The chicken, the egg, and the red herring: strange bedfellows on the path to self-discovery

In the beginning, I was a writer. And/or a scientist. Which came first, I’ve never really been able to tell. On the surface, science seems the clear winner. I had my first microscope at age five, and a seemingly inexhaustible interest in the natural world — flowers, stars, animals, rocks — I just needed to know things. The spirit of inquiry was firmly engrained long before I ever stepped foot in a classroom.

But then, so too, were stories. Already an avid reader by the time I started school, I took easily enough to writing, but it wasn’t until I was much older that I saw writing as something central to my identity. I just thought it was something everyone did. Science, on the other hand, clearly did shape me from the start, and there was a name for it made me: I was a nerd.

I would go on being a nerd throughout my formal education and into my professional career. And I’d keep writing about it the whole time. Looking back, it seems as though I’ve spent much of my life treading parallel paths, never quite committing both feet to one or the other. At times I’ve tried to bridge them, and at other times, they’ve left me feeling torn, divided, even inadequate at both.

It’s taken me a long time to set aside the chicken or the egg debate about which came first or which is more important, and accept the fact that this is just who I am. Now I have two degrees in science, a diploma in writing, and a job that allows me to thrive in the space between these two boxes I’ve never neatly fit into. Officially, I’m neither scientist nor writer, and I’ve never been happier.

Somehow, in transitioning into my not-science/not-writing career, I seem to have stumbled upon the right mix of both. At first, I suppose I just chalked the position up to being a “good fit.” It’s been a welcome change to be able to bring the best of both worlds to my work without feeling the pressure to identify with one camp or the other. After years of trying to reconcile the science/writing dichotomy, I was happy enough to have found a balance between the two that I never really thought to question how not-science/not-writing could ostensibly be such a good fit for this scientist/writer.

Last week, it hit me. I was at a conference for experiential educators — a mixed bag of people involved in everything from campus recreation to residence life. It was an altogether different crowd and different atmosphere than I was used to, and as a relative newcomer to the world of student services, I wasn’t quite sure at first how much I’d have in common with this group. What would I, a student research coordinator, find to talk about with people who run recreational sports programs?

Before I had time to worry about it, however, I attended a session on experiential learning theory, facilitated by none other than a campus rec guy. I’d seen the theory before, and as a scientist, it seemed rather intuitive to me. You have an experience, you reflect on it, learn something from it, and then apply what you’ve learned to new situations. It’s the same kind of iterative process that underlies our research. But here was a campus rec guy talking about it, to a room full of people who used this same model as the backbone for a range of completely different programs.

I realized then that in spite of all our differences, we are indeed a community of peers. That regardless of our different educational backgrounds and career trajectories, regardless of whether we are working on residence leadership or study abroad or service-learning programs, we are united by a common purpose: to help students realize their potential by supporting them in high-impact experiential activities. What I have in common with these people who are so different from me is a deeply-held value for the benefits of learning by doing. More than that, my science/writing background, when superimposed over the various models of experiential learning, finally makes sense. I am not just a scientist/writer; I am a person who has lived and learned my entire life through a combination of experimentation, observation, and reflection. Science and writing are merely the tools I’ve used to do it. They are to me what rope courses and sailing lessons are to the outdoor leadership people — a means of experiencing and reflecting on the world and ourselves.

When I look back now at my own educational and professional history, the practise of experiential learning, whether I recognized it as such or not, has always been a common thread. It’s there in my record of high school absences, spent dodging classes I didn’t see as relevant for the real-life experience and meaningful mentorship I found working in libraries. It’s there in my undergraduate experience, where research and science writing — both non-academic experiences — became the dual pillars of my subsequent career. It’s there in the methods I’ve used in my own teaching — avoiding multiple-choice tests, taking students into the lab, challenging them to step out of their academic comfort zones and into the messiness of real-world problems. I’ve used writing to help students process information without realizing that what I was doing, in fact, was closing the loop of experiential learning.

Could it be that in all this time of striving for a balance between science and writing, I’ve missed the bigger picture? That maybe the reason my not-science/not-writing career fits so well is because I finally get to work by the same principles and values that I’ve always lived by? That I no longer feel the pressure to identify as either a scientist or a writer because I finally get to just be myself?

