Marcus du Sautoy and the Public Understanding of Science

I had the pleasure of listening to Oxford University mathematics professor Marcus du Sautoy talk about Symmetry this past Monday at the University of Oslo. The lecture was entitled Symmetry: Reality’s Riddle. The event was co-sponsored by the New Science Library (Det nye realfagsbiblioteket) and the Freedom of Expression foundation (Fritt Ord). The library building (Vilhelm Bjerknes house) will undergo extensive renovations starting in 2011, supported in part by the Freedom of Expression foundation. When the building renovations are finished in 2012, the library will be used as a center for seminars and debates about science and its role in society. Professor du Sautoy was invited to give a talk because he is also a professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and the library is interested in focusing on this aspect for the future. After listening to du Sautoy talk on Monday, I can understand why. Here is a man who can talk about mathematics in a dynamic way, in a way that captivates an audience while at the same time educating them. This is no mean feat. He is smart, clever, good at what he does, but more importantly, he can talk to people outside his profession and get them interested in his work and in mathematics. He has done this by writing best-selling books, hosting TV and radio programs in Britain, holding lectures internationally and so forth.

During his lecture on Monday, he spent a good deal of time talking about the symmetry found in the mosaic tiles of the Alhambra, a building in Granada Spain designed by Moorish architects. He also talked about M.C. Escher, whose art fascinated many of us when we were younger. He was the artist who drew staircases in space that merged into other staircases and it was impossible to know where one started and the other ended http://www.mcescher.com/Gallery/back-bmp/LW389.jpg. What I didn’t know was that Escher has done an entire gallery of symmetry drawings as well http://www.mcescher.com/Gallery/gallery-symmetry.htm, and that he was fascinated by the Alhambra. So I can thank Professor du Sautoy for this new bit of knowledge. Overall it was a very interesting lecture, and it struck me while he was talking that he did not have to hold an actual talk about the ‘public understanding of science/mathematics’ in order to impart an understanding of his field. His subject was complex, and this was clear to the audience, but his presentation was not obscure or unintelligible. His talk imparted a general understanding of the complex mathematics underlying symmetry (the number riddles involved—hence the name of the lecture, Symmetry: Reality’s Riddle) in a way that was fun, exciting and challenging. The other thing that struck me was that the audience had a lot of questions for him after his lecture, and that is the sign of a good lecture. People were not afraid to ask questions or to share their own experiences and thoughts, and that simply means that he inspired his audience rather than driving them away. I found myself remembering my calculus professor from my freshman year in college. He was such a poor teacher, even though he probably had a good grasp of his subject. He simply could not communicate his knowledge to his students, and the majority of students failed his class. That did not seem to matter to him. I stuck it out for the full year, but never took a math class again after that. I hit the wall somewhere around ‘integration by partial fractions’ which he could not intelligibly explain to us to save his life. But in high school, I really enjoyed all my math classes, and that was due in no small part to Ms. Moloney, our math teacher, who could explain what needed to be explained in an understandable and fun way. That made all the difference. Good teachers who know how to communicate their knowledge and who do so in interesting and motivating ways are the key to attracting students into math and science professions. Professor du Sautoy is one of them.

