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Ada Lovelace Day book review: Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science.

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Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Last year, I shared my reflections on Ada herself. This year, I’d like to celebrate the day by pointing you to a book about another pioneering woman of science, Maria Mitchell.

Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics
by Renée Bergland
Boston: Beacon Press
2008

What is it like to be a woman scientist? In a society where being a woman is somehow a distinct experience from being an ordinary human being, the answer to this question can be complicated. And, in a time and place where being a scientist, being a professional — indeed, even being American — was still something that was very much under construction, the complexities of the answer can add up to a biography of that time, that place, that swirl of intellectual and cultural ferment, as well as of that woman scientist.

The astronomer Maria Mitchell was not only a pioneering woman scientist in the early history of the United States, but she was one of the nation’s first professional scientists. Renée Bergland’s biography of Mitchell illuminates a confluence of circumstances that made it possible for Mitchell to make her scientific contributions — to be a scientist at all. At the same time, it tracks a retrograde cultural swing of which Mitchell herself was aware: a loss, during Mitchell’s lifetime, of educational and career opportunities for women in the sciences.

Maria Mitchell was the daughter of two people who were passionate about learning, and about each other. Her mother, Lydia Coleman Mitchell, worked at both of Nantucket’s lending libraries in order to avail herself of their collections. Her father, William Mitchell, turned down a spot as a student at Harvard — which Lydia, as a woman, was barred from attending — to stay on Nantucket and make a life with Lydia. Maria was born in 1818, the third child of ten (nine of whom survived to adulthood) in a family that nurtured its daughters as well as its sons and where a near constant scarcity of resources prompted both hard work and ingenuity.

William Mitchell was one of the Nantucket men who didn’t go to sea on a whaling ship, working instead on the island in a variety of capacities, including astronomer. His astronomical knowledge was welcomed by the community in public lectures (since youth who planned to go to sea would benefit from an understanding of astronomy if they wanted to be able to navigate by the stars), and he used his expertise to calibrate the chronometers ship captains used to track their longitude while at sea.

Since he was not off at sea, William was there with Lydia overseeing the education of the Mitchell children, much of it taking place in the Mitchell home. Nantucket did not establish a public school until 1827; when it did, its first principal was William Mitchell. Maria attended the public school for the few years her father was principal, then followed him to the private school he founded on the island. William’s astronomical work, conducted at home, was part of Maria’s education, and by the time she was 11 years old, she was acting as his assistant in the work. As it was not long before Maria’s mathematical abilities and training (most of it self-taught) soon exceeded her father’s, this was a beneficial relationship on both sides.

Maria herself did some teaching of the island’s children. Later she ran the Nantucket Atheneum, a cross between a community library and a center of culture. All the while, she continued to assist her father with astronomical observations and provided the computational power that drove their collaboration. She made nightly use of the rooftop observatory at the Pacific Bank (where the Mitchell family lived when William took a post there), and one evening in 1847, Maria’s sweeps of the heavens with her telescope revealed a streak in the sky that she recognized as a new comet.

The announcement of the comet beyond the Mitchell family gives us a glimpse into just what was at stake in such a discovery. Maria herself was inclined towards modesty, some might argue pathologically so. William, however, insisted that the news must be shared, and contacted the astronomers at Harvard he knew owing to his own work. As Bergland describes it:

When Mitchell discovered the comet and her father reported it to the Bonds at Harvard [William Bonds was the director of the Harvard Observatory, his son George his assistant], the college president at the time, Edward Everett, saw an opening: Mitchell was a remarkably appealing woman whose talent and modesty were equally indisputable. She could never be accused of being a status seeker. But if Everett could convince the Danish government [which was offering a medal to the discoverer of a new comet] that reporting her discovery to the Harvard Observatory was the equivalent of reporting the discovery to the British Royal Observatory or the Danish Royal Observatory, the Harvard Observatory would gain the status of an international astronomical authority.

Maria was something of a pawn here. She was proud of her discovery, but her intense shyness made her reluctant to publicize it. Yet that shyness was exactly what made her so useful to President Everett. Her friend George Bond had also discovered comets, but he’d been unsuccessful at arguing on his own behalf against the authorities of Europe. Since Bond was directly affiliated with the Harvard College Observatory, Harvard’s hands were tied; Everett had never even tried to defend Bond’s claims. But by framing Mitchell as something of a damsel in distress, Everett could bring his diplomatic skills to bear to establish the precedent that Harvard’s observatory was as reliable as the British Royal Observatory at Greenwich. (p. 67)

There was more than just a (potential) scientific priority battle here (as other astronomers had observed this comet within a few days of Maria Mitchell’s observation of it), there was a battle for institutional credibility for Harvard and for international credibility for the United States as a nation that could produce both important science and serious scientists. Thus, “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” took on a larger significance. While Harvard at the time would have had no use for a woman student, nor for a woman professor, they found it useful to recognize Maria Mitchell as a legitimate astronomer, since doing so advanced their broader interests.

Maria Mitchell’s claim to priority for the comet (one that turned out to have an unusual orbit that was tricky to calculate) was recognized. Besides the Danish medal, this recognition got her a job. In 1849, she was hired by the United States Nautical Almanac as the “computer of Venus”, making her one of the country’s very first professional astronomers.

Her fame as an astronomer also opened doors for her (including doors to observatories) as she left Nantucket in 1857 to tour Europe. The trip was one she hoped would give her a good sense of where scientific research was headed. As it turned out, it also gave her a sense of herself as an American, a scientist, and a woman moving in a very male milieu. Maria Mitchell was horrified to encounter neglected telescopes and rules that banned women from even setting foot within certain university facilities. She rubbed shoulders with famous scientists, including one Charles Babbage and Mary Somerville, the woman William Whewell invented the word “scientist” to describe:

When Whewell groped for words and finally coined “scientist” to describe her, the issue was not primarily gender, but rather the newness of Somerville’s endeavor — her attempt to connect all the physical sciences to one another. …

Another, even more important reason that Whewell … felt the need for a new term was that a new professional identity was developing. Those who studied the material world were beginning to distinguish themselves from philosophers, whose provinces were more metaphysical than physical. But the first steps of this separation had been quite insulated from each other: chemists, mathematicians, astronomers, and the soon-to-be-named physicists did not necessarily see themselves as sharing an identity or as working at a common endeavor. Somerville’s treatise On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences was instrumental in showing the various investigators that their work was connected — they were all practitioners of science.

Although the development of the word “scientist” related more to the philosophical point (argued by Somerville) that the sciences could be unified than it did to gender, “scientist” did gradually replace the older formulation, “man of science.” Gender also entered in, Whewell thought, because as a woman, Somerville was better equipped to see connection than a man. … Whewell argued that Somerville’s womanly perspective enhanced rather than obscured her vision. (pp. 146-147)

In Somerville, Mitchell found a woman who was a fellow pioneer on something of a new frontier in terms of how doing science was perceived. Though the time Mitchell spent with Somerville was brief, the relationship involved real mentoring:

Somerville talked to her about substantive scientific questions as none of the British scientists had done; Mitchell first learned about the works of the physicist James Prescott Joule in Florence [where she met Somerville], despite having spent months in scientific circles in England, where Joule lived and worked. Somerville took Mitchell seriously as an intellect, and wanted to share her wide-ranging knowledge and encourage Mitchell in her own endeavors. She made her affection for Mitchell clear, and she offered the support and encouragement the younger scientist needed. Best of all, Mitchell liked her. She was charming and kind, someone for Mitchell to emulate in every way. (p. 151)

Somerville was not just a role model for Mitchell. The reciprocal nature of their relationship made her a true mentor for Mitchell, someone whose faith in Mitchell’s capabilities helped Mitchell herself to understand what she might accomplish. This relationship launched Mitchell towards greater engagement with the public when she returned to the U.S.

Maria Mitchell broke more ground when she was hired by the newly formed Vassar College (a women’s college) as a professor of astronomy. While she was first interviewed for the position in 1862, the trustees were locked in debate over whether a woman could properly be a professor at the college, and Mitchell was not actually appointed until 1865. Her appointment included an observatory where Mitchell conducted research, taught, and lived. At Vassar, she broke with the authoritarian, lecture-style instruction common in other departments. Instead, she engaged her students in hands-on, active learning, challenged them to challenge her, and involved them in astronomical research. And, when it became clear that there was not enough time in a day to fully meet the competing demands of teaching and research (plus other professional duties and her duties to her family), Mitchell recorded a resolution in her notebook:

RESOLVED: In case of my outliving father and being in good health, to give my efforts to the intellectual culture of women, without regard to salary. (p. 203)

Such a commitment was vital to Maria Mitchell, especially as, during her time at Vassar, she was aware of a societal shift that was narrowing opportunities for women to participate in the sciences or in intellectual pursuits, in the realms of both education and professions. Pioneer though she was, she saw her female students being offered less by the world than she was, and it made her sad and angry.

