did not win. The planetarium rolled around the house for a few years, and was then donated to the school, where undoubtedly it was stored in a closet until the mice found it.

In high school, science fair projects were no longer obligatory, but in grade eleven I made the mistake of joining the new science club, started by our enthusiastic new physics teacher. Unfortunately, he wanted everyone in the club to participate in the city wide fair and could not imagine that anyone might be reluctant to devote all their spare time, including a full weekend at the fair, to a project. He suggested that a friend and I reproduce the famous Miller experiment, in which amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) are spontaneously synthesized from ammonia, methane, hydrogen (simulating the ancient Earth's atmosphere) and water (the ocean) by shooting electric sparks (the angry gods, or was it lightning?) repeatedly through the vapour. 

Clearly we were living out the fantasies of our teacher more than doing an experiment ourselves. I couldn't set this up by myself even today, with all the glassware, electrical circuits, transformers, and explosive gases. Cobbling together the apparatus was possible within the resources of the school, but analyzing the resulting sludge was not. Arrangements were made to do chemical tests at the university. Our host was a gnomish little man in a lab coat covered with mysterious stains, who helped us determine that we had successfully made amino acids in our artificial primeval world  (i.e. he did it for us). His lab was stuffed full of unidentifiable glass vessels and rusting metal clamps, assembled on scaffolds, connected by lengths of yellowing plastic tubing. Everybody was astonished that our experiment had worked. But despite the evidence presented, the judges apparently did not believe the data. We did not win, place or show this time around either, much to my shock. My partner blamed our failure on my decision to market our project as Spontaneous Generation. Trying to rejuvenate disgraced theories, even with a wink, is no way to win a science fair, where irony has no place.

And so I forgot about science fairs, or tried to. Until my graduation. For the ceremony, I sat beside the prettiest girl in my class, but only because our names were next to each other in the alphabet. She wore a lovely dress but her name tag wouldn't stick to her skin or the very thin shoulder straps. She giggled like Goldie Hawn and told me that I had to help her get the name tag to stay attached. On stage, they were handing out the school letters. "They called your name!" she whispered. "What?" "They called your name!" I thought she was still teasing, but then someone else poked me. I stumbled down the row of knees and stackable chairs, relieved to escape thoughts of my hands interacting with her name tag. And they awarded me the school letter. Everyone assumed it was a mistake, because all the other winners were jocks. The school letter was based on a point system combining grades and sports, and you needed points in each category to receive it. I had the grades, and what most people did to know (because I did not tell them) was that although I had never been on a sports team, I had indeed represented the school with gases, sparks, and amino acids. But I still felt like a fraud. The letter now sits downstairs in a box, and I never had the nerve to sew it on a jacket.

Paper capers

Real authors sometimes get paid to sit in bookstores and write. The science fiction writer Harlan Ellison used to do this quite often. People would stare through the window, or sit inside on easy chairs drinking coffee, watching the creative process, perhaps hoping that the inspiration would wash over to them. Then there are the Three Day Novel Writing Contests, with the competition usually occurring in private, an honour system ensuring that it didn't take the artist four, or maybe even five, days to write that novel.

I'm trying to imagine the composition of scientific papers as a spectator sport, or article writing competitions with acerbic Simon Cowell-like judges making comments like, "That reads like some kind of horrid third grade science report." It would be feasible nowadays. Before so much of the world's scientific literature was available on line, we were constantly flipping through notebooks or rushing off to libraries, searching for data or faded photocopies of treasured references. It would have been a disjointed process for spectators. But now, Laboratory Information Management Systems capture all data and experimental protocols in digital form immediately, eliminating the need to troll through mounds of laboratory note books looking for experimental temperatures or chemical concentrations.

