All of this change and adaptation makes this a very frightening time to be a scientist. No, perhaps frightening isn’t the right word. Perhaps exciting is more appropriate. This past year of I have had the privilege to see some of the most promising young scientists accomplish some herculean tasks.

Ethan Perlstein Builds a Meth Lab for Mice

Take, for example Ethan Perlstein, (pictured at left in an image he says was inspired by the TV series, Breaking Bad) formerly a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University. Ethan recently came to a crossroads. His five-year fellowship at Princeton was expiring and, despite all of his qualifications, he found himself unable to secure a position at an academic institution. Not wanting to give up on his career in research, Ethan turned to some creative solutions to accomplish his goals.

Most notably, Ethan utilized a relatively new revenue stream, crowdfunding, to finance a project to identify areas of methamphetamine accumulation in the brain. Ethan launched his campaign on the crowdfunding platform Rockethub and raised $25,460 by the time his campaign ended on November 26, 2012. Ethan and his colleagues have already begun work on the execution of the project, buying materials and reagents and meeting online with backers to discuss the approach. Despite being one of the first scientists to draw national attention to this unique funding method, Ethan is not alone in his crowdfunding success, nor is he the most fruitful.

Supporters Give $,  Bio Samples and Personal Data

Another success story in crowdfunding is that of uBiome, a project to identify and study the microbiomes (the bacteria that live on your skin and in your gut, among other places) belonging to the backers of the project. This campaign raised an impressive three and a half times the goal of $100,000, coming in with a total of $351,193. In addition to raising the requisite funding for this project, the scientists will also be provided with a very large and varied sample population to study. In exchange for an $80+ donation and a fecal sample, backers of this project will be rewarded with the knowledge and data related to the microbes that live inside of them.

This is a very interesting proposition for people, like me, suffering from gastrointestinal issues, as we stand to learn a lot about our conditions from the results of this study. By crowdfunding this project, uBiome has opened itself up to the general public, allowing anyone with a little extra change and some spare time to learn a little more about themselves, biology, and the scientific process.

Creative solutions such as crowdfunding have a lot of exciting ramifications in the academic world. Instead of depending entirely on funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes Medical Institute to fund their projects, scientists can now augment, or in some cases even replace, these hyper-competitive revenue streams with money that they can generate themselves.

This may eventually free scientists from the creative constraints often imposed by funding agencies and allow them to reach further and undertake projects once deemed “too risky.” Additionally, this has the added benefit of involving the public in the world of science, a world that can often seem distant and elitist to the average person. Every citizen pays for science when they pay their taxes, but crowdfunding is unique in that it lets them see the fruits of their investment.

Open Science Gets More Open

Many crowdfunded science projects, such as Crowdsourcing, Discovery and uBiome are very open in their methods, often meeting with backers online to discuss progress and results. All this openness and involvement leads to a better educated, more engaged public; perhaps a public that will be more willing to support science both with their wallet and with their ballot.

We are entering an era where being able to communicate and share your work will be nearly as valuable as the work itself. The most successful scientists will be those that write and speak most effectively, for they will have much more freedom in their choices of projects and funding sources and will be not be limited by conventional fundraising models. The rest will simply die off, being unable to fund their projects with the increasingly scarce and increasingly competitive funding models that currently support the scientific establishment. This is science’s own evolution by societal selection, an academic survival of the fittest. Personally, I am excited to see the innovation that can be supported by this new era and I look forward to taking part in this thrilling shift.

Tyler Shimko is an undergraduate studying biology and conducting research at the University of Utah. He is an advocate for open access and recently started a student group to promote open research on campus. You can follow him on Twitter @TylerShimko.

After a close family friend died from pancreatic cancer, I turned to the Internet to help me understand more about this disease that had killed him so quickly. I was 14 and didn’t even know I had a pancreas but I soon educated myself about what it was and started learning about how it was diagnosed. I was shocked to discover that the current way of detecting pancreatic cancer was older than my dad and wasn’t very sensitive or accurate. I figured there had to be a better way!

I soon learned that many of the papers I was interested in reading were hidden behind expensive pay walls. I convinced my mom to use her credit card for a few but was discouraged when some of them turned out to be expensive but not useful to me. She became much less willing to pay when she found some in the recycle bin! One of the best journal articles was called Carbon Nanotubes: the route towards applications.