Renée Bergland’s biography of Maria Mitchell lays out the complexities at work in Mitchell’s family environment, in the culturally rich yet geographically isolated Nantucket island, in the young United States, and in the broader international community of scientific thinkers and researchers. The factors that play a role in a person’s educational and intellectual trajectory are fascinating to me, in part because so many of them seem like they’re just a matter of chance. How important was it to Maria Mitchell’s success that she grew up in Nantucket, when she did, with the parents that she had? If she had grown up in Ohio or Europe, if she had been born a few decades earlier or later, if her parents had been less enthusiastic about education, is there any way she would have become an astronomer? How much of the early recognition of Mitchell’s work was connected to the struggle of the U.S. as a relatively new country to establish itself in the international community of science? (Does it even make sense to think of an international community of science in the mid-nineteenth century? Was it less about having American scientists accepted into such a community and more about national bragging rights? What might be the current state of the U.S. scientifically if other opportunities to establish national prowess had been pursued instead?)

Especially gripping are the questions about the proper role of females in scientific pursuits, and how what was “proper” seemed contingent upon external factors, including the availability (or not) of men for scientific labors during the American Civil War. I was surprised, reading this book, to discover that science and mathematics were considered more appropriate pursuits for girls (while philosophy and classical languages were better suited to boys) when Maria Mitchell was young. (How, in light of this history, do so many people get away with insinuating that females lack the intrinsic aptitude for science and math?) The stereotype in Mitchell’s youth that sciences were appropriate pursuits for girls seems to have been based on a certain kind of essentialism about what girls are like, as well as what I would identify as a misunderstanding about how the sciences operate and what kind of picture of the world they can be counted on to deliver. Mitchell, as much as anyone, seemed to be pushing her astronomical researches in a direction very different from the “safe” science people expected — yet in her writings, she also makes claims about women that could be read as essentialist, too. It’s hard to know whether these were these rhetorical moves, or whether Mitchell really bought into there being deep, fundamental differences between the sexes. This makes her story more complicated — and more compelling — than a straightforward narrative of a heroic scientist and professor battling injustice.

Indeed, there are moments here where I wanted to grab Maria Mitchell by the shoulders and shake her, as when she negotiated a lower salary for herself at Vassar than she was offered, even though she foresaw that it would lead to unfairly low salaries of the women faculty who followed her. Was her rejection of the higher salary just a matter of being honest to a fault about her limited teaching experience and her wavering self-confidence? Was she instead worried that accepting the higher salary might give the trustees an excuse not to take on the college’s first woman professor? Was opening the doors to other women in the professorate a more pressing duty than ensuring they would get the same respect — or at least, the same pay — as their male counterparts?

Given the seriousness with which Mitchell approached the task of increasing educational and professional opportunities for women, I can’t help but wondering how many of her choices were driven by a sense of duty. On balance, did Mitchell live the life she wanted to live, or the life she thought she ought to live to make things better? (Would she have drawn such a distinction herself?)

Some of these questions are connected to the various other strands of this rich biography. For example, Bergland does quite a lot to explore Maria Mitchell’s Quaker background, her own inclination to part company with the Society of Friends on certain matters of religious belief, the influence of her cultural Quakerism on and off Nantucket island, even how her plain Quaker dress made her an exotic and an object of curiosity during her travels through Europe at a time when the U.S. was arguably a developing country.

Bergland’s book is a captivating read that will be of interest to anyone curious about the development of educational institutions and professional communities, about the ways political and societal forces pull at the life of the mind, or about the ways people come to steer their interactions in many different circles to achieve what they think must be achieved.

An earlier version of this review was first published here.

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Want to help kids in a high poverty high school get outside and really experience astronomy? Please consider supporting “Keep Looking Up”, a DonorsChoose project aimed at purchasing a telescope for a brand new astronomy class in Chouteau, OK. Even a few dollars can make a difference.

Kicking off DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students 2012.

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Since 2006, science bloggers have been working with DonorsChoose.org and our readers to help public school students and teachers get the resources they need to make learning come alive. Is there an origin story for the annual Science Bloggers for Students drive? As a matter of fact*, there is:

Science Bloggers for Students Origin Story

If you’re reading blogs in this neighborhood of the blogosphere, chances are you care about science, or education, or both. Probably you’re the kind of person who thinks that solid — and engaging — math and science education is an important resource for kids to have as they hurtle into the future and face the challenges of our modern world.

It’s a resource that’s getting squeezed by tight public school budgets. But we have the opportunity to do something small that can have an immediate impact.

This year, from October 15 through November 5, a number of science bloggers, whether networked, loosely affiliated, or proudly independent, will be teaming up with DonorsChoose in Science Bloggers for Students, a philanthropic throwdown for public schools.

DonorsChoose is a site where public school teachers from around the U.S. submit requests for specific needs in their classrooms — from books to science kits, overhead projectors to notebook paper, computer software to field trips — that they can’t meet with the funds they get from their schools (or from donations from their students’ families). Then donors choose which projects they’d like to fund and then kick in the money, whether it’s a little or a lot, to help a proposal become a reality.

Over the last several years, bloggers have rallied their readers to contribute what they can to help fund classroom proposals through DonorsChoose, especially proposals for projects around math and science, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, funding hundreds of classroom projects, and impacting thousands of students.

Which is great. But there are a whole lot of classrooms out there that still need help.

To create the scientifically literate world we want to live in, let’s help give these kids — our future scientists, doctors, teachers, decision-makers, care-providers, and neighbors — the education they deserve.

One classroom project at a time, we can make things better for these kids. Joining forces with each other people, even small contributions can make a big difference.

The challenge this year runs October 15 through November 5. We’re overlapping with Earth Science Week (October 14-20, 2012) and National Chemistry Week (October 21-27, 2012), a nice chance for earth science and chemistry fans to add a little philanthropy to their celebrations. There are a bunch of Scientific American bloggers mounting challenges this year (check out some of their challenge pages on our leaderboard), as well as bloggers from other networks (which you can see represented on the challenge’s motherboard). And, since today is the official kick-off, there is plenty of time for other bloggers and their readers to enter the fray!




How It Works:

Follow the links above to your chosen blogger’s challenge on the DonorsChoose website.

Pick a project from the slate the blogger has selected. Or more than one project, if you just can’t choose. (Or, if you really can’t choose, just go with the “Give to the most urgent project” option at the top of the page.)

Donate.

(If you’re the loyal reader of multiple participating blogs and you don’t want to play favorites, you can, of course, donate to multiple challenges! But you’re also allowed to play favorites.)

Sit back and watch the challenges inch towards their goals, and check the leaderboards to see how many students will be impacted by your generosity.

Even if you can’t make a donation, you can still help!

Spread the word about these challenges using web 2.0 social media modalities. Link your favorite blogger’s challenge page on your MySpace page, or put up a link on Facebook, or FriendFeed, or LiveJournal (or Friendster, or Xanga, or …). Tweet about it on Twitter (with the #scibloggers4students hashtag). Share it on Google +. Sharing your enthusiasm for this cause may inspire some of your contacts who do have a little money to get involved and give.

Here’s the permalink to my giving page.

Thanks in advance for your generosity.

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*It’s possible the origin story presented here is not entirely factual, but it sure is compelling! Also, it was created with less than 10% child labor!

Community responsibility for a safety culture in academic chemistry.

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This is another approximate transcript of a part of the conversation I had with Chemjobber that became a podcast. This segment (from about 29:55 to 52:00) includes our discussion of what a just punishment might look like for PI Patrick Harran for his part in the Sheri Sangji case. From there, our discussion shifted to the question of how to make the culture of academic chemistry safer:

Chemjobber: One of the things that I guess I’ll ask is whether you think we’ll get justice out of this legal process in the Sheri Sangji case.

Janet: I think about this, I grapple with this, and about half the time when I do, I end up thinking that punishment — and figuring out the appropriate punishment for Patrick Harran — doesn’t even make my top-five list of things that should come out of all this. I kind of feel like a decent person should feel really, really bad about what happened, and should devote his life forward from here to making the conditions that enabled the accident that killed Sheri Sangji go away. But, you know, maybe he’s not a decent person. Who the heck can tell? And certainly, once you put things in the context where you have a legal team defending you against criminal charges — that tends to obscure the question of whether you’re a decent person or not, because suddenly you’ve got lawyers acting on your behalf in all sorts of ways that don’t look decent at all.