At least, in theory. Despite computerization, most of us have scattered agglutinated masses of Post It notes, with data and observations scribbled alongside phone numbers, licence numbers once needed to install software, and half-finished to do lists. Too much critical information is haphazardly stored in our memories, in danger of being overwritten by lyrics to pop songs. It needs to be written down, either on the computer (where you will have to remember how to find it again later) or on paper. There is a whole field of academic study devoted to reinterpreting the history of science as recorded in laboratory note books. How frightening.

The scientific paper is considered a literary form by some, although most people will never read one. They are the bedrock of human knowledge, but to an outsider, staring at actual bedrock would be more interesting. Students, many of whom pursue science because they don't like writing, nevertheless must learn to write papers. Their careers depend on it. Students in foreign lands with exotic native tongues have to do it in English. Unlike a term paper, a passing grade is not good enough, and you have to be aiming at an imaginary 80 or 90% grade all the time. If you don't make it, there will be peer reviewers, associate editors, and editors-in-chief harassing you, criticizing your logic, your sentences, and your grammar. It is like having three Simon Cowells criticizing your work, but anonymously.

The sad truth is that writing scientific papers doesn't get much easier with experience. The research becomes more complex, you collaborate with a diversity of people, and somehow it is all supposed to fit together. You might imagine that we would start with an outline, and then just get on with it, but it rarely happens that way. 

One of my colleagues has permanent writers' block. When we were both in the early part of our careers, we just had to publish some of the data to keep a grant going. It was really her paper to write, but she couldn't do it. Her first language is French and she is one of these people who talks with her hands. So we sat beside each other at the computer, me typing and trying to avoid being slapped as she waved her arms around. I would tap out a sentence and ask, "Is this what you mean?" And she would say, "Not quite," and we would go from there. Three days later we had our manuscript, which when published was my most cited paper for a long time.

My only remotely public paper writing performance occurred on a transatlantic flight. Again, it was a collaboration, in this case with a colleague with a photographic memory who never wrote anything down. We spent an afternoon reviewing all the data, me scribbling on the printouts and asking every question I could imagine. Then, I got on the plane. The battery on my laptop would not last long enough to cross the ocean, so I pulled out a pad of lined paper, a pen, the marked up data sheets and began. I quickly got lost in the process, scribbling away intensively, shuffling papers, dropping things, having one pile of paper in my lap, another on the tray and more in the pocket on the back of the seat. Eventually, I became aware that the woman beside me was observing me with great curiosity, and eventually she caught my eye. "Are you grading papers?" she asked.

That was a good performance, perhaps. But most performers don't improvise all the time, and if we started writing all of our papers in front of an audience, we would probably start repeating ourselves. You might want a musician to sing that song again, but writing the same paper again and again is definitely frowned upon by the scientific establishment. Given how some of my papers turned out, maybe it would be good to write them again to get them right. But to be honest, I'd rather forget them, like those B-sides (or 'bonus tracks') of pop songs that you only play once.

Robusta data

Coffee fuels science. I've made many colleague buddies in long lines at espresso kiosks at conferences, or stumbling around at dawn in small American towns in search of cafes serving real coffee. Smart bosses don't step between scientists and their caffeine; they find creative ways to use public or grant funds to purchase the latest coffee brewing technology. I was once invited to apply for the directorship of a prestigious European institute, and my campaign promise was to install an espresso maker in the cafeteria. The response from one of my moles was that after my last visit, free automated multi-brew machines had been installed in every hallway. For some reason, I did not get the job.

Most labs go through a steady stream of broken carafes and calcium encrusted heating coils. We beta-test all new capsule based brewing systems, scoffing at colleagues who pretend to be content with freeze dried instant coffee. In the days when Netscape was the Internet browser of choice, some enterprising Scandinavian grad students set up a web cam (although that label had not yet been invented) to transmit photos of their coffee pot as it became progressively mouldier. They changed the pot now and then, in order to keep their viewers engaged, and perhaps to ensure adequate replication of their experiment. People still seem compelled to post pictures of mould in coffee cups. True, we seldom wash our mugs. On a good day, we rinse them once or twice, but despite this, a scaly brown scum builds up on the inside of the vessel as the weeks and the months pass. Then, ordinary soap or dishwashers hardly touch it, and we need to resort to a universal solvent like the all powerful nitric acid (this is a joke... do not try this!).