This was the [paywall to the] article I smuggled into biology class the day my teacher was explaining antibodies and how they worked. I was not able to access very many more articles directly. I was 14 and didn’t drive and it seemed impossible to go to a University and request access to journals.

Some adults have told me I should have done that but, as a 14 year old, it was intimidating. It was also hard to get my parents to drive me to a University library since they didn’t really believe in my project and were trying to convince me to change projects! So there are a lot of barriers for kids to learn more and educate themselves. Open access would help people like me who may not drive or have access to a University library.

Luckily I was able to convince my mom to finance some more articles I needed and I learned to try different ways of circumventing the pay walls. I emailed one author with some questions though and he was able to provide me with a copy. Writing authors directly is a good way to get articles without paying but I didn’t figure this out right away.

I was persistent enough to be able to get access or at least the abstracts to enough journals to help me write my proposal which I then used the Internet to find and email over 200 local professors who were working on pancreatic cancer. Of course, most didn’t take me seriously or were too busy or just not interested in helping but I finally did get into a lab. Of course when I did get into a lab, then the University had access to so many articles because they subscribed to them. However, even universities are feeling that the subscriptions are expensive.

I was on a panel with Luis A. Ubiñas , head of the Ford Foundation, and heard him describe how running times at the Olympics plummeted after African countries started participating. I was thinking that if kids around the world could get connected to the internet and journals and each other, that even more creativity would be harnessed to solve the world’s problems.

Open access would be an important first step. I would love to see research that is publicly funded by taxes to be publicly available through neighborhood libraries and public school libraries.

 It would make it so much easier for people like me to find the information they need.  If I can create a sensor to detect cancer using the Internet, imagine what you can do.

At 15, Jack Andraka of Crownsville, MD won $75,000 in scholarship funds at the 2012 Intel Science Fair for his invention of an early ‘dip stick’  test for pancreatic cancer. Now 16 and a high school sophomore, Jack continues his research activities while serving as an advocate for STEM education and Open Access to scientific research.

Follow Jack on Twitter  @jackandraka

flickr photo by inskora

My wife and I are in attendance at a lonely Suffolk pub for our annual Christmas get together with both sets of parents. Conversation focuses on the back problems of middle age, the latest tale of woe about my very elderly grandma and the lives of my old school friends who never left to go to university.

I look sceptical. “Crystals?” I say, raising an eyebrow.

A few tables away a well-dressed lady and a man in wellington boots grasping a pint are stroking a dog lying by the bar.

Mum fixes me with one of her looks. “Josh, what you don’t know is, the guy could roll the crystals around on her back and tell immediately where her back hurt without even asking”.

I’m loosing it, but so as not to cause a scene in front of all the middle class people, I mutter something under my breath about what sort of person honestly believes in magical crystals.

***

For Massimo Pigliucci it was a newspaper that finally did it.

Massimo Pigliucci, Chair of the Dept of Philosophy at CUNY Lehman College

“I couldn’t believe it, I opened the newspaper, and I just said ‘what the hell is this?’” he tells me. The Tennessee legislature was trying to give creationism equal weighting with science in public schools. At the time (this was the mid-90’s) Pigliucci was an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, so the development hit a nerve.

“Then it slowly came to me,” he says, “I’m in the middle of the Bible belt, first of all. Secondly, Knoxville is only 40 km away from Dayton, Tennessee which is where the Scopes trial took place in 1925. So the local people were immersed in these kinds of things.”

“Myself and some colleagues reacted, we wrote to legislators and all that, and eventually the law went nowhere,” explains Pigliucii. “But it really raised my awareness. I thought to myself: ‘Hey, we’re in the middle of this thing, so we’d better do something more pre-emptive.’”

In the end Pigliucci had what he calls a “mid-life crisis” and decided to switch careers to philosophy of science. “Some people buy a red sports car – I became a philosopher,” he says. That was in the early 2000’s, and a few years ago Pigliucci got a full time position at City University, New York. There, he spends his days writing, the keyboard alternating between his professional papers and his popular blog, Rationally Speaking.

***

The week after Christmas I’m back in Bristol where I sit down in my flat and call Pigliucci. He’s editing a forthcoming book on the philosophy of pseudoscience, and I had wanted to talk to him about that. But, remembering those magic crystals, I somehow end up having a much more personal conversation.

“You’re a philosopher of science,” I say, “and you communicate with the public. Any advice on my mum and her empathy for crystal-based back therapies?”