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: I think the bigger question in my mind is how does the community respond? How does the chemistry department at UCLA, how does the larger community of academic chemistry, how do Patrick Harran’s colleagues at UCLA and elsewhere respond to all of this? I know that there are some people who say, “Look, he really fell down on the job safety-wise, and in terms of creating an environment for people working on his behalf, and someone died, and he should do jail time.” I don’t actually know if putting him in jail changes the conditions on the outside, and I’ve said that I think, in some ways, tucking him away in jail for however many months makes it easier for the people who are still running academic labs while he’s incarcerated to say, “OK, the problem is taken care of. The bad actor is out of the pool. Not a problem,” rather than looking at what it is about the culture of academic chemistry that has us devoting so little of our time and energy to making sure we’re doing this safely. So, if it were up to me, if I were the Queen of Just Punishment in the world of academic chemistry, I’ve said his job from here on out should be to be Safety in the Research Culture Guy. That’s what he gets to work on. He doesn’t get to go forward and conduct new research on some chemical question like none of this ever happened. Because something happened. Something bad happened, and the reason something bad happened, I think, is because of a culture in academic chemistry where it was acceptable for a PI not to pay attention to safety considerations until something bad happened. And that’s got to change.

Chemjobber: I think it will change. I should point out here that if your proposed punishment were enacted, it would be quite a punishment, because he wouldn’t get to choose what he worked on anymore, and that, to a great extent, is the joy of academic research, that it’s self-directed and that there is lots and lots of freedom. I don’t get to choose the research problems I work on, because I do it for money. My choices are more or less made by somebody else.

Janet: But they pay you.

Chemjobber: But they pay me.

Janet: I think I’d even be OK saying maybe Harran gets to do 50% of his research on self-directed research topics. But the other 50% is he has to go be an evangelist for changing how we approach the question of safety in academic research.

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: He’s still part of the community, he’s still “one of us,” but he has to show us how we are treading dangerously close to the conditions that led to the really bad thing that happened in his lab, so we can change that.

Chemjobber: Hmm.

Janet: And not just make it an individual thing. I think all of the attempts to boil what happened down to all being the individual responsibility of the technician, or of the PI, or it’s a split between the individual responsibility of one and the individual responsibility of the other, totally misses the institutional responsibility, and the responsibility of the professional community, and how systemic factors that the community is responsible for failed here.

Chemjobber: Hmm.

Janet: And I think sometimes we need individuals to step up and say, part of me acknowledging my personal responsibility here is to point to the ways that the decisions I made within the landscape we’ve got — of what we take seriously, of what’s rewarded and what’s punished — led to this really bad outcome. I think that’s part of the power here is when academic chemists say, “I would be horrified if you jailed this guy because this could have happened in any of our labs,” I think they’re right. I think they’re right, and I think we have to ask how it is that conditions in these academic communities got to the point where we’re lucky that more people haven’t been seriously injured or killed by some of the bad things that could happen — that we don’t even know that we’re walking into because safety gets that short shrift.

Chemjobber: Wow, that’s heavy. I’m not sure whether there are industrial chemists whose primary job is to think about safety. Is part of the issue we have here that safety has been professionalized? We have industrial chemical hygienists and safety engineers. Every university has an EH&S [environmental health and safety] department. Does that make safety somebody else’s problem? And maybe if Patrick Harran were to become a safety evangelist, it would be a way of saying it’s our problem, and we all have to learn, we have to figure out a way to deal with this?

Janet:Yeah. I actually know that there exist safety officers in academic science departments, partly because I serve on some university committees with people who fill that role — so I know they exist. I don’t know how much the people doing research in those departments actually talk with those safety officers before something goes wrong, or how much of it goes beyond “Oh, there’s paperwork we need to make sure is filed in the right place in case there’s an inspection,” or something like that. But it strikes me that safety should be more collaborative. In some ways, wouldn’t that be a more gripping weekly seminar to have in a chemistry department for grad students working in the lab, even just once a month on the weekly seminar, to have a safety roundtable? “Here are the risks that we found out about in this kind of work,” or talking about unforeseen things that might happen, or how do you get started finding out about proper precautions as you’re beginning a new line of research? What’s your strategy for figuring that out? Who do you talk to? I honestly feel like this is a part of chemical education at the graduate level that is extremely underdeveloped. I know there’s been some talk about changing the undergraduate chemistry degree so that it includes something like a certificate program in chemical safety, and maybe that will fix it all. But I think the only thing that fixes it all is really making it part of the day to day lived culture of how we build new knowledge in chemistry, that the safety around how that knowledge gets built is an ongoing part of the conversation.

Chemjobber: Hmm.

Janet: It’s not something we talk about once and then never again. Because that’s not how research works. We don’t say, “Here’s our protocol. We never have to revisit it. We’ll just keep running it until we have enough data, and then we’re done.”

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: Show me an experiment that’s like that. I’ve never touched an experiment like that in my life.

Chemjobber: So, how many times do you remember your Ph.D. advisor talking to you about safety?

Janet: Zero. He was a really good advisor, he was a very good mentor, but essentially, how it worked in our lab was that the grad students who were further on would talk to the grad students who were newer about “Here’s what you need to be careful about with this reaction, “ or “If you’ve got overflow of your chemical waste, here’s who to call to do the clean-up,” or “Here’s the paperwork you fill out to have the chemical waste hauled away properly.” So, the culture was the people who were in the lab day to day were the keepers of the safety information, and luckily I joined a lab where those grad students were very forthcoming. They wanted to share that information. You didn’t have to ask because they offered it first. I don’t think it happens that way in every lab, though.

Chemjobber: I think you’re right. The thorniness of the problem of turning chemical safety into a day to day thing, within the lab — within a specific group — is you’re relying on this group of people that are transient, and they’re human, so some people really care about it and some people tend not to care about it. I had an advisor who didn’t talk about safety all the time but did, on a number of occasions, yank us all short and say, “Hey, look, what you’re doing is dangerous!” I clearly remember specific admonishments: “Hey, that’s dangerous! Don’t do that!”

Janet: I suspect that may be more common in organic chemistry than in physical chemistry, which is my area. You guys work with stuff that seems to have a lot more potential to do interesting things in interesting ways. The other thing, too, is that in my research group we were united by a common set of theoretical approaches, but we all worked in different kinds of experimental systems which had different kinds of hazards. The folks doing combustion reactions had different things to worry about than me, working with my aqueous reaction in a flow-through reactor, while someone in the next room was working with enzymatic reactions. We were all over the map. Nothing that any of us worked with seemed to have real deadly potential, at least as we were running it, but who knows?

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: And given that different labs have very different dynamics, that could make it hard to actually implement a desire to have safety become a part of the day to day discussions people are having as they’re building the knowledge. But this might really be a good place for departments and graduate training programs to step up. To say, “OK, you’ve got your PI who’s running his or her own fiefdom in the lab, but we’re the other professional parental unit looking out for your well being, so we’re going to have these ongoing discussions with graduate cohorts made up of students who are working in different labs about safety and how to think about safety where the rubber hits the road.” Actually bringing those discussions out of the research group, the research group meeting, might provide a space where people can become reflective about how things go in their own labs and can see something about how things are being done differently in other labs, and start piecing together strategies, start thinking about what they want the practices to be like when they’re the grown-up chemists running their own labs. How do they want to make safety something that’s part of the job, not an add on that’s being slapped on or something that’s being forgotten altogether.

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: But of course, graduate training programs would have to care enough about that to figure out how to put the resources on it, to make it happen.

Chemjobber: I’m in profound sympathy with the people who would have to figure out how to do that. I don’t really know anything about the structure of a graduate training program other than, you know, “Do good work, and try to graduate sooner rather than later.” But I assume that in the last 20 to 30 years, there have been new mandates like “OK, you all need to have some kind of ethics component” —

Janet: — because ethics coursework will keep people from cheating! Except that’s an oversimplified equation. But ethics is a requirement they’re heaping on, and safety could certainly be another. The question is how to do that sensibly rather than making it clear that we’re doing this only because there’s a mandate from someone else that we do it.