We are not supposed to eat or drink in the lab, as all institutional, local, provincial, national and international regulations explicitly state. Coffee seems to be an unwritten exception, as an inspection of any lab garbage can will surely reveal. We rationalize that somehow it is okay at our desks, even if the desk is in the lab. After all, toxic chemicals, microbes and radioactivity do not spontaneously search out and jump onto coffee mugs, do they? It is not for nothing that all computer manuals warn you not to spill coffee on keyboards or CPUs. Just because caffeine speeds up neurons, doesn't mean it speeds up computers.

I did not start drinking coffee until I started my PhD. Coffee break was a good opportunity to talk with my new lab mates, to try to learn their strange language and mysterious ways. I drank this highly concentrated, delicious fluid, really liked it and often had a second cup. Soon, I was eagerly craving the call of the coffee bell, salivating like Pavlov's dog. Drawing was part of my work; there was a uncontrollable vibration in my fingers at some times of the day that made my doodlings look like they were produced on an etch-a-sketch. I did not drink coffee at home, and it took me years to figure out why I always had lingering headaches on the weekends.

When I first started working in labs, I was shocked at the amount of time people waste at coffee breaks. Now, my lab's afternoon break is our main opportunity for free wheeling discussions, which often go on for 45 minutes, half an hour longer than regulation time. Some days the caffeine really kicks in, making the quietest of colleagues into motor mouthed speculators. We get some of our best ideas this way. Only a few of them involve more efficient caffeine extraction and delivery mechanisms.

Technonostalgia

Today at coffee break, a riff began about technology that once seemed cutting edge but that is now obsolete. Like the Yorkshiremen of Monty Python, we each tried to outdo the wistfulness of the clueless youngsters.

"When I did my masters thesis," said our most recently hired staff member, "all my data fit on one USB stick. 18 GB of data on one thumb drive."  

"When I was your age," I said, "nobody knew what gigabyte was."

"I used those hard 3.5 inch disks for my MSc," said someone else.

"Mine was on floppy disks that actually were floppy. We were afraid that if the disks bent the wrong way, all the data would be lost, so we made as many backups as we could. The computer didn't even have a hard drive."

"I remember when the monitors had no colour, and there were just these blinking amber letters."

"When I did my masters," I said, "I lived in a hole in the road, with a cardboard box for a roof."

Later, walking back to the lab, I said, "We think our technology is so cool now, but ten years from now, people will laugh at our huge cell phones, sighing about the days before phones were implants."

Same thing for lab equipment. We spend a lot of time writing experimental methods, ignoring the fact that many of the kits and machines we use to obtain our data will be unavailable by the time our papers are published. Obsolete equipment accumulates in labs like dinosaur bones in an archeological site, waiting to be scooped up, polished, and deposited in a Museum of the History of Science. Some people actually collect old lab equipment, as if it were as interesting and valuable to society as old baseball cards, antique ceramic shoes, or used postage stamps (the stickers that were once used to send email when it was still written by analog on paper and transmitted by couriers on horseback).  

Living the history of science

A few years back, I was travelling on a bus through the mountains of Utah with a journal editor-in-chief. An unexpected consequence of her job was the realization that each paper accepted for publication immediately became part of scientific history. This idea was a metaphorical slap for me, because it crystallized thoughts that had been burbling around in my head for awhile. For all my jokes about celebrity scientists, and attempts to maintain humility about my own discoveries and achievements, I have always been careful about what I publish. Manuscripts sometimes sit in my filing cabinet for decades, waiting for conditions to be right so they can be completed.

Obsessiveness and perfectionism aside, at some point we have to release our discoveries into the world. We don't know which will be the big ones, and realistically, none are likely to be big in a way that will impress the local newspaper, our neighbours or the dog. But they will all be part of the micro-history of some micro scientific field, and  relevant to a wider micro-world in some way.