“My suggestion is not to go for the straightforward rationalistic argument,” says Pigliucci. That often just doesn’t work with true believers. “It’s more of the occasional comment, and asking people to explain to you how they think things work.”

I say I’m not sure if I would describe my mum as a true believer. For her, the issue is that these alternative therapies seem to give results, rather than that she actually ‘believes’ in them. She accepts that they are probably placebos (although she might not use that word), but has that post-modernist attitude of ‘that’s OK, if it works for you.’

I put this problem to Pigliucii (and begin to feel like perhaps I’m taking the whole thing a bit too far).

“That argument can be approached a little more directly,” he says, “because you can turn those things into an interesting conversation about the value of anecdotal evidence, as opposed to standardised clinical trials.”

On reflection, it seems like the advice I’ve been given is basically: ‘do public engagement with science.’ Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected anything else. Pigliucci says this is exactly what he’s is trying to do with his blog and podcasts. As well as broadcasting, he says he listens and responds to comments, and directs people to things they might find interesting.

So in future I’ll be having more conversations with my mum about evidence. Thanks for the advice, Pigliucci.

—

Notes

Just in case you think I’m a monster who writes mean things about his mum for kicks – I ran this past her before publishing, and she agreed not to disown me.

I first got interested in Pigliucci’s blog because of a book he’s edited called ‘The Philosophy of Pseudoscience.’ That will be coming out later this year, and when it does I’ll be covering one particularly interesting chapter on this blog.

—

Josh Howgego spent the last four years peering into round bottomed flasks, working on a chemistry PhD. Now he has turned his hand to writing about science, and is currently studying science communication at Imperial College London. Follow on Twitter: @jdhowgego

So traditional PhD projects – where a student is assigned a supervisor in a specific subject, and then basically just gets on with their research for three years, emerging as an expert on the other side – are beginning to disappear in the UK. In their place a new way of training PhD students is emerging: the Centre for Doctoral Training (or CDT) [1].

There are several differences between a CDT and a traditional project studentship PhD. For one thing, CDT students generally spend their first year doing ‘research broadening sabaticals’ in several different labs, rather than jumping straight into one project. This means the PhD lasts four years instead of the traditional three and that the students, in theory, have a broader knowledge of their subject. They also receive specially tailored training in ‘transferable skills’, and generally “more attention from academics” (as we’ll hear in a moment).

Unfortunately, all this comes at a price. Each CDT student accounts for about 60% more cash per year than an equivalent project studentship. Perhaps because of this, CDTs polarise academic opinion. One told me that the ”soft skills” the candidates would develop were “an appalling waste of young scientists’ talent and an utter waste of tax revenue”. Other academics remain in favour of CDTs, arguing that multidisciplinary scientists are an absolute prerequisite for the kind of complex science that goes on in the 21st century.

So who is right – are CDTs the way forward, or a dangerous detour? I co-authored this article on the subject, where I noted down some of the complicated issues surrounding this debate. But I felt like the voice of the students was missing; one criticism of the CDTs is that they create a two-tier atmosphere, where the remaining project studentship guys are left feeling like second class citizens in the presence of their trained-up, super charged CDT peers. But is that actually true – do the students really feel like that? I decided it would be a good idea to ask them. So - equipped with bad coffee from the library canteen – I sat down to have a chat with Tom, Jazz and Freddie, three students from Imperial College London’s Department of Materials. Allow me to introduce them:

One thing I uncovered in my research into this topic were fears that tensions would develop between CDT students and project studentship students. With all that extra money and special training being bestowed on those in the CDT, would ‘outsiders’ feel a bit jealous?  Here’s another extract from our conversation:

So maybe there is a little inter-PhD course tension! But of course each CDT is different. I had already spoken to Adrian Sutton, the founder of the CDT that Tom and Jazz are part of, and he told me it was very much his mission to have the benefits that the CDT brought to his department “spill over” into the rest of the school’s research too. An independent mid-term review [2] of the EPSRC’s CDTs seemed to agree that this could happen, saying that CDTs could ‘act as a nucleation site[s] to focus a range of research and training activities.’ But this has to be driven by the management team, it doesn’t just happen automatically.

I asked the students what they thought about the staff managing their CDT. It sounds like a best practice from the CDT is shared accross the department, so how important were the staff in shaping this experience?

Lastly we turned to the issue of multidisciplinary science. Almost the whole point of CDTs is that they are multidisciplinary. But perhaps some types of science don’t fit neatly into that mould – do CDTs suit some types of science better than others?

