"Framing"

This week's Science has an article on "framing" science so that the unwashed masses can understand it and relate to it. The general idea is that when you are talking to someone, they should understand, empathize, and relate to what you are communicating, even if the other person happens not to be a scientist.

Thing is...The entire communications field, as a profession, has been saying all these things since, oh, the Victorian era! There actually exists, in nearly every university with a science department, a whole entire department called "communications," and figuring out how to spread information as effectively as possible is pretty much what they do, all day long, for lots of money. All you have to do is go to your university webpage and click on the "academics" or "departments" link, there it is. It's the equivalent of publishing an article about these new-fangled techniques called Writing, or making a big effing deal about the social significance of this interesting new finance method called "capitalism." It annoys me that such things make it into highfalutin journals like Science, then are treated as if they are some novel idea. It's a sort of demonstration that academics really do live in ivory towers or in distant, crumbling castles with no company but that of burbling green test tubes. Makes me wish I had a dragon handy.

I thought, apparently naively, that speeches and such to various audiences were merely par for the course for all scientists at some point. My undergrad university prepared me to believe so, and gave several intensive classes that involved oral presentations of scientific material to various audiences. As a professional in industry, I had to give presentations of my work to many audiences, including trainees, patients, lawyers and non-scientific clients as well as colleagues. In order to become a better presenter, I took special seminars that taught me to speak clearly and with enthusiasm, in an organized fashion, without PowerPoint. My bosses and project managers were often quite skilled presenters themselves, and could explain their work to a run-of-the-mill news journalist and whomp together a decent press release perfectly well. They had been trained by countless legal and PR departments in the proper ways to present to various audiences. This was just part of the skillset, it went along with buying my first real interview suit.

On the occasions when I felt the message was not getting across clearly, or when my audience was leaping to conclusions or not reacting appropriately, I looked up the advice of communications experts who specialized in communicating on that particular issue. Telling someone about how you sterilized a whole building after an anthrax attack, or explaining a manufacturing failure to stockholders who don't want to hear bad news, those are specialized tasks that you won't get through without a certain structure and wording. Delicate. A joke, a cartoon, a story they can relate to, won't get you through that. I wouldn't attempt to write a patent application without a lawyer's help, I don't communicate important things without advice from a communications pro either.

Now, this seemed fairly obvious to me. My husband is about as far from a science geek as you can get, most of my relatives are not scientists, and so I get plenty of social interaction outside of the wonderful world of nerddom. And at every cocktail party, cookout, or beer-soaked house party I've ever been to, the icebreaker question "what do you do for a living" never worked to break the ice with me. I used to respond, "I'm a scientist." This seemed like a simple enough answer, but the follow-up questions were always along the lines of, "oh, you dissect frogs/play with beakers all day? Doesn't that get boring?" If I tried to explain that no, in fact I did not do anything like that at all, and tried to explain what I did do all day, I got blank stares. Most of these people--college-educated professionals, mind--didn't even know what a cell was, let alone why you'd want to culture one in a big metal tank. They figured all chemicals were inherently dangerous and that most modern things were not made of chemistry anymore for safety reasons. There was no way that I'd ever be able to dumb down my actual job to something they could understand. They'd mumble something about it being nice to meet me and wander off, leaving me to find a quiet corner to be bored in. Eventually I learned that you have to lead with the conclusion:

Normal person: "So, what do you do for a living?"
Me: "I'm trying to cure [horrible disease]."
NP: "Really?"
Me: "Well, I'm working on it. I'm a research scientist."
NP: "Oh how interesting! My cousin's friend's aunt has [horrible disease] and it's so terrible! She's tried [competitor's drug], [other competitor's drug] and woo and magic potions and I don't know what all and it's so awful for her! Blah blah blah...blah blah. Well, good for you! There's so much more work to be done!"

Now, after talking my ear off, they might have one or more other interesting things we can talk about in passing, and they go home feeling good about having met, in real life, someone who cures horrible diseases and who also likes Belgian beer and horror movies and so forth. They may be philosophically opposed to many things I do in the course of my daily work (e.g. mouse experiments, killing OMG human cells in a Petri dish!, or using evolutionary theory to predict cellular behavior), but that's not what they remember. If it was even mentioned--a very big if, as I don't talk about the more technical stuff unless specifically asked--and they ask why I do that, I explain it in simple layman's terms and don't dwell on it, then go right back to the thing they understand, their cousin's friend's aunt's suffering.