A fireside lesson in science communication from the woefully misinformed

Having spent the better part of my research career working in the field of plant biotechnology, I’m no stranger to scientific controversy. As a researcher, I’ve met my fair share of people — including other scientists — who hold strong opinions about genetically-modified food: about whether it’s safe for humans and the environment, whether it’s really needed to address global food security, whether it should be labeled, who really benefits (other than biotech companies and patent attorneys), and even why, as a biotechnologist, I should burn in Hell.

I’m not easily rattled by a scientific debate.

I’m well-versed in the arguments both for and against, and my personal opinions on the issue are neither black nor white. I’ve spent much of my career immersed in the scientific evidence and the best I can settle on personally is an evolving shade of grey — biotechnology is not inherently good or bad, neither panacea nor Pandora’s Box. When it comes to a debate, as a scientist, my default setting is to keep calm and consider the evidence.

But last weekend I was sitting around a campfire with a couple of my scientist friends when an acquaintance (not a scientist) started challenging us on various scientific topics — from genetically-modified foods to factory farming to Angelina’s double mastectomy. It was by far one of the most exasperating evenings I’ve ever spent discussing science. It was also perhaps one of the most educational in what it highlighted about the challenges of modern science communication.

When I started writing about science, I had an editor who encouraged me to focus on the art of translation — turning technical jargon into something accessible by a reader he fondly referred to as “Joe Lunchbucket.” Joe Lunchbucket was the reader who browsed the paper over a ham sandwich and would only read a science article if it was wrapped with a shiny, friendly bow that said “Gee whiz, this is cool, you gotta see this!” In time, however, I learned that translation wasn’t enough. It’s hard to get people excited about science for science’s sake — there has to be a compelling story, something for the audience to connect with above the science itself. After years of being trained as a researcher to strip the humanity out of my writing, I had to learn to put it back in, to stop “writing about science” and start writing about people and the process of discovery.

Joe Lunchbucket made me a better writer, but now I think he’s a relic of a simpler journalistic era. Science communication is far messier today than even when I first dipped a toe in the water a decade ago. It’s no longer fundamentally about telling a good story or making sense of the jargon, although those skills are still vital. Now it’s as much about rising above the noise, fighting fiction with fact, battling stubborn misperceptions, and countering fear-mongering emotional arguments with…logic?

If only it were that easy…

Case in point: our opponent in last weekend’s campfire debates was a middle-aged woman, raised in a small rural town, no post-secondary education. What she knows about science, she’s learned from decades-old high school lessons and the internet. She’s health-conscious and environmentally-conscious and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that her motivation to be informed about issues she cares about is sincere. But this is a person who still believes, despite her “research”, that a woman shouldn’t run because her uterus might fall out, that commercial chickens are no longer raised with legs, and that wheat gluten is an evil product of genetic engineering.

How do you even begin to argue with a person who reacts to information without having even a basic understanding of it? How do you dispel misinformation about science with a person whose sole connection to the subject is grounded in emotion rather than logic? How can you compete calmly against sensationalist drivel?

I can tell all the stories I want, I can counter with facts based on peer-reviewed literature, I can even empathize with the difficulty of distinguishing the good information on the internet from the bad. But who am I but a scientist? I’m one of the people who once made a living advancing the very technology she fears. Why would my knowledge of the subject come as any comfort to her? What have I done to earn her trust?

Granted, it also doesn’t help that stereotypes persist about scientists being cold and unfeeling and distant,  or that we have a government that wants its scientists to cater to commercial interests, undermining our ability to represent ourselves as objective, trustworthy sources of information. But what have we done as researchers, to help ourselves?

I think we have done science a disservice in separating the process of doing science from the process of communicating it to the public. As researchers, our professional obligation is to publish our work in peer-reviewed academic journals, to share it with other researchers. We write in a technical language and publish in a medium that largely excludes the public. We can partially address the issue of access by insisting that publicly-funded research be made available free to the public, and I’m a strong advocate for such open access initiatives. But access alone isn’t enough. It doesn’t do anything to address the issue of comprehension.