Interestingly the students agreed that some subjects are inherently multidisciplinary, and so that suits the CDT model quite well. But, according to Freddie, it’s not that people who do project studentship PhDs are somehow incapable of working in multidisciplinary environments, it’s just that CDTs have that idea specifically in mind.

It was good to talk to the students – I feel like now I have a much fuller picture of the debate. Having said that it won’t, of course, make any difference; CDTs seem to be here to stay.

Not all academics are completely happy with that. Recently the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology asked a range of expert witnesses about whether PhD training in the UK is on the right track (as part of a wider report on higher education in STEM subjects). The Engineering Professors Council (EPC) said (pdf, see p. 169) that some of their members would contend that “a PhD is a journey of scientific discovery; some training along the way may be helpful but it is not the main point.” So clearly some still see all the extra training the CDT students get as a dilution.

The consensus seems to be that CDTs are good, as long as they are done well. But perhaps we shouldn’t assume a PhD training monopoly for the CDTs would be a good thing.  The EPC put this quite nicely, so let’s give them the final word:

“We would see advantage in having several [PhD training] models working side by side, to give flexibility and the best capture of excellent candidates. DTCs fit within this, but should not be the only model”. (p. 171).

—

Notes

1. Confusingly, people sometimes refer to these as ‘Doctoral Training Centres’, so on occasions the acronym becomes DTC instead of CDT.

2. The word ‘independent’ might be slightly misleading here. The pannel of reviewers included academics from Oxford University and Newcastle University, both of which host EPSRC funded CDTs. So, by ‘independent’ the EPSRC obviously don’t mean that the reviewers had no professional connection with CDTs.

IMAGES: Flickr, CIMMYT

I picked Melvin Calvin as my hero. But it was only because of an amusing story I was told by the legendary John Kilcoyne  that I began to take serious notice of Calvin’s work. That said, Calvin is a man worthy of standing alongside some of the other giants of the chemical sciences. Most scientists will instantly associate Calvin with the famous biochemical cycle, named in his honour, which he elucidated. In the 1950s, when Calvin carried out his work, little was known about the details of photosynthesis and the idea that carbon dioxide was the feedstock for making plants’ sugary foodstuffs wasn’t widely accepted.

Calvin set about conducting torturously complex experiments to assess the impact of everything from light, pH, carbon dioxide and oxygen on photosynthesis. All this needed an elaborate array of instruments and Calvin’s 1955 paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society has a figure showing one such set up. It looks like exactly the sort of thing a stereotypical mad scientist would dream up and was undoubtedly exacting both to set up and use on a daily basis.

Here’s the diagram – can you spot anything unusual about it yet?

I wasn’t lucky enough to ever meet Calvin (he died in 1997), but according to Kilcoyne he was a serious man with little patience for jokes or pleasantries. This contrasted starkly with his graduate student, A. T. Wilson, who was, it would seem, a bit of a practical joker. Wilson reputedly made a wager with his departmental secretary that he could sneak in a picture of a man fishing into one of the diagrams in a forthcoming paper without his supervisor noticing. He won his bet and the fishing man is still in the diagram today. Calvin never found out.

There he is!

Silly stories aside, Calvin’s work was immensely important and he received the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. The mechanisms of photosynthesis which he helped work out still seem magical to us today; that a plant can take literally thin air and turn it into energy-storing organic compounds is quite incredible. But interestingly we face an analogous challenge today in the shape of the seemingly impossible task of generating cheap, clean energy. It seems clear we need more chemistry heroes of at least the same calibre as Calvin to address this problem. And what with the hard work it will inevitably take, a sense of humour would probably help too.

—

This is an edited version of a story that was originally published on the Chemistry World blog.

—
Josh Howgego spent the last four years peering into round bottomed flasks, working on a chemistry PhD. Now he has turned his hand to writing about science, and is currently studying science communication at Imperial College London. Follow on Twitter: @jdhowgego

Many of the criticisms of science boil down to the fact that the people who do science are only human – they make mistakes, head down blind alleys, look out for their career and hedge their bets. But what if we could make science automatic? It would take all of that unattractive partiality out of the endeavour. But would that be a good thing? Chemistry, perhaps more than any other science, is already becoming automated, and in this post I’ll explore what that looks like and what it could mean.

