Post Ignite Talk

As I mentioned somewhere down below, I was selected to give an Ignite talk about informational processing in biological systems. The talk happened tonight with an audience of about 500 people, and I completely deviated from my prepared notes and winged it very successfully (the drawing together of informational threads when I improvised was better than my notes). I even convinced my brother and sister to do an interpretive dance while I talked to illustrate the transmission of information from DNA to RNA to protein, even though one of them got dropped by the other in the middle of their big 2-person cartwheel (they made up their routine).

After the presentation, a bunch of people whose names I no longer remember shook my hand and told me that I'd given a great talk that was very interesting and many people shared their stories with me of how molecular biology has randomly affected their own lives. There were also a lot of people who knew about the Central Dogma, but had always viewed it as something to be memorized and had never considered biochemical pathways to be a form of useful, active information. Nonetheless, what people very specifically pointed out about my talk were my slides. I painted about half my slides by hand with soluble ink and watercolor. Here are many of them:

Translation.


Protein Folding.


Sonic hedgehog. It helps you tell your head from your ass.


Sonic Hedgehog talking to his buddies Smoothened and Patched.


Concentration gradient of Sonic Hedgehog helps Embryonic Pony determine anterior-posterior patterning.


Transcription. I chose to leave out semi-conservative replication to keep my talk focused.


Proteins have distinct functional motifs, like this one's tongue.

Other presentations ranged from mastodon hunting technology to home funerals to spaghetti bolognese and were overall quite excellent. A program of the evening can be found here, and I will post video of the event once my brother returns my camera. I would certainly do one of these again, and have even submitted a proposal to give a TEDxUM talk in April. I'm thinking Immunology in 15min.

Science Isn't a Job

I am not suited to have a job.

Notwithstanding my circadian malfeasance, I can't just have a job. A job is something you go to for 8h a day and detach yourself from coming home, something that pays the bills and fits in a big chunk of your daily routine. Something that weekends are an escape from.

Science isn't just a job. Science isn't just a career. Doing science is a mode of being, a way of thinking and a pervasive outlook that permeates all aspects of life. To be sure, there are people doing science to whom science is nothing more than a job, but to the scientists, doing science is a passionate outpouring of their innate internal curiosity and excitement at the sheer wonder and awesomeness of the reality around them.

As I said, I can't just have a job, I need the storm and flow of science's complex funneling of my creativity, cleverness, and joie de vivre. Even as I define the parameters of my experiments, science, in many ways, defines me. My education in science has sharpened my inquisitive and skeptical predispositions to become useful tools and not just the occupation of idle daydreams. This utility of my innate urge to create new stuff, to explore and discover are why science isn't just a job for me, it's awesome.

There are times that I get frustrated with my benchwork. Recently I had a long series of experiments not work properly for a couple months, and tearing through my methodology to try to find where I'd gone wrong, trying to plot out possible sources of error and chafing at the bit as each of these experiments took several days to validate was draining and discouraging. There are times that the poor quality of my data, such as getting a higher event count from bleach than my sample on the flow cytometer, makes me question my scientific aptitude in the first place. How could I ever expect to succeed in this experimental endeavor when I wasn't smart enough to begin with?

But it is this that is also valuable. Science forces us to question ourselves. We wrap up our self-esteem in our experimental results and we take rebukes from reviewers personally. We chase windmills of perfect data and push the capabilities of our minds ever further seeking to integrate our data into a new story the world has never seen before. This is important. By being both scientists and science, by loving what we do and the delightful but exhausting challenges it confronts us with, we are pushed not only to improve the quality, scope and ambition of our experiments themselves, but also to become better, savvier scientists and humans as well.

As a science, biology is weird. It's messy, it's frequently stubborn, it's complex and chaotic and these are what attracted me to studying it. And then into more complexity I realized how awesome immunology is. But it's not so much the complexity itself that draws me back into the lab, it's that with molecular biology I am literally peeling back levels of reality with my mind through the careful design of experiments with cells and reagents that I cannot see, feel, or taste. It could not be cooler, unless I had more lasers, but I digress:

Science ain't a job so much as it is riding an angry horse through a buffet of cookies and ice cream.

Waffle, Groffle, Air Guitar!

When our experiment isn't working quite right or our data is running right at a p-value of 0.05001, we get frustrated and angry. This is only natural, because we are human scientists and that's how we roll. The data being bastardy isn't always your fault, sometimes it's the fault of your tools, your undergraduate minions, or even the organisms/molecules in question. We've all been there. Some have been there for a long time and have reached the breaking point of despair where, in their deepest heart of hearts they want nothing more than to dump all their notes in a large pile and light it all on fire whilst dancing about it, singing happily in tongues.

But what can we mere mortals do to break out of this rut?

Some prefer to rail at the PCR Gods and Cloning Faeries. Some prefer to vandalize their advisor's personal property. Some prefer to stick everything in the freezer and leave it until later when they maybe feel like trying again. But none of these are guaranteed. In fact, the only sure-fire way to give your experiments that little extra puff of wonder, whimsy, and badassness that they need to succeed is to INVOKE THE ELDER SCIENTISTS' SPIRITS*.

How does one do such a thing?

Why, with a dance, of course!

Figure A: How to summon the Elder Scientists' Spirits.

There are 3 simple steps to this dance, as illustrated clearly above:

1) Waffle.
2) Groffle.
3) Air Guitar.

In the Waffle step you throw your jazz hands into the air, lift one leg, and then hop from one foot to the other whilst continuing jazzy hands. In the Groffle step you do a modified version of The Sprinkler, but you have to be on the verge of tearing out your hair with your left hand and very violently swing your right arm about while moving the right leg up and down to make sure it's not too easy to balance. And finally, in the Air Guitar step the spirits start to gather (see gathering gloom in illustration above) as you wail away at your imaginary axe. It helps to make guitar sounds and run around on top of your bench the stage, gyrating furiously and windmilling. In case you need help envisioning, planning, and/or executing the last step, Toaster's got your back with some inspiration:





I hope this helps you in your Quest For Science.

*h/t Arikia Millikan's wit.

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This post brought to you by the generosity of the generous people who have donated to the Silence Is the Enemy fund for Doctors Without Borders.