Chemjobber: One of the things that I’ve always thought about in terms of how to better inculcate safety in academic labs is maybe to have training that happens every year, that takes a week. New first-years come in and you get run through some sort of a lab safety thing where you go and you set up the experiment and weird things are going to happen. It’s kind of an artificial environment where you have to go in and run a dangerous reaction as a drill that reminds you that there are real-world consequences. I think Chembark talked about how, in Caltech Safety Day, they brought out one of the lasers and put a hole through an apple. Since Paul is an organic chemist, I don’t think he does that very often, but his response was “Oh, if I enter one of these laser labs, I should probably have my safety glasses on.” There’s a limit to the effectiveness of that sort of stuff. you have to really, really think about how to design it, and a week out of a year is a long time, and who’s going to run it? I think your idea of the older students in the lab being the ones who really do a lot of the day to day safety stuff is important. What happens when there are no older students in the lab?

Janet: That’s right, when you’re the first cohort in the PI’s lab.

Chemjobber: Or, when there hasn’t been much funding for students and suddenly now you have funding for students.

Janet: And there’s also the question of going from a sparsely populated lab to a really crowded lab when you have the funding but you don’t suddenly have more lab space. And crowded labs have different kinds of safety concerns than sparsely populated labs.

Chemjobber: That’s very true.

Janet: I also wonder whether the “grown-up” chemists, the postdocs and the PIs, ought to be involved in some sort of regular safety … I guess casting it as “training” is likely to get people’s hackles up, and they’re likely to say, “I have even less time for this than my students do.”

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: But at the same time, pretending that they learned everything they need to know about safety in grad school? Really? Really you did? When we’re talking now about how maybe the safety training for graduate students is inadequate, you magically got the training that tells you everything you need to know from here on out about safety? That seems weird. And also, presumably, the risks of certain kinds of procedures and certain kinds of reagents — that’s something about which our knowledge continues to increase as well. So, finding ways to keep up on that, to come up with safer techniques and better responses when things do go wrong — some kind of continuing education, continuing involvement with that. If there was a way to do it to include the PIs and the people they’re employing or training, to engage them together, maybe that would be effective.

Chemjobber: Hmm.

Janet: It would at least make it seem less like, “This is education we have to give our students, this is one more requirement to throw on the pile, but we wouldn’t do it if we had the choice, because it gets in the way of making knowledge.” Making knowledge is good. I think making knowledge is important, but we’re human beings making knowledge and we’d like to live long enough to appreciate that knowledge. Graduate students shouldn’t be consumable resources in the knowledge-building the same way that chemical reagents are.

Chemjobber: Yeah.

Janet: Because I bet you the disposal paperwork on graduate students is a fair bit more rigorous than for chemical waste.

Why does lab safety look different to chemists in academia and chemists in industry?

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Here’s another approximate transcript of the conversation I had with Chemjobber that became a podcast. In this segment (from about 19:30 to 29:30), we consider how reaction to the Sheri Sangji case sound different when they’re coming from academic chemists than when they’re coming from industry, and we spin some hypotheses about what might be going on behind those differences:

Chemjobber: I know that you wanted to talk about the response of industrial chemists versus academic chemists to the Sheri Sangji case.

Janet: This is one of the things that jumps out at me in the comment threads on your blog posts about the Sangji case. (Your commenters, by the way, are awesome. What a great community of commenters engaging with this stuff.) It really does seem that the commenters who are coming from industry are saying, “These conditions that we’re hearing about in the Harran lab (and maybe in academic labs in general) are not good conditions for producing knowledge as safely as we can.” And the academic commenters are saying, “Oh come on, it’s like this everywhere! Why are you going to hold this one guy responsible for something that could have happened to any of us?” It shines a light on something interesting about how academic labs building knowledge function really differently from industrial labs building knowledge.

Chemjobber: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s very difficult for me to separate out whether it’s culture or law or something else. Certainly I think there’s a culture aspect of it, which is that every large company and most small companies really try hard to have some sort of a safety culture. Whether or not they actually stick to it is a different story, but what I’ve seen is that the bigger the company, the more it really matters. Part of it, I think, is that people are older and a little bit wiser, they’re better at looking over each other’s shoulders and saying, “What are you doing over there?” and “So, you’re planning to do that? That doesn’t sound like a great idea.” It seems like there’s less of that in academia. And then there’s the regulatory aspect of it. Industrial chemists are workers, the companies they’re working for are employers, and there’s a clear legal aspect to that. Even as under-resourced as OSHA is, there is an actual legal structure prepared to deal with accidents. If the Sangji incident had happened at a very large company, most people think that heads would have rolled, letters would have been placed in evaluation files, and careers would be over.

Janet: Or at least the lab would probably have been shut down until a whole bunch of stuff was changed.

Chemjobber: But in academia, it looks like things are different.

Janet: I have some hunches that perhaps support some of your hunches here about where the differences are coming from. First of all, the set-up in academia assumes radical autonomy on the part of the PI about how to run his or her lab. Much of that is for the good as far as allowing different ways to tackle the creative problems about how to ask the scientific questions to better shake loose the piece of knowledge you’re trying to shake loose, or allowing a range of different work habits that might be successful for these people you’re training to be grown-up scientists in your scientific field. And along with that radical autonomy — your lab is your fiefdom — in a given academic chemistry department you’re also likely to have a wide array of chemical sub-fields that people are exploring. So, depending on the size of your department, you can’t necessarily count on there being more than a couple other PIs in the department who really understand your work well enough that they would have deep insight into whether what you’re doing is safe or really dangerous. It’s a different kind of resource that you have available right at hand — there’s maybe a different kind of peer pressure that you have in your immediate professional and work environment acting on the industrial chemist than on the academic chemist. I think that probably plays some role in how PIs in academia are maybe aren’t as up on potential safety risks of new work they’re doing as they might be otherwise. And then, of course, there’s the really different kinds of rewards people are working for in industry versus academia, and how the whole tenure race ends up asking more and more of people with the same 24 hours in the day as anyone else. So, people on the tenure track start asking, “What are the things I’m really rewarded for? Because obviously, if I’m going to succeed, that’s where I have to focus my attention.”

Chemjobber: It’s funny how the “T” word keeps coming up.

Janet: By the same token, in a university system that has consistently tried to male it easier to fire faculty at whim because they’re expensive, I sort of see the value of tenure. I’m not at all argue that tenure is something that academic chemists don’t need. But, it may be that the particulars of how we evaluate people for tenure are incentivizing behaviors that are not helping the safety of the people building the knowledge or the well-being of the people who are training to be grown-ups in these professional communities.

Chemjobber: That’s right. We should just say specifically that in this particular case, Patrick Harran already had tenure, and I believe he is still a chaired professor at UCLA.

Janet: I think maybe the thing to point out is that some of these expectations, some of these standard operating procedures within disciplines in academia, are heavily shaped by the things that are rewarded for tenure, and then for promotion to full professor, and then whatever else. So, even if you’re tenured, you’re still soaking in that same culture that is informing the people who are trying to get permission to stay there permanently rather than being thanked for their six years of service and shown the door. You’re still soaking in that culture that says, “Here’s what’s really important.” Because if something else was really important, then by golly that’s how we’d be choosing who gets to stay here for reals and who’s just passing through.

Chemjobber: Yes.

Janet: I don’t know as much about the typical life cycle of the employee in industrial chemistry, but my sense is that maybe the fact that grad students and postdocs and, to some extent, technicians are sort of transient in the community of academic chemistry might make a difference as well — that they’re seen as people who are passing through, and that the people who are more permanent fixtures in that world either forget that they come in not knowing all the stuff that the people who have been there for a long, long time know, or they’re sort of making a calculation, whether they realize it or not, about how important it is to convey some of this stuff they know to transients in their academic labs.

Chemjobber: Yeah, I think that’s true. Numerically, there’s certainly a lot less turnover in industry than there is in academic labs.

Janet: I would hope so!

Chemjobber: Especially from the bench-worker perspective. It’s unfortunate that layoffs happen (topic for another podcast!), but that seems to be the main source of turnover in industry these days.

Gender bias: ethical implications of an empirical finding.

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By now, you may have seen the recently published study by Ross-Macusin et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students”, or the nice discussion by Ilana Yurkiewicz of why these findings matter.

Briefly, the study involved having science faculty from research-focused universities rate materials from potential student candidates for a lab manager position. The researchers attached names to the application materials — some of them male names, some of them female names — at random, and examined how the ratings of the materials correlated with the names that were attached to them. What they found was that the same application materials got a higher ranking (i.e., a judgment that the applicant would be more qualified for the job) when the attached name was male than when it was female. Moreover, both male and female faculty ranked the same application more highly when attached to a male name.