The most obvious example of how automation is influencing chemistry comes in the shape of Chematica, a map of organic chemistry, published by Bartosz Gryzbroswski earlier this year [1]. The map comprises a series of nodes – actually around 7 million of them – each representing an organic molecule, connected by links representing chemical reactions that can be used to transform one molecule into another. Gryzbroswski’s team have spent years working out the structure of the network.

This is not just any map. It has been called an ‘internet for organic chemistry,’ but (perhaps because I have just moved to London) I prefer the analogy of the London Tube Map. The important thing about this map is that it is a schematic – and that’s exactly what Chematica is. The emphasis is on connections, not necessarily on ‘relatedness’ in the real world. On the tube map stations can look miles apart, but on the surface, they are often much closer to one another than you would think. For chemists it is the habits and traditions of their discipline that sometimes make the connections between chemicals hard to spot. Chematica reveals them.

Because of this, one intriguing use for the map is to identify new routes to medicinally important molecules. For example, if new reaction sequences can be identified which all share the same solvent, they can be performed in tandem, without having to purify the material between steps. On an industrial scale innovations like this could save huge amounts of time, money and effort. Grybrowski reports that Chematica has found new routes to some of the substances that his spin-out company Prochimica makes, offering savings of up 45% on their target molecules.

It sounds impressive, and the reports have certainly made headlines among the chemical community (for example, see this piece by Phillip Ball). But it would be easy to imagine some of the more crusty members of the chemical academe grumbling that the map will take the art out of organic synthesis. Many practitioners of the discipline think of making complex molecules as a bit like chess: planning an attack on a compound takes scientific understanding, sure, but also skill and creative thinking (the final few steps of the challenging organic syntheses are even known among chemists as the ‘endgame’, in chess parlance).

Prostaglandin E2 is a complex molecule with quite a few medicinal uses. There have been numerous inventive syntheses of this compound over the years; one very recently [2].

But some think that automating the process could actually mean chemists have more time to be creative. That is what Craig Butts of the University of Bristol is hoping, anyway. Butts is director of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy in the chemistry department at the university. This technique is the the key weapon organic chemists have when trying to work out what the chemicals are that they make in their round-bottomed flasks. The process of acquiring the data is no mean feat, and interpreting it to elucidate the structures of molecules requires expertise. But Butts has been designing a program that will one day, he hopes, make the elucidation of molecular structure by NMR an automatic process.

“Philosophically, I think a lot of chemistry could be automated”, he says. “And I’ve always felt that people shouldn’t spend a lot of time doing something that a computer or automation process can do for them faster, and hopefully better”.

“Even just using automated procedures to confirm that the structure of a compound that you’ve just received from a supplier is indeed what it says on the bottle – these sorts of things are really big in [the chemical] industry at the moment – because they want to minimise the amount of person time it takes to establish a simple fact.” So the theory is that, with fewer mundane fact-finding tasks to grapple with, chemists should have room for more creativity.

And if chemical techniques become easier to use via automation, it should also mean that non-experts will be able to try them out for size. Varinder Aggarwal, a respected synthetic organic chemist, also at the University of Bristol, is working on ways of doing full-blown chemical synthesis which he hopes will one day be so simple to use, that any intelligent person can have a go. He is designing reactions that have inherently predictable outcomes. In a video produced for the university’s new website, he’s candid about why that might be useful:

“Ultimately, if we can automate [our process], it means that people outside of the discipline of organic synthesis will be able to create their own molecules. It won’t just be really hard-core organic chemists who can do that; it’ll be a much broader pool of scientists […] and they’ll be able to include their own creativity, and create something that’s much bigger than what we have at the moment.”

Critics of Chematica might like to imagine a dystopian future where all art is removed from science, and our drugs and plastics are designed by machines. But, in the short term at least, the opposite seems more likely to be true. We are free to choose how we use automation, and – if we make the right choices – its widespread application in chemistry may eventually herald in a new era of creativity.

—

1. C. M. Gothard et al, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2012, 51, 7922. (DOI: 10.1002/anie.201202155)

2. G. Coulthard et al, Nature, 2012, 489, 278 (DOI: 10.1038/nature11411)

Josh Howgego spent the last four years peering into round bottomed flasks, working on a chemistry PhD. Now he has turned his hand to writing about science, and is currently studying science communication at Imperial College London. Follow on Twitter: @jdhowgego

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Did you have a plan to be a fireman? Maybe. An explorer? Possibly.

But what about a scientist? Probably not.