Why do I work on fluffy little cute mice? Because I want to be reasonably sure that these new drugs aren't toxic, and I have no other way of knowing. It's hard to tell if a drug is going to be toxic sometimes, when it's brand new. I would hate to give a drug to a patient suffering from [horrible disease] if I wasn't pretty sure that it would work. Aren't human cells alive? They are a type of cancer cell; even cancer tumors are alive. The cells that cause [horrible disease] are alive, although we wish they weren't. Didn't gawd create the world? Maybe, but the evolutionary predictions work in real life when we try them out. In this case, they worked to predict [aspect of horrible disease].

This works great for one-on-one discussions, or for small groups. There's whole other Marketing Departments full of techniques for larger audiences. The goal is to tell the story, in which there should be lots of human interest and pathos. Why are you doing this stuff, anyway? Who cares about it? If it's not dramatically life-changing, is it perhaps funny or amusing? Could you represent it in a case study type of poster child example that people might sympathize with? Is it so trainwrecky that it could make random people stop and take pictures?

Crikey. Get out more. Network outside your field for a change. Take a public speaking course. It's so simple. For more complex stuff, take a more advanced communication seminar or talk to your employer's PR department; even universities have one of those. Who the hell can't do this?

John Tierney ignores (mountains of) data that do not support his hypothesis

I can't believe my mother hasn't emailed me this NYT article yet. It's right up her alley. Any minute now, my inbox should be pinging with a reminder that I am unnatural, not female, possibly not human, and any day now my British husband will squeeze into a tutu and leave me for a gay man who does better oral than me. Isn't that the gawd-ordained fate of a female scientist?

I don't mind, actually, if my being a scientist means I can't be a woman too. As long as I get to keep the multiple orgasms, Mr. Tierney can envision a new gender for me, since I definitely don't have a penis. Although this brings to mind a whole new genre of pornography...

Anyway, for anyone interested, the fact of sexism in science can be found at the following links, although I really dislike having to repeat what has been shouted by many, many people and which Mr. Tierney is well aware of:

Nature, SherryTowers' investigation of Fermilab
European Commission Directorate-General Research Report on sexism in STEM (pdf)
A whole wagon-load of scholarly references, brought to you by Science (pdf)

You know what discouraged me from going into science/tech/eng? It wasn't all that subtle. I mean, when you sit down in your high school algebra class on the first day of eleventh grade, and your teacher sneers at the class that he doesn't want to teach this class because, and I quote, "you girls should all be in Home Ec, not taking a college prep level class," that was a pretty clear indicator that I wasn't welcome. Thanks, Mr. Tryba!

Also, I'm Pennsylvania Dutch. I was reared to bake really good pies, muck out barns, and serve dinner to the menfolk and to Grandmom, who ruled the Thanksgiving table with an iron fist. Not to be "anything you want to be, honey!" unlike many young women these days. I was told in no uncertain terms that I could not have X, Y and Z because it was a Thing For Boys. My mother figured that when I went to college (which she wasn't willing to pay for, not for a daughter), I would study art or English Lit or some cheesy thing until I got my MRS degree. She demanded, several times, that I not take classes she didn't approve of, even though she wasn't paying for them. Nor was she above going through my mail to find out if I was lying about my course schedule. My honors advisor once had a faux schedule printed up for her benefit, and I used to get mail at my advisor's office for that reason.

When I was an undergrad, oh lordy, which story do I tell? The one about the genetics prof who regaled a room full of honors students (men and women) with his stories of picking up prostitutes to see to his "manly needs"? The one about the ecology prof who couldn't keep his hands to himself and figured that having tenure meant you could perv on your students and hang up Playboy centerfolds in the main office? The other genetics prof who told his class that "ladies are always welcome to come to class without their clothes"? The chemistry department head who, if you asked for help on the homework, offered to exchange sex for grades with several students before finally picking on an Iraq War v. 1.0 vet who sued him into oblivion? They've all created some special memories, for sure.

