If you can, come to the talk, don’t be shy to approach me and say Hello, and perhaps join us for dinner and drinks afterward.

The persistence of circadian rhythmicity during long bouts of hibernation in mammals has been a somewhat controversial topic in the literature. While some studies suggest that circadian clock is active during hibernation, other studies dispute this. Apparently, the truth is somewhere in-between – it differs between species:

Not all hibernating animals retain apparent circadian rhythmicity during the hibernation season. Whereas some species, such as bats and golden-mantled ground squirrels, maintain circadian rhythmicity in Tb [core body temperature] throughout the hibernation season when held in constant conditions, other species, such as European hamsters, Syrian hamsters, and hedgehogs, lose circadian rhythmicity in Tb.

The outputs of the clock measured in these studies range from body temperature and brain temperature, to timing of waking, to metabolic and behavioral parameters. But, to my knowledge, nobody has yet looked if the circadian pattern of expression of “core clock gene” persists during hibernation.

Thus, it was really interesting to see a study on the state of hibernation in a completely different kind of organism – a tree. About a year ago [Note: that was in 2005, this is a re-post from the archives], a group from Spain did exactly what was needed – they measured the levels of expression of circadian clock genes in the chestnut tree.

They measured the expression of clock genes both during naturally occurring winter dormancy and in the laboratory experiments involving chilling of seedlings combining with exposure to different photoperiods. In both cases, the core molecular mechanism of the circadian clock stopped entirely if the temperature and photoperiod both indicated ‘winter’, and was revived by warming-up the seedlings or the onset of spring.

Circadian clocks exhibit temperature independence, i.e., the period of the rhythm is not affected by temperature, within relatively broad limits. Apparently, the winter temperatures are outside the lower limit in the chestnut tree. Furthermore, it appears that the chestnut actively stops the clock with the onset of winter.

How can we interpret these data?

Overwintering is the stage in which all energetically expensive processes are minimized or shut down. However, workings of the clock itself are not very energetically expensive, so this is an unlikely reason for the elimination of rhythmicity during winter.

Second interpretation would be that, as the tree shuts down all its processes, there is nothing for the clock to regulate any more. There is also no feedback from the rest of metabolism into the clock. Thus, circadian rhythmicity fades as a by-product of overall dormancy of the plant.

Third, the clock itself may be a part of the mechanism that keeps everything else down. In other words, a clock stopped at (for instance – this is a random choice of phase) midnight will keep giving the midnight signal to the rest of the plant for months on end, keeping all the other processes at their normal midnight level (which may be very low). Thus, the clock may be central to the overall mechanism of hibernation in trees – i.e., the autumnal stopping of the clock is an evolved adaptation.

If you have published a blog post about plants since the last issue on January 30th, send me the link by using this submission form.

Officially, the deadline for submissions is February 25th, but I am lenient – even if you send it as late as 28th at noon, I will still likely include it, and will post the carnival on the morning of the 29th of February. But sending early is appreciated. If you see a post by someone else that you think fits the concept, send it in (but insert a note to me that it is not your own post).

What counts? The official ‘rules’ state:

Berry Go Round covers all thing botanical. That is, featured articles should just be about plants, from cells & chemistry to plant ecology and communities. Pictures can also be submitted whenever a minimum amount of information is given (such as scientific name, family and the like), and recipes may also be featured if the main ingredient is a plant and provided a decent botanical account follows.

So yes – small plants, big plants, common plants, rare plants, extinct or extant, mosses, liverworts, horsetails, ferns, with or without flowers, microscopic or giant trees – all of them are eligible. Biochemistry, molecular, cellular and developmental biology, physiology, behavior (yup, plants behave), evolution, genetics, paleontology, biogeography, taxonomy/systematics, ecology, conservation – anything goes. It can focus on a recent finding, or a historical account, it can explain the basics, or it can be a timeless truth, it can be basic or applied, or you can write a personal account of awe in encountering a baobab for the first time in your life.

Apart from text, we welcome original art, illustration, photography, cartoons, podcasts, videos, animations, infographics or any other forms of multimedia (especially if all mixed into a single post). If you are using someone else’s art, please properly credit and link to the original artist in your posts.

A Mother’s Love: Memoirs in the Digital Age – A Valentine’s Day event about family, love and heartbreak, brought to you by The Atavist. February 14 at Melville House, 145 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY at 6:30 p.m. Featuring: Clive Thompson, Cris Beam and David Dobbs.

“Brains” – a Story Collider storytelling event: Wednesday the 15th of February, 2012, at Union Hall, Brooklyn, NY.

Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media – Science Online NYC at AMNH: Thursday, February 16 at 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

With these three events attracting some of the same crowd, we feel there is no need to organize an additional #NYCSciTweetUp – let’s assume that all three events combined also serve as one long three-day tweetup.

Learn more:

What is: The Story Collider

What is: Science Online New York City

If you are lucky, you’ll find a couple of other attendees have landed at about the same time, so you meet them at the baggage claim (fortunately, Terminal 1 is under renovation so everyone had to land at the same over-crowded Terminal 2), and share a shuttle or cab into town.

This is the first moment of serendipitous meetings, as you introduce yourselves to each other, who are you, where you come from, what you do, what brings you to ScienceOnline… you just made your first #scio12 friends.

Twenty minutes later, your taxi pulls up at the Doubletree/Brownstone hotel. As you and your fellow passengers exit the car and start gathering your luggage, this tall, skinny, bespectacled, excitable creature runs out of the hotel, waiving his arms, and starts hugging everyone. Oh, that must be Bora! So, you get a hug. And naturally, the next thing you do is take your iPhone out again and tweet: “#scio12 has officially started: #IhuggedBora!”

And so the adventure begins… (most of the images in this post are thumbnails – click to see them larger)

The Close-contact community

In 2007 we met at UNC. The following four years, we convened at the wonderfully scienc-ey Sigma Xi. This year we moved to McKimmon Center at NCSU. We keep moving to bigger spaces, but our community keeps getting larger, so the density remains high. Thus, wherever we met, we were always tightly close together, rubbing shoulders with each other. There are hugs (not just with me, but among others).

This is me, getting a hug from the NCSU chancellor – photo by Tim Skellet:

There are handshakes:

There is some (though controversial) research showing that hugging and close contact increase mutual trust, thus strengthening the community. Close proximity to friends, by increasing oxytocin levels, may help people get bolder, perhaps speak up at conferences, which is a good thing at unconferences like ours.

But there is a flip-side to this coin. Strengthening of bonds within an in-group weakens the bonds to people outside of it. If you are all hugged-out at #scio12, are you then suspicious of perfectly nice passers-by on the streets of Raleigh as you are walking to a restaurant? Are you going to tip your waitress less because she is not a part of the in-group? Are you more unpleasant when replying to emails, tweets or blog comments by people who are not at the conference? We certainly do not want that side-effect to happen!

And then there is the question of new people at the meeting. As veterans, now old friends, hug each other (and me), do the newbies feel left out? Are they now out-group and treated as such by the in-group? Judging from the feedback, generally not, but at least initially some may feel that way until they realize how welcome they are by everyone else. Those are some hard questions we want to ask (and I asked a few times on Twitter after the conference), because we do not want anyone to feel left out – at the conference physically, or watching from afar online.

The introvert reaction to #IhuggedBora

With the fast growth of the conference, there were more newbies attending this year than repeat offenders veterans. This had a potential of changing the atmosphere of the conference, so we did our best to prepare the new people, as well as to recruit the veterans to actively welcome new people to the community. Blog posts by Pascale, Zuska, Janet and me, as well as asking the question on Twitter, we hope, helped new people prepare better for what they will be experiencing. The “SXSW of science”, “SciFoo, but democratic”, The Bonnaroo of the Blogosphere, or “Burning Man for scientists” – those are some comparisons made with ScienceOnline over the years (and see for yourself), so we wanted to make sure that new attendees understood this well in advance.

But not everyone is ready for such a close-contact and furiously-paced event. Some people are introverted. Others are shy. Some may be both introverted and shy. Some may be suffering from the impostor syndrome at the beginning, not knowing if they fully belong to this community. Some are not active on Twitter (or not on Twitter at all – 64 did not enter a Twitter account into their registration form, and most of them I could not find there with searching either) and thus may not know the rest of the community well yet.

I probably have mild Aspergers (not diagnosed, but people who know me very well – including a psychiatrist – agree that all signs are there), so had to spend decades studying people’s body language and training myself to recognize subtle cues and respond appropriately. As people walk in, especially new people, I have to quickly figure out if the person will be comfortable getting a hug from me or not. I don’t want to assault anyone, or make anyone uncomfortable. I had to make fast to-hug-or-not-to-hug decisions on the fly, and I hope my success rate is not too bad. So some people got a handshake or a nice word instead. Some of the same people gave me spontaneous hugs three days later, some did not. I want everyone to be comfortable and to get the most they can from the conference. Not everyone is here in order to become my personal friend (Dunbar be damned) and that is OK.

But not getting hugged may make people feel like they are not a part of the in-group. Perhaps there is a hugged circle, and an un-hugged outside group. This would be against the ethos of our meeting, but this is the BlogTogether spirit that was the original inspiration to the conference – that being in the same space as others, with hugging or handshakes or just eye contact, helps us know more about each other and affects our online relationships. But I want to try something different next year. I have no idea how and when #IhuggedBora tradition started (a couple of years ago), and it is fun, and I like it, and many others like it. But there should be a way for non-hugged people to feel just as welcome. Perhaps a second hashtag?

Someone on Twitter suggested high-fiving. But then I remembered when I first arrived in the USA I was unfamiliar with the gesture. I worked at a horse farm, working with young horses in the mornings and teaching riding school in the afternoons. There were a couple of big, burly guys working at the barn, feeding horses and such. They would come down the aisle of the barn, raise their hands and say “Hi, five” and I would step to the side and do this:

Hi Five!

I had no idea I was supposed to come toward them and that our palms were supposed to meet! Obviously, a cultural difference…

Perhaps this Web-savvy community has seen the “Like” button enough times to understand the “thumbs-up” gesture (despite the thumbs-up gesture being considered rude in some cultures)?

Thumbs up!

We have a year to think about this, and welcome all of your feedback, but we will definitely ponder a number of ideas on how to make the event more comfortable for people who are new, shy, introvert, or just plain exhausted and overstimulated.

Perhaps we can designate a “silent room” where there is no talking, where people can come in for a few minutes to recharge their batteries (both their mental batteries, and those charging their elecronic devices), get online and write in peace, perhaps take a nap, meditate, do some yoga….the Cafe room is awesome for interactions, but it is anything but quiet.

We may also try to do some veteran-n00b pairings ahead of time, essentially providing each new attendee (or at least the students, or people who indicate at registration they would like this) with a “go to” person for questions and help, perhaps starting the conference with an event designed to get the pairs to meet each other for a few minutes. A broader, speed-meeting rotation (like speed-dating events) to get people to break the ice and talk to someone new, may also be considered.

At ScienceWriters meetings, there are all sorts of ribbons one can attach to the name-tag, including “first-timer” and “talk to me”, the latter indicating a veteran willing to field questions or help the new people. Perhaps we can do something similar.

And of course, serendipitous meetings of small groups of new people are already embedded in the program – random banquet seating, bus rides to and from the hotel, tours you sign up for without knowing who else will be going there with you, chairs all over the Cafe room and the main hallway, parties at the hotel, going out for dinner at a restaurant – opportunities for talking to new people one-on-one or in small groups are numerous.

Obviously, we are obsessed with details. Not just because it frees you up to focus on the proceedings, but because not paying attention to detail can actively hinder and spoil the experience for some people.

Diversity

We had attendees from 40 states of the USA (if you count D.C. as a state), five Canadian provinces, and seven other countries.

Unsurprisingly for the host state that is a hotbed of science and technology, North Carolina was represented by 119 people (plus four locals who snuck in for a single session without registering, but that is OK). There were 56 attendees from New York, 34 from California, 21 from Massachussets, 15 from Washington D.C., 14 from Maryland, 13 from Virginia, 12 from Illinois, and 10 from Wisconsin. There were also representatives from Pennsylvania (9), Washington State (8), Minnesota (7), Florida and Colorado (6 each), Arizona, Indiana, Montana and Connecticut (5 each), Ohio and Texas (4 each), Alaska, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Utah (2 each), and one person each from Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Maine, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Vermont.

Canadians were represented by 8 Ontarians, 4 people from British Columbia, 3 from Alberta, and one each from Quebec and Nova Scotia. From other continents, we had 13 guests from the U.K., 5 from Germany, two from Denmark, and one each from the Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Mauritius. Of course, those are people’s current addresses. If we asked for the place of origin, it would have been even more geographically distributed (Peru, Hong Kong, Costa Rica…). After all, Nadja Popovich and I spoke Serbian to each other at the conference, as we were both born in Belgrade (which also continues the tradition of having someone from Serbia every year)…

Discussion about sex and gender in online science communication started before the conference, was a strong theme during the event itself, and the conversation, continues, well after the meeting ended.

Race, ethnicity and culture, together with geography and gender, are important aspects of diversity. According to the feedback we are getting, sessions on Broadening the Participation of Underrepresented Populations in Online Science Communication and Communities and Science writing in and for developing nations were incredibly well received. Again, there is, quite a lot of post-conference discussion of it. There is a lot of enthusiasm now not just for expanding next year’s program to include more sessions on this topic (see the wiki page with Program suggestions for 2013, already buzzing with activity), and not just to get an even more diverse group to attend next year, but also to do as much as possible throughout the year to start and test a variety of strategies for promoting science in as broad communities around the world as possible.

Brian Malow, the science comedian

The diversity of people attending ScienceOnline, in terms of geography, gender, race, ethnicity or culture, means that everyone brought something different to the meeting – different background, history and culture, different angles and goals and needs. While here, they cross-fertilized their ideas, told their stories and learned from others. This also means that people have gone home to all those distant places and are now sharing what they learned, teaching, influencing their colleagues, neighbors and students, thus enlarging this community even more.

On the wearing of many hats

According to our registration form report, ScienceOnline2012 had 243 bloggers (high time to defenestrate the notion that this is a ‘bloggers conference’ when half the people don’t blog), 153 journalists, 151 scientists, 115 educators, 71 students, 43 enterpreneurs, 34 Web developers and 46 who identified as ‘other’. That total is almost 900, so on average everyone (457 people checked in at the registration desk) checked two boxes.

Thus, the success in cross-fertilization of ideas at ScienceOnline is not just due to it being a rare event bringing together people who do different things in science, e.g,. researchers, teachers, journalists, bloggers, web developers, publishers, public information officers, librarians, artists, historians, students, etc. but because almost everyone at the meeting is currently (or has experiences in the past of being) in multiple roles. Not because people here wear different hats, but because everyone wears many hats.

There was an interesting moment at the end of the closing plenary panel, moderated by David Kroll with panelists Maggie Koerth-Baker, Seth Mnookin and myself. Someone in the audience grumbled that the scientists were not represented on the panel. David and I looked at each other in puzzlement. David just boxed up his lab equipment a couple of weeks before the event, moving from full-time research to full-time communication. How is he so suddenly not a scientist any more?

Although most of us at ScienceOnline play multiple roles, it seems that people have an automatic tendency to assign only a single “profession” to each other, mainly guided by the most recent place of employment. Some people think of me as a freewheeling, provocative blogger. Others think of me as a ‘journalist’ because I am an editor at a respected media entity. Others think of me primarily as an educator because I teach BIO101 to adult students and blog my lecture notes and am a Visiting Faculty at NYU school of journalism.

I am all of that, for sure. But if you forced me to identify myself with just a single word, I would easily choose this one: “scientist”. Just because I haven’t messed around a lab for a decade does not mysteriously make me a non-scientist. ‘Once a scientist always a scientist’, because being a scientist is not a profession but a worldview. I cannot quit being a scientist now. Not to mention that I still have research collaborations that occasionally lead to publication. Which is why I tend to take the scientists’ side in various scientists vs. journalists debates.

The realization, after the conference already ended, that we are all a bunch of misfits, pioneers, and generally crazy risk-takers, led to an amazing new hashtag – #IamScience. Inspired by unlikely career trajectory of Mireya Mayor, our keynote speaker, Kevin Zelnio finally let it all out – an incredible and courageous story of his life and how he got into science, and into and out of a research career. Hundreds of tweets, and dozens of blog posts are being now assembled on a Tumblr blog, while Allie Wilkinson started a photo-Tumblr with pictures of scientists – This Is What A Scientist Looks Like – and Mindy Weisberger put together a video:

I Am Science from Mindy Weisberger on Vimeo.

There are many blog posts already posted, some old some new, and here is just a small sample of posts I could find most easily: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

It seems that #scio12 attendees are not the only ones with unusual and circuitous career trajectories in and out of science. Perhaps the “usual” path is the most unusual of all. There is a lesson in this somewhere….

Move aside, C.P.Snow, we bridged dozens of cultures

Writing text is not the only way of communicating science. And it can only reach certain audiences. There are many other ways to communicate science, either independently or in conjunction with text, each method potentially reaching a different segment of the target population: art, illustration, photography, maps, data visualization, sounds, music, animation, video, games…possibilities are endless.

We’ve always had sessions on art and video, but this year we really upped the ante. There was a whole slew of workshops on art, photography, data visualization, making maps, making videos, etc, and many sessions discussed the relationship between science and various areas of art, photography and music.

Artists submitted their art for the Art Contest. Their submissions were projected on a screen in the Cafe room and were given prizes in the end. Videographers, likewise, sent in their work ahead of time and their videos were projected during the Film Festival, again with prizes.

Maggie Pingolt, Russ Creech and Brian Crawford took most of the “official” photos at the conference, but others did their share as well. Probably the most popular was the #youhavebeenframed series – many of the people in those photos now use the images as their new Twitter avatars.

If you look at Flickr sets tagged with scio12 or scienceonline2012 or YouTube videos tagged with scio12, you will see that many participants used the conference to practice their skills – some with amazing results.

Perrin Ireland led a workshop on Sketch-notes on the very first morning, after which she and her brand-new trainees drew cartoon notes of all the sessions they subsequently attended – this was a huge hit!

A couple of dozen attendees went to a tour of the NC Arboretum and drew, painted or photographed the amazing flora there. Much of their work is now online.

Podcasts are still coming out, but listen to Nadja Popovich’s official ones here. Finally, several videos were made at the venue, some still in production, some embedded into this post, others easily found on YouTube.

And then….oh my! Some attendees decided to make art permanent, on their own bodies! They went to Dogstar Tattoo Company for a Science Ink tour. After hearing Carl Zimmer talk about the history of tattooing, and having his book signed, several participants got their own tattoos (less courageous of us got temporary tattoos, provided to everyone at registration).

From the Raleigh News & Observer: Rebecca Guenard, center, and Russ Creech, left, watch as Christie Wilcox, who is getting her PHd at the University of Hawaii, gets a lionfish tattoo from Kathryn Moore at Dogstar Tattoo Company in Durham Friday, January 20, 2012. Wilcox is one of the attendees in the ScienceOnline2012 conference in Raleigh.

And it is not just art – history, philosophy, sociology, ethics, politics, mathematics, literary narrative and humor kept cropping up in many sessions and events, some dedicated to it, some not. Music had its own session, but also made an appearance in discussion of crafting a longform narrative, in a session on data journalism, and in discussions of video. And at the Open Mic, we could see that many scientists and science communicators have tremendous musical talents.

Math had its own two sessions and two Blitz-talks, yet also invaded many other talks and sessions, from narrative to altmetrics. I doubt anyone at #scio12 is such a stereotypical data-robot not to be moved and impressed by this interweaving of a whole slew of ‘cultures’. After all, it’s all about context. Person most excited exiting the altmetrics Blitz-talk was a historian! If years of library digging – stuff that makes a PhDs in history – can be replaced by a few clicks to get patterns of citations and mentions over time, then historians can finally focus on the real deal: analysis and interpretation of such patterns. Can you imagine the time-saving and re-focus that discipline can have?

