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.