It's funny, does anyone really ask why people leave science? I see a lot of speculation in the editorial pages of the weekly journals, plus a lot of speculation by the authors Mr. Tierney cites, ("women just aren't interested"--did you ask? no you didn't, you ASSumed) but it seems like no one really asks anyone. Maybe we should have exit interviews. I know many of my fellow alumnae ended up going to nursing, dentistry or medical school instead of into research as a direct result of their experiences with sexism. I know several female co-workers who went into nursing school or teaching because they needed a steadier job than STEM could offer; outside of the coastal areas of the US and a few select regions in Europe, steady, middle-class-paying jobs for scientists, engineers and mathematicians are pretty thin on the ground. When I lived in the Midwest, I once was offered a job that involved temping for a full year before the possibility of full-time work would even be considered, for $15/hour, with a 90-minute commute (one way), no health insurance, working with BSL-3s. And this was for a federal defense contractor. Nursing, with starting pay at $20/hour and all the benefits you can eat, looks pretty good from there.

I can also see the rationalization that women leave for family reasons. I've always wanted a stay-at-home wife, myself; you know, the kind from the 1950s who does all the housework and greets you at the door with a cold drink and dinner ready? I asked my husband if he would be a househusband, though, and he didn't seem too keen on the idea. He immediately saw the downside to being a stay-at-home spouse: economic insecurity, infinite boredom, social aspects of work, plus the basic reality that doing housework all day really blows. But if you have a spouse who earns a lot more than you (likely, given the usual wage disparity in most jobs), and your actual workplace isn't all that social or fulfilling (perhaps because your colleagues are sexist jerks), then maybe daytime TV and play-dates with the neighborhood Mommy Brigade don't look so bad.

Hey, there's my inbox now! I bet it's mom...

How To Compress Training Time

Someone on Scienceblogs said they'd be interested in learning about training compression. Industrial geeks will notice that what I am posting here is extremely similar to cGLP/cGMP methods, with a little bit of Mayo Clinic-style training and Dale Carnegie thrown into the mix. I've used these methods to train technicians, scientists and engineers to run the old-fashioned stainless steel chemical reactors as mammalian cell culture bioreactors, to teach undergrads the fine art of protein purification and various biochemical techniques, and to teach chemical engineers basic biology and tissue culture. It used to take my employer about two years to train people to run the bioreactor hall, and now it takes about three to four months. However, if you choose to cherry-pick what I'm posting, realize that you may only get incremental results depending on what technique you select. I'll explain why in a bit.

First: Lots of people who teach in academia have never, not once, had any training or seminars on how to be a good teacher. Some people are naturally good teachers, but those are few and far between. When you’re teaching an auditorium full of bored undergrads, it’s a qualitatively different experience from training someone whose failure could mean your livelihood and health on the line. Trainers cannot rely on their awsum innate skillz to be good at teaching. Don’t rely on student feedback forms to tell you if you’re a good teacher or trainer, either; if you handed out free As for everyone regardless of merit, you’d get great reviews too. If I had a dozen students sleeping through lecture in an auditorium full of 400 other kids, it was no biggie—I handed them an F, told them they could take it up with the dean if they wanted, and sent them on their merry. When the engineer I worked with didn’t thoroughly check the valve configuration and filled the entire 2000 square meter bioreactor hall with hot caustic NaOH to a depth of 2 cm, that was a Problem. In order to be a good trainer, you have to want to be a good trainer, is what I’m getting at. The old, “But I’ve been teaching for a zillion years! That should count for something!” is really not sufficient. My bum has been a bum for…well, a very long time…and I don’t listen to what it says, either. The true test of whether or not you are a good trainer is how quickly your trainees get up to speed and the trainee’s skill level.

Now, about the cherry-picking: The first lesson you learn in education is that people learn in different ways. Some people learn by visual demonstrations. Some people learn by reading. Some people have to have something verbally explained to them. Other people learn by doing something hands-on and figuring out the spatial relationships themselves. Most people have some combination of techniques that helps them learn best. In order to make a whole group of people learn something, you need to have a way of teaching to all of their preferred methods. So, if you decide you’ll only have a ring binder of protocols in the lab for anyone to peruse at their leisure, you’re leaving out the folks who need something explained verbally, the folks who need a demonstration, and so on and so forth, not to mention leaving yourself at the tender mercies of the poor grad student who gets the thankless task of writing up all the protocols. By having super-redundant training methods, you not only reach everyone in your audience but you also make sure that all those crucial details have been communicated to several people for proofreading and troubleshooting.