It strikes me that there are some ethical implications that flow from this study to which scientists (among others) should attend:

  1. Confidence that your judgments are objective is not a guarantee that your judgments are objective, and your intent to be unbiased may not be enough. The results of this study show a pattern of difference in ratings for which the only plausible explanation is the presence of a male name or a female name for the applicant. The faculty members treated the task they were doing as an objective evaluation of candidates based on prior research experience, faculty recommendations, the applicant’s statement, GRE scores, and so forth — that they were sorting out the well-qualified from the less-well-qualified — but they didn’t do that sorting solely on the basis of the actual experience and qualifications described in the application materials. If they had, the rankings wouldn’t have displayed the gendered split they did. The faculty in the study undoubtedly did not mean to bring gender bias to the evaluative task, but the results show that they did, whether they intended to or not.
  2. If you want to build reliable knowledge about the world, it’s helpful to identify your biases so they don’t end up getting mistaken for objective findings. As I’ve mentioned before, objectivity is hard. One of the hardest things about being objective is that fact that so many of our biases are unconscious — we don’t realize that we have them. If you don’t realize that you have a bias, it’s much harder to keep that bias from creeping in to your knowledge-building, from the way you frame the question you’re exploring to how you interpret data and draw conclusions from them. The biases you know about are easier to keep on a short leash.
  3. If a methodologically sound study finds that science faculty have a particular kind of bias, and if you are science faculty, you probably should assume that you might also have that bias. If you happen to have good independent evidence that you do not display the particular bias in question, that’s great — one less unconscious bias that might be messing with your objectivity. However, in the absence of such good independent evidence, the safest assumption to make is that you’re vulnerable to the bias too — even if you don’t feel like you are.
  4. If you doubt the methodologically soundness of a study finding that science faculty have a particular kind of bias, it is your responsibility to identify the methodological flaws. Ideally, you’d also want to communicate with the authors of the study, and with other researchers in the field, about the flaws you’ve identified in the study methodology. This is how scientific communities work together to build a reliable body of knowledge we all can use. And, a responsible scientist doesn’t reject the conclusions of a study just because they don’t match one’s hunches about how things are. The evidence is how scientists know anything.
  5. If there’s reason to believe you have a particular kind of bias, there’s reason to examine what kinds of judgments of yours it might influence beyond the narrow scope of the experimental study. Could gender bias influence whose data in your lab you trust the most? Which researchers in your field you take most seriously? Which theories or discoveries are taken to be important, and which others are taken to be not-so-important? If so, you have to be honest with yourself and recognize the potential for this bias to interfere with your interaction with the phenomena, and with your interaction with other scientists to tackle scientific questions and build knowledge. If you’re committed to building reliable knowledge, you need to find ways to expose the operation of this bias, or to counteract its effects. (Also, to the extent that this bias might play a role in the distribution of rewards like jobs or grants in scientific careers, being honest with yourself probably means acknowledging that the scientific community does not operate as a perfect meritocracy.)

Each of these acknowledgments looks small on its own, but I will not pretend that that makes them easy. I trust that this won’t be a deal-breaker. Scientists do lots of hard things, and people committed to building reliable knowledge about the world should be ready to take on pieces of self-knowledge relevant to that knowledge-building. Even when they hurt.

Dueling narratives: what’s the job market like for scientists and is a Ph.D. worth it?

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At the very end of August, Slate posted an essay by Daniel Lametti taking up, yet again, what the value of a science Ph.D. is in a world where the pool of careers for science Ph.D.s in academia and industry is (maybe) shrinking. Lametti, who is finishing up a Ph.D. in neuroscience, expresses optimism that the outlook is not so bleak, reading the tea leaves of some of the available survey data to conclude that unemployment is not much of a problem for science Ph.D.s. Moreover, he points to the rewards of the learning that happens in a Ph.D. program as something that might be values in its own right rather than as a mere instrument to make a living later. (This latter argument will no doubt sound familiar.)

Of course, Chemjobber had to rain on the parade of this youthful optimism. (In the blogging biz, we call that “due diligence”.) Chemjobber critiques Lametti’s reading of the survey data (and points out some important limitations with those data), questions his assertion that a science Ph.D. is a sterling credential to get you into all manner of non-laboratory jobs, reiterates that the opportunity costs of spending years in a Ph.D. program are non-neglible, and reminds us that unemployed Ph.D. scientists do exist.

Beryl Benderly mounts similar challenges to Lametti’s take on the job market at the Science Careers blog.

You’ve seen this disagreement before. And, I reckon, you’re likely to see it again.

But this time, I feel like I’m starting to notice what may be driving these dueling narratives about how things are for science Ph.D.s. It’s not just an inability to pin down the facts about the job markets, or the employment trajectories of those science Ph.D.s. In the end, it’s not even a deep disagreement about what may be valuable in economic or non-economic ways about the training one receives in a science Ph.D. program.

Where one narrative focuses on the overall trends within STEM fields, the other focuses on individual experiences. And, it strikes me that part of what drives the dueling narratives is what feels like a tension between voicing an individual view it may be helpful to adopt for one’s own well-being and acknowledging the existence of systemic forces that tend to create unhelpful outcomes.

Of course, part of the problem in these discussions may be that we humans have a hard time generally reconciling overall trends with individual experiences. Even if it were a true fact that the employment outlook was very, very good for people in your field with Ph.D.s, if you have one of those Ph.D.s and you can’t find a job with it, the employment situation is not good for you. Similarly, if you’re a person who can find happiness (or at least satisfaction) in pretty much whatever situation you’re thrown into, a generally grim job market in your field may not big you very much.

But I think the narratives keep missing each other because of something other than not being able to reconcile the pooled labor data with our own anecdata. I think, at their core, the two narratives are trying to do different things.

* * *

I’ve written before about some of what I found valuable in my chemistry Ph.D. program, including the opportunity to learn how scientific knowledge is made by actually making some. That’s not to say that the experience is without its challenges, and it’s hard for me to imagine taking on those challenges without a burning curiosity, a drive to go deeper than sitting in a classroom and learning the science that others have built.

It can feel a bit like a calling — like what I imagine people learning how to be artists or musicians must feel. And, if you come to this calling in a time where you know the job prospects at the other end are anything but certain, you pretty much have to do the gut-check that I imagine artists and musicians do, too:

Am I brave enough to try this, even though I know there’s a non-negligible chance that I won’t be able to make a career out of it? Is it worth it to devote these years of toil and study, with long hours and low salary, to immersing myself in this world, even knowing I might not get to stay in it?

A couple quick caveats here: I suspect it’s much easier to play music or make art “on the side” after you get home from the job that pays for your food but doesn’t feed your soul than it is to do science on the side. (Maybe this points to the need for community science workspaces?) And, it’s by no means clear that those embarking on Ph.D. training in a scientific field are generally presented with realistic expectations about the job market for Ph.D.s in their field.

Despite the fact that my undergraduate professors talked up a supposed shortage of Ph.D. chemists (one that was not reflected in the labor statistics less than a year later), I somehow came to my own Ph.D. training with the attitude that it was an open question whether I’d be able to get a job as a chemist in academia or industry or a national lab. I knew I was going to leave my graduate program with a Ph.D., and I knew I was going to work.

The rent needed to be paid, and I was well acclimated to a diet that alternated between lentils and ramen noodles, so I didn’t see myself holding out for a dream job with a really high salary and luxe benefits. A career was something I wanted, but the more pressing need was a paycheck.

Verily, by the time I completed my chemistry Ph.D., this was a very pressing need. It’s true that students in a chemistry Ph.D. program are “paid to go to school,” but we weren’t paid much. I kept my head, and credit card balance, mostly above water by being a cyclist rather than a driver, saving money for registration, insurance, parking permits, and gas that my car-owning classmates had to pay. But it took two veterinary emergencies, one knee surgery, and ultimately the binding and microfilming fee I had to pay when I submitted the final version of my dissertation to completely wipe out my savings.

I was ready to teach remedial arithmetic at a local business college for $12 an hour (and significantly less than 40 hours a week) if it came to that. Ph.D. chemist or not, I needed to pay the bills.

Ultimately, I did line up a postdoctoral position, though I didn’t end up taking it because I had my epiphany about needing to become a philosopher. When I was hunting for postdocs, though, I knew that there was still no guarantee of a tenure track job, or a gig at a national lab, or a job in industry at the end of the postdoc. I knew plenty of postdocs who were still struggling to find a permanent job. Even before my philosophy epiphany, I was thinking through other jobs I was probably qualified to do that I wouldn’t hate — because I kind of assumed it would be hard, and that the economy wouldn’t feel like it owed me anything, and that I might be lucky, but I also might not be. Seeing lots of really good people have really bad luck on the job market can do that to a person.

My individual take on the situation had everything to do with keeping me from losing it. It’s healthy to be able to recognize that bad luck is not the same as the universe (or even your chosen professional community) rendering the judgment that you suck. It’s healthy to be able to weather the bad luck rather than be crushed by it.

