…for Silvie!

Many people enjoy the ‘Garfield’ comic strip; a comic about a lazy, sarcastic cat who loves lasagna and hates Mondays.  What’s not to like?  As Nina pointed out in a previous blog post, there aren’t that many truly new ideas left to have, but thank goodness Dan Walsh didn’t know that, or else he might not have ever asked himself, “What would ‘Garfield’ be like without Garfield?”  And with that simple question ‘Garfield-minus-Garfield’ was born.

The premise of ‘Garfield-minus-Garfield’ is straight-forward; remove Garfield and all references to him from an original ‘Garfield’ comic and see what happens.  With Garfield removed, the reader can focus more intently on Garfield’s owner Jon, who, as it turns out, is the more compelling character in the strip.  As an example, here’s the original strip.

In the above strip, the joke is that Garfield is lazy.  But when Garfield is removed, the whole perspective changes.  Instead, the strip becomes a view into Jon’s state of depression.

I’m also a big fan of another ‘Garfield’ spinoff called ‘Realfield’ (http://juannavarro.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/realfield-like-lasagna-too/).  In this comic, Garfield is replaced with a real cat.  Different, but also funny.

It has been pointed out that we should be following the journalistic exhortation to simplify, to reduce, to “kill ones darlings” when compiling our manuscripts. We must shape the message, spin the content to its best effect and grab the editor and referees attention in the first 300, 200, 100 words, in the first paragraph, in the title.

Undoubtedly this is good advice. We should be clear and concise. But it does make one wonder where such brevity, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum way, might lead.

To a recently discovered new journal dedicated to publishing via Twitter perhaps. As one might expect manuscripts submitted to JTwitBiol have to conform to the 140 character limit as do each of the referee’s and editor’s comments and decisions. As a test case a revamped biopesticide paper was duly submitted:

Fngs klls mlria. Intr: Malria bd Fngs Gd. M&M: An st, Bb, Spry, xp. Rslts:  Dth&Dstrctn P<0.001. Dsc: Prblm slvd Nbl Prz pls. Refs: Thng1, Thng2

Appropriately enough the comments from the referees came back quickly.

Rfree1: OMG IMHO ths m/s Totes Amaze. Hv no rsrvtns abt nythng, gr8 cncpt, wll dsgnd, wll wrttn, shld b pblshd.

Rfree2: AYFKMWTS? So bd I SCOON. IRL thr NFW ths wrks. Evn smpl BOTEC FUBAR. WOMT. TGIF.

Rfree3: TL;DR

The editor sealed the manuscripts fate.

Edtr: Thx 4 sbmtng wrk 2 JTwitBiol. Nftntly & dspte Ref3 mssng pnt, cnt rcncle hge dfrncs btwn rfees so mst REJECT m/s.

Absurd decision of course. Editor must be suffering fro Boanthropy. So it goes.

Even though I (like many others) often feel like I don’t know anything or have any skills, I am probably more frustrated by feeling that I don’t know anything important (i.e., at this point, relevant to my thesis). I do actually know a fair number of facts, though; I have always been apt to acquire them.

This is one reason why I always liked science classes. I loved memorizing things: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (I memorized that in sixth grade. Before “domain” was a thing.). But, even if everyone is a little crazy, not everyone is a little lyrebird, happy to chirp back new words.

I know that learning things by rote works. We chanted the cell theory together as a biology class in ninth grade, and I can still intone, “All cells come from preexisting cells.” But science has so much more than trivia to give to people who don’t want to be scientists. I worry that it’s more the way we teach science…and math, and most everything else for that matter, rather than individual variation in curiosity and voracity for understanding, which leads children to dislike school and, especially, science. Do you think that’s true?

As I said before, I need people to explain things to me. Especially as a child, I had trouble seeing the forest for the trees. I am totally into trees, but it was still really annoying to finally turn around and realize how much sense they can all make together. I guess what I’m advocating here is, instead of… tree taxonomy(?), forest ecology?

I spent this Memorial Day Weekend in Philadelphia, and besides copious amounts of wine and good company, my favorite part was visiting the Mutter Museum, operated by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. On par with the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, it contains a beautiful collection of anatomical specimens, medical oddities, and obsolete surgical instruments of the most heinous variety. One of the most impressive exhibits was the skull collection of Dr. Joseph Hyrtl, an anatomist and phrenologist from Vienna. This collection was amassed over his career and contains 139 specimens, including data such as age, gender and cause of death (here’s the whole catalog; you can even adopt one!)