OK, enough caveats. The actual method. You start by writing every single protocol your lab has ever run in a shared electronic document where everyone can access it. The protocols need to be extremely detailed. For the sake of future publications, I strongly recommend a “Summary” section of each protocol at the beginning that can be neatly copy/pasted into manuscripts. Your Methods sections might be boring and formulaic, but they’ll be consistent and readable. After all the protocols have been written as drafts, send them round to other lab members with “Track Changes” turned on, so they can add their comments in other colors. Or send around hard copies and colored pencils. Make sure everyone gets a crack at it and that all variations on the protocol are added.

Example: Incubate the blot at room temperature for 3-18 hours in a 1:1000 solution of primary antibody in Tris buffer. TBST 0.1% Tween-20 works better—M. Smith I used 3% milk once and it was fine—J. Johnson

Then have the author execute it right in front of you while you are standing beside them. If they missed anything out of habit (“oh yeah, I forgot, you kinda have to flip that switch”), now’s the time to add it. Print hard copies. Make a shortcut on a computer that’s available to everyone. Index it, make it searchable. And be 100% certain that everyone who sets foot in the lab knows where it is and what they should expect to find in it. Follow up and make sure the book is being used and updated regularly. If it’s not, find out why not and hold the authors accountable. If someone in your lab hands you a manuscript with a method that differs significantly from your lab book, demand a resolution.

This maybe should be its own separate step, but it’s really just a part of method review: Are your protocols any good? “Why of course they are good! They were good enough for great-grandad and they are good enough for me!” Have a long hard look at your technology. Then have a long hard look at the latest offerings from Invitrogen, Perkin-Elmer, VWR, and Qiagen. Then look some more. If a protocol takes three years to do properly, and there’s no new alternative method, maybe you need to hike across campus and see if the Engineering department can come up with something better for you. Yeah, I know, back in your day you had to walk to work in the snow, uphill both ways! So did I. It only makes me all the more grateful that now I have a bunch of sleek shiny boxes and an on-site reagent shop and I don’t have to waste years cooking up endonuclease from bacteria. There’s a paper or three in developing and validating a new technology, too. Heck, there’s a whole multimillion-dollar startup, early retirement and a really cool car in that sort of thing. I’ve heard the worry that trainees won’t truly learn how to troubleshoot with a machine, and I tell you it is not so. When the machine breaks down and the field service guy can’t come out till next week, you’ll figure it out right quick. I’ve seen million-dollar automation systems temporarily repaired with rubber bands, plumbing Teflon tape and plastic zip ties by relatively inexperienced chemists.

Next step: Figure out the order that the protocols are best learned in. This order is not necessarily going to depend on the project, nor will it necessarily be with the goal of making the trainee the most useful as quickly as possible. For example, in order to make technicians extremely useful very quickly, we used to train them on the simplest, most routine, everyday protocols. Then we delegated those tasks to them and had more senior techs actually run the reactors. We figured that the techs, as they observed the larger, more complex tasks, would kind of grow into being able to do bigger and better things. This turned out to be a really lousy way to train people, because they had no way of seeing the rationale of why they were being told to do this or that. They waited to be given orders, which meant that I had to think about their schedule, my schedule, everyone else’s schedule, all the bloody time, and follow up to make sure they did it right. Since we had high turnover, that meant I was always mothering over someone new and barely had time for my own projects. When they made a mistake, it was a nightmare to go back and fix it.

What worked better was gradually introducing them to the rationale of why things happened the way they did. They learned the calculation process from the very start, by working with small cultures by hand. Sure, that meant that for a few weeks they spent a lot of time warming a chair, reading articles and watching online training presentations. By using small pumps to move cultures and media around and maintain culture splits, by working with very simple disposable reactors, they learned the basic requirements, the math and engineering that guided the system, and figured out the hows and whys. Then, when they had proven themselves on a small scale, we taught them the same thing again on the big reactors. I never, never once had to correct a tech’s math when they were taught small-scale cultures maintained by hand first. When I had full-blown engineers and scientists who were trained in the “let’s make them useful first” method, I always had to correct their math and explain something fairly elementary. Over and over and over. It had nothing to do with their innate ability, everything to do with the training method. There’s an order you need to teach, and in my experience it’s best to start with the big picture first.