But, it’s probably also healthy to recognize when there may be systemic forces making it a lot harder than it needs to be to join a professional community for the long haul.

* * *

Indeed, the discussion of the community-level issues in scientific fields is frequently much less optimistic than the individual-level pep-talks people give themselves or each other.

What can you say about a profession that asks people who want to join it to sink as much as a decade into graduate school, and maybe another decade into postdoctoral positions (jobs defined as not permanent) just to meet the training prerequisite for desirable permanent jobs that may not exist in sufficient numbers to accommodate all the people who sacrificed maybe two decades at relatively low salaries for their level of education, who likely had to uproot and change their geographical location at least once, and who succeeded at the research tasks they were asked to take on during that training? And what can you say about that profession when the people asked to embark on this gamble aren’t given anything like a realistic estimate of their likelihood of success?

Much of what people do say frames this as a problem of supply and demand. There are just too many qualified candidates for the available positions, at least from the point of view of the candidates. From the point of view of a hiring department or corporation, the excess of available workers may seem like less of a problem, driving wages downward and making it easier to sell job candidates on positions in “geographically unattractive” locations.

Things might get better for the job seeker with a Ph.D. if the supply of science Ph.D.s were adjusted downward, but this would disrupt another labor pool, graduate students working to generate data for PIs in their graduate labs. Given the “productivity” expectations on those PIs, imposed by institutions and granting agencies, reducing student throughput in Ph.D. programs is likely to make things harder for those lucky enough to have secured tenure track positions in the first place.

The narrative about the community-level issues takes on a different tone depending on who’s telling it, and with which end of the power gradient they identify. Do Ph.D. programs depend on presenting a misleading picture of job prospects and quality of life for Ph.D. holders to create the big pools of student labor on which they depend? Do PIs and administrators running training programs encourage the (mistaken) belief that the academic job market is a perfect meritocracy, and that each new Ph.D.’s failure will be seen as hers alone? Are graduate students themselves to blame for not considering the employment data before embarking on their Ph.D. programs? Are they being spoiled brats when they should recognize that their unemployment numbers are much, much lower than for the population as a whole, that most employed people have nothing like tenure to protect their jobs, and indeed that most people don’t have jobs that have anything to do with their passions?

So the wrangling continues over whether things are generally good or generally bad for Ph.D. scientists, over whether the right basis for evaluating this is the life Ph.D. programs promise when they recruit students (which maybe they are only promising to the very best — or the very lucky) or the life most people (including large numbers of people who never finished college, or high school) can expect, over whether this is a problem that ought to be addressed or simply how things are.

* * *

The narratives here feel like they’re in conflict because they’re meant to do different things.

The individual-level narrative is intended to buoy the spirits of the student facing adversity, to find some glimmers of victory that can’t be taken away even by a grim employment market. It treats the background conditions as fixed, or at least as something the individual cannot change; what she can control is her reaction to them.

It’s pretty much the Iliad, but with lab coats.

The community-level narrative instead strives for a more accurate accounting of what all the individual trajectories add up to, focusing not on who has experienced personal growth but on who is employed. Here too, there is a striking assumption that The Way Things Are is a stable feature of the system, not something individual action could change — or that individual members of the community should feel any responsibility for changing.

And this is where I think there’s a need for another narrative, one with the potential to move us beyond the disagreement and disgruntlement we see each time the other two collide.

Professional communities, after all, are made up of individuals. People, not the economy, make hiring decisions. Members of professional communities make decisions about how they’re going to treat each other, and in particular about how they will treat the most vulnerable members of their community.

Graduate students are not receiving a mere service or commodity from their Ph.D. programs (“Would you like to supersize that scientific education?”). They are entering a relationship resembling an apprenticeship with the members of the professional community they’re trying to join. Arguably, this relationship means that the professional community has some responsibility for the ongoing well-being of those new Ph.D.s.

Here, I don’t think this is a responsibility to infantilize new Ph.D.s, to cover them with bubble-wrap or to create for them a sparkly artificial economy full of rainbows and unicorns. But they probably have a duty to provide help when they can.

Maybe this help would come in the form of showing compassion, rather than claiming that the people who deserve to be scientists will survive the rigors of the job market and that those who don’t weren’t meant to be in science. Maybe it would come by examining one’s own involvement in a system that defines success too narrowly, or that treats Ph.D. students as a consumable resource, or that fails to help those students cultivate a broad enough set of skills to ensure that they can find some gainful employment. Maybe it would come from professional communities finding ways to include as real members people they have trained but who have not been able to find employment in that profession.

Individuals make the communities. The aggregate of the decisions the communities make create the economic conditions and the quality of life issues. Treating current conditions — including current ways of recruiting students or describing the careers and lives they ought to expect at the other end of their training — as fixed for all time it a way of ignoring how individuals and institutions are responsible for those conditions. And, it doesn’t do anything to help change them.

It’s useful to have discussions of how to navigate the waters of The Way Things Are. It’s also useful to try to get accurate data about the topology of those waters. But these discussions shouldn’t distract us from serious discussions of The Way Things Could Be — and of how scientific communities can get there from here.

Safety in academic chemistry labs (with some thoughts on incentives).

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Earlier this month, Chemjobber and I had a conversation that became a podcast. We covered lots of territory, from the Sheri Sangji case, to the different perspectives on lab safety in industry and academia, to broader questions about how to make attention to safety part of the culture of chemistry. Below is a transcript of a piece of that conversation (from about 07:45 to 19:25). I think there are some relevant connections here to my earlier post about strategies for delivering ethics training — a post which Jyllian Kemsley notes may have some lessons for safety-training, too.

Chemjobber: I think, academic-chemistry-wise, we might do better at looking out after premeds than we do at looking out after your typical first year graduate student in the lab.

Janet: Yeah, and I wonder why that is, actually, given the excess of premeds. Maybe that’s the wrong place to put our attention.* But maybe the assumption is that, you know, not everyone taking a chemistry lab course is necessarily going to come into the lab knowing everything they need to know to be safe. And that’s probably a safe assumption to make even about people who are good in chemistry classes. So, that’s one of those things that I think we could do a lot better at, just recognizing that there are hazards and that people who have never been in these situations before don’t necessarily know ho to handle them.

Chemjobber: Yeah, I agree. I don’t know what the best way is to make sure to inculcate that sort of lab safety stuff into graduate school. Because graduate school research is supposed to be kind of free-flowing and spontaneous — you have a project and you don’t really know where it’s going to lead you. On the other hand, a premed organic chemistry class is a really artificial environment where there is an obvious beginning and an obvious end and you stick the safety discussion right at the beginning. I remember doing this, where you pull out the MSDS that’s really scary sounding and you scare the pants off the students.

Janet: I don’t even think alarming them is necessarily the way to go, but just saying, hey, it matters how you do this, it matters where you do this, this is why it matters.

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: And I guess in research, you’re right, there is this very open-ended, free-flowing thing. You try to build knowledge that maybe doesn’t exist yet. You don’t know where it’s going to go. You don’t necessarily know what the best way to build that knowledge is going to be. I think where we fall short sometimes is that there may be an awful lot of knowledge out there somewhere, that if you take this approach, with these techniques or with these chemicals, here are some dangers that are known. Here are some risks that someone knows about. You may not know them yet, but maybe we need to do better in the conceiving-of-the-project stage at making that part of the search of prior literature. Not just, what do we know about this reaction mechanism, but what do we know about the gnarly reagents you need to be able to work with to pursue a similar kind of reaction.

Chemjobber: Yeah. My understanding is that in the UK, before you do every experiment, there’s supposed to be a formalized written risk analysis. UK listeners can comment on whether those actually happen. But it seems like they do, because, you know, when you see online conversation of it, it’s like, “What? You guys don’t do that in the US?” No, we don’t.

Janet: There’s lots of things we don’t do. We don’t have a national health service either.

Chemjobber: But how would you make the bench-level researcher do that risk analysis? How does the PI make the bench-level researcher do that? I don’t know. … Neal Langerman is a prominent chemical safety expert. Beryl Benderly is somebody who writes on the Sheri Sangji case who’s talked about this, which is that basically that we should fully and totally incentivize this by tying academic lab safety to grants and tenure. What do you think?