Reject and Resubmit

The Peanuts character Snoopy was always trying to get his manuscripts published, and some of the funnier strips dealt with the responses he would often get from publishers who sent his rejected manuscripts back to him in the mail with short comments like ‘please do not ever contact us again’ or similar. In keeping with the theme of my post from yesterday about publishing your book, I thought I would talk about the difficulties involved in publishing scientific articles in established journals and the vagaries of the business when it comes to whose articles get accepted for publication and whose get rejected. I know quite a bit about this since each of my scientific publications during the past thirty years has been an exercise in blood, sweat and tears for me and my co-authors. In other words--not much fun for any of us. Of my publications to date where I was the first author, only ONE article was accepted for publication without major comments, criticisms, or requirements for extensive revisions—rather it received praise and a stamp of approval. My former boss told me at that time (1994) that I should take the short review I got from that journal, frame it and hang it in my office as I would never experience anything like it again. He was right, even though I absolutely did not want to believe him at the time. Since that time, the reviews of my work and the work of others I know have been interesting, to put it mildly. Sometimes I wonder if we are all on the same page, or even the same planet. Some of the reviews have been downright rude, others negative, others constructive but overly ambitious in the sense of what the peer reviewers suggest we do to make the paper better, others simply ridiculous. For example, a common suggestion when we get a cancer cell line article rejected is that we resubmit the article to the same journal after having done the same types of experiments in three or four more additional cell lines. That sounds like very little work on paper. But what it translates to is another one to two years of work for a small research group (four to five people) with perhaps one technician and one PhD student. To do this extra work would mean that the article’s publication would be delayed by at least two years because it will take at least a year to do the work and another year to perform the ‘submit to journal merry-go-round’. In the ‘Publish or perish’ arena that we live in each day as academic research scientists, this is unthinkable. So you send out the paper again to a new journal (that has a lower impact factor) and hope for the best. If this new journal rejects it, you send it out again to another journal, and so forth. Eventually it will usually get accepted somewhere but the entire process can take up to one year, because with each submission, you must wait sometimes up to two months to get a reply. It is frustrating and challenging and ultimately unfair, no matter what people say. But it is the system and at present there is a lot of groaning and moaning about how unfair it all is, but nothing has really changed as of yet.

I think that many of the peer reviewers (those scientists who agree to review your articles anonymously for a particular journal) come from big laboratories with fifteen or more people working for them—technicians, students, postdocs, etc. and they think that everyone else in the academic research world has the same size research group. How wrong they are. My own little research group a few years back had exactly four women in it—me, a PhD student, a Master’s student, and a technician. We worked hard, efficiently, and enthusiastically and managed to publish about four articles in good research journals in the space of the six years we were privileged to work together. Much has changed since that time in terms of getting new funding and finding new students. It’s not easy and it never will be—that is simply the name of the academic game. You either like it or you don’t. But either way, it is a struggle to survive. The more publications you have, the more funding you are likely to generate for yourself and your workplace, which in turn allows you to get more students because students are human too—they want to work for a well-funded research group that guarantees them enough money to do their experiments and to attend a few international conferences where they can present their work and network with others doing the same kind of work. It’s a formula and you get into the groove and just go with it. But sometimes things happen to push you off the path. One of those things is getting an article refused for publication many times (where you ultimately have to throw in the towel and admit defeat), another is losing the funding you once had, another is hearing from your superior that you are good but not good enough because you are not generating a lot of funding for your workplace. Because you are only as good as your last paper and your last grant—and if you don’t accept these facts you can just find another job. Academic research scientists are now expected to be money generators---in the form of grants, patents, companies on the side, research groups with many students, many networks and numerous collaborators (other academic groups as well as collaborations in industry).  Those who manage all of this are the elite scientists, and they are rewarded well—their names precede them. There is nothing wrong with this except when it leads to a system that destroys the small research groups, and in my view this is the current situation in academic science, at least in the realm of cancer research.

Peer review of scientific articles is a mixed bag. It is supposed to function fairly and objectively, but it doesn’t anymore as far as many scientists are concerned. It is supposed to be an anonymous, objective, constructive review of your work since you as the author do not know who the reviewers are, but it often ends up as anything but that. And even though your paper can now be anonymized for peer reviewers as well, they may still figure out who the authors are from the article’s content. If those authors are their competitors, they can slow them down by rejecting the paper outright or by suggesting all sorts of new experiments that they know will take the authors a year or more to complete, thus delaying their progress.  And so it goes. The science journal The Scientist published an interesting article recently on peer review entitled ‘I Hate Your Paper’ (http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/8/1/36/1/) that discusses the current problems with peer review and some possible solutions for how to fix them. Personally, I don’t think that the system will change too much because it is not really clear at this point what type of system will work better. But at the very least, it might be nice to get reviews back that were actually constructive, well-reasoned, and helpful and which took into account the size of the research group before rejecting the article outright for not having used enough cell lines and before suggesting additional work that will simply frustrate the submitting research group who know they will never meet the requirements. You may argue that rejection is good since it keeps the numbers of manuscripts being published down, but this is not always the case. Take a good look around as a research scientist and you will find many articles that used the same number of cell lines as perhaps you did in your experiments (similar research areas), but for some reason those papers were accepted while yours was not. Could there be cronyism involved—did the first or last author know the editor of such and such a journal and did that help them? Perhaps. But in any case, it is difficult to prove this and most scientists have enough to do without worrying about whether this is the case. You just take your Reject and resubmit reply and you do resubmit—but to another journal.