Storytelling, though part of the discussion in several sessions, also had a DIY component – the Monti storytelling show during the banquet. Humor was discussed in a dedicated session (as well as in a couple of others), and then there was Brian Malow, switching from theory to practice, doing stand-up science comedy (which also included art) during lunch.

Heck, even sports snuck in somehow – we all got an introduction to the wonderful world of curling.

To boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before…

A lot of the discussion at ScienceOnline2012 was, without stating so overtly, about the distinction between push and pull strategies for reaching new audiences. We are pretty happy with what we can do – and the quality of work – at science-dedicated venues, be it the science section of NYTimes, or pop-sci magazines, or specialized science radio shows, or blogs, podcasts and websites. People working at such venues tend to be good at what they do and they tend to be… at ScienceOnline!

As the now famous diagram by Ed Yong demonstrates – the good scientists and good journalists talk to each other about bad scientists and bad journalists who are conspicuously absent. But those bad scientists and journalists have to be reached or replaced. How? They work in mass media we cannot penetrate, addressing audiences we cannot reach. How do we also get there and reach those same vast audiences with well-done science stories?

It’s hard, but it can be done. There were more than several people at the meeting who do it, daily or occasionally. They have great success and their new audiences appreciate them. The resistance mostly comes from our own ranks!

When a scientist publishes text and data in a scientific paper (especially behind a paywall), the audience is miniscule and the effect on popular understanding of science and trust in scientists is zero. But when a scientist decides to show up in the media as a source, s/he gets tagged as a “media whore” by the colleagues in the department (or in the entire discipline). The ‘Sagan-Gould effect’. If you popularize science, your research must be suspicious, right?

And if on top of appearing in traditional media you also do some of your own blogging, or engagement on social networks, the eye-rolling and ‘tsk-tsk’-ing must be endless. You may have to do this pseudonymously because your PI or your Department Head may explicitly forbid online engagement. In some places it is the government that prohibits scientists from talking to the media. It takes some courage to go ahead and do it anyway. The problem is not the audience, but one’s bosses and colleagues. People who do this anyway are at ScienceOnline. But how do we reach people who are too afraid to do this – they are too afraid to come to ScienceOnline as well!

Scientists are also chastised by their colleagues if they voice a political opinion, even if it comes to policies that directly affect them, e.g, opposing the RWA bill. The instinct to present an apolitical face is strong among scientists (as well as many journalists), with sometimes devastating consequences.

Other science communicators push the envelope by doing something else – publishing in unlikely venues or trying to reach new audiences by going where those audiences are.

You may go where the cheerleading fans are, then serve them science. The audiences love it, the traditional science communicators accuse you of sexism.

A reader of Playboy magazine may read it for the Vonnegut stories, but then gets served science. The target audience loves it. The traditional science communicators accuse you of sexism.

Your audience may go to BlogHer to get sex advice, and get served science. The audience loves it. The traditional science communicators think you are not really up to par.

Your audience may follow the links to hear some hip-hop, and there they get served science. The audiences love it, but since the traditional communicators do not grok that culture, they may not think you are good enough. Seriously?

You start pushing hard science and skepticism at the super-popular website infamous for its richness of dangerous medical quackery and ridiculous New Age pseudoscience. The audience laps it up. The traditional science communicators are skeptical.

You may have an unusual background, unusual career, unusual “looks” for a scientist, more balls and ovaries than the remaining 456 people in the room for the Keynote lecture, go where most guys have no courage to go, face certain death five times, discover a new species, still do your own lab science, are a role-model for balancing career with life as a parent, but since you are on TV, with your own show, this must mean that you are a bad scientist or no scientist at all, right? It does not matter that TV is the hardest medium to penetrate, and the hardest medium to get science done right (it is a very male, ego-driven culture, full of people who “know what works on TV” and thus will not listen), and that we are all saying that someone’s gotta do it because everyone watches TV – that’s where the real “mass” audience is. But when someone does, and does it well, we are all up in arms? We invited Mireya to do the keynote specifically to break those biases among ourselves. It seems it worked. And everyone who got to chat with her during the remainder of the meeting has a new appreciation for her as a person with passion, for her science, for her work as a science communicator, for her groundedness and level-headedness, sense of humor and overall humanity. She’ll be back next year, as one of us, doing something fun, TBD.

If we want to reach broader audiences, we have to get out of our own comfort zones, adopt the cultures of those audiences, and serve them science wherever they are, in ways they can like and appreciate. Hard to do. But if the ScienceOnline community does not lead the way, who will? We may think, from our perspectives, that some of those cultures are imperfect for various, often valid reasons (e.g., sexism). But are we going to avoid communicating science to all the people we deem imperfect? If so, all we are left is our own echo-chamber. We need to break out of it – isn’t that what the Web is good for?

We keep saying that we should divert attention of people who are browsing the Web looking for celebrity gossip, or politics, or attractive human forms, to cool science stories instead. Let’s do even more of that! And support those of us who are trying.

Your feedback

So far, 186 out of 457 attendees responded to the feedback form. If you have not yet done so, please do it now (we’ll later have a separate feedback form for people who attended virtually).

We read your responses very carefully every year, many times throughout the year, and try to address the issues you identify, or incorporate your ideas. Your feedback is extremely valuable to us so we can always try to make the conference better than the previous year.

I take it as a sign of generally even and high quality of the program that so many sessions are picked as the “strongest point” or “highlight” of the conference, instead of one or two sessions dominating that question. On the other hand, each session that was identified as “weakest point” by some people was also touted as the best session by someone else – just goes to show that tastes differ.

This also tells me I need to work closer with moderators in making descriptions of sessions as crystal-clear as possible as to what exactly they will cover, at which level, for which audiences (though unconference format can lead to a different session anyway), so people have a better idea what to expect. And some of the feedback noted serendipity – attending a session that was very different from expected and learning a lot from it nonetheless. We are also happy that many informal events got frequent mentions as highlights – Keynote, The Monti, comedy lunch, several tours, evening at the Museum…

The reaction to the Keynote was overwhelmingly positive. Some extremely positive. About a dozen respondents (all women) replied in a similar vein – they came in with trepidation and skepticism and came out enlightened and with their worlds turned upside-down, the same reaction Zuska wrote about in public. And Janet’s banquet story was a perfect book-end to it as well. There were only three strongly negative responses, including one by a person who did not attend the Keynote or talk to Mireya in person, carefully protecting one’s a priori biases from potential challenge.

And every time we get an email notification that a new feedback form came in, we have the urge to respond, to answer your questions. I will not break your anonymity, but I can speak to some concerns in general terms. In some cases, our reaction is “Hey, we sent out this information in advance, you should have read our email messages”. In other cases we think “Oh well, we have to make sure to use ALL methods of communication, and repeatedly so, and not hope that one tl:dr email and a few tweets are sufficient.

Different people have different communications habits, and different personal schedules (travel, work, teaching, ups and downs in ability to respond), so each piece of information needs to be sent out multiple times by email, Twitter, G+, Facebook, blog, etc., in order to reach everyone and make sure that everyone has all the information in timely manner. As I noted above, 64 attendees did not enter a Twitter account into their registration form (and most of those really are not on Twitter), while some others may use it rarely, or are new to the platform and still do not know how to follow hashtags and lists well. So Twitter, while it reaches most of our participants, does not reach 100% and we need to keep that in mind.

For many other questions, comments and suggestions in the forms, we have a generic response: “Yes, we wanted to do that, but could not due to reasons X, Y and Z”, where X = insufficient funds, Y = insufficient time/manpower, and Z = there are legal or administrative barriers to doing this.

- Hotel. It would be great (and so much easier for us and everyone) if all the attendees were housed at the same hotel. We’ll try to do that for next year. Now that Doubletree has survived us once, saw that we can fill the hotel during off-season, make a little noise but no damage, and can clean up the bar supplies every night, I bet they will like to have us back again next year (though not sure they have enough room for all of us). We can negotiate with them earlier in the year for more rooms for everyone.

- Shuttles. We’d love to have more buses going at more times, but that is an extremely expensive part of our budget. As a quarter of our attendees are locals, we can try to summon them to do more carpooling of guests next time. Or if a good sponsor comes along, we can perhaps provide more buses.

- Banquet. It is absolutely wonderful working with the McKimmon crew and the NCSU people. It is due to them that we could have a small miracle of actually serving alcoholic drinks at the banquet. McKimmon is on state property and has to abide by state laws and regulations. Serving alcohol requires a lot of paperwork being approved by several layers of bureaucracy, but our hosts helped us navigate that potential quagmire with grace and ease.

As you know, Doubletree/Brownstone hotel was just renovated… except the ballroom which is still under renovation. By this time next year, their ballroom will be looking good again, so perhaps we can have the banquet there, allowing us to spend more time there, have a greater variety of food and drinks, and not worry about transportation to and from it. This can have an additional effect of bringing the locals to the hotel bar to mingle with the guests from out of town a little more.

- Technical stuff. There were some glitches in some sessions – screens going up, laptops requiring passwords we were not given etc. Happens when one moves to a new building after four years of intimate familiarity with every detail of the old building. The McKimmon crew is very responsive and is actively seeking our feedback. I am sure those problems will be eliminated by next year (but, as is normal with technology, who knows what new problems will arise).

- Wifi. This is the third year in a row that our friends from SignalShare provided wifi for us (I bet they are providing wifi for SuperBowl as I write this – they’ll read this later). It rocks! With 450 highly-connected people constantly uploading and downloading stuff, tweeting, blogging, etc., no building can support our conference with its native wifi.

It seems from the feedback forms that one or two people erroneously chose one of the NCSU or McKimmon wifis instead of the official “ScienceOnline2012″ one, in which case they reported some slow-downs and hiccups. We’ll try to make sure to communicate this little detail repeatedly next year, so people know what to do. Despite getting a good deal on this from our neighborly crew, wifi is one of the biggest items in our budget – if your organization is interested in sponsoring wifi next year (with the banner with your name occasionally showing up at the bottom – just start scrolling and it disappears), let us know as soon as you can.

- Livestreaming and recording. This is by far the most expensive item on our list and this year we just did not have the funds to do it. We tried until the very last day to find a sponsor (we had people lined up, ready to do it) but it did not materialize. In retrospect, we should have abandoned the idea earlier and focused more strongly on Plan B – providing a bunch of tripods and Flip cameras and asking our student-volunteers to record all the sessions and instantly upload them.

This way, we had to do it in a rush and rely on voluntary action of participants. We brought in a few Flips and issued a call for people to come and get them and to film sessions. Luckily, several people did, so many sessions are now online (just search YouTube for “scio12“). Hopefully a couple of generous sponsors will come in to fund this important service next year, or if the date is right we may explore a partnership with the Elon University school of journalism and hire their students to do this – livestreaming and recording are essential for including the virtual participants.

- Twitter and screens. We wanted to have a big screen with Twitterfall in the hallway, as well as to project the Art Contest entries on a larger screen, but this also fell by the wayside due to insufficient funds. Hopefully next year…

Twitter.com is actively blocking people from collecting tweets. A Twapperkeeper with about 11,000+ tweets generated before the conference is now gone, but I copied and pasted them all into an RTF document. There is roughly a day-long break during Tue-Wed of active tweeting where we have no collection I know of. There were apparently more than 17,000 tweets generated during the conference itself. And many more since then.

I have all of those tweets saved in my Gmail – I use tweetymail.com service which sends me notifications whenever the #scio12 hastag is used, usually sending it in batches of 20-100 tweets. That is still hundreds (perhaps thousands) of email notifications, but I have them and if I find a free hour or two I may also copy them into an RTF file – useless for Storifys, but if anyone has a use for them, let me know and I can compile and send. Finally, there are some collected subsets of tweets here, here and here that you may be able to use for Storifys, stats, etc.

- Babysitting. We want to make the conference family friendly. There were several kids (and even babies) at the conference – luckily we had LEGOs and plenty of fresh fruit. Unfortunately, we cannot legally organize or hire babysitters and have the kids be taken care at McKimmon. The best we can do is provide information in advance, e.g., names and recommendations for local babysitters or services, and let the parents make their own arrangements. We will also look into options for science-themed kids programing off-campus, since we are not allowed to make any such arrangements on campus.

- Cafe room. Big hit of the conference. Kudos to Karyn for her creative vision in organizing this space. LEGOs, coffee, food, tables for laptops, comfy chairs for chatting, power strips, books, art, bones, armpit swabs, more coffee, and the man behind the curtain! Definitely the center of activity for the entire conference, a place for serendipitous encounter and fun conversations.

- Swag. Most people are very happy with our decision to reduce the swag from an enormous bag of stuff to a nifty little notebook filled with stickers and temporary tattoos. The book lottery was a huge hit as well. So was the ThinkGeek swag served for the banquet dinner. But we were floored as to how many people mentioned in their feedback forms how much they loved the automatic dispensers of M&Ms with the #scio12 and Mendeley logos. Note to self: repeat something like this next year.

Next year

Yes, we will do this again next year. We do not have the date yet. First we need to confirm that McKimmon will have us again, then see what is on their calendar. It will be at roughly the same time – second half of January or perhaps very early February. Different people have different dates for their first day of classes, or attend different conferences. Still, once February comes, the density of other conferences becomes so high, we are bound to conflict with many of them. But let us know about the big ones that our attendees are likely to attend in large numbers, e.g., TAM or SICB.

At this point, there are 209 names on the waitlist. We did not “clean it up” as we went, so a couple of dozen of those people actually registered and attended, but that is still a large number. The mention and link in the New York Times article earlier in the week sent a flurry of new applicants to the waitlist, some as late as Saturday afternoon when the conference was already wrapping up. I guess people know that getting on the waitlist also automatically means getting on our mailing list, so they can get alerts in advance for the next year.

So, what do we do next? It seems that with 457 people we have reached the limit. Anything bigger than that and there is no way the intimate feel of the meeting can remain. Already a common theme on Twitter, after the conference ended, was people lamenting missing meeting some of the others.

In his post, Ed Yong stresses that we “rig things so that the most passionate people show up”. But that is only half of the picture – as I explained a couple of weeks ago, the excitable and tuned-in folks are essential but not sufficient for the success of the conference. Yes, they help shape the program throughout the year, they hit the ground running on Day One, they know how to do the ‘unconference’ method of leading sessions, they are more than welcoming to the newbies, but without newbies there would be no ScienceOnline. They refresh us every year. They bring in new ideas. They connect us to different communities back home once they leave.

They may be exactly the kind of people we want – non-blogging scientists, “bad” journalists, high school students, senior citizens with decades of media experience under their belts, as well as representatives of different groups, cultures or subcultures that can inject new ways of thinking into our community. They may belong to groups that are traditionally not welcome at the table so they may be reluctant to push their way in by being super-fast during registration times, but rather need to be invited, with a genuine welcome they can trust.

So we actually “rig things” so we get a little bit of both – as you could see this year: half veterans, half new people, more than half women, less than half bloggers or journalists, a quarter locals, many representatives of different scientific, geographic, professional or ethnic communities. The excitable veterans may fill first 100 slots within two minutes, but there are ways to bring in others as well – as moderators of sessions, as volunteers, as scholarship recipients, as Keynote speakers or Blitz-talk presenters. As the conference grows, and more and more people really, truly want to be here, this task becomes more difficult. We welcome other ideas that can help this happen.

As I also explained a couple of weeks ago, we do not want to change our funding methods. We don’t want to accept a large sponsorship from a large company that can then turn around and start shaping the program, e.g., insisting their CEO gives the Keynote lecture, or veto-ing a session. And we don’t want to substantially increase the registration fee because it is important to us to provide few barriers to people who cannot really afford to come here – we’d rather help them by waiving the fee and providing travel grants.

But this does not scale well. The registration fee does not pay for the participant. For $150 (or $75 if you are student), you get 6-7 complete meals, three whole days of coffee and snacks, rocking wifi, free transportation, entertainment, swag, books, personalized M&Ms, the Keynote speaker, use of equipment, and a good feeling that your fee or personal donation went toward travel grants for students, people without steady jobs, or people traveling from other continents. All of that needs to be sponsored and we prefer to have many small sponsors, each paying for one element of the event, rather than one or two huge sponsors who cover everything. Thus, we have to work hard to use every single dollar in the best possible way, often pondering late at night what would be the best use of the limited funds we have. We are pondering alternative methods of funding as well – from crowdfunding to setting up a swag store – and are interested in your thoughts.

According to Jeff Jarvis and his commenters, at this point, a popular conference can go in two ways: it can keep growing, like SXSW, and become more corporate and less of a community event; or it can limit the growth, like TED, and become exclusive, expensive and elitist. We don’t want to go either way.

It is likely, if the trend continues, that next year we’ll have more people stuck (and unhappy) on the waitlist than people registered. Thus, doing much more to include virtual participants is essential. We are also working on releasing some of that pressure by organizing additional events, either by ourselves, or in partnership with other organizations like Nature Publishing Group, or releasing our brand name to other groups to organize on their own. Sorta like TEDx events soften the exclusivity of the original TED, or the way 140conf has branched out to different cities and topics.

There are three potential models for this. One is an annual large event in other cities, like Science Online London. Another is a smaller monthly event with a single evening session, modeled after Science Online NYC. The third is a completely informal gather-and-drink monthly event, like #NYCSciTweetUp (now already copied in Washington DC and in Chicago, with Raleigh and Seattle doing some thinking about doing the same). We are exploring all of these options with potential partners for San Francisco this year, and potentially Austin, Chicago, Vancouver, Belgrade and Antananarivo in the future. Also, a topical Science Online Teen (#sciojr) is being planned for New York City in 2013. Events that occur entirely online are not out of the question, either.

Call to action

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been trying to get ScienceOnline to slowly move from just talking to also doing. This year we did it – I think quite successfully – with art, photography, music, podcasting and video, as I already described above in the “bridging the cultures” subheading. In each of these areas we had workshops where people learned new skills, sessions where people discussed the applications of these skills, and events or opportunities to practice those skills on the spot.

Next year we want to do more. This year moderators got a gentle nudge to try to have goals, hopefully actionable goals, for their sessions. Next year, we’ll work in advance to make sure that some such actions materialize. There is already a discussion about a Hackaton on the 2013 wiki, with potentially multiple activities – some involving coding, some involving online activity not requiring coding skills, and some involving offline activity (yes, this year we had LEGO blocks for practice, but no clear goal as to what to do with them).

We are also interested in heeding Dave Wescott’s call for preparing action in countering politically motivated anti-science movements, both those coming from the Right (GW denialism, creationism, ban on stem cell research, etc.) and those coming from the Left (animal rights terrorism, anti-vaccination movement, New Age woo, anti-GMO-foods, etc.) – the two may require different strategies. Suggestions as to how to do this right are welcome – or just add ideas to the wiki.

Citizen Science projects are especially of interest to us. Last year, a number of participants got their navels swabbed, and the bacteria from them subsequently cultured. This year, the people from Rob Dunn’s lab were back, taking samples from the armpits. I am afraid to ask which orifice they intend to sample next year…and we hope we can do some other stuff as well.

Inspiration

We really like the way ScienceOnline inspires people to do more, or to start new projects with people they just met, or dig into information they first heard at the conference and write about it in greater depth later.

In the years past, many such projects had their first seeds at our meeting, and often were officially announced at the same meeting a year after. For example, ScienceSeeker was unveiled at last year’s conference, while some nifty upgrades were announced during this one.