Janet: I think that the intuition is right that if there’s not some real consequence for not caring about safety, it’s going to be the case that some academic researchers, making a rational calculation about what they have to do and what they’re going to be rewarded on and what they’re going to be punished for, are going to say, this would be nice in a perfect world. But there really aren’t enough hours in the day, and I’ve got to churn out the data, and I’ve got to get it analyzed and get the manuscript submitted, especially because I think that other group that was working on something like this might be getting close, and lord knows we don’t want to get scooped — you know, if there’s no consequence for not doing it, if there’s no culture of doing it, if there’s no kind of repercussion among their peers and their professional community for not doing it, a large number of people are going to make the rational calculation that there’s no point in doing it.

Chemjobber: Yeah.

Janet: Maybe they’ll do it as a student exercise or something, but you know what, students are pretty clever, and they get to a point where they actually watch what the PI who is advising them does, and form something like a model of “this is what you need to do to be a successful PI”. And all the parts of what their PI does that are invisible to them? At least to a first approximation, those are not part of the model.

Chemjobber: Right. I’ve been on record as saying that I find tying lab safety to tenure especially to be really dangerous, because you’re giving an incredible incentive to hide incidents. I mean, “For everybody’s sake, sweep this under the rug!” is what might come of this. Obviously, if somebody dies, you can’t hide that.

Janet: Hard to hide unless you’ve got off-the-books grad students, which … why would you do that?

Chemjobber: Are you kidding? There’s a huge supply of them already! But, my concern with tying lab safety to tenure is that I have a difficult time seeing how you would make that a metric other than, if you’ve reported an accident, you will not get tenure, or, if you have more than two accidents a year, you will not get tenure. For the marginal cases, the incentive becomes very high to hide these accidents.

Janet: Here’s a way it might work, though — and I know this sort of goes against the grain, since tenure committees much prefer something they can count to things they have to think about, which is why the number of publications and the impact factor becomes way more important somehow than the quality or importance of the publications as judged by experts in the field. But, something like this might work: if you said, what we’re going to look at in evaluating safety and commitment to safety for your grants and tenure is whether you’ve developed a plan. We’re going to look at what you’ve done to talk with the people in your lab about the plan, and at what you’ve done to involve them in executing the plan. So we’re going to look at it as maybe a part of your teaching, a part of your mentoring — and here, I know some people are going to laugh, because mentoring is another one of those things that presumably is supposed to be happening in academic chemistry programs, but whether it’s seriously evaluated or not, other than by counting the number of students who you graduate per year, is … you know, maybe it’s not evaluated as rigorously as it might be. But, if it became a matter of “Show us the steps you’re taking to incorporate an awareness and a seriousness about safety into how you train these graduate students to be grown-up chemists,” that’s a different kind of thing from, “Oh, and did you have any accidents or not?” Because sometimes the accidents are because you haven’t paid attention at all to safety, but sometimes the accidents are really just bad luck.

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: And you know, maybe this isn’t going to happen every place, but at places like my university, in our tenure dossiers, they take seriously things like grant proposals we have written as part of our scholarly work, whether or not they get funded. You include them so the people evaluating your tenure dossier can evaluate the quality of your grant proposal, and you get some credit for that work even if it’s a bad pay-line year. So a safety plan and evidence of its implementation you might get credit for even if it’s been a bad year as far as accidents.

Chemjobber: I think that’s fair. You know, I think that everybody hopes that with a high-stakes thing like tenure, there’s lots of “human factor” and relatively little number-crunching.

Janet: Yeah, but you know, then you’re on the committee that has to evaluate a large number of dossiers. Human nature kicks in and counting is easier than evaluating, isn’t it?

______
* Let the record reflect that despite our joking about “excesses” of premeds, neither I nor Chemjobber have it in for premeds. Especially so now that neither of us is TAing a premed course.

Science, priorities, and the challenges of sharing a world.

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For scientists, doing science is often about trying to satisfy deep curiosity about how various bits of our world work. For society at large, it often seems like science ought to exist primarily to solve particular pressing problems — or at least, that this is what science ought to be doing, given that our tax dollars are going to support it. It’s not a completely crazy idea. Even if tax dollars weren’t funding lots of scientific research and the education of scientists (even at private universities), the public might expect scientists to focus their attention on pressing problems, simply because scientists have the expertise to solve these problems and other members of society don’t.

This makes it harder to get the public to care about funding science for which the pay-off is not obviously useful, especially “basic research”. You want to understand the structure of subatomic particles, or the fundamental forces at work in our universe? That’s great, but how is it going to help us live longer, or help us build more fuel-efficient vehicles, or bring smaller iPods to market? Most members of the public don’t even know what a quark is, let alone care about whether you can detect a particular kind of quark experimentally. Satisfying our curiosity about the details on the surface of Mars can strike folks not gripped by that particular curiosity as a distraction from important questions that science could be answering instead.

A typical response is to note that basic research has in the past led to unanticipated practical applications. Of course, this isn’t a way to get the public to see the intrinsic value of basic research — it merely asks them to value such research instrumentally, as sort of a mystery box that is bound to contain some payoff which we cannot describe in advance but which promises to be awesome.

Some years ago Rick Weiss made an argument like this in the Washington Post in defense of space research. For example, space exploration. Weiss expressed concern that “Americans have lost sight of the value of non-applied, curiosity-driven research — the open-ended sort of exploration that doesn’t know exactly where it’s going but so often leads to big payoffs,” then went through an impressive list of scientific projects that started off without any practical applications but ended up making possible all manner of useful applications. Limit basic science, the argument went, and you’re risking economic growth.

But Weiss was careful not to say the only value in scientific research is in marketable products. Rather, he offered an even more important reason for the public to support research:

Because our understanding of the world and our support of the quest for knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a core measure of our success as a civilization. Our grasp, however tentative, of what we are and where we fit in the cosmos should be a source of pride to all of us. Our scientific achievements are a measure of ourselves that our children can honor and build upon.

I find that a pretty inspiring description of science’s value, but it’s not clear that most members of the public would be similarly misty-eyed.

Scientists may already feel that they have to become the masters of spin to get even their practical research projects funded. Will the scientists also have to take on the task of convincing the public at large that a scientific understanding of ourselves and of the world we live in should be a source of pride? Will a certain percentage of the scientist’s working budget have to go to public relations? (“Knowledge: It’s not just for dilettantes anymore!”) Maybe the message that knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a fitting goal for a civilized society is the kind of thing that people would just get as part of their education. Only it’s not on the standardized tests, and it seems like that’s the only place the public wants to put up money for education any more. Sometimes not even then.

The problem here is that scientists value something that the public at large seems not to value. The scientists think the public ought to value it, but they don’t have the power to impose their will on the public in this regard any more than the public can demand that scientists stop caring about weird things like quarks. Meanwhile, the public supports science, at least to the extent that science can deliver practical results in a timely fashion. There would probably be tension in this relationship even if scientists weren’t looking to the public for funding.

Of course, when scientists do tackle real-life problems and develop real-life solutions, it’s not like the public is always so good about accepting them. Consider the mixed public reception of the vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV). The various strains of HPV are the leading cause of cervical cancer, and are not totally benign for men, causing genital warts and penile cancers. You would think that developing a reasonably safe and effective vaccine against a virus like HPV is exactly the sort of scientific accomplishment the public might value — except that religious groups in the US voiced opposition to the HPV vaccine on the grounds that it might give young women license to engage in premarital sex rather than practicing abstinence.

(The scientist scratches her head.) Let me get this straight: Y’all want to cut funding for the basic science because you don’t think it will lead to practical applications. But when we do the research to solve what seems like a real problem — people are dying from cervical cancer — y’all tell us this is a problem you didn’t really want us to solve?

Here, to be fair, it’s not everyone who wants to opt out of the science, just a part of the population with a fair bit of political clout at particular moments in history. The central issue seems to be that our society is made up of a bunch of people (including scientists) with rather different values, which lead to rather different priorities. In thinking about where scientific funding comes from, we talk as though there were a unitary Public with whom the unitary Science transacts business. It might be easier were that really the case. Instead, the scientists get to deal with the writhing mass of contradictory impulses that is the American public. About the only thing that public knows for sure is that it doesn’t want to pay more taxes.

How can scientists direct their efforts at satisfying public wants, or addressing public needs, if the public itself can’t come to any robust agreement on what those wants and needs are? If science has to prove to the public that the research dollars are going to the good stuff, will scientists have to stretch things a little in the telling?

Or might it actually be better if the public (or the politicians acting in the public’s name) spent less time trying to micro-manage scientists as they set the direction of their research? Maybe it would make sense, if the public decided that having scientists in society was a good thing for society, to let the scientists have some freedom to pursue their own scientific interests, and to make sure they have the funding to do so.

