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.