This year, I understand that the session on using music and geometry to craft longform pieces will soon result in a webinar of sorts. Rachel Nuwer was inspired by the Lemur tour to dig deeper. Robin Lloyd and Matt Shipman were impressed by the Forensic Anthropology tour (as well as the table of bones the lab brought to McKimmon Center). Helen Chappel, Elizabeth Preston, Anna Kuchment and Brian Switek heard or saw something new and quirky at the two (Raleigh and Durham) Museum tours and wrote pieces with more details.

That’s the spirit!

See the current listing of blog and media coverage of #scio12 (and add any missing links if you know of them, please). If anything else comes out of the meeting, please let us know. And see you online, for the online year-long #scio13 until we meet again in person next January.

~~~

Photos: mostly from the #scio12 Flickr collection, by Maggie Pingolt, Russ Creech, Brian Crawford, Dawn Crawford, Anton Zuiker, Mindy Weisberger, Graham Steel, Stacy Baker, Colin Schultz, Rachel Ward, Stacey Shackford, Perrin Ireland, Katie PhD and North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Photo from the tattoo tour in Raleigh New & Observer, by Ethan Hyman. Ed Yong’s flow-chart graph, by Ed Yong. Wordle by Walter Jessen. Group photo of scio12-artists by Glendon Mellow. Chimp caricature of me, by Nathaniel Gold. Let me know if I omitted anyone.

Best of December at A Blog Around The Clock – the usual monthly summary, just like this one.

ABATC Year in Review – 2011 – a good place to start if you are new to this blog and would like to see at a glance what it is about.

ScienceOnline2011 – interview with Kristi Holmes – the last in the 2011 series, the 2012 series starting soon.

ScienceOnline2012 – the Unconference, the Community – a long, serious, detailed post about the conference and what it all means.

#scio12: Multitudes of Sciences, Multitudes of Journalisms, and the Disappearance of the Quote. – another long, serious, provocative post, to set the stage for #scio12 discussions.

Something funny for you while I am busy at #scio12 – a great new video from the recent SHERP graduates.

Previously in the “Best of…” series:

2011

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2010

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2009

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

Featuring: Francie Diep, Emily Elert, Rose Eveleth, Mary Beth Griggs, Mara Grunbaum, Ferris Jabr and Douglas Main, all recent graduates of the Science Writing program (SHERP) at the NYU school of journalism.

Plenary Panel: Check, check, 1, 2…The sticky wicket of the scientist-journalist relationship

Besides me, the panelists will be Maggie Koerth-Baker and Seth Mnookin. It will be moderated by David Kroll.

The motivation for this panel came from a stormy debate that took place a few months ago on science blogs, social networks and The Guardian pages, about the pros and cons of some journalists’ practice of checking one’s facts or quotes with one’s sources. If you missed it, or if you want to refresh your memory, here is the listing of the main links to the debate:

Trine Tsouderos on This Week in Virology: When do you fact-check article content with sources?

How do scientists view fact-checking by science writers?

Getting on the same page with Science Journalists

Readbacks and Researchers

Scientists should not be allowed to copy-check stories about their work

Scientists should be allowed to check stories on their work before publication

Scientist copy-checking: Point-counterpoint at the Guardian

Journalists, editors and science writers – checking with the source

What’s wrong with this piece on science and journalism? Oh, let me count the ways.

Guardian ends run of smart science journalism discussions with scientists’ self-congratulatory essay about peer review*

Introducing SciWriteLabs. Today’s installment: Kroll and Racaniello discuss the journalism/factchecking debate

SciWriteLabs #2: Reuters’ Ivan Oransky and Wired’s Adam Rogers on sources v. subjects & more on the factchecking debate

SciWriteLabs #3: TWiV co-hosts on arrogance vs. accountability

SciWriteLabs #4, in which Alistair Dove argues that bad science inevitably gets “overwritten” by good science…and I point out on all the harm that can happen in the meantime

SciWriteLabs #5.1: Nature’s Ananyo Bhattacharya on “Bad Science,” inverted pyramids, and information webs

SciWriteLabs #5.2: Bhattacharya returns! The MMR debacle and why peer review is no substitute for penetrative reporting

Nine ways scientists demonstrate they don’t understand journalism

Nine ways journalists demonstrate they don’t understand science

I hope you read those – quite an interesting debate. There was some misunderstanding, at least at first, as to what is really meant. Checking facts, or checking copy, checking with sources, or checking with subjects, or checking with third parties? In general, journalists were on the side “never show copy to scientists”, while scientists were on the side of “you better show me the copy to approve”. A clash of cultures.

What struck me, as I was reading all those posts and articles back then, how much the debate is anchored in the “here and now” of the current practices in the current media environment (or perhaps, a media environment of the late 20th century). I like, when thinking about such topics, to take a longer view. I want to explore how the practice started. How was it done in some relevant time in the past, be it a decade ago, or a century ago, or in the 17th century, or in the caves, or the savannah or the Primordial Soup, whatever is the appropriate time period to look at. On the other end, I like to think into the future. It is perilous to make exact predictions about the future, especially giving confident numbers (e.g., “5 years from now”), but one can assess current trends, project them into the future assuming the trends will continue, then envision a new future environment and examine how it would affect the practices in question. So let me try to take a quick stab at the clash of cultures exemplified by the articles linked above.

Who is the author of the article?

A journalist is writing an article about a scientific topic. He/she calls up a couple of experts to make sure all the facts are right. As a reward, the experts will get named and briefly quoted in the article. This also shows that the journalist did the duty of checking with experts. The journalist finishes the article and turns it in for publication. His/her name will be up on top, so the assumption is that his/her reputation is on the line, and that he/she is the author of the piece and has full control over it.

A scientist – one of those experts called in – does not think that way about the authorship. In science, the author is NOT the one who writes the words. In science, the authors are people who identify the problem, ask the question, get hired by an institution that can provide space, successfully get grant money, set up a lab, gather a good team (students, postdocs, technicians, collaborators), get the experiments done, analyze data, interpret the results. The last step of the scientific process, communication of the results, is often seen as separate endeavor. Sure, most scientists, especially in smaller labs, write their manuscripts themselves. But bigger labs employ professional writers to write all the manuscripts, grant proposals, etc. Those writers are never considered to be authors, because they are not considered to have intellectually contributed to the work. In the world of science, authorship has nothing to do with writing.

Thus, in the example above, the scientist, being the one who supplied the information, considers him/herself to be the author of the article, with the journalist acting as someone who just writes it up. The article is about “my area of expertise, quoting me as an expert, so if the guy gets something wrong the whole scientific community will laugh at me, and my reputation is going to hell, thus as the author of the piece I have to have complete control over it, just like when I write a manuscript or a grant proposal”.

Think about it: two people each inhabit their own cultures, and each fails to recognize that the other person’s reputation hinges on the accuracy of the same piece of writing! Of course they both want control over it!

The problem of the quote

I do not know when the practice of quoting began and why. I can guess at a couple of reasons for it. First, that was a way for a reporter to signal to the editor that he has actually called experts instead of writing something out of thin air. Second, it saves space, which in the realm of paper publishing, is limited. Third, it moves some of the responsibility off the reporter and onto the expert. If the statement is wrong, the reporter can have an excuse: “That’s what she said”.

A scientist interviewed for an article will talk for an hour. She would much prefer if the reporter summarized that hour in a paragraph and let her check if it’s accurate. The quote, no matter which two sentences have been pulled out of an hour-long interview, can never be representative of the entire hour’s material. Every quote is by definition a quote out of context. Every quote is always a misquote.

But if a quote is a must, then the scientist is worried – which two sentences will get picked and how much will those two sentences be misleading without the proper context?

Everyone who’s ever been quoted is always unhappy with the quote. Reporter is often blamed, but really, it is the problem of the form. If no quote can ever be representative of what the person said in an hour, then every quote must be, by definition, an atrocity that puts the quotee in bad light. Many people have quit doing interviews entirely because of this.

I was interviewed for and quoted in an article in New York Times today (it is actually a very good article – the discussion below is not a judgment on the article as a whole). See:

Cracking Open the Scientific Process.

By Travis Dove, The New York Times

We spoke on the phone for more than an hour. We covered a lot of ground. I got two quotes in there. They are kinda OK, not totally misleading, but they are not representative of what I said, nor are they representative of who I am and what I stand for, and why I was interviewed in the first place. Was the whole interview a waste of time if the key ingredients did not make it into the article?

One quote is about journals, specifically Nature. I was pushed to say something, but I was reluctant to say much, since SciAm is owned by Nature, and I have no idea what the bosses at Nature are thinking and planning – I am not an expert on the inner workings of NPG. But I did go at lengths about the journal publishing business as a whole, various new models, how the Web is changing the publishing industry, how different major players are responding to changes, etc. In the end, I guess the NPG bosses are happy with my quotes because it appears I am defending them. My friends may raise their eyebrows, thinking I am abandoning my proselytizing for Open Access. Other readers may be misled in thinking that my off-the-cuff semi-sentences are indications of some big changes at Nature that are secret but I know about them. Yet others may think, because of the context of the previous paragraph, that I am defending the entire publishing industry. Not clear. Not where my expertise lies. Not what I wanted to talk about. Not why I was supposed to be in that article in the first place. But hey, I am happy to have a photo in NYT and a link to my blog and to ScienceOnline2012.com homepage.

My other quote says something about replacing articles about Lindsay Lohan with articles about science. Catchy quote. Good for SEO. But the point of that part of the interview was different – I was talking about the differences between push and pull strategies for science communication and how science stories should appear where the people are, e.g., right next to Lohan stories. The idea is that all science communicators, including professional science media, are in the same business with the same goal – promoting science. Instead of thinking of each other as competitors, more and more such organizations see each other as collaborators. The true competitor for audience attention is popular culture. Really, all I did was rehash what I wrote a long time ago in this post, just updating the name of the celebrity. You could not glean any of it from my quote, right?

So, what to do?

This is the era of the Web. There is no limit to space. And not using links is rude and diminishes one’s trust with the readers. Thus:

Both the reporter and the interviewee should record the whole thing (and really, at this day and age you should be recording, not hammering notes into a stone tablet). And then, they should both post the recording online. And the final article should link to the recording (or full transcript) of the interview. A quote should never stand alone – it should only serve as a ‘hook’ for the readers to click on the link and listen to (or read) the whole thing. That is what I have in the past dubbed The Ethics of The Quote.

This way, nobody is quoted out of context. No more finger-pointing between the two parties. No more battle over control of the final text, or “who is the real author here” debate. The whole “sharing with sources” debate becomes moot.

Multitudes of Sciences

In all of these debates about science journalism, we always tend to talk about Science as if it was a unified ‘thing’. But it is not. There are numerous scientific cultures. The culture is affected by one’s discipline, by the department and institution, and by country in which the lab resides.

Some disciplines attract a lot of money. They are a potential road to fame, wealth and power. They can be extremely competitive, attracting people into it who are already competitive, then enculturating them to become even more so. Careers are made or broken by the Impact Factor of the journal one manages to publish in. Speedy lab techniques introduce a real potential for getting scooped. Secretiveness rules. The discipline is potentially politicized. The field may be essentially basic science, but it masquerades as applied in order to garner funding and attention. Labs are likely to be in top-level research institutions, usually in the Western countries.

Other disciplines attract loners, in small departments, in small schools, often in other countries, where pressures are lower. They pursue some weird, quirky research out of personal curiosity. It costs very little. There is no Nobel prize for what they do. Society journals (or PLoS ONE these days) are perfectly fine venues for the occasional publication. Teaching and outreach are as important as research. It is unlikely or impossible to get scooped, so free and open discourse is a norm. Drafts of manuscripts are shared with “competitors” asking for feedback (well, there are only three other people in the world doing the same thing, might as well be friends and coordinate work instead of wasting time doing exact same experiments). The society does not even have to notify the hotel that the entire field will come in one day and have their annual meeting in their lobby.

Covering these two disciplines, as a journalist, cannot be the same thing. Practitioners in one of them you can trust much more than the other, right? So your attitude is different – more antagonistic for one discipline (or institution, or country), more collaborative for the other.

Multitudes of Journalisms

Just like there are many sciences, not just one, there are also many ‘journalisms’, not just one, and we should be aware of this in these discussions. A lot of these debates assume that everyone knows the inside baseball of a newsroom. But people who are just the audience don’t know much about how the divisions work within the media. Everything that is in the paper is, well, “in the paper”. News, features, investigative reporting, op-eds, obituaries, sports results, TV listings, ads, comics, horoscopes…all of that is in the paper. Thus, for a casual reader, a regular citizen, all of it is media, and journalism, and news. Even before the Web, when one arrives to a page via link with no orientation where it belongs on the website, people did not know the difference between “straight” reporting, and editorials, etc. The same also includes radio, television and, these days, also the Internet. It is all media.

But, whenever we get into these debates, especially when bloggers start showing examples of the quality of their work in many areas – news coverage, features, explainers, fact-checking, investigative reporting, etc. the old-style journos retreat into defining “real journalism” very narrowly, as investigative journalism only. They tend to cling to the Woodward Bernstein Myth, as if that was real, and if that was usual, and as if that was the only journalism worth the name. But cartoons are journalism, too, you know, if you ask anyone on the street reading your newspaper….

So yes, an intrepid reporter who sniffs a fishy story and doggedly pursues it until the dirt is uncovered and a career affected (e.g., by sending someone to jail, or leading to loss of job, or medical/law licence, etc. – see Brian Deer vs. Wakefield) is doing an extraordinary feat of journalism.

But is that science journalism?

For a long time I have been arguing that journalism that investigates misdeeds by scientists is not science journalism, but political (or economic or financial or whatever) journalism that just happens to involve a scientist, so the academic context is important (how does the money flow through the system, how does reputation and hierarchy work in it, etc.).

In science journalism, it is the scientists who discovered the secrets, and the journalists help share the discovery with the public. The scientist has nothing to hide. Collaborative, not antagonistic work. Mutual trust, not suspicion. In science journalism, as opposed to investigative journalism that happens to involve a scientist, the scientist is the source, not subject. The process of writing the article is a collaborative project. Both are authors. So why not share? Not just quotes – heck, work on the article together in a Google doc.

I know the people with the Woodward-Bernstein Complex will not like the paragraphs above (and by golly, how many students go into journalism due to the Woodward-Bernstein Complex because they saw “All The President’s Men”!!!!). I still stand by them – science journalism is writing about science to lay audiences with a goal to inform, educate and entertain.

If we classify science stories into ‘cool’, ‘relevant’ and ‘fishy’, the third one is not really science journalism as its goal is not to promote science to the lay audience. Indeed, it may have the opposite effect, that of reducing trust in science and scientists, especially if that is all people see. It is important, it forces the academic world to act against its bad actors faster than the usual “we’ll do it fast, in about two years of committee meetings” speed.

But it is inside baseball, and it is not the kind of stories I would push very much in front of completely lay audience, side-by-side with Lindsey Lohan. Perhaps it would be better to put those pieces into the “pull media” outlets, where those who need to see it – because they can act to exert pressure – can see it. Better that than projecting the image of science as being eternally untrustworthy, leading to all the climate denialism and other politicized anti-science movements that capitalize on that kind of perception.

Remember: 99.9% of scientists are honest, are excited about their work and about science, and are careful not to over-stress the importance of their findings. It’s part of their culture and their training. They are not trying to sell you anything. I understand that reporters whose daily beat forces them to deal entirely with the dirty deeds of a few individuals (or only cover papers in GlamourMagz authored by scientific superstars with named chairs at Ivy League schools) may have such a jaded, yet highly skewed, view of science. But it is just not correct. Most reporters, covering most areas of science, need not be so suspicious of scientists, or of PIOs at institutions, etc – they are all working collaboratively together to present the cool, new findings to the world. Work with them, not against them.

Who is a science journalist these days?

The science journalism ecosystem has been rapidly changing lately. It is becoming very difficult these days to say who is a journalist. The courts are having trouble with this as well, especially when they try to identify a person, who by virtue of working for a media organization, can be legally considered to be a journalist. What we need instead is to define acts of journalism. Anyone can commit such acts, so in court cases the point would be to determine if the act in question should be considered an act of journalism, thus perhaps deserving some protections.

In science journalism, in particular, there is a fuzzy division now between journalists and scientists. Many scientists are not sources any more, but ‘go direct’ (as Dave Winer would say) and communicate straight to their audiences.

On the other hand, more and more science journalists these days have a real background in science – they got science degrees, did scientific research, then leaked out of the tenure-track pipeline and decided to become science writers, or science journalists, or PIOs. Instead of backgrounds in English or communications, or accidentally being assigned the science beat by editors, today’s science journalists are likely to be scientists as well.

Some of them have completely quit research, but “once a scientist, always a scientist” – being a scientist is a mindset, not a profession. It comes with training. It never leaves. Though one can always learn to write better

Others still have one foot in the lab and their writing is either a semi-amateur outlet for one’s passion for writing, or is a test for a potential move into full-time writing careers.

Some scientists move from research to writing by going through specialized science writing programs in journalism schools, while others enter more ‘laterally’, by becoming successful science bloggers first.

Some are writers first, but are also heavily involved in doing Citizen Science or DIY science.

And others never intend to leave the lab, but thoroughly enjoy writing their science blogs in the evenings.

Many are not the usual white, male, middle-class, top-research-university-in-the-USA kinds of people, bringing diversity of angles, approaches and voices that help reach a broader audience than what the old-style journalists interviewing old-style scientists could ever dream of (look around the #SciAmBlogs network – there is a reason why the chosen line-up is so diverse in geography, gender, age, race/ethnicity, scientific background, writing experience, and more…despite having very different writing styles they are all awesome bloggers, and as a group they can reach an incredibly diverse and broad audience).

But then…what does it mean to be a “source” any more?

Expert bloggers, and it’s hard to think of bloggers with more expertise on their subject (or a subject requiring more expertise) than science bloggers, are their own sources. Bloggers have the liberty to cover only the areas of science they are comfortable with, those in which they are confident they have sufficient expertise in. Why call and interview (and quote) anyone else? If a paper on circadian biology comes out, I can explain it because I am one of the experts. I am both the source and the journalist when covering that paper (so I guess I will share the “copy” with myself throughout the process of me collaborating with myself).

Moreover, if a mainstream media outlet writes about the same paper, I expect they will check what the expert bloggers are saying first (easy sources that don’t need to be called) and thus see my coverage. They will then quote me, name me and link to my post (well, they should, and they better!) – my post is their expert source. It is the ready-made transcript of the interview they never conducted – they didn’t have to, because I already provided the whole text for them in advance, in public, on my blog. And if there is something fishy about the paper, I am much more likely to notice and write about it, sparing the journalist the embarrassment of getting it wrong at first, then correcting later (or worse – see the #arseniclife media debacle).

Obviously, in the new media ecosystem, the whole notion of sharing with sources is all fuzzy – who is the source these days when scientists write in public, and journalists are themselves scientists? Makes no sense. But it makes sense that people who write for the public know what they writing about. This is why science journalism has never been as good as it is now – scientists write, journalists know their science, commenters know it even better, and the audience is having great fun. Society benefits.

Experienced conference-goers can rarely be found in the actual conference rooms, or, if that would sometimes happen, they could be seen dozing off in the back row, or amusing themselves with the technology of the day (doodling on their notepad, later laptops, later iPhones/iPads). The speakers would prepare slideshows, the student presenters would all dress up and then sweat, the organizers would do their best to promote the sessions, only to see the rooms half-empty because everyone is having much more productive conversations out in the hallway.

