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.”