To support access without comprehension only opens the door to the further spread of misinformation — perpetuated by well-intentioned (and sometimes not so well-intentioned) people who understand just enough of the scientific detail to get it wrong. Traditionally, we’ve relied on professional journalists to get the story right — sometimes with mixed results. Now we have a whole slew of advocacy groups and “citizen journalists” who flood the internet with their own interpretation of the science. The loss of journalistic gatekeepers isn’t necessarily a bad thing as public engagement is concerned, but as researchers, it’s clear that we can’t continue to rely on others to get the story right. We can’t shut ourselves out of the public conversation and then expect our voices to be respected. Now more than ever, researchers need to be proactive in engaging directly with the public.

We’re also working in a political climate that is becoming increasingly hostile to basic research. Researchers are under significant pressure from the government and funding bodies to deliver short-term economic outcomes — to focus on applied, industry-friendly research with commercial applications. So far, the pushback from researchers seems to focus on the threat to academic freedom, but does anyone outside of academia really understand what that means? Will Joe Lunchbucket have any sympathy for a bunch of tenured Ivory Tower white coats complaining that they can no longer do whatever they want?  The threat to academic freedom is very real and very serious, but it’s not an argument that’s going to resonate with people who don’t really understand what researchers do. And as long as we’re relying on other messengers to explain the value of research to the public, we’re hardly in a position to complain that the public doesn’t comprehend the severity of the situation.

When I first got involved in science writing and outreach as an undergraduate student, one of my professors responded with an air of disgust: “What self-respecting scientist does that?”

At the time, it was enough to temporarily shake my conviction. But a decade later, I wonder what self-respecting scientist can afford not to?

May the Fourth (be with you): reflecting on a year of change

May the Fourth. It’s a day revered by geeks the world over, a little play on words that, like the Konami Code or the number 42, elicits a wee happy dance from our inner nerd every time it comes around. But while it’s not like me to shy away from nerd pride or let pass an irresistible pun, my allegiances have long rested elsewhere — I’m a Star Trek fan with a grammar obsession; it’s March 4th, not May the 4th, that makes my heart swell and my pancakes look like ampersands.

That was, of course, until last year. Last year, on May the 4th, I was settling into a post-conference vacation in Phoenix when I got a call. A week earlier, I’d interviewed for a new job, and I was being offered the position. It was the news I’d been hoping for, but it still caught me a little off guard. I’d been contemplating a career change for months, but in the span of a few whirlwind days, the idea had transformed into action, and suddenly, in that moment, the prospect of life after science became real. This was the start of a new chapter, and there would be big changes ahead. For the rest of the day, whenever a stranger would say “May the Fourth be with you,” I couldn’t help but think that yes, perhaps it finally was.

Even now, when I look back, it still has a surreal quality about it. It simultaneously feels like it happened a lifetime ago, and only yesterday. If you’d asked me a year ago to predict what my life would be like now, I couldn’t have guessed. In truth, I wouldn’t allow myself to think about it much. My biggest fear was not the uncertainty of the path ahead, but that I might succumb to doubts that could hold me back. I needed to embrace change as the way forward, and so I chose — against all my Spock-brain instincts — to find comfort in momentum rather than in details.

So what have I learned, a year later?  Well, for one, that I absolutely made the right choice. It’s always a relief when something that seemed like a good idea at the time turns into a best case scenario, and perhaps never more so than when it involves a life-altering career decision. I felt good about it at the time, but to look back now and know that I’m truly better off is hugely empowering. I no longer feel like I’m following a path of someone else’s design, or that I must fit neatly within the boundaries of Profession X. I’m neither fully a scientist nor fully a writer, and after years of trying to reconcile the two, I’m finally in a place where the in-between actually makes sense.