So, some smart people a few years back decide to do something about this. Why not scratch most or all of the boring lecturing from the program, and instead move the hallway discussions into the conference rooms? Thus, the Unconference format was born. There are several different methods to organizing and participating in an Unconference (I provided some “Related” links at the bottom if you want to learn more, especially if you intend to organize an unconference yourself), but here I want to focus on the format we use at ScienceOnline conferences. While this post is public for everyone to read and think about and perhaps implement some of it in the future, the real target audience for this post are the participants (and even more: session moderators) of ScienceOnline2012, especially as more than half of the attendees this year are first-timers and may not be familiar with the format.

Building the Program

Some Unconferences build the program after the meeting starts, once everyone is in the room, using markers and a white-board over about an hour to put together a program. This can work wonderfully for a one-off local tech conference, but it has some serious drawbacks when organizing a large, international annual meeting with a particular topic. For example, this method privileges aggressive, A-type, middle-aged, white males over all the others who may not want to be so quick dashing to the board and grabbing the markers. Some topics may not be appropriate (for ScienceOnline each topic has to have a science component and an online component, not just one of the two).

Year after year the same topics would be rehashed over and over again – an annual conference needs some work to make each year new and fresh and creative and cutting-edge (and balanced – not everything should be about blogging or journalism as there are many other topics), one year’s topics are building on top of the topics already covered previously, making sure that there is interesting stuff both for the veterans and for the newcomers. Some people are paying a lot of money out of their own pockets to travel large distances, including from other continents – we cannot leave to chance the quality of the program, so this has to be done in advance.

But this does not mean that we invent the program out of our own heads. Instead, we just funnel the energy of the community. The program is crowdsourced and community-built. We put up the Program Suggestions page on the wiki early on (in March, I believe) and let the people edit the page and add their suggestions, start talking to each other and plotting (many of those ideas were first hatched on Twitter before getting added to the wiki – this shows the importance of following the #scio12 hashtag throughout the year – there are more than 10,000 tweets using this hashtag already, and the meeting is yet to start in two weeks).

In August and September we started contacting some of the people who posted interesting suggestions and helped them develop their ideas and build really interesting sessions. By October or so, this produced a rough draft of the program. By November, the final Program was set in stone. Now everyone can start preparing in advance for the sessions – it is very important to come prepared, as the quality of the discussion is dependent on the sum of the knowledge and wisdom of the people in the room (very important link to a post to read carefully), for which preparation in advance is an important factor.

Moderators of all the sessions are encouraged to start their own individual wiki pages where they can add more information, links, documents, ask questions, start the discussion in advance. Several have already done so (see examples here, here, here, here, here and here – there should be more soon). Once more of those single-session pages are built, we will also link to them from this nifty and useful Sched.org Agenda which you can use to personalize your own schedule (watch this video to get the most out of it).

Sessions – how to moderate, how to participate

There are three types of sessions this year. First, there are Blitz-talks on Friday afternoon (color-coded right now as light blue on the Agenda, but the color may change). These are fast 15-minute presentations done in a more traditional style, hoping that the discussions will commence afterwards in the hallways (and oh yeah, some of them WILL!).

Then, there are several workshop-style sessions (provisionally lavender-ish color on the Sched.org Agenda) where the people in front have skills that the people in the room are trying to learn. Just because this is more of a classroom-type situation does not mean that the session cannot be lively and interactive, as other people in the room are encouraged to ask questions and inject their own knowledge from the beginning. At previous iterations of the meeting, that is exactly what happened in each workshop.

But the majority of sessions (right now coded with banana-yellow on the Agenda, though this may change) are meant to be in a truly unconference mode: the people in front are not speakers or lecturers, they are moderators. Use of PowerPoint is strongly discouraged – if something needs to be shown, it usually can be quickly found and shown on the Web. Moderators will start the session with a brief introduction to the topic and the goals of the session, and will be ready to instantly respond to the questions and comments from the room. Their job is to make sure that the discussion goes smoothly, that it stays on topic, that no individual (including themselves) hijacks the conversation, and, in the best of all worlds, to end the session either with a resolution, an answer to a question, or with something actionable that the people in the room can commit to do or build over the following few weeks or months of collaborative work online. The session ends when people decide it’s over. Yes, the session physically ends when the time is up, but the discussion can spill into subsequent related sessions, or continue in the hallways and online as long as people want to continue – some topics go on in the blogosphere for many months after the session ends. Be prepared.

This year, for the first time (though we toyed with the idea before), we implemented three new rules which should help make the Program and the sessions more lively. First, we set a limit to two moderators per session. Tendency to build large panels (which allows more people to register as moderators, with a guaranteed slot) is not conducive to free-flowing discussion. By the time all the panelists have their say, half the allocated time is over and it is hard to get the discussion going. We’ve had a couple of panels in the past that were done well and were interactive, but those were done by organizational geniuses and we cannot be sure that can always happen. If moderators want the knowledge and wisdom of particular people to be tapped into during their session, they are encouraged to ask those people to register, come to their session, sit in the room with everyone else, and be prepared to be productive contributors to the conversation.

Second, we set a limit to two sessions per moderator. This way we avoided the situation in which many sessions are led by the same usual suspects. Instead, many sessions are going to be moderated by new people, bringing in fresh perspectives and voices, thus rejuvenating the conference and making it more interesting and more fun. Due to this year’s growth-spurt of the meeting, more than half of the attendees will be first-timers, which should prevent the veterans from forming cliques and dominating the discourse.

Third, we discourage Skyping in people. First, Skype is a drain on the wifi (and that is expensive). Second, it stilts the discussion and has to be done with care and not everyone knows how to do it well. It is not 100% reliable it will work. And, although we may do it in an emergency (e.g., if a moderator gets stuck and cannot show up at the last moment), we did not want any session moderators to plan in advance on skyping in other people, or having virtual co-moderation (hard to moderate a discussion when one cannot see/hear/feel the room, anyway).

Oh, and it is perfectly OK to enter or leave the room in the middle of the session – if the discussion goes in the direction you are not interested in, don’t waste your time, but go to another session instead. It’s fine. No, really, it’s OK.

Virtual participation

As I noted before, ScienceOnline is a kind of conference that is ongoing online throughout the year, mainly on Twitter using the official hasthtag #scio12, as well as on blogs and other online platforms. Once a year, the physical interaction gets added to this. Both Anton Zuiker and I find great value in meeting online friends in person. It raises the subsequent quality of online discourse to a higher level and allows magical things to happen – from personal friendships, to gigs and jobs, to business start-ups, to scientific collaborations and more. Meeting in person makes a community grow stronger.

But we are also aware that not everyone can come to the conference. There is limited space (about 450 people this year which is huge growth from 320 last year). Some people have to be elsewhere. Some people just live too far away. But they are part of this community, so they cannot and should not be cut off from the proceedings. The attendees themselves do most of the communication out of the conference, on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, blogs and more. Everyone is encouraged to relay as much as possible about the event to the online audiences in as real-time as humanely possible. Some sessions will probably be livestreamed and most or all sessions will be recorded in one way or another. And we will have volunteers whose task will be to produce blog posts, Storify-s of tweets, photography, podcasts and videos of the event. There will also be a variety of ways for people to post their artistic renderings of the meeting online as well (e.g., sketches, aka, livescribes of the sessions). And as many in the attendance are professional journalists, we expect, as in the past years, that MSM articles will appear soon afterward.

That is information going out. How about information coming in? There will be a Twitterfall in the hallway, but there will be none in the session rooms (for a good reason). With our attendees being so hooked online, with everyone livetweeting or liveblogging, essentially everyone in the room will be monitoring the outside twitterverse (and Facebook, G+, blogs etc) and will be ready to instantly reply. As long as people use the #scio12 hashtag, everyone in the room will be able to see their tweets, perhaps insert Twitter-posted questions into the live discussion in the room. That seemed to work the last couple of years, and should work again. Moreover, all the moderators will be instructed to pay attention to the online discussion themselves, as they have the power to move discussion in different direction in response to the online chatter.

Again this year, our friends at SignalShare will provide rocket-speed wifi at the venue. They usually do bigger events, like Super Bowl and Grammys, but from their perspective, although numerically smaller in regard to the number of people on site, we are a big event. Every year they are flabbergasted as to how much data this crowd can push through the intertubes in such a small period of time. This is a very connected crowd and people are constantly tweeting, blogging, uploading photos, podcasts and videos, and more. Not to mention livestreaming. No building has native wifi that can support this kind of crowd, but with the help of SignalShare, wifi will rock.

The ScienceOnline Community

ScienceOnline2012 is a community-organized, community-planned, community-funded, community-owned and community-run conference. The ethos of the meeting is that this is an egalitarian community. Nobody is VIP, nobody is a priori a superstar. One becomes a superstar by virtue of being here (including virtually, yes). Participating in ScienceOnline is a badge of honor and a matter of pride – it means “I am a part of the small but cutting-edge community that is changing the worlds of science and science communication”. Even those who tend to get treated as VIPs by other conferences – New York Times and The New Yorker columnists, senior scientists, Pulitzer Prize winners, familiar NPR voices, CEOs, top bloggers – love the fact that, once a year, they are equal to undergrads, high school students (and their teachers), beginner bloggers, programmers, artists, librarians, and others in the community. Everyone is a superstar in their own domain, and a n00b in others. Everyone has something to teach and something to learn. It is a lot of fun. A lot of networking goes on. A lot of intense learning goes on. Many, many collaborations and projects got started here, and those often turned into gigs and jobs later on. Some of those projects would then be first announced to the world at the next meeting.

This is one conference where personal finances do not (or at least should not, in theory) determine who can and who cannot come. This is what the community is for – to help each other. Those who can, donate their registration fees (and often more) towards the travel fund for those who cannot afford the trip. Students, freelancers, and others, come from all over the world – apart from people coming from all over the USA and Canada, we always have someone from the U.K., Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Serbia. We’ve had attendees in the past traveling from Brazil, Poland, Sweden, South Africa, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, and this year we also expect people from Denmark, Australia and Mauritius. It is a global community, each helping the others come here if possible, perhaps being recipients of such help in the previous years as people’s fortunes change over time.

Every aspect of the conference is underwritten by small sponsorships from many, many organizations, big and small, preventing any one organization from starting to dominate and thus dictate the agenda. This model of funding is not only in line with the ethos of the conference but also the first step in putting together a new system of funding. Whenever old systems break and new ones are arising, many people in the new system do not have regular jobs because such jobs do not yet exist – they are in the process of inventing them. Others in the new system, the pioneers, make sure that all the others are well taken care of before they collectively build a new system that actually creates jobs for everyone within it. This is one of the things that ScienceOnline meeting is all about.

As the Program is built by the community on the wiki over several months, and as all the extra-curricular activities, old and new, initially started as ideas from the community, everyone contributes ideas and realization of those ideas. This is why everyone feels it is their meeting. They feel an ownership of it. They do not come as guests, to see what we have prepared for them. Instead they come as hosts (even though they may live in Vancouver or Warsaw or Amsterdam or Sydney), ready to run this show. And the locals feel it doubly – for a couple of days each year, all the eyes are on the Triangle, for everyone to see what an amazing center of science, tech, and innovation this is.

Conversation

If the point of an Unconference is to take the hallway, tour-bus and hotel-bar discussions and move them into the conference rooms, then it makes sense to get the discussions started in the hallways first. To do that we have, in the past, dedicated the first day (or more) to the opportunities to mingle: Early-Bird dinner, workshops, tours, finally a Keynote, all of those happening before the official program started. This gave people plenty of time to arrive, rest, relax, get comfortable, start schmoozing and networking, serendipitously meeting other interesting people on the tour buses, etc. By the time the first session starts, the discussions have already been going on for some time, and it was easy to move them into conference rooms and continue – on a particular topic each hour.

One drawback to this kind of schedule is that not everyone would come to the first day of the meeting. Not having scheduled sessions felt to some like this was not an essential part of the conference (it is), so some people would arrive just in time for the main program (this included a lot of locals) at which point they can be confused and disoriented because they have missed all the informal discussions and socializing of the previous day.

The move to a new, bigger venue, as well as a great increase in the number of people attending in person, provided us with new challenges – how to let the meeting grow without losing the community spirit and the opportunities for serendipitous meetings, for networking and schmoozing. Also, how to make sure people understand that the informal events are an essential part of the meeting, not just the sessions?

We decided to try to expand the meeting to three full days (well, it always was three days, but it did not look like that on paper) and to have formal and informal aspects of the conference alternate – a little bit of sessions, then a little bit of something informal, then more sessions, more informal stuff, etc. This way, everyone will be here from the beginning to the end, and nobody will miss out on the important informal parts of the conference (one would have to actively leave in order to miss them, not just fail to show up). This also provides for continuous discussions going into and out of the session rooms for quite a while. Fortunately, it seems that many people are arriving on Wednesday afternoon (or even earlier) so the informal chatting can start early. We hope this works – fingers crossed.

On top of that, we (and when I say “we” I mean Karyn Traphagen, the Master of Ceremonies and an organizational genius) have planned on some creative use of space. McKimmon Center is large and was recently renovated (I remember when it was a deadly boring space – it is much more cozy and lively now). It has many interesting spaces and lots of nooks and crannies. Central to our conference – more central than any of the conference rooms – will be the large Cafe room. It will, apart from coffee flowing all day every day (and other drinks, water, cookies, candy and more), have all sorts of nice places to sit and chat in small groups, for individuals to sit down and use laptops, for others to see, touch, hear, explore stuff, leaf through books, watch attendee-produced art, monitor Twitterfall, and more (I myself do not know everything about this – I know Karyn will surprise us all with some of the things in there). This will be the Central-place foraging spot (from which people will go “foraging” to sessions and other events), the “activity hub” and the “home” for everyone. This is where you start and end your day, and where you come to take a break and meet people. I am looking forward to seeing you all in there.

Related:

ScienceOnline’09 – Saturday 2pm, and on the organization of an Unconference
On organizing and/or participating in a Conference in the age of Twitter
ScienceOnline2010 – what to do while there, what to do if you are not there but are interested?
Making it real: People and Books and Web and Science at ScienceOnline2010
Looking ahead to #scio12: the nature of the unconference.
What is an unconference?
Why “unconferences” are fun conferences
Wikipedia: Unconference
The Unconference Blog
Understanding the Unconference

Learn more:

Homepage
Blog
Planning Wiki
Draft Program
See who’s registered
Waitlist sign-up
Facebook page
FriendFeed group
Tumblr coverage blog
Google Plus official page
Google Plus circle of participants
Twitter account
#scio12 hashtag
Twitter repository
Twitter list of participants
Previous conferences
Nice things people said about ScienceOnline2010
ScienceOnline2011 on YouTube
ScienceOnline2011 on Flickr
ScienceOnline2011 official recordings

Previously in this series:

What is: ScienceOnline2012 – and it’s coming soon!
ScienceOnline participants’ interviews
Some updates on #scio12, #NYCscitweetup, Story Collider and more.
Updates: ScienceOnline2012, Science blogging, Open Laboratory, and #NYCSciTweetup
ScienceOnline2012 – we have the Keynote Speaker!
Mathematics – Algebra and Statistics and more – at ScienceOnline2012
Information, data and technology at ScienceOnline2012
Health and Medicine at ScienceOnline2012
Education at ScienceOnline2012
Movies and Video at ScienceOnline2011
Sound and Music at ScienceOnline2012
Visual Communication at ScienceOnline2012
Submissions for the Cyberscreen Science Film Festival are now OPEN!
Scientists and the Media, at ScienceOnline2012
Writing, narrative and books at ScienceOnline2012
Outreach, activism and persuasion at ScienceOnline2012
Updates: #scio12, #soNYC, #NYCSciTweetup and more.
Making it in the new media ecosystem, at ScienceOnline2012
ScienceOnline2012 Call for Entries: Science-Art Show!
Science + Storytelling + Good (Food & Drink) = The Monti at ScienceOnline2012 Banquet
Just one week left to submit for the Cyberscreen Science Film Festival!

Today my guest is Kristi Holmes of VIVOweb.org (Twitter).

Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

Thank you for welcoming me, Bora!

It has been a bit of a journey to get to where I am now: a scientist completely immersed in the library environment. I was always incredibly interested in science – even from a very early age and spent many hours with my nose in a science book. In college, I had a great mentor who encouraged me to pursue advanced studies in chemistry, and I am grateful for his kindness and support (Thanks, Dr. Mosher!). I eventually graduated with a PhD in Biochemistry from Iowa State University where I worked on small ribosomal subunit assembly, learned how to think critically and had some fun along the way (Thanks, Dr. Culver!). Iowa State also gave me a great introduction to the library, as I served as the Graduate Student Senate representative to the University Library Committee. Upon graduation, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life – I knew that a traditional academic career wasn’t for me, as I find so many (too many?) topics of interest. I thought that intellectual property law might be a good fit, so my family and I moved to St. Louis so that I could go to law school. While in St. Louis, I stumbled into a career in the library, left behind law school, and I have been here ever since!

I have the good fortune to have a career that allows me to be able to bring my science background to a service-based library environment. I work as a bioinformaticist at the Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis. My job duties there are incredibly varied: I teach classes and coordinate training opportunities on campus on software platforms and databases, offer research consultations, support collaboration at our university, and I even work on projects related to research impact and genomic medicine.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I am fortunate to have an opportunity to work on a number of other exciting projects and I’ll describe a few of them for you. A great deal of my efforts in the library support the mission of the Washington University Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (WU-ICTS). The WU-ICTS is one of 60 Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) institutions that “… are transforming the way biomedical research is conducted [by accelerating] the translation of laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients, [engaging] communities in clinical research efforts, and [training] a new generation of clinical and translational researchers.” (CTSA Consortium, 2011) I am a member of the WU-ICTS and also serve as a member of the WU-ICTS Tracking & Evaluation program where we work to track research output and understand the impact of the Institute’s efforts. One particularly exciting project I’m involved with which is supported by the WU-ICTS and carried out in partnership with the Becker Medical Library and the Washington University Departments of Medicine, Genetics, Pediatrics and Pathology & Immunology is the interdisciplinary seminar series, Introduction to Genomic Medicine. The series offers attendees a practical background in topics related to genomic research and applications of genomic technologies in the research environment and aims to increase understanding of the clinical application of gained knowledge. The 2011 series was a resounding success and we look forward to the 2012 series.

I also serve as the National Outreach Coordinator for an open source Semantic Web-based research discovery platform called VIVO (www.vivoweb.org). VIVO facilitates research discovery by providing verifiable information about researchers and their interests, expertise, publications, grants, courses, and more. Across institutions, VIVO provides a uniform semantic structure to enable a new class of tools that use this data to advance science. I have been working in this role for about two years as part of a National Institutes of Health–funded ARRA award. This role necessitates that I am on the road a lot, visiting universities and organizations and attending conferences (like Science Online!). I conduct webinars for groups wishing to know more about the VIVO software and work on a number of policy- and data-related tasks, as well. We’ve had a national conference for two years now, with the third scheduled for August 22-24, 2012 in Miami, FL. We also sponsor other events such as workshops, an implementation fest, and hackathons. The open source VIVO community is vibrant and growing and it has been great fun to collaborate with amazing people from across the country and around the world.