Women in Science

I read a very interesting article this past week in The Scientist. It was entitled ‘A Transforming Field’ (http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/5/1/80/1/) and presented the stories of two transgender scientists: the first was about a woman who became a man, and the second about a man who became a woman. While their stories are remarkable in and of themselves, what struck me most was how they experienced their daily scientific lives afterwards. Both of them praised their colleagues and bosses for being supportive of their decisions. What bothered me most was what both had to say about how women are discriminated against in academic science. The woman who became a man experienced a boost in his career evolution and opportunities, while the man who became a woman experienced poor treatment that she had never experienced as a man. I thought, my God, this is so interesting. Having felt some of that discrimination myself, I thought that these two scientists are actually living proof that this discrimination exists, because they have experienced both sides of the coin so to speak.

The problem of discrimination against women in science is difficult to prove, because those women (and men) who try will always be told that the reason they are doing so is because they are themselves not good enough and are thus envious of those who are. Even if this was true for a few women scientists, most of the women scientists I know walk around with that feeling of not being good enough anyway on a daily basis, so hearing it said to you puts you in your place. The questions then become, why is it this way for women and how do they deal with it? Most of the women scientists I know in Norway have simply resigned themselves to the discrimination. It can take the following forms: they are ‘overlooked’ for a higher (leadership) position, their opinions are dissed during planning meetings, they are told that they are difficult and unwilling to collaborate or not good at collaborating, they are expected to do the menial work in projects that are being planned and if they protest against this are told that they are not being cooperative, they are denied technical help while male scientists with the same competence get that help, they experience being ‘talked down to’ or ‘talked over’ while they are expressing an opinion, and then when they actually express irritation at being treated in this way are told that they are ‘out of balance’ or that they have misinterpreted the situation. I can only speak for academic scientific environments in this country, but know that this behavior occurs in the private sector as well. I know women scientists who have hit the wall and gone out on sick leave several times for different reasons, but when pressed will tell you it was because they have been treated poorly. All of them have left those jobs and moved on. These women are not slouches. In fact, the opposite is true for nearly all of them. They have an incredible work ethic, they are innovative, and they are smart. Perhaps they are too smart for the people for whom they work. I do not know. What I do know is that when you have experienced a work environment that treats women with respect (as I did in New York many years ago—working for three men who knew how to treat women well), you remember that for the rest of your life. And you hold it up as the example against which all other workplaces must measure up to. But unfortunately they don’t.

In this age of budget cuts, fiscal crises and corruption, no one really cares about whether women are discriminated against in science. I get that. I also get that women have a better overall work life in westernized countries than in other more repressed parts of the world, so that we shouldn’t really complain. We have a lot to be thankful for. Even the women who feel the discrimination have resigned themselves to it because they need their jobs. They chose and choose not to fight it. But what is happening now in my workplace is that some of these women are being bullied out of their jobs so that budgets can be ‘balanced’. Their bosses (who have been promoted to the level of their incompetence a la the Peter Principle—translated, have kissed a lot of ass on the way up) are finding all sorts of ways to make them feel incompetent and worthless. One woman scientist I know here who is experiencing that sort of bullying can retire in January when she turns 62 (early retirement). Unfortunately, there are no buyouts being offered these women such as would likely occur in the private sector. It might be worth considering if such were the case, although apparently if one accepts such a buyout then that affects one’s pension rights and retirement options. She might want to fight against her workplace now that things have become unbearable. Maybe she will. I don’t know. All I know is that I am and always have been more interested in fighting to prevent such behavior from taking root, but I stand alone in that fight in my own workplace, and deep down I know that it will be a pointless fight and that I am tilting at windmills. It’s better to call a spade a spade and to move on.