The history of art is captured in the galleries of the world, but no one would claim that every piece in every museum is an indispensable part of history. Yet, they are all part of the grand story of art in the same way that all scientific papers are part of the narrative of scientific discoveries about our world. Dead celebrity scientists are represented in the museums of the history of science that dot the globe, but what about the rest of us? 

In London, England, the city council has placed round, blue plaques in sidewalks around the city to commemorate sites where famous people, including famous scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday, lived or performed great works. In Chicago, USA, there are larger explanatory plaques on sign posts, such as the one in front of the house where the physicist Enrico Fermi lived, shown at the top of this article. I doubt the present occupants of the house are disturbed too often by Fermi groupies ringing their doorbell and asking to see where Enrico slept, but you never know.

I live in a wood-lot outside the city, and like every field biologist am often obsessive about documenting the plants and animals and tiny things that share the property. I fantasize about creating an identification manual for whoever inherits these acres, imagining how impressed they will be by all the species living on the grounds. A few years ago, to the perplexity of the arborist we hire to clean up messes that I can't handle, I was very emphatic that a certain bunch of dead branches were not to be touched because they were part of my work. The notion that a scattering of dead maple branches on the ground could become some kind of minor scientific reserve because a new species was discovered on them, seemed too improbable to explain.

Yesterday, I was cycling along a trail near home, and stopped by a tree that I visit frequently.  I am a bit like a dog who finds something surprising in a certain place, and then checks the same spot every day for the rest of his life just in case something unexpected might occur again. So this is an interesting tree, and for the last few years I have found something rare living on it, not a new species, but a very old and obscure one. The biological community is now in the process of trying to sequence the genome of every living species under the sun. I decided to try to collect this rare species again, and put it forward for genome sequencing, yet another contribution of unknown significance to the knowledge of mankind. Then I will go to an engraving shop, after the genome is done and published, and buy a little brass label explaining that this tree was the site where the first genome of that species originated, perhaps including the URL where the sequence is stored.

Then today I thought, "Why not do this for everything?" We should all do this for everything! Our scientific institutions should display an ever expanding index documenting the connections between discovery and location. Scientists should start a respectful guerrilla movement and begin labelling, as permanently as possible, the sites where discoveries are made. Nothing is permanent, but even in our Information Age, this kind of knowledge evaporates too easily. Even if it is stored digitally, it is buried in bits and bytes of quiet databases, disconnected from the tangible world. 

If we do this, most of these little mementoes will probably be destroyed eventually, but maybe some will be preserved. Perhaps this will be one way to excite little sparks of curiosity, and inform the populace that scientists inhabit their day to day world as surely as artists do.

One Square Centimetre of Life

On Google Earth, we can fly from outer space into our back yards. There are linked photos of interesting places, 3D reconstructions of many cities, and you can go for a virtual walk. What if we could continue the zoom, the Power of Ten film brought to reality?

I envision a network of biologists takings surface samples 1 cm square all over the planet. This can be done with very clear, transparent cello-tape, simply by pressing it to the surface of interest. The tapes would be mounted on microscope slides and photographed at either 400x or 1000x (depending on the distortion imparted by the tape and its glue), using motorized stages, automated focussing, and scanning to digital cameras, with all the resulting images for each sample stitched together into one vista. These images could then be annotated by a wiki process, with identification of all the microorganisms, crystals and fibres made by expert microscopists.

If we want to get really fancy, we will begin with sterile tape (the kind used to seal 96-well microplates, perhaps) and sterile microscope slides, and then after assembling the photoscape, perform in situ PCR so that DNA barcodes can be applied to identify each cell on the matrix.

A few intermediate hi-res images of the collecting spot would enable  the zoom from outer space to be convincing. Perhaps an image of the spot from 10 metres away, another from 1 m, another a macro image from a few cm away.