Locally, our library is interested in how we can support our researchers in areas related to data management and preservation, dissemination, and so on. I’ve been working with a group of librarians from across both campuses at Washington University as part of the Association of Research Libraries/Digital Library Foundation (ARL/DLF) E-Science Institute. As part of this work, each team carries out an environmental scan of their university, conducts interviews with the major stakeholders, performs a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, Threats) and eventually develops a game plan to support the needs of our research community around data. We’re in the middle of this process right now and I anxiously await the end so that we have a good perspective of how best to move forward at our university.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

I find that I tend to be a “jack of all trades” at work. There are so many interesting projects and ideas flowing right now, I find it hard to restrict my time to just a few areas! Beyond my daily responsibilities supporting WU researchers, I have several other projects that occupy my time. Certainly my roles on the local and national VIVO projects are a major effort, as is my work on topics related to “e-research” topics at our institution. I am collaborating with the Scholarly Communications Specialist at Becker Library, Cathy Sarli, on updates to the Becker Model – a framework for moving beyond citation counts to track the impact of biomedical research. I have also been spending a great deal of time working to develop programs that educate and provide information support for a wide range of stakeholders on topics related to genomic medicine (e.g. researchers, various health care providers, patients and their advocates).

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

My work on VIVO has given me a good perspective of the limitations in the discovery process in the academic environment. Data are spread out, often out of date, and poorly structured and maintained. There is an increasing recognition by a variety of stakeholders of the value of semantic web standards and technologies to facilitate research discovery. I’m eager to share the opportunities that the Semantic Web presents for not only connecting people, but also for building a rich open web of information that can be used for a variety of purposes for everyone – researchers, journalists, patients, librarians, and physicians, alike. I’m also very excited about some of the recent efforts related to scholarly output and impact, such as microattribution, nanopublications, and various alternative metric efforts by a number of groups. A good discussion of many of these issues can be found in a recent article from Nature Genetics, The value of data. (Mons, 2011)

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others? How do you intergrate all of your online activity into a coherent whole? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I have a couple of blogs and I use them primarily as a way to share information with readers. While I don’t often write long posts, I have found that the blog medium fits my needs. My library blog, Bioinformatics@Becker, serves as a place for me to share resources, advertise classes, and post interesting ideas that pop up. I also have a VIVO blog where I post project announcements and press releases.

As far as other social media goes, even though I feel as though I was a late adopter, I really value Twitter as a way to stay up to date in a variety of topic areas. The tweets are short, relevant, and contain extra information such as links to websites if I want to learn more about the topic. I also like Twitter because it allows me to virtually attend conferences by following a conference hash tag – a great way to stretch tight travel budgets.

My online activities allow me to be more productive than ever. I depend on blogs, wikis, and Twitter for information and I depend on other tools like Google Docs, Dropbox, Skype, and GoToMeeting to make online collaboration and communication easier.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

There are far too many good blogs to mention them all – especially this year with the increased attendance. I am definitely looking forward to chatting with some of my favorite bloggers (old and new!) at Science Online 2012.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you? Any suggestions for next year?

Science Online 2011 was a great opportunity to have a front-row seat to different aspects of science communication. There are so many interesting people doing very interesting work – what a great community! It was also wonderful to see many library-based folks at Science Online. Libraries tend to be on the bleeding edge of information and technology and I loved hearing about work in other organizations.

I’m really excited for Science Online 2012! I think that the preliminary program looks amazing – although I will certainly have a difficult time deciding which sessions to attend. I look forward to participating in sessions related to things I do at work related to the Semantic Web (VIVO) and Genomic Medicine – it will be fun to share some of my interests with the other attendees. There is an amazing session of three full tracks of Techno Blitz presentations planned for Friday afternoon on topics related to doing science, communicating science and issues related to credit, identity, and discoverability in science. Most of all, I look forward to seeing familiar faces and to finally meeting a lot of the people I follow on Twitter and through blogs.  This is going to be the most amazing weekend to hear about all of the cool things that are happening in this great big beautiful online world!

Thank you, Bora. See you soon!

Thank you – see you in two weeks!

References:

CTSA Consortium. (2011). Retrieved January 1, 2012, from https://www.ctsacentral.org/ctsa-consortium

Mons, B. et al. (2011). The value of data. Nature Genetics, 43, 281–283. doi:10.1038/ng0411-281

The launch of this network was the #1 event of the year for me. But I also traveled a lot – every month (or so) to New York City, also to Boston, Philly, Washington DC (twice), Asheville, Winston-Salem, Flagstaff, London (UK) and Belgrade (Serbia). I did not blog much about those travels or personal stuff. And my blogging is not nearly as frequent as it once was (remember when my output was 8.2 posts per day?). A lot of the quick stuff – links, quotes, personal stuff, humor/cartoons, etc. – I moved to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Google Plus, Tumblr and Posterous, leaving the blog for the most important and serious stuff only. I also have to write or edit multiple blogs now, so A Blog Around The Clock is not the only place I can focus my attention to. But here we go – the key posts of the year:

January is all about ScienceOnline, of course, but I did manage to sneak in a post that was not about it:

Can WordPress do this?

In February I wrote my first big SciAm science post, and also went to AAAS meeting and blogged about it:

Circadian clock without DNA–History and the power of metaphor

Web breaks echo-chambers, or, ‘Echo-chamber’ is just a derogatory term for ‘community’ – my remarks at #AAASmtg

March was a fun month – lots of work, though, so not much time left for my own blogging:

A “sixth sense” for earthquake prediction? Give me a break!

Book review: Pink Boots and the Machete by Mireya Mayor

In April I tried my hand at this ‘journalism’ thing I am supposed to be doing now:

Giant Dino exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, or why I should not be a photojournalist

May was noisy around here, so why not write about it:

Cicadas, or how I Am Such A Scientist, or a demonstration of good editing

Is education what journalists do?

Scientific Communication all-you-can-eat Linkfest

In June I participated in the World Science Festival and left some trail of it on the blog:

The Bezos Scholars Program at the World Science Festival

Stories: what we did at #WSF11 last week

July was the Big Month – the launch of the network, and my renewed energy for blogging:

Introducing: the new Scientific American blog network!

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock – Next Generation.

Telling science stories…wait, what’s a “story”?

Blogs: face the conversation

August was calm, so I managed to write about science:

City Of Light: Insomniac Urban Animals

Identity – what is it really?

Hmm, just a bunch or re-posts from the archives in September, as I was spending my time in Europe…

October was back-to-work time, but I did manage to blog a little bit:

The Fracking Song

ScienceOnline participants’ interviews

Two posts I really enjoyed writing in November:

Myths about myths about Thanksgiving turkey making you sleepy

Books: ‘Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science’ by Michael Nielsen

Not sure what happened in December, but I was quite productive blogging science, including reporting on a paper the same moment its embargo lifted:

The New Meanings of How and Why in Biology?

The wonderful quail…and what Sen.Coburn should learn about it.

Data for #drunksci: Daily rhythm of alcohol tolerance

Now I have to write the Preface for Open Laboratory anthology, and another lengthy media/blogging post before #scio12, but organization of that meeting will probably suck up most of my free (i.e., writing/blogging) time in January. Let’s hope the next year is even better and productive than this one. Have a Happy New Year!

A couple of brand new posts:

The New Meanings of How and Why in Biology?

The wonderful quail…and what Sen.Coburn should learn about it.

A couple of updates and announcements about the upcoming ScienceOnline2012 meeting:

Science + Storytelling + Good (Food & Drink) = The Monti at ScienceOnline2012 Banquet

Some quick ScienceOnline2012 updates

Another Q&A with a participant of last year’s meeting:

ScienceOnline2011 – interview with Paul Raeburn

Several re-posts from the old archives:

Basics: Biological Clock

The Clock Metaphor

Evolutionary Medicine: Does reindeer have a circadian stop-watch instead of a clock?

What is a ‘natural’ sleep pattern?

Circadian Rhythms in Human Mating

Data for #drunksci: Daily rhythm of alcohol tolerance

Books: ‘The Poisoner’s Handbook’ by Deborah Blum

Books: ‘Bonobo Handshake’ by Vanessa Woods

Science Books from my Childhood

Previously in the “Best of…” series:

2011

November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2010

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

2009

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

The Program is set in stone, including the Blitz talks.

The main hotel is full, but there is still room in the overflow hotel. Save space (and your own money) by finding a room-mate, and/or carpooling.

Aside from the main Program, there will be many additional events and activities. For example, during the Friday banquet, we’ll have a storytelling event organized by our friends at The Monti. There will be an Art Show, Open Mic night, a book/swag show and exchange, a Science tattoo trip, stand-up comedy (Saturday lunch), an art+photo nature walk (sign-up coming soon) and several lab/museum tours (info and sign-up coming very soon).

Some sessions and workshops require advance preparation (at least thinking), e.g,. the Media training workshop and Blogging Science While Female. One workshop actually will be by sign-up – Science Scribe 2.0. Come prepared!

Blog coverage is already growing – if you blog about #scio12, please let us know or just add your link to the wiki. The participants’ blogroll is growing, as more people are slowly moving from the (enormous) waitlist into registration.

There will be good wifi, good coffee and food at all times. But we are still not sure we can afford the livestreaming, and still do not have sufficient funds for all the travel grants for students coming from far away. So we are still open for new sponsorships or donations.

Learn more:

Homepage
Blog
Planning Wiki
Draft Program
See who’s registered
Waitlist sign-up
Facebook page
FriendFeed group
Tumblr coverage blog
Google Plus official page
Google Plus circle of participants
Twitter account
#scio12 hashtag
Twitter repository
Twitter list of participants
Previous conferences
Nice things people said about ScienceOnline2010
ScienceOnline2011 on YouTube
ScienceOnline2011 on Flickr
ScienceOnline2011 official recordings

Previously in this series:

What is: ScienceOnline2012 – and it’s coming soon!
ScienceOnline participants’ interviews
Some updates on #scio12, #NYCscitweetup, Story Collider and more.
Updates: ScienceOnline2012, Science blogging, Open Laboratory, and #NYCSciTweetup
ScienceOnline2012 – we have the Keynote Speaker!
Mathematics – Algebra and Statistics and more – at ScienceOnline2012
Information, data and technology at ScienceOnline2012
Health and Medicine at ScienceOnline2012
Education at ScienceOnline2012
Movies and Video at ScienceOnline2011
Sound and Music at ScienceOnline2012
Visual Communication at ScienceOnline2012
Submissions for the Cyberscreen Science Film Festival are now OPEN!
Scientists and the Media, at ScienceOnline2012
Writing, narrative and books at ScienceOnline2012
Outreach, activism and persuasion at ScienceOnline2012
Updates: #scio12, #soNYC, #NYCSciTweetup and more.
Making it in the new media ecosystem, at ScienceOnline2012
ScienceOnline2012 Call for Entries: Science-Art Show!
Science + Storytelling + Good (Food & Drink) = The Monti at ScienceOnline2012 Banquet

Every campaign season, quite predictably, someone from the GOP makes a document like this, listing examples of spending that, in their view, represents the most egregious excesses of governmental spending. Counting on their voters not to know or understand anything about these projects (especially the way these are carefully framed) and aware that nobody in the mainstream media will be pointing and laughing at them, they push these memes onto the unsuspecting public.

Many of these projects are competitive grant-funded scientific research, already paid by NIH or NSF after a draconian process of peer-review of the grant proposals by the experts in the field.

Remember the autism fruitfly research that Sarah Palin thought was wasteful? John McCain’s deriding of important bear DNA research? The “projector” at the Adler Planetarium? All horrendous misinterpretations of the actual research for the sake of scoring political points.

Just a campaign tactic to get people riled up against the “pointy-heads”.

Unsurprisingly, this latest list contains quite a few volleys against science – in service of politicking. A quick scan finds about a dozen scientific research projects already funded by federal grants, and I think some of the other bloggers on the network may cover some of them. I will focus on this one:

23) Rockin’ Robins: Study Looks for Connections Between Cocaine and Risky Sex Habits of Quail – (KY) $175,587

What common sense suggests, science has confirmed over and over again: namely, that cocaine use is linked to increased risky sexual behavior. Just to be sure, however, one federal agency thought it should test the hypothesis on a new subject: Japanese quail.

The University of Kentucky received a grant of $181,406 in 2010 from the National Institute of Health to study how cocaine enhances the sex drive of Japanese quail. In 2011, grant funding was extended and an additional $175,587 was provided for the study. The total awarded to the project will be $356,933.140

The study seeks to verify the clinical observations that indicated that cocaine use in humans may increase sexual motivation, thereby increasing the likelihood of the occurrence of high-risk sexual behavior. The researcher conducting the study highlighted how Japanese quail are ‘ideal‘ animals to use when studying the link between sex and drugs because the birds readily engage in reproductive behavior in the laboratory. University of Kentucky‘s website stated that quail provide a convenient and interesting alternative to standard laboratory rats and pigeons. This study is slated to continue through 2015.

Scicurious goes in great depth and detail about this particular line of research and why it is important – check it out. I will instead point out what’s wrong about laughing at Japanese quail as a research model, since I spent ten years of my life doing research on it.

Let me start with the first statement that this research is done “on a new subject: Japanese quail”. Maybe it is new to Coburn, but Japanese quail has been a pretty standard laboratory animal for about a century. Not wanting to dig through my file cabinets to find several dozen additional reviews on printed paper, I just did a quick Google Scholar search and found these few reviews on the usefulness and importance of this species in research: J.R.Cain and W.O.Cawley, 1914, Padgett, CA and Ivey, WD, 1959, Ellen P. Reese and T. W. Reese, 1962, A. E. Woodard, H. Abplanalp, W. O. Wilson, and P. Vohra, 1973, Ichilcik R and Austin JC., 1978, Huss D, Poynter G and Lansford R., 2008, Greg Poynter, David Huss and Rusty Lansford, 2009, Gregory F. Ball and Jacques Balthazart, 2010.

Note that these reviews span about a century. That’s not “new”.

Also note that most of these reviews are behind the paywalls.

Not everyone in the country is deeply ideological. Most of the US voters are intelligent and open-minded. Every couple of years they need to go to the polls so they want to be making informed decisions. They will look for information, but will not spend too much time and effort (and certainly not money) finding it. So, it is deplorable that the side of reason, the Reality-Based community, is keeping its information hidden behind paywalls, while the side of Anti-Science is not just making it all free, but actively pushing their disinformation by every avenue and channel available. Why is it a surprise that the guys who deny reality keep winning? It is easy for snake-oil salesmen to make fun of stuff that most people cannot even access to read!

Why is Japanese quail such a good laboratory animal?

Japanese quail is sometimes called the “mouse of bird research”. The two species are comparable in a number of important properties (see: Breeding Strategies for Maintaining Colonies of Laboratory Mice – A Jackson Laboratory Resource Manual; Japanese Quail As A Laboratory Animal – Avian Genetic Resource Laboratory (AGRL); Quail – AnimalResearch.info).

For example, gestation in mice lasts 18-21 days. In quail, the eggs hatch in 16-17 days. Those are both extremely fast developmental times, making it easy to quickly breed a lot of experimental animals.

It takes about six weeks for both mice and quail to attain sexual maturity after they are born. Again, that is a very fast maturation rate, making it efficient for breeding in the lab.

Mice can have litters anywhere between two and 12 pups at a time. Quail can lay essentially an egg per day throughout the year, throughout their lives. Quail win on this one – they can produce much more offspring per year. Efficient.

While techniques for genetic manipulation in quail lagged behind those of mice (just like those of mice lagged by many years behind Drosophila techniques), they are now available. It is now possible to make transgenic quail and use them in genetic research.

In many other aspects, quail is a better lab animal than the mouse (or rat or chicken). While laboratory strains of mice have been “domesticated” for only a few decades, the quail has been fully domesticated for about 500 years – it is poultry. While lab mice will rarely bite, they have to be handled with care – on the other hand, you can CUDDLE with a quail if you want to!

A decade ago, cuddling with quail.

Unlike its wild counterparts which are long-distance migrants, laboratory strains of Japanese quail are very slow fliers. Unlike wild songbirds (that need to be caught outside which is stressful) which, if they get lose in the lab one needs an army of technicians with butterfly nets to catch it (stressed), I can’t even remember how many times I caught runaway quail in mid-flight, with one hand, barely looking (actually, many times I caught them in the dark, not seeing but just hearing and feeling where they might be flying). Then you huddle it, and pet it on the head and put it back in its cage. And you get a loving look back and perhaps a quail-style “thank you” call. They are cute. But not as cute as many other species of birds, which makes it somewhat easier to overcome one’s reluctance to occasionally do something unpleasant to them, e.g., surgeries.

It is a hardy animal, very easy to keep, breed and feed, with minimal demands (which is why so many small farmers breed them around the world). They are social animals so they can be kept in groups. They are small and generally happy and content, so many more quail can be kept in a room without being stressed than, for example, one can keep comparatively enormous, slow-breeding, slow-maturing chicken in the room of the same size.

The lab rodents, like mice, have to be handled with utmost care, always keeping the threat of zoonozes in mind – there are many diseases that can jump from mice to human and back. There is essentially nothing that can infect both a human and a quail, especially not in the isolated, climate-controled environments of a university laboratory.

Quail’s immune system is amazing. While one has to perform a completely sterile surgery on mice, in quail it is done so only because IACUCs (Institutional Animal Care and Use Commitees) recently started demanding this (discussion of the wastefulness of this approach can be left for some other time). I bet you could do a surgery on a quail with dirty fingers and a rusty pocket-knife and the only consequence would be that the bird’s white blood cells would heartily laugh at you. This is also the reason why quail has been under intense research in Immunology for decades – if we learn something how the quail can be so resistant to essentially anything and everything in its environment, perhaps we can apply some of that knowledge to human medicine as well.

On the “intelligence scale” of birds, the quail hits the rock bottom. It is, frankly, not that smart. And this is a good thing from the point of view of research on behavioral neuroscience. They “don’t do” much thinking. They essentially go through the day like little automatons and most of their behaviors are routinized and stylized and automatic, like ‘fixed-action patterns’. Thus, manipulating a particular brain area usually results in a particular change of a particular behavior. This is repeatable and replicable, without too much noise in the data (at least in comparison to some other species), so the statistics are reasonably easy to do and findings are pretty clear. This makes research useful and efficient – sample sizes can be reasonably small.

There are very few species of animals about which we know as much as we do, and in so many areas of biology, as we understand the quail: embryonic development, genetics, physiology, metabolism, reproduction, immunology, endocrinology, neurobiology and behavior. With such a large amount of background information, it is much easier to make breakthroughs than when one is just starting to explore a new animal model (though as my regular readers know – I am very much in favor of adopting new models, as well as just purely comparative research). Studying effects of cocaine on reproductive behavior is so much more efficient in a species in which we do not have to start from scratch – we already know so much about its brain, behavior and reproduction, we can move on to more sophisticated studies than just the first exploratory “basic experiments”. Thus we can make faster progress. This is an efficient approach.

Most research on quail has – and often the same experiment simultaneously – relevance to three different areas of human interest: understanding of basic biology, application to human biomedical research, and application for agriculture – remember that quail is poultry.

Quail and chicken are very closely related. Each one of their genes is about 99% identical. In many ways, the quail is a model for the chicken. Instead of keeping just a few large, slow-breeding chickens in the lab, doing one slow experiment at the time, one can instead keep hundreds of quail in the same amount of space without stress, and do several fast, simultaneous experiments in the same amount of time. That is efficient. And that is how we can learn how to increase chicken (and turkey) productivity AND at the same time study how to make them healthy, unstressed and happy while doing so – a very important aspect of Poultry Science research.

A big advantage of quail over rodents is in the research on sleep. Rodents are nocturnal. Rats and mice sleep more during the day than during the night. But their sleep is not consolidated – they sleep in many short bursts: there are just more of these bursts during the day than night. On the other hand, quail is, like us, a diurnal animal. Quail are fully awake throughout the day and have a long consolidated sleep during the night (at least in short summer nights, while they may occasionally wake up during long winter nights…wow – just like us!!!!)

Finally, my own past research combining the studies on circadian rhythms and clocks, thermoregulation, photoperiodism, seasonality and reproduction (see this for a follow-up in another species) has several areas of relevance. It helps us make smarter husbandry for the poultry industry. It is a great model for why human adolescents, once they hit puberty, have phase-delayed circadian rhythms (cannot fall asleep in the evening, then cannot wake up in the morning, just like quail). It helps to inform how to conserve endangered bird species, and to predict how the birds will respond to climate change.