I’ve learned there is a big difference between doing what you’re good at and doing what’s meaningful. I’ve  always loved science, and by all external measures, I was reasonably good at it. But while I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of it — the questions, the problem-solving, the learning by doing — in the end, I grew weary of the “paper tiger impact” of the publish-or-perish culture. It’s people, not papers, that drive science forward, and no matter how good I was at writing papers, there was little personal satisfaction in succeeding at a system that judges the value of a person by his or her publication record. Even if you are lucky enough to write an influential paper, it never writes back to you to tell you that you did a good job or that you helped to make a difference. People do, and I would much rather be judged for my human impact, however slight, than for my h-index, however large. In stepping out of the numbers game, I’ve reconnected with academia on a human level, and in the process, regained a sense of purpose and a simple joy in finding things out.

I’ve also learned that the notion of “work-life balance” is a fundamentally flawed construct. It treats work and life as though they exist on two entirely separate planes, and in so doing, elevates “work” in itself to be as important as everything else that constitutes “life.” It’s a false dichotomy that makes balance impossible. Work is a part of life, and thus, it’s not “work-life balance” that we should be concerned about, but simply “life balance.” A year ago, I thought that the biggest adjustment to my lifestyle would be working a 35-hour week for the first time in my career. I both craved and feared this arbitrary boundary between my work and my life. It’s taken some time to overcome old habits and attitudes, but my relationship to my work has changed profoundly. The result is that my life now involves more of “everything in moderation” and less juggling, sacrifice, and resentment. As for balance? I’ve learned it’s not just about keeping all the balls in the air — it’s more like a kind of equilibrium, a give and take within a system whose limits are defined and respected.

Related to that, perhaps the biggest change — or at least the one other people tend to notice — is that I’m a lot calmer and happier than I was a year ago. The stress and exhaustion that led me to the brink of burnout is long gone now, replaced by a renewed sense of optimism and resilience. I feel stronger, inside and out, than I have in a long time. And contrary to what people sometimes say, I haven’t become a different person — I’ve simply become more like the person I always knew I could be.

Or, as Yoda might say, “my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.”

The difficulty of communicating science simply

In my double-life as a writer and a scientist, I’ve always had an interest in writing about science in way that is accessible to a general audience. As an undergrad, I remember coming out of some of my classes feeling the way you do when you have a secret you can’t wait to tell somebody, a mental itch just begging to be scratched. Only science wasn’t secret. It was right there, all around us, all the time. So whenever I learned something really cool, I couldn’t help but write about it immediately to my closest non-scientist friend, librarian, and confidant. She’d send me relationship advice, and I’d reply with something like “Have you ever seen a starfish flip over?”

This might explain why I still live alone with my cat and an autographed calendar of half-naked firemen. But I digress.

My point is, this was before Facebook and YouTube and Wikipedia; I couldn’t just send a link to what I wanted to share  – I had to actually try to explain it.

Within a year, I got a job writing profiles of researchers for university publications that were targeted to the general public. My job was to go talk to scientists, find out what they did, and figure out a way to share it with people who might  only have a passing interest in the topic. I had to wade through the jargon and simplify the science without “dumbing it down”  (a phrase, by the way, that I detest for its inherent condescension). It was a challenging task, made all the more difficult by the researchers’ frequent inability to express what they did in simple terms.

It got no easier when I became a researcher myself, and had to learn how to communicate just as effectively with the jargon as I did without it. The jargon was both a necessity and a barrier to effective communication, a double-edged blade that I’ve spent the better part of my career trying to master, with no shortage of red ink spilled in the effort. Along the way, I’ve tried to share what I’ve learned with my colleagues and students, so that they too might become more effective jugglers of jargon and the public understanding of science.

But it’s not just about effective communication. One of the benefits of being forced to explain a difficult concept in simple terms is that you must change your perspective, and in the process of seeing something again with a beginner’s eyes, you can come to a deeper understanding of the subject  yourself. You stop taking the jargon at face value and begin asking yourself “what does this really mean?”

Recently, this xkcd comic prompted the creation of the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, which challenges users to explain a difficult concept using only the “ten hundred” (thousand isn’t on the list) most commonly used words. Researchers in several disciplines have already jumped to the challenge and tried to describe what they do using this limited vocabulary.

Of course, I had to try it.