There are many misconceptions about who scientists are. In classic depictions, scientists are frequently shown as mad, with crazy hair, in chaotic labs surrounded by bubbling liquids and solving complicated equations. These stereotypes have been embedded in our society and have the potential to make people turn away from a career in science, or not even consider it.

As we have shown through our journey to get to know those who make up the Blast lab at Imperial College, London, this is not the reality. The truth is, researchers are usually far from these stereotyped images. Scientists are normal people.

But still we wondered, did any members of the Blast lab want to be a scientist when they grew up?

“Ha…no, in short! Superhero, yes; Surgeon, maybe; Engineer, occasionally; Soldier, possibly; But Scientist, never! However, it is the one profession that combines all of my childhood aspirations, allowing me to dream, tinker and solve everyday.”

”I’ve never really thought about what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve always been interested in understanding how things work. I’ve always made things and taken things apart… sometimes even put them back together! If you’d have told me then that that’s what scientists and engineers get to do everyday I’m pretty sure that’s what I’d have wanted to be. I’m pleased that’s what I am.

Editor’s Note: Anna Perman and David Robertson contributed equally to this article.

Sara and Gina are collecting baby teeth, to build a palace.

Gina: “The experiment has gone so far, without even being made, that it’s become an interesting journey. What we saw as the end was actually the start.”

Sara: “And the end doesn’t matter so much.”

Gina: “There is no end. But I don’t want to be sticking teeth to a sculpture for the next ten years.”

Gina Czarnecki is a Liverpool-based artist working on a sculpture made of donated baby teeth, to be displayed in the Science Museum. Her collaborator, Professor Sara Rankin, a member of the Blast research group, works next door to the museum at Imperial College, London. Sara is not an artist. The sculpture is something that she does on top of her successful career researching on stem cells.

Gina and Sara chose to use baby teeth as a material for the sculpture because, although considered something that can be thrown away, they are actually a source of valuable stem cells. They can be used for science, but the teeth bring up issues of belief and myth because of their association with the tooth fairy. There are also issues around consent, in that the teeth have the added value of having been donated.

But the project seems to have moved away from science, which brings into question whether the artwork, or the science is more important.

“For me, the science is a priority,” Sara explained. “I don’t want to become a science communicator, and I think my value is in bringing my specific knowledge and expertise to any project in terms of the science.”

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems that if the science is hidden in an artwork, the tangible returns from such science outreach is tiny. It is unlikely to have a profound impact on most of the audience, and generally, outreach is of little benefit in an academic career. So why do scientists like Sara bother with projects that bring their work to a wider audience?

Andrew Phillips, another member of the Blast group, runs more traditional workshop-based outreach with the Royal Institution. Like Sara, the problem is not lack of motivation to participate in outreach projects. He explained how getting the time to and funding to fit these projects in is often prohibitive for scientists.

“Everything is time – that’s probably why these masterclasses are so expensive,” he said. “Many outreach projects don’t require much in the way of raw materials, but the thought, planning and administration needed means that the time spent adds up quickly.”

The motivation for any individual scientist to reach out with their work will vary, from promoting their research to loftier aims of enlightenment and a vast range of more nuanced positions in between. But one common thread is likely to come up time and again: they enjoy it.

An important reason that Sara’s project works is the enjoyment she gets from her collaboration with Gina. When we interviewed them ideas flowed between them seamlessly. They got lost in the implications of the project, and it was hard not to get caught up in their enthusiasm.

This personal connection is crucial to making a piece of science outreach work. For Gina and Sara, it is not just their relationship but the relationship with the public that is important. The project hasn’t even been built, but the trust that their contributors are placing in them is something beautiful.

Sara told us about an incident with a fellow mum at her child’s school. This woman’s son didn’t want to give up his teeth, but she offered to give them to the project anyway, once ‘the tooth fairy’ had visited. Sara flatly refused – to her the point is not collecting a certain number of teeth, but the fact that people are willing to give something that is a part of themselves in order to create the artwork. Without consent, there was no relationship, and the teeth would be valueless.

The point is that research and medical treatment using human material requires a relationship of trust between the donor and the recipient, whether they be a patient in need of a transplant, or a research lab. And this applies to outreach too. What really gets people interested in science is when they feel a personal interest in a project, and a connection to those who do it.

But if a connection is so important to get a positive outcome, then outreach without that bond runs the risk of backfiring and actually alienating the public. It is easy to think that any attempt at outreach is inherently good, and that all scientists should be encouraged to do it. But it requires both interest in a project and skill. Naturally, not every scientist will have those. Outreach should be treated with the same respect and care as any scientific study. This means that it can’t just be giving information. Outreach has to be an experience where those who usually wouldn’t come into contact with science are able to take a part in the process.