Not too shabby for a small bird, right? You really want to make fun of it for the sake of politics? You are lucky the quail is just too nice to bite you back!

Related at Scientific American

Cocaine and the sexual habits of quail, or, why does NIH fund what it does?

The Guppy Project is not wasteful, Sen. Coburn.

Whenever I read a paper from Karl-Arne Stokkan’s lab, and I have read every one of them, no matter how dense the scientese language I always start imagining them running around the cold, dark Arctic, wielding enormous butterfly nets, looking for and catching reindeer (or ptarmigans, whichever animal the paper is about) to do their research.

If I was not so averse to cold, I’d think this would be the best career in science ever!

It is no surprise that their latest paper – A Circadian Clock Is Not Required in an Arctic Mammal (press release) – was widely covered by the media, both traditional and blogs. See, for example, The Scientist, BBC, Scientific American podcast and Wired Science.

Relevant, or just cool?

It is hard to find a science story that is more obviously in the “that’s cool” category, as opposed to the “that’s relevant” category. For the background on this debate, please read Ed Yong, David Dobbs, DeLene Beeland, Colin Schultz, and the series of Colin’s interviews with Carl Zimmer, Nicola Jones, David Dobbs, Jay Ingram, Ferris Jabr, Ed Yong and Ed Yong again.

I agree, it is a cool story. It is an attention-grabbing, nifty story about charismatic megafauna living in a strange wilderness. I first saw the work from the lab in a poster session at a conference many years ago, and of all the posters I saw that day, it is the reindeer one that I still remember after all these years.

Yet, the coolness of the story should not hide the fact that this research is also very relevant – both to the understanding of evolution and to human medicine. Let me try to explain what they did and why that is much more important than what a quick glance at the headlines may suggest. I did it only part-way a few years ago when I blogged about one of their earlier papers. But let me start with that earlier paper as background, for context.

Rhythms of Behavior

In their 2005 Nature paper (which was really just a tiny subset of a much longer, detailed paper they published elsewhere a couple of years later), Stokkan and colleagues used radiotelemetry to continuously monitor activity of reindeer – when they sleep and when they roam around foraging.

You should remember that up in the Arctic the summer is essentially one single day that lasts several months, while the winter is a continuous night that lasts several months. During these long periods of constant illumination, reindeer did not show rhythms in activity – they moved around and rested in bouts and bursts, at almost unpredictable times of “day”. Their circadian rhythms of behavior were gone.

But, during brief periods of spring and fall, during which there are 24-hour light-dark cycles of day and night, the reindeer (on the northern end of the mainland Norway, but not the population living even further north on Svaldbard which remained arrhythmic throughout), showed daily rhythms of activity, suggesting that this species may possess a circadian clock.

Rhythms of Physiology

In a couple of studies, including the latest one, the lab also looked into a physiological rhythm – that of melatonin synthesis and secretion by the pineal gland. Just as in activity rhythms, melatonin concentrations in the blood showed a daily (24-hour) rhythm only during the brief periods of spring and fall. Furthermore, in the latest paper, they kept three reindeer indoors for a couple of days, in light-tight stalls, and exposed them to 2.5-hour-long periods of darkness during the normal light phase of the day. Each such ‘dark pulse’ resulted in a sharp rise of blood melatonin, followed by just as abrupt elimination of melatonin as soon as the lights went back on.

Rhythms of gene expression

Finally, in this latest paper, they also looked at the expression of two of the core clock genes in fibroblasts kept in vitro (in a dish). Fibroblasts are connective tissue cells found all around the body, probably taken out of reindeer by biopsy. In other mammals, e.g., in rodents, clock genes continue to cycle with a circadian period for a very long time in a dish. Yet, the reindeer fibroblasts, after a couple of very weak oscillations that were roughly in the circadian range, decayed into complete arrhytmicity – the cells were healthy, but their clocks were not ticking any more.

What do these results suggest?

There is something fishy about the reindeer clock. It is not working the same way it does in other mammals studied to date. For example, seals and humans living in the Arctic have normal circadian rhythms of melatonin. Some other animals show daily rhythms in behavior. But in reindeer, rhythms in behavior and melatonin can be seen only if the environment is rhythmic as well. In constant light conditions, it appears that the clock is not working. But, is it? How do we know?

During the long winter night and the long summer day, the behavior of reindeer is not completely random. It is in bouts which show some regularity – these are ultradian rhythms with the period much shorter than 24 hours. If the clock is not working in reindeer, i.e., if there is no clock in this species, then the ultradian rhythms would persist during spring and fall as well. Yet we see circadian rhythms during these seasons – there is an underlying clock there which can be entrained to a 24-hour light-dark cycle.

This argues for the notion that the deer’s circadian clock, unless forced into synchrony by a 24 external cycle, undergoes something called frequency demultiplication. The idea is that the underlying cellular clock runs with a 24-hour period but that is sends signals downstream of the clock, triggering phenotypic (observable) events, several times during each cycle. The events happen always at the same phases of the cycle, and are usually happening every 12 or 8 or 6 or 4 or 3 or 2 or 1 hours – the divisors of 24 (not necessarily whole hours, e.g., 90minute bursts are also possible). Likewise, the clock can trigger the event only every other cycle, resulting in a 48-hour period of the observable behavior.

If we forget for a moment the metaphor of the clock and think instead of a Player Piano, it is like the contraption plays the note G several times per cycle, always at the same moments during each cycle, but there is no need to limit each note to appear only once per cycle.

On the other hand, both the activity and melatonin rhythms appear to be driven directly by light and dark – like a stop-watch. In circadian parlance this is called an “hourglass clock” – an environmental trigger is needed to turn it over so it can start measuring time all over again. Dawn and dusk appear to directly stop and start the behavioral activity, and onset of dark stimulates while onset of light inhibits secretion of melatonin. An “hourglass clock” is an extreme example of a circadian clock with a very low amplitude.
While we mostly pay attention to period and phase, we should not forget that amplitude is important. Yes, amplitude is important. It determines how easy it is for the environmental cue to reset the clock to a new phase – lower the amplitude of the clock, easier it is to shift. In a very low-amplitude oscillator, onset of light (or dark) can instantly reset the clock to Phase Zero and start timing all over again – an “hourglass” behavior.

The molecular study of the reindeer fibroblasts also suggests a low-amplitude clock – there are a couple of weak oscillations to be seen before the rhythm goes away completely.

There may be other explanations for the observed data, e.g., masking (direct effect of light on behavior bypassing the clock) or relative coordination (weak and transient entrainment) but let’s not get too bogged down in arcane circadiana right now. For now, let’s say that the reindeer clock exists, that it is a very low-amplitude clock which entrains readily and immediately to light-dark cycles, while it fragments or demultiplies in long periods of constant conditions.

Why is this important to the reindeer?

During long night of the winter and the long day of the summer it does not make sense for the reindeer to behave in 24-hour cycles. Their internal drive to do so, driven by the clock, should be overpowered by the need to be flexible – in such a harsh environment, behavior needs to be opportunistic – if there’s a predator in sight: move away. If there is food in sight – go get it. If you are full and there is no danger, this is a good time to take a nap. One way to accomplish this is to de-couple the behavior from the clock. The other strategy is to have a clock that is very permissive to such opportunistic behavior – a very low-amplitude clock.

But why have clock at all?

Stokkan and colleagues stress that the day-night cycles in spring help reindeer time seasonal events, most importantly breeding. The calves/fawns should be born when the weather is the nicest and the food most plentiful. The reindeer use those few weeks of spring (and fall) to measure daylength (photoperiod) and thus time their seasonality – or in other words, to reset their internal calendar: the circannual clock.

But, what does it all mean?

All of the above deals only with one of the two hypotheses for the adaptive function (and thus evolution) of the circadian clock. This is the External Synchronization hypothesis. This means that it is adaptive for an organism to be synchronized (in its biochemistry, physiology and behavior) with the external environment – to sleep when it is safe to do so, to eat at times when it will be undisturbed, etc. In the case of reindeer, since there are no daily cycles in the environment for the most of the year, there is no adaptive value in keeping a 24-hour rhythm in behavior, so none is observed. But since Arctic is highly seasonal, and since the circadian clock, through daylength measurement (photoperiodism) times seasonal events, the clock is retained as an adaptive structure.

This is not so new – such things have been observed in cave animals, as well as in social insects.

What the paper does not address is the other hypothesis – the Internal Synchronization hypothesis for the existence of the circadian clock – to synchronize internal events. So a target cell does not need to keep producing (and wasting energy) to produce a hormone receptor except at the time when the endocrine gland is secreting the hormone. It is a way for the body to temporally divide potentially conflicting physiological functions so those that need to coincide do so, and those that conflict with each other are separated in time – do not occur simultaneously. In this hypothesis, the clock is the Coordination Center of all the physiological processes. Even if there is no cycle in the environment to adapt to, the clock is a necessity and will be retained no matter what for this internal function, though the period now need not be close to 24 hours any more.

What can be done next?

Unfortunately, reindeer are not fruitflies or mice or rats. They are not endangered (as far as I know), but they are not easy to keep in the laboratory in large numbers in ideal, controlled conditions, for long periods of time.

Out in the field, one is limited as to what one can do. The only output of the clock that can be monitored long-term in the field is gross locomotor activity. Yet, while easiest to do, this is probably the least reliable indicator of the workings of the clock. Behavior is too flexible and malleable, too susceptible to “masking” by direct effects of the environment (e.g., weather, predators, etc,). And measurement of just gross locomotor activity does not tell us which specific behaviors the animals are engaged in.

It would be so nice if a bunch of reindeer could be brought into a lab and placed under controlled lighting conditions for a year at a time. One could, first, monitor several different specific behaviors. For example, if feeding, drinking and defecation are rhythmic, that would suggest that the entire digestive system is under circadian control: the stomach, liver, pancreas, intestine and all of their enzymes. Likewise with drinking and urination – they can be indirect indicators of the rhythmicity of the kidneys and the rest of the excretory system.

In a lab, one could also continuously monitor some physiological parameters with simple, non-invasive techniques. One could, for example monitor body temperature, blood pressure and heart-rate, much more reliable markers of circadian output. One could also take more frequent blood samples (these are large animals, they can take it) and measure a whole plethora of hormones along with melatonin, e.g., cortisol, thyroid hormones, progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, etc (also useful for measuring seasonal responses). One could measure metabolites in urine and feces and also gain some insight into rhythms of the internal biochemistry and physiology. All of that with no surgery and no discomfort to the animals.

Then one can place reindeer in constant darkness and see if all these rhythms persist or decay over time. Then one can make a Phase-Response Curve and thus test the amplitude of the underlying oscillator (or do that with entrainment to T-cycles, if you have been clicking on links all along, you’ll know what I’m talking about). One can test their reproductive response to photoperiod this way as well.

Finally, fibroblasts are peripheral cells. One cannot expect the group to dissect suprachiasmatic nuclei out of reindeer to check the state of the master pacemaker itself. And in a case of such a damped circadian system, testing a peripheral clock may not be very informative. Better fibroblasts than nothing, but there are big caveats about using them.

Remember that the circadian system is distributed all around the body, with each cell containing a molecular clock, but only the pacemaker cells in the suprachiasmatic nucleus are acting as a network. In a circadian system like the one in reindeer, where the system is low-amplitude to begin with, it is almost expected that peripheral clocks taken out of the body and isolated in a dish will not be able to sustain rhythms for very long. Yet those same cells, while inside of the body, may be perfectly rhythmic as a part of the ensemble of all the body cells, each sending entraining signals to the others every day, thus the entire system as a whole working quite well as a body-wide circadian clock. This can be monitored in real-time in transgenic mice, but the technology to do that in reindeer is still some years away.

Finally, one could test a hypothesis that the reindeer clock undergoes seasonal changes in its organization at the molecular level by comparing the performance of fibroblasts (and perhaps some other peripheral cells) taken out of animals at different times of year.

What’s up with this being medically relevant?

But why is all this important? Why is work on mice not sufficient and one needs to pay attention to a strange laboratory animal model like reindeer?

First, unlike rodents, reindeer is a large, mostly diurnal animal. Just like us.

Second, reindeer normally live in conditions that make people sick, yet they remain just fine, thank you. How do they do that?

Even humans who don’t live above the Arctic Circle (or in the Antarctica), tend to live in a 24-hour society with both light and social cues messing up with our internal rhythms.

We have complex circadian systems that are easy to get out of whack. We work night-shifts and rotating shifts and fly around the globe getting jet-lagged. Jet-lag is not desynchronization between the clock and the environment, it is internal desynchronization between all the cellular clocks in our bodies.

In the state of almost permanent jet-lag that many of us live in, a lot of things go wrong. We get sleeping disorders, eating disorders, obesity, compromised immunity leading to cancer, problems with reproduction, increase in psychiatric problems, the Seasonal Affective Disorder, prevalence of stomach ulcers and breast cancer in night-shift nurses, etc.

Why do we get all that and reindeer don’t? What is the trick they evolved to stay healthy in conditions that drive us insane and sick? Can we learn their trick, adopt it for our own medical practice, and use it? Those are kinds of things that a mouse and a rat cannot provide answers to, but reindeer can. I can’t think of another animal species that can do that for us. Which is why I am glad that Stokkan and friends are chasing reindeer with enormous butterfly nets across Arctic wasteland in the darkness of winter

Reference:

Lu, W., Meng, Q., Tyler, N., Stokkan, K., & Loudon, A. (2010). A Circadian Clock Is Not Required in an Arctic Mammal Current Biology, 20 (6), 533-537 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.01.042

Images: Reindeer drawing – EnchantedLearning.com; Reindeer photos – Reindeer Ranching and the Economic Benefits, by Emma Englesby, Kimberly Richards and Stephanie Bell; graphs from the Lu et al. 2010.

Related at Scientific American:

Rudolph Would Have Run Away From Santa by Jason G. Goldman

A Skill Better Than Rudolph’s by Anne-Marie Hodge

How Its Internal Clock Is Read, Knows Reindeer by Christopher Itagliata (podcast)

How Rudolph Remains Bright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed Through the Big Night by David Biello

Trying to keep Rudolph, and his fellow reindeer, from going down in history by John R. Platt

Satellite snow maps help reindeer herders adapt to a changing Arctic, From ESA.

U.S. Seeks to Protect Forests to Save Wild Reindeer by Laura Zuckerman

Originally posted on July 17, 2006.

David Ng asked a question:

Are there any children’s books that are dear to you, either as a child or a parent, and especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility? Just curious really. And it doesn’t have to be a picture book, doesn’t even have to be a children’s book – just a book that, for whatever reason, worked for the younger mind set.

Here is my list of childhood favourites, the books that turned me on to science – a list that reflects the time and place where I grew up:

As a little kid, I have practically memorized the 1971 translation of the 1968 book The new golden treasury of natural history by Bertha Morris Parker (under the title of Riznica Prirode). This is where I learned all the names of prehistoric creatures like Dynichtys, trilobites, dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals. This is where I learned about the Solar system and about evolution. And everything else. This is the book that started it all.

At about the same time (very early childhood), I also had and read repeatedly Our Friend the Atom by Heinz Haber, where I learned the basic physics (which I, for the most part, forgot since then).

I have already written about the importance to my naturalist development of The prince and his ants (Ciondolino) by Ricardo Vamba aka Luigi Bertelli.

I also had a couple of books by Alfred Edmund Brehm, including his most famous Brehm’s Life of animals: A complete natural history for popular home instruction and for the use of schools, which I used, later in school, as a source for some early papers/reports about animals.

Then, I swallowed a number of translated books by Gerald Durrell and his Russian counterpart, Vera Caplina.

Later, I graduated to works by Konrad Lorenz and, at the age of 13, my first attempt at reading Darwin’s Origin Of Species.

Finally, probably the most important kids’ books I had were a trilogy by Dr.Zivko Kostic (which I see has been reissued): “Between Play and Physics”, “Between Play and Chemistry” and “Between Play and Mathematics”. Each of the books had a story – a bunch of kids (mostly boys!!!! – reflecting their origin in the 1950s and 1960s) having a club, meeting regularly and doing experiments or, even more often, using their knowledge to pull pranks on each other and the rest of the community.

But the story was restricted to just a few places scattered around the book. Most of each book was devoted to about 150 “experiments”. I have not just read each of the books many times, but I have also tried to do many of the things described within. Math was easy – paper and pencil was all one needed for most of it. Chemistry was great fun, but it was hard to come up with chemicals (probably impossible in the here and now). So, I mostly did the physics stuff, using materials easily found around the house – some string, a glass of water, a pencil, a coat-hanger and a bottle cork. That was great fun.

More importantly, each book is broken into chapters, each chapter covering a particular topic or sub-discipline. And each chapter started with a brief and fascinating history of that field. Archimedes. Mendeleyev. Newton. They were all in there, in anecdotes and coming alive on the pages of the book.

But the greatest fun was when I got to meet the author when I was about 10 years old or so. For a kid in Yugoslavia at the time, it was equivalent of you getting to meet Carl Sagan or Isaak Asimov. My idol, in flesh and blood! And not just for a few seconds at a book signing – he came to visit us for lunch and coffee at my grandparents’ summer cottage.

So I listened with awe to his stories and he answered about a zillion questions I had for him. He is still alive and my mother said she was in touch with him recently. She just bought me the three-book set of Kostic’s books. They were re-issued about three years ago and are now in EVERY school library in Serbia, as well as favourite prizes to give to good students at end-of-the-year ceremonies.

Perhaps they may be fun to translate. Or, I can do something that I wanted to do for decades now – write the fourth volume: “Between Play and Biology”.

One biologist will give you an explanation in terms of molecules, cells, tissues, organs, organ systems and the organism as a whole, explaining how that trait develops in the embryo and how it works in the adult.

The other biologist may give you an explanation of how that trait arose within that particular lineage, why it was selected, how it confers fitness to the organism, and why that trait is considered to be an adaptation.

For about a century following Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’, confusion reigned in biology as to which kind of explanation is the “real” explanation. Biologists misunderstood each other, talked past each other, and entered sometimes fierce debates when trying to explain biological phenomena.

As early as 1937, James Baker (who was an early researcher in my field, although he did not know it at the time, studying bird seasonality, latitude, reproduction and migration) suggested that biology asks two kinds of questions which are different, yet compatible with each other. The ‘How’ questions explain the mechanism by which a trait develops and works (physiological explanation) and the ‘Why’ questions explain the evolutionary history and adaptive function of the trait.

In 1961, Ernst Mayr published a very influential paper – ‘Cause and effect in biology’ – in Science in which (also using bird migration as an example) he named the ‘How’ questions ‘Proximate causes’ (how the birds’ brains orient and navigate) and the ‘Why’ questions ‘Ultimate causes’ (how did the birds evolve to start their long-distance migrations). In the paper Mayr argued that these two kinds of questions are separate domains of study, yet that they are compatible and that each informs the other. Evolutionary theorists and philosophers of science ran with this idea, and it quickly became almost universally accepted, entered the textbooks and has been taught in introductory biology courses ever since.

Two years later (1963), Niko Tinbergen published a paper that was a refinement of this idea, which became even more influential than Mayr’s among people studying animal behavior. In the paper, Tinbergen proposed that every biological phenomenon should be studied by asking four questions: mechanism (physiology), development, function, and evolutionary history. The former two are subsets of Proximate causes, and the latter two are subsets of Ultimate causes. Tinbergen argued that the only way to properly understand a trait is if one asks ALL four questions and let the answers to one question inform the research on the other three and so on, in an iterative manner, until the phenomenon is fully understood.

In today’s issue of Science, there is an interesting new paper by philosophers of biology Kevin Laland, Kim Sterelny, John Odling-Smee, William Hoppitt and Tobias Uller. In it, the authors argue that the sharp dichotomy between Proximate and Ultimate questions as stated by Mayr and accepted by many (but not all) biologists may not be as useful any more (while acknowledging it was useful at the time, if nothing else to settle the old disputes stemming from mutual misunderstandings as to what constitutes ‘explanation’ in biology).

In science, as in many other areas, words matter. Words are metaphors that put us in a particular frame of mind. Different frames of mind guide different approaches to research questions. Thus, re-evaluating scientific metaphors as used by researchers is an important exercise that all fields should do every now and then (like I did for my field yesterday).

The distinction between Proximate and Ultimate questions, especially in the strong version as envisioned by Mayr, suggests a uni-directional causation of biological traits – genes code for traits. Once developed in the individuals, the traits become visible to natural selection and can be selected for or against. The causation always flows from Proximate to Ultimate domain.