I overheard a lot of comments while perusing the Hyrtl collection, most notably “why would anyone collect skulls, that is so creepy”. While I have to admit that keeping a basement full of body parts sounds more serial killer than it does pioneer scientist, the habit of collecting specimens (of all kinds) that was popularized among both career scientists and hobbyists alike in the Victorian era has greatly benefited the public today. I had the privilege to receive an educational grant in college to work as a curation assistant at the Illinois State Museum Research and Collections Center in the Zoology department. This is a 97,000 square foot warehouse facility where all of the accessions are housed, most of them still waiting on identification and cataloging, which was my primary task during my time there. Admittedly, some of the accessions were clearly piles of junk that someone had collected that were donated after their passing, including jars of formaldehyde-preserved stomach contents from…some type of mammal? But we never, ever threw anything away; we don’t know what could possibly be useful later on, down to the smallest bone fragments. It was interesting to identify, fix and catalog everything from dragonfly specimens from eminent entomologists, to trophies donated by Teddy Roosevelt, to a collection of 5,000 mammal skins and skulls preserved by a hobbyist.

Every once in a while, curation enters the back of my mind as a possible job prospect, despite the fact that funding and opportunities are even more scarce than those in research science. Despite curation being more or less an attempt at organizing what we already know, the preservation and care of the past is invaluable to the future of the field of science in general.

We are frequently captivated by the accumulation of large numbers of individuals of a single (or multiple) species. Mass gatherings can be triggered by seasonal migrations, such as those exhibited by monarch butterflies, red crabs of Christmas Island in Southeast Asia or of dragonfly species that have been suggested to fly the utterly absurd distance from southern India to eastern Africa, managing a pit stop in the Maldive Islands. Other sources of impressive animal aggregations are a result of reproductive or intellectual coordination. The eruption of cicadas from their sleepy below-ground dwellings and the gathering of ruffians interested in the ecology and evolutionary biology of disease this past week, serve as two local examples of the mentioned phenomena.

Tightly packed individuals whether in swarms, herds or schools capture our imagination in a way that is absent when rarity, instead of abundance is the default condition, especially with regard to “uncharismatic” animals such as insects (entomologists feel free to argue away).  Generally, we also tend to pay less attention to animals that we observe frequently on a day-to-day basis. Aggregations of these animals often force us to pay greater attention to them.

Which leads me to squirrel migrations.

I recently learned that squirrel migrations (better described as sporadic mass movements, as they appear to have no discernible spatial or temporal pattern) have been a documented phenomenon, being described by early naturalists mostly during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. There are accounts of gray squirrels moving in great numbers through open grasslands, 4-5 miles from any forest, and even awkwardly swimming sometimes to fatal exhaustion in the Hudson, Ohio and Niagara rivers. Numbers were sufficient enough during these events that a single hunter was recognized of killing 160 animals in one day. Calculations based on historical accounts put the number of squirrels at 30,000 in a square mile. Why were they on the move? The dominant explanation seems to be one centered on over-population. Regardless, I’ll be looking at the furry critters on campus with less of a perfunctory gaze.

I saw a preview for a new movie coming out, which seems to take place in a future where the ultra-privileged who live in space while the desperately poor fight for scraps on the Earth below. I’m a sucker for sci-fi, but the part that grabbed my attention was a scene in which a young woman from the privileged set enters a device not unlike a tanning bed to get a health check-up. The tanning bed informs her that she has trace amounts of cancer cells and then–in less time than it takes to start up a computer–that it has eliminated all of the offending cells. The woman then exits the tanning bed to do whatever the space-elite do to fill the time when they’re not actively oppressing the poor.

A tanning bed that prevents cancer?

It would be great to eliminate the cancer cells while leaving the surrounding tissue intact, but the part of the technology I really want to see is the detection device. For starters, no magic bullet can be effective if we don’t know that we need to use it. But also all therapies that act against living things are a double-edged sword, meaning that they select for the traits we fear most (cells that are more drug-resistant, more aggressively cancerous) even as they reduce the chances for our targets to replicate and mutate into their nightmarish-counterparts.

I’m skeptical of the tanning bed though. Unless treatment is truly free of side-effects, I don’t see how any strategy can be effective if we don’t understand how big the problem is and how fast it is spreading. In other words, the cancer detector should require at least two time points of data to make a good estimate of risk and determine the optimal degree of treatment. Intervention is costly both in monetary terms and in the potential for collateral damage, and those costs must be weighed against the risks associated with doing nothing.

I believe that to be better at your job, that is to be a more efficient worker and to continue to love what your doing while your doing it, you need to build in some time to decompress and unplug from the daily stressors of our jobs.  I feel this is especially true for scientists in academia with flex schedules, which contrary to popular belief does not mean we can take as many vacations as we want when we want, but instead means we tend to work all of the time.  I often try to build in time off to do something I enjoy outside of work after a series of deadlines have been met or after a particularly busy point in work.  It serves as a reward for accomplishing said tasks and allows the brain to recover for the time when I return to work.  So, to practice what I preach, I am off to our Northern neighbor Canada for a long weekend to visit friends and to frankly, not think about work, as much as I love it.  Happy Memorial weekend!

I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the week when we have our “stress” lab meeting, I have one of my most stressed out days ever. I think it must be, because — according to my response to Lauren’s post — the stress lab meeting didn’t itself stress me out. Rather, it’s probably the inordinate number of deadlines facing me as well as ridiculous obstacles to actually meeting them. I won’t bore you with the details, because my perceived busyness isn’t the point.