I have to say that I never much cared about the differences between men and women and how they approached science earlier in my life. What mattered were the science and the joy of doing science. I still love the science. I just think now that there are better ways to express that love than working for a workplace that discriminates against its female scientists.

Comments about the 'Evolution of Science*

I read a very interesting short article the other day, published in a magazine called The Scientist. The article is entitled ‘Evolution of Science’ and was written by Lauren Urban. You can read it here http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57368/. Urban writes about a scientist named Alex Shneider who has attempted to describe the different types of research scientists by putting them into stages: stage 1, 2, 3, and 4, in essence, categorizing them, which is a scientific approach in and of itself. Shneider describes the characteristics and talents of scientists in these different stages, and makes the point that there can be an evolution, so to speak, from one stage to the other. It really is the first article of its kind that I have read, and it resonated with me. Shneider describes first-stage scientists as the great innovators and risk-takers. Of course, Craig Venter, whose company Celera Genomics competed with the publicly-funded Human Genome Project to sequence the human genome, comes to mind. He lives in another world than ‘us ordinary folks’, and listening to him talk about his ideas for the future and for the planet (via his new company--Synthetic Genomics which he co-founded) is awe-inspiring and exciting. It must also be said that he has the capital and the chutzpah to take the necessary risks to move science forward, and if he doesn’t have the money he isn’t afraid to ask private investors for it. I remember seeing photos of the sequencing labs at Celera, and they showed rooms full of DNA sequencers that operated around the clock. First-stagers move the world forward, but they are not necessarily the ones who translate their ideas into practice. This is where the stage two scientists come into the picture. Shneider describes them as having “ingenuity, inventiveness, and high risk tolerance”. Most scientists fall into the third-stage category, which Shneider describes as those scientists who “use those new tools to answer new questions, thereby coming up with new insights and more questions”. They are, in his words “more methodical, detail-oriented, and concerned with absolute correctness”. Fourth-stage scientists are those who write about and chronicle science in an attempt to organize scientific data, but they are not the discoverers and inventers.

It struck me while reading the article that I have had the privilege of working in two dynamic research laboratories during the past twenty years, both of them American. One was located in New York City and the other in San Francisco, California. If I could sum up my experiences in both laboratories, I would have to say that the laboratory leaders were a mixture of stage one and stage two scientists in their respective fields, and they managed to impart their ideas and enthusiasm to the third-stage scientists who worked for them. More importantly, these leaders functioned as a tight-knit team. They knew how to communicate and collaborate with each other and they respected each other’s ideas. If you have experienced the opposite--leaders who fight and compete among themselves and do not know how to collaborate--you will appreciate how necessary leader teamwork is to create a dynamic work environment where people feel like they are a part of something important, where they feel valued, and where they want to come to work. It is perhaps the best argument against having business administrators take over all aspects of research science. They have null understanding for the necessity of this type of dynamic work environment. They are only concerned with the fiscal bottom-line, which ultimately leads to workplace boredom and lethargy.

The laboratory in San Francisco was run by a man who was rumored to be a difficult personality when he was younger. I’m guessing that these rumors were spread by small-minded people who did not have his vision or his energy. In any case, he paid little attention to them and reached the top without them. He is still an innovator. He collaborated well with other innovators, both American and European, and his lab was truly an international lab, as was the New York lab I worked in. At the time I worked in New York, we had scientists from Poland, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Germany working there as well. It felt like we were part of the ‘larger picture’, that what we did had meaning outside of our lab, and that we were contributing to making the world a better place. I believe these are necessary feelings if one is to do a good job.

Shneider states that all four stages of scientific discipline are valuable and that what characterizes each stage is a particular type of talent. The challenge therefore for each scientist becomes identifying your particular talent and finding your niche. The original article by Shneider upon which Urban based her article is worth reading. It is entitled ‘Four stages of a scientific discipline; four types of scientist’ and was published in the journal Trends in Biochemical Sciences, volume 34, issue 5, in 2009. It is probably best to contact the author directly by email in order to obtain a reprint: ashneider@curelab.com.