But, as the new paper reminds us, last several decades of research have shown that there are many aspects of biology in which this clean separation – and especially the single direction – does not work. The authors use examples of evo-devo, sexual selection, niche construction, evolution of human cooperation, and cultural evolution, in which development and physiology affect the evolution and vice versa.

In sexual selection, male and female traits (e.g., males’ long tails in peacocks and females’ preferences for long tails in peahens) affect each others selection, thus directs evolution in a small particular subset of all possible directions.

In niche construction, parents modify the environment in a way that affects the fitness of their progeny. They use the example of earthworms which change the physical and chemical properties of the soil. After such changes were effected by their parents, the offspring find themselves in a different selective environment than their parents. Given many generations, mechanistic trait (what earthworms do to the soil) changes the direction in which evolution proceeds. In many cases, the activities of one species affect the environment, and thus selective pressures, for other species in the same space.

While some researchers think of cultural evolution as a higher-level evolutionary process, others see it as a proximate cause that affects biological evolution. Just like in niche construction, transmission of cultural traits (e.g., knowledge and skills) affects the way humans live and work, thus altering the environment (living in big cities makes it less likely to get eaten by a lion, but more likely to get hit by a car, or die young due to stress) which now selects for different sets of traits.

The paper does not argue we should abandon the terms Proximate and Ultimate. The authors acknowledge that there will always be How and Why questions in biology, and that the two sets of questions are complementary and inform each other. What they argue is that straightforward causation from genes through development to traits visible to selection is rare in nature, more of an exception than the rule.

They suggest that, instead, we should change the way we think when we use the words “Proximate” and “Ultimate”. Proximate (How) questions are not limited to genes, development and physiology. And Ultimate (Why) questions are not limited to adaptive function and evolutionary history. The answers to both the How and the Why questions will almost always have both mechanistic and evolutionary components.

What they do not say explicitly is that this suggestion to change the way we think about How and Why questions is going to affect the way we do research and understand nature. In a paradigm in which developmental and evolutionary causes undergo multiple feedback loops of mutual effect, the notion of “gene control” (or as philosophers would say “upward causation”, or bad journalists would say “gene for X”) would be replaced by a more sophisticated and more realistic understanding of the world in which explanations reside simultaneously at multiple levels, and “control” can be both upward and downward.

In an effort to attract not only creationists but also climate change denialists and anti-vaccers in the comments, I should also note one more thing that is missing from the paper – why should we care about all of this?

And there is something very obvious going on in the world right now. Cultural evolution in humans has led to accumulation across generations of knowledge and skills that have profoundly affected the way we live. From the advances in medicine (especially germ theory leading to better public health, hygiene, vaccines and antibiotics) leading to a huge increase in survivability and longevity of humans leading to population explosion, to the way we find, transform and use energy, our newly developed behaviors have all resulted in large effects humans exert on the environment of other species.

While clear-cutting a forest affects local populations, global warming affects them all. We are in a midst of the grandest experiment of niche construction to ever happen on this planet. So perhaps we should think about it in a correct and realistic way – not just as cultural evolution we can be proud of, but also as a proximate cause of trials and tribulations of all the other organisms on Earth.

One final note – much of the stuff in this paper is not that new (though concisely and clearly stated here, for a change). It is not new to people who have been carefully reading journal papers and books in philosophy of biology over the past few decades. It is also not new to people who have been observing these kinds of debates between philosophers of science and theoretically minded biologists in the science blogosphere over the past several years. But by being published in Science this topic is now brought to the new audiences that are not familiar with either philosophical literature or the blogosphere – the thousands of researchers who are still limiting their information intake to journals like that. And it is useful for that audience to hear these ideas, too.

Reference:

Kevin N. Laland, Kim Sterelny, John Odling-Smee, William Hoppitt, Tobias Uller, Cause and Effect in Biology Revisited: Is Mayr’s Proximate-Ultimate Dichotomy Still Useful? Science, Vol. 334, December 6, 2011.

Chad Orzel wrote a neat history of (or should we say ‘evolution of’) clocks, as in “timekeeping instruments”. He points out the biological clocks are “…sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics…” and he is right – for us biologists, messier the better. We wallow in mess, cherish ambiguity and relish complexity. Anyway, he is talking about real clocks – things made by people to keep time. And he starts with a simple definition of what a clock is:

In order to really discuss the physics of timekeeping, you need to strip the idea of a clock down to the absolute bare essentials. At its core, a clock really has only one defining characteristic: A clock is a thing that ticks.

OK, I’m using a fairly broad definition of “tick,” here, but if you’ll grant that leeway, “ticking” is the essential property of clocks. In this context, “ticking” just refers to some regular, repetitive behavior that takes place in a periodic fashion.

This reminds me that a “biological clock” is a metaphor. A useful metaphor, but a metaphor nonetheless (and just like metaphors of cellular machinery are taken literally by Creationists, they have been known on occasion to talk about circadian clocks as if they had real wheels and cogs and gears!).

I want to stress that the clock metaphor has been very useful for the study of biological rhythms. Without Pittendrigh’s insight that cycles in nature can be modeled with the math of physical oscillators, we would be probably decades behind (unless someone else of authority in the field at the time had the same insight back then) in our understanding of the underlying biology. Just check how useful it was in the entire conceptualization of entrainment and photoperiodism. The Phase-Response Curve, based on the math of physical oscillators, is the Number One tool in the chronobiological repertoire.

But, just as most people in the field take the clock metaphor for granted and without much thinking, there have been a few people who questioned its utility for some areas of research. For instance, for the study of biological rhythms in nature within an ecological and evolutionary context, Jim Enright proposed a metaphor of an audio-tape set on continuous play (Enright, J.T. (1975). The circadian tape recorder and its entrainment. In Physiological Adaptation to the Environment (ed. F.J.Vernberg), pp. 465-476. Intext Educational Publishers, Ney York.). Only a dozen or so publications since then took him seriously and tried to apply this concept. Today, in the age of CDs and iPods, who even remembers audio tapes?

While fully utilizing the utility of the clock metaphor and applying it myself in my own work, I was always cautious about it. Aware that it is a metaphor, I always wondered if it constrains the way we think about the biological process and if we may miss important insights by not thinking in terms of other possible metaphors.

While far from mature, my thinking is that different metaphors apply best to different areas of research and different questions. While the clock metaphor is great for understanding the entrainment of the circadian system (including whole organism, tissues and individual cells) and photoperiodism, and Enright’s endless tape (or some modern substitute) may be useful for ecological studies (including temporal learning and memory), other angles of study may require other concepts.

For instance, I think that the study of what goes inside the cell can benefit from a different metaphor. Studying the molecular basis of circadian rhythms may best be done by utilizing a Rube-Goldberg Machine metaphor: event A triggers event B which starts process C which results in event D….and so on until the event Z causes the event A to happen again. If that last step is missing, it is not a circadian rhythm – it is more akin to an hourglass clock in which something outside of the system needs to start the process all over again.

For studying the outputs, i.e., how the circadian system orchestrates timing of all the other processes in the body, the metaphor may have to fit the organism. An ON-OFF switch is the best metaphorical description of the clock system in (Cyano)bacteria, where there are only two states of the system: the day state and the night state.

For something a little bit more eukaryotic, a relay may be a better metaphor (more than two, but not too many states). The metaphor of a camshaft in car engines that times the opening and closing of cylinders would be fine for fungi and plants and perhaps some invertebrates.

But I had a hard time coming up with a decent metaphor that could apply to complex animals, like us. So far, the best I could come up with is the barrel of a Player Piano. Many little knobs on its surface determine when each note will be played. If you make the barrel rotate slowly and the song lasts 24 hours, then outputs from circadian pacemakers are knobs and the target organs (and peripheral oscillators in them) are those long prongs that make music. Can you think of a better metaphor?

Related reading:

Basics: Biological Clock
Circadian clock without DNA–History and the power of metaphor
A Pacemaker Is A Network
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
Seasonal Affective Disorder – The Basics
Sun Time is the Real Time
Lesson of the Day: Circadian Clocks are HARD to shift!
Lithium, Circadian Clocks and Bipolar Disorder
Are Zombies nocturnal?
Diversity of insect circadian clocks – the story of the Monarch butterfly
Me and the copperheads–or why we still don’t know if snakes secrete melatonin at night
The Mighty Ant-Lion
City Of Light: Insomniac Urban Animals
Spring Forward, Fall Back – should you watch out tomorrow morning?

First published on January 28, 2007

Considering I’ve been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined the term “biological clock” itself before, despite using it all the time.

Since the science bloggers started writing the ‘basic concepts and terms’ posts recently, I’ve been thinking about the best way to define ‘biological clock’ and it is not easy! Let me try, under the fold:

A biological clock is a structure that times regular re-occurence of biochemical, physiological and behavioral events in an organism in constant environmental conditions

Perhaps the best way to explain this is to dissect the definition word-by-word, explaining my choice of words included (and those omitted) in the definition. But first, I need to make it clear that I am NOT trying to invent a new definition, or to impose my views on others. Instead, I am trying to capture the sense in which the term has actually been used by the practitioners in the field, and the way such usage may have changed over time.

What a Biological Clock isn’t

- I need to stress once again that the term “biological clock” is not a real entity, but a metaphor used by the researchers to describe a real entity in shorthand. This metaphor was very useful throughout the history of the field, though on occasion it locks people into frames of mind that may prevent them from seeing a problem as clearly as it could be.

- A biological clock is certainly not to be taken literally, as a real machine with gears or pendulums ticking somewhere inside a living organism.

- A biological clock does not refer to the pseudoscience of biorhythms, one of many ways to extract money from the gullible, either in its original Wilhelm Fliess version or its more recent and spiced-up Oriental variety.

- Colloquially, people often use the term ‘biological clock’ in the sense of “mine is ticking” meaning that time for having kids is running out. That is fine in conversation, but it is not a scientific use of the term.

- Biological Clock should not be confused with the Molecular Clock, a measure of the rate of nucleotide substitution in the DNA over evolutionary time periods, used to infer times of divergence between lineages.

…in an organism…

There are rhythms in nature that occur at levels higher than the organism, e.g., the cycles of population booms and busts in ecology (hare and lynx examples are most famous). Such rhythms are never refered to in the scientific literature as driven by any kind of clocks. The term ‘biological clock’ is sometimes used interchangeably with the term ‘physiological clock’.

This is also the reason I left out of the definition any references to adaptive or evolutionary factors and focused on the way the term is used in the literature – as a sources of a physiological mechanism.

…in constant environmental conditions…

If I give you an electroshock every two hours, you will exhibit a 2-hour cycle of convulsions. This does not mean that your rhythm is endogenously generated by an internal biological clock. It is directly induced by a recurring event in the environment. Many rhythms in living organisms are a result of a direct effect of some environmental factor. A biological clock is responsible only for recurring events that are not direct responses to the environmental cycles.

Yet, I did not use a term “environmentally independent” or some such phrase, because the rhythms generated by endogenous clocks are malleable to environmental factors, especially to light (and very few hormones and other chemicals) – the phase, period and amplitude of the rhythms can be modified by environmental cues. They just don’t disappear once the organism is held in completely constant conditions for prolonged periods of time (at least 2-3 times longer than the period of a single cycle).

…biochemical, physiological and behavioral events…

I did not want to say “everything”, although it comes close in reality. Again, this excludes ecological cycles. It also leaves it somewhat vague if developmental events are to be included or not, which is a good thing, because some developmental events are (e.g., insect eclosion, bird hatching, somite development, developmental timing in Nematodes), while others are not regulated by various types of biological clocks.

Also, not every clock in the body controls every event. A clock in the liver times events in the liver, a clock in the lungs controls events in the lungs. Only the pacemakers control everything, by synchronizing peripheral clocks, which in turn drive local rhythms.

A pacemaker in the suprachiasmatic area (SCN) of the mammalian brain may entrain other local clocks in the brain which in turn drive rhythms of various behaviors.

…times regular re-occurence…

I did not really want to use the word “rhythm” because it may suggest only rhythms of a high frequency (as in music rhythms). I also did not want to limit the definition only to daily/circadian rhythms. Other kinds of rhythms, e.g,. tidal, lunar and circannual, are also driven by biological clocks. The term “calendar” is sometimes seen in popular articles, though not as a specific scientific term, and only in reference to photoperiodism.

…a structure…

This was the hardest part of making the definition. What is a clock? A mechanism? An organ system?

Throughout the 20th century, this was easy. You take an organism, you put it in some kind of setup in which you can continuously monitor some kind of output (usually behavioral activity) and you document a rhythm in constant conditions. Then you systematically lesion or remove various organs or nuclei in the brain, until the rhythm disappears. The organ, which when removed results in arrhytmicity is, you publish, the biological clock in that organism. Thus, you discover the SCN in mammals or the pineal or retina in non-mammalian vertebrates, various brain-nuclei, optic lobes or eyes in invertebrates, etc.

But the world has changed since then. We are now investigating biological clocks at the molecular level. Is the transcription-translation feedback loop among a dozen or so canonical clock genes itself a clock? No, because it is only a necessary but not sufficient part of the clock. Or is a cell that contains such a molecular mechanism a clock? I’d say yes. Or is the tissue composed of such cells a clock? Different people in the field use this term differently, so I wanted to remain vague. But it is a structure.
At the same time, the distinction between a clock and a pacemaker is becoming more and more important, yet more and more difficult to define.

The clock in each cell of the liver is entrained by the signals from the pacemaker in the SCN. The SCN is, in turn, entrained by the light-dark cycles detected in the environment by the eyes. Is the only distinction between a pacemaker and the peripheral clock in the ability to directly (vs.indirectly) tap into environmental information? Does that mean that we have pacemakers and clocks, while fruitflies and zebrafish have only pacemakers as every cell of their bodies is a pacemaker directly entrained by environment? Those are some of the current problems in the field. This is the reason why more and more chronobiologists tend to use the term “circadian system” instead of “circadian clock”, in order to imply the underlying complexity.

In many animals, there are not just clocks in every cell in the body, but also multiple pacemakers, each getting information from the environment. These multiple pacemakers affect each other as well as peripheral clocks and are also affected by the feedback from the periphery.

And that is just vertebrates! We know much less about clocks and circadian organization in invertebrates, fungi and plants.

And then, there are unicellular organisms, both bacteria and protists, many of which contain, or should we say, ARE biological clocks. There is no distinction there between the clock and everything else the cell does.

Recently, it has been discovered that biological clocks (or at least clock genes) are also directly involved in regulation of (not just timing of) development, metabolism, appetite, thermoregulation, reproduction, sleep, cocaine addiction and behavior. Thus, the borderlines between the circadian system and other organ systems are getting increasingly fuzzy.

So, whatever structure (cell or higher) that controls the timing of oscillations in everything happening in the body devoid of environmental cues is a biological clock.

Related reading:

Circadian clock without DNA–History and the power of metaphor
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
Seasonal Affective Disorder – The Basics
Sun Time is the Real Time
Lesson of the Day: Circadian Clocks are HARD to shift!
Lithium, Circadian Clocks and Bipolar Disorder
Are Zombies nocturnal?
Diversity of insect circadian clocks – the story of the Monarch butterfly
Me and the copperheads–or why we still don’t know if snakes secrete melatonin at night
The Mighty Ant-Lion
City Of Light: Insomniac Urban Animals
Spring Forward, Fall Back – should you watch out tomorrow morning?
A Pacemaker Is A Network

This data-set is from an old study (Wilson R, Newman E and Newman H. 1956. Diurnal Variation in Rate of Alcohol Metabolism. J Appl Physiol 8 556-558.), back from the times when it was OK to recruit some college freshmen to drink alcoholic beverages in the name of science (good luck in getting any IRB in the USA to let you do that today!).

This is a record of a diurnal rhythm in alcohol clearance, and the figure is from a pamphlet: Palmer JD 1983. Human Biological Rhythms. Carolina Biological Supply Company, Burlington NC.:

It shows why we can drink more in the evening than at other times of day – there is so much more alcohol dehydrogenase activity in the evening. I am not encouraging drinking here, but if you are into it and can be responsible about it, you can save some serious money by downing a single shot at dawn, according to this graph, or enjoy it more at night.

So, what do you think – does it matter at what time of day/night cops stop you to give you a breathalyzer test? Or your medical tests of various kinds?

And what do you think about the ethics of the study?

a) it was unethical to do this even back in 1956
b) it was OK according to the ethics of the day, but ethics evolves over time so it is unethical today.
c) it is ethical today, but the “ethics creep” of the IRBs has gone way over the line of common sense.

Thoughts?

Originally posted on June 7, 2010.

To get disclaimers out of the way, first, Vanessa Woods (on Twitter) is a friend. I first met her online, reading her blog Bonobo Handshake where she documented her day-to-day life and work with bonobos in the Congo. We met in person shortly after her arrival to North Carolina, at a blogger meetup in Durham, after which she came to three editions of ScienceOnline conference.

I interviewed Vanessa after the 2008 event and blogged (scroll down to the second half of the post) about her 2009 session ‘Blogging adventure: how to post from strange locations’. At the 2010 conference, she was one of the five storytellers at the ScienceOnline Monti on Thursday night (and did another stint at The Monti in Carrboro a couple of months later). I have since then also met her husband Brian Hare and we instantly hit it off marvelously.

I have read Vanessa’s previous book, ‘It’s every monkey for themselves‘, but never reviewed it on the blog because I felt uneasy – that book is so personal! But it is an excellent and wonderfully written page-turner of a book so I knew I was in for a treat when I got a review copy of her new book, Bonobo Handshake (amazon.com). I could not wait for it to officially come out so I could go to the first public reading (where I took the picture) at the Regulator in Durham on May 27th, on the day of publication.

Vanessa recently moved her blog to a new location on Psychology Today network and had a few interviews in local papers, more sure to come soon.

The book weaves four parallel threads. The first is Vanessa’s own life. Bonobo Handshake starts where ‘Each monkey’ leaves off. And while the ‘Monkey’ covered the period of her life that was pretty distressing, this book begins as her life begins to normalize, describing how she met Brian, fell in love, and got married – a happy trajectory.

The second thread is the science – the experiments they did on behavior and cognition in bonobos and chimps, and how the results fit into the prior knowledge and literature on primate (including human) nature.

The third thread reports on the conservation status of great apes, especially bonobos, and all the social, cultural, financial and political factors that work for or against the efforts to prevent them from going extinct.

The fourth thread is the country of Congo, where all the bonobos in the wild live, especially its recent history of war and its effects on the local people.

The four threads are seamlessly intervowen with each other, but it takes some time into the book to realize that there is, besides the fact that Vanessa was there and did the stuff and wrote about it, another unifying thread – the question of cooperation vs. competition. Vanessa and Brian sometimes love, sometimes fight: what determined one behavior at one time and the opposite at another time?

For the most part, chimps compete and bonobos cooperate: why is that? And what accounts for occasional exceptions to that rule? When threatened, or perceiving to be threatened, animals become insecure. Chimps deal with that insecurity by lashing out – becoming violent and aggressive, or at least putting out a great show of machismo. When bonobos feel insecure (including when they are very young), they solve the problem (and release the tension) by having sex with each other. If chimps won the national elections in the USA, they would probably rule by fear and force, investing mightily into the military, the police and the prison system, going around the world bombing other countries, declaring various internal “Wars on X”, and generally trying to keep the population fearful, subdued and obedient. Bonobos in such a position would always first try to find out a diplomatic solution: how to turn a stranger, or even an enemy into a friend and ally? Share something! Whatever you have: food, shelter, sex…. Everyone is safer that way in the end.

Of course, there are reasons why chimps are one way and bonobos the other. Food is scarce where chimps live, thus there is competition for it, thus the strongest individual wins, and the winner takes all. The position in the hierarchy is the key to survival. Individualism rules. On the other hand, there is plenty of food where bonobos live, enough to share with everyone, eat enough to get bloated, and still plenty left over to just let rot. Why fight over it? Thus, communitarian spirit rules, and if a big strong male starts to feel his oats a little too much, the females will get together and gang up on him as a sisterhood and beat the crap out of him – a rare exception to their usual non-violence, but an act that restores harmony to the group as a whole.