There is an easy, ready made community of, mostly middle class people who are ready
and waiting to consume science content. But what about those who are indifferent, or worse,
hostile toward science and would run a mile at the sight of a person in a lab coat? How can science compete for their attention over any of the other myriad activities on offer?

This is where Gina and Sara’s project feels incredibly effective, in that it does not look like
science, but frames a scientific question in terms that feel relevant to everyone.

Gina: “It’s about the donor’s belief either in the project or the institution.”
Sara: “Or in the tooth fairy.”

Gina and Sara’s project is all about big ethical questions and ideas of consent and belief, but more traditional outreach tries to put across the scientific process. In Andrew Phillips’ Engineering Masterclasses, he gets kids to build a simple hip joint to show how muscles must be working, even when we are just standing. To him, what is important is not getting across facts or figures, but the concept of seeing the entire system. “For me it’s a fairly basic research point, but it’s important to get them to realise that you can’t look at something in isolation,” he explained.

At this point, outreach and education diverge. Education prioritises a curriculum of some form, with learning objectives, whereas in outreach, the content is secondary to the experience.

This brings us back to the question: what is the point, if not to educate? Is it to create scientists? Is it to encourage them to fund science? We think it is more general. Good outreach should show its audience that they are valued, and give them a broader perspective of, and sympathy with, science. It can give participants the confidence and tools to be inquisitive, to break down questions into their parts, to think about things from every angle and examine evidence before drawing a conclusion – or pursuing further questions.

“Children are going to start asking questions, parents are going to start asking questions and that’s how you engage with them,” Sara says. It’s a sentiment that cuts to the heart of science, and underpins the concept of outreach. Question, investigate and share. In their research in the Blast lab, researchers do the sharing last, when they are confident in their findings. What matters in outreach is sharing the question, the uncertainty and the process of a scientific journey of discovery.

That’s an objective we at the Inside Knowledge team can sympathise with.

Image via Flickr / Andrew Griffith

Mathematical models are convenient ways for scientists to represent, understand and predict what happens in the world outside of the lab. But any model is a simplification of what it represents, and we need to ask: how closely do models fit the real world?

For the Blast research group at Imperial College, London, creating a realistic model of the human body, and in particular the legs, is a vital part of research. Despite being a difficult, complex process, the group has created some of the most sophisticated models used in research today.

Understanding the composition of the millions of different elements of a single bone, and how they respond to the forces they are subjected to is key to understanding the dynamics of an injury.

However, a model is only as good as its inputs and programming. An older man with osteoporosis will have a dramatically different bone make-up than a young athlete. A previously damaged and healed bone may have unpredictable weaknesses. While the Blast Lab has accounted for some of the real world variability in their models, their estimations are not perfect.

The ultimate aim for the group – or any model creators dealing with complex and chaotic systems, from medicine to climate science – is to devise something that represents the real phenomenon accurately and generates the information needed to make useful, practical decisions. The level of detail they’re seeking may seem pedantic, but with every small modeling advancement, their goal of understanding, and therefore preventing, blast injuries becomes to be a little easier to reach.

The Blast lab at Imperial College, London, is a percussionist’s dream. During experiments, which examine the effects of explosions on humans, metal plates are bashed upwards under pressure, weights clang against each other and wooden planks are used for forcible adjustments to the machinery. These sounds happen over and over as the scientists run dozens of tests, seeking enough data to draw meaning from the noise. Taken out of context, a single action in the lab means little, but when orchestrated correctly, a coherent story about biomechanics can be told.

We spent an afternoon recording members of the lab as they performed repeated blast tests. The work would seem familiar to any musician – tuning instruments, setting up recording devices and repeating the same actions to get the desired result.

This video was constructed from scratch, using real sounds and footage from the lab. Some adjustment of the raw sound was necessary, and string sounds had to be recreated using stringed instruments. As with any complex project, pulling together the disparate pieces was a real challenge!

While it may seem lighthearted, there’s a strong message behind the video. The finished product of a scientific investigation, like a song, is inevitably the result of days of practice, experimentation and collaboration. A scientist might have an idea of what they want their investigation to sound like, but the process of science will throw up challenges, test creativity and occasionally uncover entirely new melodies.