Third step: Train the trainers. I think the best teachers I ever had were from a small liberal arts college. Those folks were heavily invested in teaching as their primary job, and by and large they were pretty good at it. Lots of things that I have since been told are “impossible” to teach in less than two years, they happily taught in a few months as a regular lab course: various types of liquid chromatography, protein purification, electron microscopy, tissue culture, veterinary surgery, all kinds of things. The catch is that they made a big honkin’ point of getting professors who really cared about teaching. The general method, which I have seen many other teachers and corporate trainers use with great success, is this:

1. Teach a lecture explaining the theory. Give a short quiz on theory. You need to have good lecturers do this, don’t assign it to the guy who barely speaks a word of the local language. I can just about order a beer and a sandwich in German without making a total fool of myself, but I’m sure not ready to go lecturing at Max Planck Institute.

2. Once the students are in the lab, demonstrate the technique while narrating what you are doing. This is a skill that the Dale Carnegie public speaking courses teach pretty well, and I highly recommend them.

3. Walk the students through doing the protocol themselves, nitpicking their technique until they get it exactly right. Don’t give up and decide that it’s good enough when it’s not. Really nitpick, in a nice and respectful way of course.

4. Give them a protocol to run by themselves that you know will run just fine, given the material they already have. Do not expect them to troubleshoot at this stage.

5. Demonstrate yourself, and walk the students through several scenarios, where something went horribly wrong, and explain why it was wrong and how to ensure that the wrong thing doesn’t happen.

Schedule exactly 2.5 times the length of time it normally takes you to run the protocol when everything goes smoothly, just to run each protocol one time. I can split a 2500L reactor culture in about two hours, but if I’m training someone I allocate five hours for the process. This allows time for the narrative, errors, double-checking, questions on the fly, etc. That means for a two hour task, you’re going to spend a minimum of 20 hours training someone on how to do it. And yes, that’s even if they do have prior experience and education on the protocol. They might have learned a very different way.

The key here is that you don’t want students getting frustrated with something that doesn’t work all that well to begin with. You want them to build the confidence that they can carry out this protocol, by themselves, and they can make some good guesses as to why things go wrong and how to fix it. You want them to have this self-confidence before you set them loose in the lab. Otherwise, it’s a recipe for lots of wasted materials, wasted time, wasted energy.

The bonus you get for yourself from this exercise is robustness of results. Let’s imagine you have a postdoc in your employ who seems to have magic hands that get all the right results that support your pet hypotheses du jour. When you test-drive his/her protocols with trainees, the results the trainees get are only half-baked, for some mysterious reason. Now that you realize that your results aren’t really all that reproducible, you know that you need to take a long, hard look at your postdoc’s notebooks. Hey, if the notebooks check out, are high-quality legible data written in ink, signed and dated, great. If not…

Fourth step: Make sure you hired people who can do the job. “Thanks, Captain Obvious!” Yeah, you’re welcome. But when my grad school advisor made up his mind to hire a student who had no experience, no motivation to learn, and only wanted to put in a year or two before buggering off to medical school, he didn’t see for the life of him why that was a Bad Idea. Things You Can’t Teach include motivation, interest, a love for the field, and passion. Don’t hire someone who only wants the job because they don’t know what to do with themselves, because their mommy told them they needed a Master’s, or because this was Plan Y and Plans A-X have already failed them. If a trainee sees no reason to commit a procedure to memory, they’re not going to learn it. On the contrary, you can teach someone to carry out a grad school-level procedure even if they completely lack formal education, so long as they are interested in the subject and motivated to learn.

Final step: Keep on top of it. Track who is trained on what and create a training program for all new lab members. Have trainers decide who is adequately trained, don’t leave this up to trainees. Reward people who get trained on new techniques somehow, and reward people who invent or bring new techniques from other labs. Make it clear that you value training in your lab, and that innovation will be honored and respected—a Nature Methods paper should be respected just like any other Nature paper.

Bear in mind, most of the examples presented here are from my own experience organizing training for a bioreactor suite. The important thing to take away is that this is a method for organizing thought processes of a large group and delineating the degree of training involved for both trainee and trainer. It can be applied to most any training process.