The scope of the challenge was evident as soon as I tried describing oilseed biotechnology without being able to use the words “plant”, “seed”, “oil” or “fat.”  Couldn’t use “science” or “lab” or “research” either. Even “affect” and “effect” are off the list, which meant I would have to get over my scientific squeamishness about saying one thing “causes” another.

Here is what I came up with:

I try to understand how living things work inside. Lots of things happen in our bodies all the time, even when we’re sleeping, which is pretty amazing! But we don’t understand very much of it. Knowing about what happens inside us (in our cells) is important because then we can learn what is good or bad for our bodies. Sometimes we hear about food that is good or bad for us. What does that mean?  Our food changes what happens in the cells of our bodies, and it can make us feel good, or it can make us sick. If we know what kind of food makes us feel good, we can try to make more foods that keep us feeling good, or fix the things that make us sick.

How do we do that?

Our food also comes from living things. Like us, the living things that we use for food also have stuff happening inside their cells. This can cause them to be good or bad for us when we eat them. By changing what happens in the cells of the living things we plan to eat, we can make more and better food. This will help us to not get sick. Sometimes, we can also change the way the living things we eat are grown so that they can grow in places where they would usually die (like places where it is really dry and there is no rain). This helps people grow food in places where they don’t already have enough food.

Now, I’m not sure I would suggest that we all start talking this way — after all, we’ve evolved beyond a vocabulary of “ten hundred” for a reason. But aside from the challenge of conveying a difficult concept simply, this exercise also really makes you aware of the words that aren’t nearly as common as you’d think. Perhaps it will make you think twice about the words you do choose the next time you have to explain something in plain language, when the question is not “can you use the word?”, but “should you?”

Publish or perish — what’s behind door #3?

There has been a lot of discussion over the past year about the state of academic publishing — from the exploitive business models of the publishing heavyweights, to the crisis this creates for libraries, and the emerging case for open access. Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am a strong proponent of open access initiatives, and that I believe this kind of public debate on the issue is long overdue.

But I also wonder if it misses the point.

You see, we’re still not addressing the issue of what makes researchers beholden to publishers in the first place. The publishing models may be changing, but the culture that drives the explosive growth of academic publishing has not. So while open access promises to bring down one barrier to scientific communication, we continue to ignore what is potentially a much more formidable and serious challenge — the sheer volume of papers being published.

Although it’s difficult to determine accurately, it has been estimated that there are more than 50 million scholarly papers in existence right now, with more than 1.5 million new articles being added each year (and steadily climbing). That’s about 3 papers being published every minute.  And the sad reality is that the vast majority of these papers will never be cited.

This begs an obvious question: if the purpose of scholarly publishing is to communicate our results, but the majority of papers go unread or uncited, are we actually communicating? More to the point, why do we continue to “publish-or-perish” if most of our publishing efforts are for naught?

The truth is, it’s not primarily about communication anymore; it’s about satisfying institutional demands that treat publications as a proxy for research excellence. That idea took root over a century ago, when William Rainey Harper, then president of the University of Chicago, first proposed that advancement in academic rank and salary should be tied “more largely” to research productivity. The policy was quickly adopted by other research-intensive universities. By the 1930s-40s, the phrase “publish-or-perish” had been coined to describe the pressure on academics to publish, and today, it’s practically synonymous with the academic lifestyle. Today, scholarly publications are not only used to measure individual performance, but also to help determine institutional rankings and to measure national performance on innovation.

Today, the pressure to publish comes not from a demand by the consumers of knowledge (i.e. other scholars), but from a demand by the merchants of knowledge — those whose profits and prestige are linked directly to growth in research publications.

What about the rest of us?

Short-term career advancement aside, the publish-or-perish culture doesn’t really benefit individual researchers, who invest much of their time and energy either in producing papers or in reviewing them — a huge waste if most of those articles fail to reach their audience.

It’s not particularly beneficial to students, since researchers are often forced to prioritize research output over teaching. For grad students, publish-or-perish means they spend much of their time learning and conforming to an academic career structure that will not serve the 70-80% of them who will not have access to stable academic careers no matter how much they publish. That’s another post entirely.