To start small, I suggest a modest website to demonstrate the concept. If you think this is an interesting idea, and have the resources or will to make it a reality, I release the idea to the Commons and hope to participate.


Note: After writing this short article, I became aware of a book called A World in One Cubic Foot by David Liittschwager. It's a similar idea, mostly focused on macro organisms (visible ones) in sea water or soil. Some of the wonderful photographs are included with E.O. Wilson's article on the National Geographic website.

Be Sharp!

Ah, notes. We are taught to keep notes in grade school, starting with a pencil so we can correct mistakes. Later, we make notes in ink so we cannot correct mistakes. Not that we should ignore errors, just that we should not try to hide them. Lab notes should be recorded as experiments happen, not from hazy memories. Many labs demand ink notes kept in hardback notebooks, signed and dated every day by the experimenter, signed and dated by the supervisor. This used to be critical for patent purposes, when discovery dates were legally established with such documents. A major adjustment to the computer world was maintaining proof of the discovery chain in a legally acceptable way, as note keeping entered the digital realm.

But there is another dimension to this. Objects in labs need to be labelled so we can keep track of them, and this is where we really get into trouble. Every scientific neophyte learns to pay attention to the labels on the shafts of felt tip pens. 'Water soluble' is definitely something to avoid (who buys these pens for labs?), as is 'temporary' or the euphemistic 'semipermanent'. No matter how carefully you craft your handwriting on Petri dishes or flasks with such pens, you will find mirror images of the lettering in green ink on your fingers, and unintelligible smears on glass. Even if you succeed in labelling your test tubes, two or three weeks later the ink will have faded away to a ghost.

So, permanent pens are a must. They still leave ink on your fingers, which takes a lot of soap and rubbing to remove. They leak in your pockets. Most white lab coats have black, red and blue splotches of permanent ink, the trophies of productivity and absent mindedness. Next, you learn to check the actual tip of the pen before writing too much. Sometimes the felt nib is frayed or flattened as if it has been hammered against the bench top in a stippling frenzy. If you write large enough for the letters to be legible with those pens, almost the whole surface of a test tube will be covered with ink. Then there is the problem of writing on cold surfaces misted with condensation after removal from the freezer. You can buy very expensive pens to do that.

Once the reliability of a lab pen has been established by experimentation, strong feelings of ownership arise. People will label their personal pens with other 'permanent' markers, in a usually futile attempt to keep them from wandering. Others will hide their special pens in drawers, or place them in pen holders with conspicuous 'DO NOT REMOVE!!!!' signs. As the senior lab member, I usually don't respect these claims of ownership, feeling that my grant money has bought it all and everything is actually mine. But don't take my pen!

Permanent inks may not be washable with water, but many can be removed with ethanol. It helps to know this in advance. I once had a student who wiped a bunch of tubes with ethanol to sterilize them before opening, only to find that he had erased all the labelling telling him what was in the tubes. This was an aspect of the famous Patchwork Mouse episode in the mid 1970s, when a clever grad student enhanced mouse skin symptoms with a felt tip pen, only to have the diagnostic symptoms washed off with ethanol by suspicious technicians.

What solvents won't erase, time will. Because I procrastinate a lot and don't like to throw things away, I am often trying to read lab labels that are several years old. My own handwriting is bad enough even when fresh. Other people's handwriting is worse. You find these old things with the faintest outline of a permanent label visible. Dissecting microscopes can help. You tilt the surface at different angles to catch the right angle of light, and take the finest tipped permanent marker you can find, and try to reconstruct the writing. Sometimes it works, sometimes the result makes sense, but often you can't make any sense of it at all.

More and more, we use printed labels, graduating from thermally printed plastic labels to two dimensional barcodes with adhesives guaranteed to survive a nuclear holocaust and lettering guaranteed to remain legible even if sent crashing into the surface of the sun. Or at least until the database necessary to interpret them crashes, becomes obsolete, or the universe comes to an end.