Is that my esophagus in your hand? May I have it back please?

I think an interesting follow up to the question of “what stresses you out?” is “what does your stress feel like?”. For me, it feels like someone has grabbed my esophagus and is twisting it with two hands in opposite directions. It’s a horrible sort of I can’t breathe / I might vomit combo feeling. Blech. Not pleasant.

My approaches for dealing with this esophagus-squashing stress have included:

1. ujjayi breathing…a relic from my more active yoga days. I have had limited success with this today.

2. ice cream…a relic from (I don’t know) childhood (?). This was delicious and did temporarily relieve some stress, but the effects wore off once I had scraped the last bit out of the bowl.

3. giving one of my best buddies a giant hug after not seeing her for 7 months. I haven’t actually done this one yet, since her train has yet to arrive. And, naturally, her train is late (but I’m trying to not let that stress me out!). I have a good feeling about this approach though.

If anyone has any other stress-relieving suggestions, I’d be up for hearing them because today’s most promising approach is, sadly, a bit hard to engineer.

There are probably two types of scientists: the ones who want to solve intellectually interesting problems, and the ones who are driven to safe the world. Of course, in an ideal world, we would kill these two birds with one stone, but deep down, what is mainly driving you?

The reason why I ask is that I find the science of malaria eradication – applied science at the heart – fascinating. ISglobal, the institute I am now associated with, is increasingly focusing on malaria eradication. Academically, this involves a whole shift in mindset: the goal is not output in terms of papers, it is eradication success. I had the privilege to attend a few sessions in the science of eradication course held in Barcelona, a very interesting experience. Although I am skeptic when it comes to eradication, it is an intriguing process. There are many unknowns and I believe eradication is potentially risky, but nevertheless, attempts for eradication will happen, with or without answers. In fact, some of these questions can only be answered by doing the large-scale ‘experiment’.

And as such, while the aim of eradication is not to generate data, it will do so. This is the reason why I am so intrigued by the whole process: it is a large-scale evolutionary experiment. Is my interest based on a drive to safe the world? Perhaps the honest answer to this questions would be no, I think there are more efficient ways to safe the world. However, I do hope that as an academic I will generate data and knowledge that would help the process and I believe it is my duty as an academic to strive for this knowledge to be put in the right hands and minds, so that they can, eventually, safe the world.

We periodically have “pub sessions” in place of lab meetings. Your initial inclination, as mine was, may be to assume the pub is short for publication.  This is not the case. A pub session derives its name from the meeting location: the pub. During these informal gatherings, Matt and Andrew lead an informal discussion on a general topic.  This sort of thing has the potential to be completely obnoxious, but actually this is an enjoyable and often helpful experience. However, there is one pub session that I dread and that is the yearly “stress meeting”.

The intention of this meeting is to allow lab members to describe what causes them stress. The desired outcome is that by airing these concerns and addressing them that we will be liberated from them.  Additionally, we will be comforted in the knowledge that others share similar concerns.  Freed from the bonds of anxiety we will burst forth to become unstoppable research machines leaving mounds of Nature and Science papers in our wake.

For those of us that struggle with stress, this scenario is not probable.

First, for those of us who are expert worriers these situations do nothing but increase anxiety.  As Jessi described in an earlier post, worriers practice worrying and are very good at it.  As other members describe their concerns the well-worn networks of anxiety synapses will begin to fire in many of the listener’s brains. Their heart rate increases and muscles will tense as their bodies become anxious and primed to feel worried. Second, as that fight or flight response kicks in the higher processing centers of the brain turn off.  We are left only with the primitive parts of our brain function. These primitive components of the brain are the ones that we share with reptiles. Not too many reptilian paper authors are there?

I think the key flaw in the current model for this meeting is that we are trying to stop stress.  Stress is a physiological response to external stimuli. It is the reason your ancient ancestors survived and the reason you are here. Even though you are no longer scraping in the caves to survive, your ancient stress response remains. It has been heavily selected for and it will always be with you.  We should all feel remarkably blessed that we have supervisors who want to know what they can do to improve our stress.  This will not happen in the real world so feel lucky. Instead of trying to stop stress, I believe we will be better served by working to understand it, recognize it, and manage it, in the same way that a diabetic knows to monitor and adjust their insulin levels. (Yes, body I know you are responding as though we have just seen a zombie bear, but really the PCR just didn’t work. So calm down).

So, what do I suggest instead? I think we should follow the advice of Shawn Achor’s recent TED talk.  Achor does this so beautifully I’m not inclined to attempt to paraphrase.  If I had to come up with one suggestion to take from this excellent talk (this is well worth the 12 minute watch) it would be that we turn this “Stress” meeting into a “Wellness” meeting. We should take a time out to talk about one thing that we absolutely love about working as a scientist and then turn to our neighbor and tell them why we are grateful to have them as a colleague, and yes, we can also have a
few pints.

Shawn Achor TED Talk