It doesn’t benefit scientific integrity, since the unrestrained growth in publications places more and more stress on the system of peer-review. The pressure to publish is so intense that researchers will resubmit their rejected manuscripts multiple times, working their way down from the top-tier journals to the electronic slush piles that have lower standards of peer-review. Each published paper then, often represents multiple rounds of peer-review, each a burden on the system, and even then, it’s still possible for researchers to pay for access to bottom-feeder journals just to get the paper out, however bad. Bad research in turn places its own burden on the system as precious resources are invested in a futile effort to validate them.

In recent years we’ve seen everything from rampant plagiarism and duplication of publications, to data manipulation or fabrication, to elaborate “citation cartels” used to artificially inflate the prestige of certain journals. Just last week, a researcher was caught using his own email address under a fake name so that he could “peer-review” his own papers!

On one hand, we might be comforted by the fact that the peer-review system is catching these cases of obvious misconduct, but on the other hand, shouldn’t we be more alarmed about the institutional pressures that are leading to the behaviour in the first place?

And what of the higher-profile retractions? What does it say about the effectiveness of our current system of peer-review when the highest-profile journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.) also tend to have the highest rates of retraction?  True, these journals tend to be on the cutting edge and we know it can cut both ways sometimes. These journals also have large audiences: more eyes means more potential for catching a mistake. But these are also the journals that tend to get the most press, so such high-profile retractions also have the potential to negatively impact public trust of science. When you have researchers chasing publication in these journals as a career-making move rather than it being based on the quality of their data, it can only harm the collective image of the research community.

Public trust isn’t the only thing at stake. Scholarly communication is, by its highly technical nature, exclusive to a particular audience. Even with the expansion of open access publishing, which would make papers accessible to the public, there is still a significant barrier for the public in understanding that original research. And yet, never before has the public understanding and acceptance of science been so important. The big issues of the day — energy, sustainability, climate — require a certain acceptance of scientific information. But outreach activities often don’t count for much in faculty evaluations — so researchers tend to remain focused on writing papers for other scholars. In effect, the publish-or-perish system places more value on scholarly papers that go unread than on the myriad ways that researchers could otherwise be connecting with a non-academic audience to inform the public debate.

This is perhaps the most tragic waste of our scientific knowledge, and the point at which I begin to seriously question the ethical footing of the publish-or-perish culture. In an era of economic instability and fiscal restraint, when public access to scientific knowledge is key to advancing the most pressing social, economic, and political issues of the day, is it ethical for publicly-funded institutions to continue demanding that researchers prioritize scholarly publications (largely for the sake of prestige), at the expense of actually reaching the audience that can most benefit from the research?

What’s the alternative and how do we make it happen?

A little Fall cleaning…

This is the time of year when I can barely stop myself from buying school supplies.  Everywhere I turn, it seems that I am surrounded by crisp, clean, perfect stacks of paper, freshly sharpened pencils, and that intoxicating new book smell. Most people think of August as the end of a season, but the arrival of school supplies speaks not to an end, but to a beginning.

This is the season of ideas.

When I started writing this blog a little over a year ago, it was to fulfill the requirements of a course assignment. It began with a theme, but not much of a purpose other than to make light of my own experience as a scientist and maybe make people laugh in the process. I think humour can play an important role in science communication because fundamentally, it’s about breaking down barriers and seeing things from a different perspective. As scientists, we tend to take ourselves too seriously, and that can interfere with our ability to help people understand what we do.

But a lot has changed over the past year. I no longer make my living as a scientist. Jokes about the lab life just don’t ring as genuinely as they did a few months ago. As a writer, I’m no longer torn between two worlds, juggling the conflicting demands of academic writing and non-academic writing, trying to develop a voice with one while actively eliminating it from the other. The work-life balance quest remains a work in progress, but progress is a good thing.

It’s in that spirit of change and new ideas that I’m doing a little fall cleaning — combing through old posts to see what still fits, changing the site’s design (which is really just an excuse for me to finally get around to playing with some of WordPress’ customization features), and refocusing the content for the fall.

Consider it the digital equivalent of sharpening a pencil and starting with a new page. Bring on September…