What can we learn from it? That, being equally related to both species, as well as being smarter, we are quite capable of switching between the two modes of reaction to perceived threats: competitive or cooperative. Some people (probably due to the social environment in which they were raised) tend to respond more like chimps, others more like bonobos, but all are capable of behaving both ways. Thus, all are capable of making choices how to react. And the society as a whole can teach people about the exictence of this choice and, in some general ways regarding different kinds of issues, suggest which of the two reactions is condoned by the society and which one will lend you in jail. Studying both chimps and bonobos, comparing them to each other and to humans, can help us understand this choice better, and what it takes to make one or the other reaction to a perceived threat. And even how to study, as researchers, competitions versus cooperation, something that was historically colored by the social upbringing of individual scientists.

[An aside: this is not really relevant to the book as whole, but if I remember correctly it occurs once in the book, and Vanessa sometimes mentions it in her public speaking and on her blog. She mentions the old trope that we are about 98% identical to both chimps and bonobos. That number denotes the identity of sequences of DNA that is expressed in adult, sexually mature individuals at a particular time of year and particular time of day. It ignores all the unexpressed DNA, individual differences, seasonal/daily changes in expression, and effect of the environment. It also ignores the fact that the sequence is not what really matters - it is how the developing organism (from zygote, through embryonic and post-embryonic development, through metamorphosis, growth, maturation, puberty, adulthood and senescence) uses those sequences to effect the development of traits and the day-to-day response of the organism to the environment. It is not the sequence that matters, but which gene is expressed in which cell at what time and in conjunction with which other genes that matters. The number "98% equal" reeks of genetic determinism, which originates with Adaptation and Natural Selection, the 1966 book by George Williams which corrupted generations of biologists, and 'The Selfish Gene', the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins which ruined generations of lay readers and science journalists. It peaked in late 1990s (I wrote this in 1999) with the hype over Human Genome Project ("Holy Grail", "Blueprint of Life"!) and currently survives only in the realm of that abomination of science we all know as Evolutionary Psychology. There is a lot of literature explaining the poverty of the genocentric and deterministic view of biology, most notably the entire opuses of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, their numerous students and proteges and fans, and an entire generation of evo-devo researchers (the field was spawned/inspired by Gould's 1977 book 'Ontogeny and Phylogeny') and Philosophers of Science (e.g.., Bob Brandon, Bill Wimsatt) who spent some years proving it wrong and, successfully done that, have since moved on to more fertile topics. Actually, one of the easiest-to-read books on the topic for lay audience is titled - What it Means to be 95% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and their Genes. Saying that humans and bonobos are 98 (or 95, or 99, different numbers are thrown out) percent identical to us is like saying that an airplane and a house are identical because both are built with identical sizes, shapes and colors of Lego blocks - except that one propeller-piece that the airplane has and the house does not. Bonobos and humans are similar because our development is similar, leading to similar phenotypes - not much to do with the sequences of c-DNA libraries. Aside over.]

Conservation of Great Apes depends on humans cooperating to make it happen, but also has to take into account the instrinsic proclivities of different species (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons are all different) towards violence vs. collaboration which dictate the sizes and shapes and organizational schemes of their sanctuaries and eventual wild refuges.

Finally, civil war in Congo is an enormous example of violent competition, but what were its causes? Who chose to compete in this way and why? What was the competition about? Did the end of the Cold War sufficiently weaken the Non-Aligned Movement in a way that reduced the national pride of the people of its member-nations (allowing tribal instincts to take over), reduced the economic cooperation between the member countries (thus sending some of their economies into a downward spiral leading to hopelessness which often leads to lashing out at perceived enemies), or reduced the military cooperation between the members that would scare any potential leader of a tribal movement, or reduced the authority and thus ability of the Movement’s leadership to intervene and prevent wars between the members?

Why did some people come out of war utterly changed – the “living dead” – while others emerged hopeful, energetic and optimistic, full of life and love? How did collaboration of some people help save some of them from murder, and save their psyches from lifelong scars?

Vanessa weaves these four threads expertly and, at the end of the book, you cannot help but care about all four! It is a fast and easy read, you never feel bored or inundated by information, yet you end the book with vastly more knowledge than when you began. And once you know about something enough, you start caring.

I remember as a kid, before the Internet, trying to find something to read after I have finished all 20 library books I took out and still having a couple of weeks of boring vacation ahead of me. Stuck somewhere outside of civilization, with nothing else to do, there was nothing else but to explore the enormous leather-bound classics, each thousands of pages long, each unabridged – stuff that every home has. So I read, slowly and carefully as there was no need to rush, such books as David Copperfield, Pickwick Papers, Teutonic Knights, Moby Dick, Les Miserables, The Road to Life and Martin Eden and others. Being a kid, I did not know anything about any of those topics, and these ancient authors LOVED to write lengthy treateses on various topics over many pages, yet, by getting informed about them, I got to care about Victorian England, Medieval Religious Wars in Poland, classification of whales (and how Melville got it horribly wrong), Paris sewers, educational reforms, and the hard life of becoming a writer. Once, when I contracted something (rubella? scarlet fever?) that made me sick for a couple of days but contagious for another three weeks, with nothing to do at home, I read the unabridged five volumes of War and Peace – at the beginning I did not, but at the end I did care about Russian aristocracy and military strategy (or “how to lose a land war in a Russian winter, part I”).

I don’t know about you, but before I picked up ‘Bonobo Hanshake’ I cared about Vanessa, being a friend, and was thus interested to see what happened after the ‘Monkeys’ book was published. I was interested in bonobo behavior (as we discussed it a lot back in grad school – I did my concentration in Animal Behavior and was a part of the Keck Center for Behavioral Biology) especially as I did not follow the scientific literature on it over the past 6-7 years. I had no idea how endangered bonobos were, nor did I know anything about the civil war in the Congo (and how it is related to the civil war in Rwanda). And while Vanessa did not emulate the 19th century writers, and instead of long chapters on each topic she intertwined brief updates on each of the four threads within each short chapter, I still learned a lot – enough to start caring about the apes, about the people of Congo, about the primatologists working in dangerous places, about individual bonobos and individual Congolese people whose lives intersected Vanessa’s over the past few years. More you know, more you care. So, even if the four themes of this book do not automatically excite you, I suggest you pick up the book – a couple of hours later, you will deeply care about it, know more, want to know even more, and will feel good about it.

Update: In strange synchronicity, Jason Goldman and Brian Switek also reviewed the book today. The book has now also been reviewed by DeLene Beeland, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Christie Wilcox.

I remember from an old review that John Palmer did a study on the diurnal pattern of copulation in humans some years ago. You can see the abstract here.

Now, Roberto Reffinetti repeated the study and published it in the online open-access Journal of Circadian Rhythms here:

The two studies agree: The peak copulatory activity in people living in a modern society is around midnight (or, really, around bedtime) with a smaller secondary peak in the morning around wake-time. This makes sense, as natural (pre-Edison) pattern of human sleep is bi-modal: two bouts of sleep. One bout starts at dusk. The second bout ends at dawn. And there is not much to do for a couple of hours of wakefulness in the middle of the night. You can stand sentry. You can think deep philosophical thoughts. Or, if you are there with your partner…well, you know what to do.

Dig through the papers yourself for additional data on workday-weekend differences and the temporal patterns of the female orgasm.

Originally posted on July 6, 2010.

If you picked up The Poisoner’s Handbook (amazon.com) looking for a fool-proof recipe, I hope you have read the book through and realized at the end that such a thing does not exist: you’ll get busted. If they could figure it all out back in 1930s, can you imagine how much easier they can figure out a case of poisoning today, with modern sensitive techniques? And if you have read the book through, I hope you found it as fascinating as I did. Perhaps you should use your fascination with poisons to do good instead, perhaps become a forensic toxicologist?

Deborah Blum (blog, Twitter) has done it again – written a fast-paced page-turner, full of action and intrigue, and with TONS of science in it. It reads like a detective novel. Oh, wait, it is a detective novel. Who said that an author has to invent a fictional detective, an Arsene Lupin or Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes or the Three Investigators? There existed in history real people just like them, including Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, the heroes of The Poisoner’s Handbook.

Charles Norris was the first Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York, or at least the first one who was actually qualified for that position which, before him, was a political appointment not requiring any expertise. Norris served in this role from 1918. to 1935. and revolutionized both the position and the science of forensic medicine. Alexander Gettler was one of his first appointees, who served as New York City’s chief toxicologist until 1959.

The two of them used their prominent position to set the new high standards for the profession of a public medical examiner, and also set the new high standards for the scientific research in forensic pathology, including forensic toxicology – the study of the way poisons kill and how to detect it. They affected rules and legislation with their work, they sent clever murderers to the electric chair, and exonerated the innocents who were headed that way due to mistakes of the non-science-based courtroom battles. And in order to do that, they needed to do a lot of their own research during many years of long days and nights in the lab performing meticulous and often gruesome studies of the effects of various substances on animals, people, living and dead tissues and coming up with ever more sensitive and clever methods for detecting as small quantities of the poison as was technically possible at the time.

In the author’s note at the end of the book, Deborah Blum notes that there were many other forensic scientists before, during and after the Norris-Gettner era, and many of them got mentioned in the book or are cited in the EndNotes (which I discovered only once I finished the book – I hate the way publishers do this these days!). But it is also true that Norris and Gettner were the leaders – they used their prominent position and political clout, and their meticulous research defined the high standards for the nascent discipline. In a way, the central importance and prominence of these two men worked well for the book – here we have two interesting characters to like and follow instead of a whole plethora of unfleshed names. And as each chapter focuses on one poisonous substance and one or two notorious cases of its use, it is just like following Holmes and Watson through a series of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories – the two characters are the connecting thread, and they evolve throughout their lives and throughout the book, case by case.

Apart from being a history of forensic toxicology, the book has several other themes that keep recurring in each chapter, as they chronologically unfold. The book is also a history of 1920/30s New York City, and a history of technology and engineering. Carbon monoxide poisoning? That was the beginning of the car craze. Gas? Everyone cooked and heated with it at the time. Some other poisons were easily found in many over-the-counter products in stores and pharmacies.

Having just read On The Grid, I was also attuned to the discussions of infrastructure of NYC in the early 20th century. How did people transport themselves? Air pollution? Gas? Clean water? Wastewater? All sources of potentially toxic chemicals. How efficient was garbage collection? Not much….thus there were many rats. And rats needed to be controlled. And for that, there was plenty of rat poison to be bought. And rat poison can kill a human as well – inadvertently, as a method for suicide, or as a murder weapon. It is kinda fun to see some of the same infrastructure issues, like garbage disposal and pest extermination in N.Y.City, addressed from different angles in different books – this one, On The Grid, as well as Rats, another fascinating science book that covers New York City engineering, infrastructure and politics of the time. All the threads tie in together….

Another topic addressed in each chapter was Prohibition. One can certainly die of a huge overdose of ethyl alcohol normally found in drinks, but at the time when producing and selling drinks was illegal, people still drank, perhaps even more. And what did they drink? Whatever they could find on the black market – home-made concoctions brewed by unsavory types more interested in profit than the safety of their product. Instead of ethyl, those drinks were mostly made of methyl (wood) alcohol which is much more dangerous in much smaller doses. Prohibition saw a large increase in drinking-related deaths, a fact often loudly pronounced by Norris, leading to the eventual end of Prohibition. Can we apply that thinking to the War On Drugs now?

And the story of Prohibition has another element to it – the importance of regulation. An unregulated substance is potentially dangerous. By solving a number of poisoning cases, and by doing their research on the toxicity of then easily available substances, Norris and Gettner have managed to initiate regulation of a number of toxins, or even their removal from the market altogether. Some substances that were found in everything, even touted as health potions (even radioactive substances!!!) were discovered by forensic toxicologists to be deadly, and were subsequently banned or rigorously controlled. Today we have entire federal agencies dealing with regulation of dangerous chemicals, but in the early 20th century, it was the time of laissez-faire murder, suicide, suffering and death.

Finally, after I finished this fascinating book, I realized it gave me something more: an anchor, or a scaffolding, or a context, for every story about poisons I see now. Now every blog post on Deborah’s blog makes more sense – I can fit it into a body of knowledge and understanding I would not have if I have not read the book. This really goes hand in hand with the recent discussions of #futureofcontext in journalism – see The Future Of Context for starters. The idea is that news stories do not provide enough context for readers who tune into a new topic for the first time. A story that is an update on an ongoing story is not comprehensible without some context, which the news story cannot provide. So now various media organizations are experimenting with ways to provide context for people who are just tuning in. The perfect source of context for a topic is a book, especially now that every book appears to have its own website with links and news and a blog and a Twitter feed and a Facebook page. The book provides context, and all these other things provide updates.

For example, reading Bonobo Handshake may not provide much more context for me about animal behavior and cognition since I already have that context, but it certainly now makes it easier for me to understand the news stories regarding conservation of great apes. And without that book I would never have sufficient background in the recent history of Congo to understand and appreciate this comment thread. ‘On The Grid’ gives me context for all news regarding infrastructure. Explaining Research is a great recent example of a book that is a great start on the topic, but which constantly reminds the reader that this field is in flux and that the book’s website contains frequent updates and additional resources. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks provides fantastic context for the discussions of medical ethics and its evolution in the USA in the past several decades, which I riffed off a little bit in my latest interview.

What reading The Poisoner’s Handbook did for me is to give me enough knowledge and understanding on the topic that I can really appreciate it. I now get excited about news stories regarding poisons because I feel I understand them better. While reading Deborah Blum’s blog was interesting before, now it is more than interesting – it is exciting and I can’t wait for a new post to show up. I did not know how much I did not know. Now that I do, I want to know more. I am hungry for more knowledge, and more news, and more stories about toxins and poisons and how various strange and not so strange substances affect our bodies – where they come from, how they get in, how they hijack or disrupt our normal biochemical processes, how they kill us, and how do we figure that all out in the laboratory or in the basement of the mortuary. I hope you will feel the same once you finish reading this book. You will do that now, OK?

I have mentioned this in my older post: in a natural state, humans do not sleep a long consecutive bout throughout the night (except in the middle of the summer in low latitudes). The natural condition is bimodal – two bouts of sleep interrupted by a short episode of waking in the middle of the night.

In today’s New York Times, there is an article about this:

Sleep Disorder? Wake Up and Smell the Savanna by RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.:

————snip———–
Many patients tell me they have a sleep problem because they wake up in the middle of the night for a time, typically 45 minutes to an hour, but fall uneventfully back to sleep. Curiously, there seems to be no consequence to this “problem.” They are unaffected during the day and have plenty of energy and concentration to go about their lives.
————snip———–
The problem, it seems, is not so much with their sleep as it is with a common and mistaken notion about what constitutes a normal night’s sleep.
It’s a question that Dr. Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health asked himself in the early 1990′s. He conducted a landmark experiment in which he placed a group of normal volunteers in 14-hour dark periods each day for a month. He let the subjects sleep as much and as long as they wanted during the experiment.
————snip———–
By the fourth week, the subjects slept an average of eight hours a night — but not consecutively. Instead, sleep seemed to be concentrated in two blocks. First, subjects tended to lie awake for one to two hours and then fall quickly asleep. Dr. Wehr found that the abrupt onset of sleep was linked to a spike in the hormone melatonin. Melatonin secretion by the brain’s pineal gland is switched on by darkness.

After an average of three to five hours of solid sleep, the subjects would awaken and spend an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness before a second three- to five-hour sleep period. Such bimodal sleep has been observed in many other animals and also in humans who live in pre-industrial societies lacking artificial light.

Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, has studied the sleep patterns of non-Western populations. From the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Africa to the Swat Pathan herders in Pakistan, Dr. Worthman documented a pattern of communal sleep in which individuals drifted in and out of sleep throughout the night.

She speculates that there may even be an evolutionary advantage to interrupted sleep. “When we lived in open exposed savanna, being solidly asleep leaves us vulnerable to predators.”

With artificial light, modern humans have essentially managed to extend their daytime activities late into the night, when all other sensible creatures are busy sleeping.

As a result, we have compressed our natural sleep into artificially short nighttimes, but not all people are so easily tamed by artificial light. Some people, who may just have very strong circadian rhythms, still have this primitive bimodal sleep that they confuse with a sleep disorder.

Add these people to the rest of us who, under the pressures of modern life, often have some trouble falling or staying asleep and there is a large captive audience for drug companies.

Thanks in large part to the meteoric rise in direct-to-consumer advertising, medications like Ambien and Lunesta have become household names and seductive panaceas that millions find hard to resist — even though a majority have no serious sleep problem to repair. If it’s any consolation to those of you who are awake in the middle of the night for an hour or so, reading or watching television, you may simply be the most natural sleepers.

I have nothing to add, except I can also give you an image I dug up – the original data from Wehr’s experiment. See how the sleep is bimodal during the long winter nights and gets compressed during simulated summer:

Related reading:

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
Sun Time is the Real Time
Lesson of the Day: Circadian Clocks are HARD to shift!
Seasonal Affective Disorder – The Basics
Are Zombies nocturnal?
Spring Forward, Fall Back – should you watch out tomorrow morning?

Now, that’s an equation for an awesome evening.

Do you love to hear a good story? Love to tell a good story?

Folks, have we got a night for you. On Fri., Jan. 20, 2012, during the ScienceOnline2012 banquet you will be treated to a special edition of The Monti, hosted by Jeff Polish.

The Monti is a non-profit organization whose mission is to create community through the telling of stores. At every show, they invite ordinary people to tell extraordinary stories without notes in front of a live audience.

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The four requirements that all stories must follow:

- All stories are true.
- All stories are told without the use of notes.
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- All stories must revolve around a predetermined theme.

For our event, the theme will be CONNECTIONS.

You can get a taste of what The Monti is all about by listening to their online archive. In particular, you might enjoy ScienceOnline alum Scott Huler’s story.

If you are interested in potentially being selected as a storyteller for the night, you should fill out the Call for Entries form on the main site. You must be a ScienceOnline2012 attendee to participate (and you must have a ticket for the Banquet—you can still get a ticket if you didn’t sign up during registration). In addition to your contact info, we’ll ask you to tell the gist of your story in 100 WORDS. No more. The Call for Entries will close on December 15th. Jeff Polish will curate the entries and select the stories he feels will give us the best variety of stories for the topic. He will work with the selected storytellers to help them cultivate their stories and their performance.

In the meantime, you should follow @TheMonti1 for 140-character quips. But don’t try to bribe him for a spot on the evening lineup!

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Previously in this series:

What is: ScienceOnline2012 – and it’s coming soon!
ScienceOnline participants’ interviews
Some updates on #scio12, #NYCscitweetup, Story Collider and more.
Updates: ScienceOnline2012, Science blogging, Open Laboratory, and #NYCSciTweetup
ScienceOnline2012 – we have the Keynote Speaker!
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Submissions for the Cyberscreen Science Film Festival are now OPEN!
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Updates: #scio12, #soNYC, #NYCSciTweetup and more.
Making it in the new media ecosystem, at ScienceOnline2012