I’m not denying that the public has a right to decide where its money goes, but I don’t think putting up the money means you get total control. Because if you demand that much control, you may end up having to do the science yourself. Also, once science delivers the knowledge, it seems like the next step is to make that knowledge available. If particular members of the public decide not to avail themselves of that knowledge (because they feel it would be morally wrong, or maybe just silly, as in the case of pet cloning), that is their decision. We shouldn’t be making life harder for the scientists for doing what good scientists do.

It’s clear that there are forces at work in American culture right now that are not altogether comfortable with all that science has to offer at the moment. Discomfort is a normal part of sharing society with others who don’t think just like you do. But hardly anyone thinks it would be a good idea to ship all the scientists off to someplace else. We like our tablet computers and our smartphones and our headache medicines and our DSL and our Splenda too much for that.

Perhaps, for a few moments, we should give the hard-working men and women of science a break and thank them for the knowledge they produce, whether we know what to do with it or not. Then, we can return to telling them about the pieces of our world we’d like more help navigating, and see whether they have any help to offer yet.

Getting scientists to take ethics seriously: strategies that are probably doomed to failure.

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As part of my day-job as a philosophy professor, I regularly teach a semester-long “Ethics in Science” course at my university. Among other things, the course is intended to help science majors figure out why being ethical might matter to them if they continue on their path to becoming working scientists and devote their careers to the knowledge-building biz.

And, there’s a reasonable chance that my “Ethics in Science” course wouldn’t exist but for strings attached to training grants from federal funding agencies requiring that students funded by these training grants receive ethics training.

The funding agencies demand the ethics training component largely in response to high profile cases of federally funded scientists behaving badly on the public’s dime. The bad behavior suggests some number of working scientists who don’t take ethics seriously. The funders identify this as a problem and want the scientists who receive grants from them to take ethics seriously. But the big question is how to get scientists to take ethics seriously.

Here are some approaches to that problem that strike me as unpromising:

  • Delivering ethical instruction that amounts to “don’t be evil” or “don’t commit this obviously wrong act”. Most scientists are not mustache-twirling villains, and few are so ignorant that they wouldn’t know that the obviously wrong acts are obviously wrong. If ethical training is delivered with the subtext of “you’re evil” or “you’re dumb,” most of the scientists to whom you’re delivering it will tune it out, since you’re clearly talking to someone else.
  • Reducing ethics to a laundry list of “thou shalt not …” Ethics is not simply a matter of avoiding bad acts — and the bad acts are not bad simply because federal regulations or your compliance officer say they are bad. There is a significant component of ethics concerned with positive action — doing good things. Presenting ethics as results instead of a process — as a set of things the ethics algorithm says you shouldn’t do, rather than a set of strategies for evaluating the goodness of various courses of action you might pursue — is not very engaging. Besides, you can’t even count on this approach for good results, since refraining from particular actions that are expressly forbidden is no guarantee you won’t find some not-expressly-forbidden action that’s equally bad.
  • Presenting ethics as something you have to talk about because the funders require that you talk about it. If you treat the ethics-talk as just a string attached to your grant money, but something with which you wouldn’t waste your time otherwise, you’re identifying attention to ethics as a thing that gets in the way of research rather as something that supports research. Once you’ve fulfilled the requirement to have the ethics-talk, would you ever revisit ethics, or would you just get down to the business of research?
  • Segregating attention to ethics in a workshop, class, or training session. Is ethics something the entirety of which you can “do” in a few hours, or even a whole semester? That’s the impression scientific trainees can get from an ethics training requirement that floats unconnected from any discussion with the people training them about how to be a successful scientist. Once you’re done with your training, then, you’re done — why think about ethics again?
  • Pointing trainees to a professional code, the existence of which proves that your scientific discipline takes ethics seriously. The existence of a professional code suggests that someone in your discipline sat down and tried to spell out ethical standards that would support your scientific activities, but the mere existence of a code doesn’t mean the members of your scientific community even know what’s in that code, nor that they behave in ways that reflect the commitments put forward by it. Walking the walk is different from talking the talk — and knowing that there is a code, somewhere on your professional society’s website, that you could find if you Googled it probably doesn’t even rise to the level of talking the talk.
  • Delivering ethical training with the accompanying message that scientists who aren’t willing to cut ethical corners are at a competitive career disadvantage, and that this is just how things are. Essentially, this creates a situation where you tell trainees, “Here’s how you should behave … unless you’re really up against it, at which point you should be smart and drop the ethics to survive in this field.” And, what motivated trainee doesn’t recognize that she’s always up against it? It is important, I think, to recognize that unethical behavior is often motivated at least in part by a perception of extreme career pressures rather than by the inherent evil of the scientist engaging in that behavior. But noting the competitive advantage available for cheaters only to throw up your hands and say, “Eh, what are you going to do?” strikes me as a shrugging off of responsibility. At a minimum, members of a scientific community ought to reflect upon and discuss whether the structures of career rewards and career punishments incentivize bad behavior. If they do, members of the community probably have a responsibility to try to change those structures of career rewards and career punishments.

Laying out approaches to ethics training that won’t help scientists take ethics seriously might help a trainer avoid some pitfalls, but it’s not the same as spelling out approaches that are more likely to work. That’s a topic I’ll take up in a post to come.

Wikipedia, the DSM, and Beavis.

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There are some nights that Wikipedia raises more questions for me than it answers.

The other evening, reminiscing about some of the background noise of my life (viz. “Beavis and Butt-head”) when I was in graduate school, I happened to look up Cornholio. After I got over my amusement that its first six letters were enough to put my desired search target second on the list of Wikipedia’s suggestions for what I might be looking for (right between cornhole and Cornholme, I read the entry and got something of a jolt at its diagnostic tone:

After consuming large amounts of sugar and/or caffeine, Beavis sometimes undergoes a radical personality change, or psychotic break. In one episode, “Holy Cornholio”, the transformation occurred after chewing and swallowing many pain killer pills. He will raise his forearms in a 90-degree angle next to his chest, pull his shirt over his head, and then begin to yell or scream erratically, producing a stream of gibberish and strange noises, his eyes wide. This is an alter-ego named ‘Cornholio,’ a normally dormant persona. Cornholio tends to wander aimlessly while reciting “I am the Great Cornholio! I need TP for my bunghole!” in an odd faux-Spanish accent. Sometimes Beavis will momentarily talk normally before resuming the persona of Cornholio. Once his Cornholio episode is over, Beavis usually has no memory of what happened.

Regular viewers of “Beavis and Butt-head” probably suspected that Beavis had problems, but I’m not sure we knew that he had a diagnosable problem. For that matter, I’m not sure we would have classified moments of Cornholio as falling outside the broad umbrella of Things Beavis Does to Make Things Difficult for Teachers.

But, the Wikipedia editors seem to have taken a shine to the DSM (or other relevant literature on psychiatric conditions), and to have confidence that the behavior Beavis displays here is properly classified as a psychotic break.

Here, given my familiarity with the details of the DSM (hardly any), I find myself asking some questions:

  • Was the show written with the intention that the Beavis-to-Cornholio transformation be seen as a psychotic break?
  • Is it possible to give a meaningful psychiatric diagnosis of a cartoon character?
  • Does a cartoon character need a substantial inner life of some sort for a psychiatric diagnosis of that cartoon character to make any sense?
  • If psychiatric diagnoses are based wholly on outward behavioral manifestations rather than on the inner stuff that might be driving that behavior (as may be the case if it’s really possible to apply diagnostic criteria to Beavis), is this a good reason for us to be cautious about the potential value of these definitions and diagnostic criteria?
  • Is there a psychology or psychiatry classroom somewhere that is using clips of the Beavis-to-Cornholio transformation in order to teach students what a psychotic break is?

I’m definitely uncomfortable that this fictional character has a psychiatric classification thrust upon him so easily — though at least, as a fictional character, he doesn’t have to deal with any actual stigma associated with such a psychiatric classification. And, I think perhaps my unease points to a worry I have (and that Katherine Sharpe also voices in her book Coming of Age on Zoloft) about the project of assembling checklists of easy-to-assess symptoms that seem detached from the harder-to-assess conditions in someone’s head, or in his environment, that are involved in causing the symptoms in the first place.

Possibly Wikipedia’s take on Beavis is simply an indication that the relevant Wikipedia editors like the DSM a lot more than I do (or that they intended their psychiatric framing of Beavis ironically — and if so, well played, editors!). But possibly it reflects a larger society that is much more willing than I am to put behaviors into boxes, regardless of the details (or even existence) of the inner life that accompanies that behavior.

I would welcome the opinions and insight of psychiatrists, psychologist, and others who run with that crowd on this matter.