I don’t know about you, but I think today’s dramatic unmasking of scientist Brooke Magnanti as the mysterious call-girl Belle de Jour, blogger and titillating tell-all author, has just done wonders for the reputation of scientists. What could be more humanizing than the oldest profession?

Dr Magnanti, who in the Sunday Times’ glamour shots bears more than a passing resemblance to Paris Hilton, is reported in the paper’s exclusive to be “a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol”. To make a long story short, she was broke after writing her thesis and decided that becoming a £300 per hour London call girl was a good a way as any to ease the pain.

There has been a bit of predictable tut-tutting about today’s revelation– but I wasn’t really that surprised. First of all, I have first-hand experience with how broke and destitute a graduate student can become. And second, science is a profession populated by human beings, and Magnanti’s decision seems like a perfectly human one. Maybe it’s just my liberal arts education, or my four-year stint in Amsterdam, but I can’t see anything morally incorrect about the good doctor’s money-making scheme, provided it was carried out, as she claims, without her or anyone else being exploited.

I was also gratified to find out that Belle de Jour was the genuine article – many journalists having decided that only a man could have written something so smutty. Good on her. But my main reaction on hearing the news was excitement: surely this unveiling would help to shatter the tedious stereotypes suffered by our entire profession. It may be a sad indictment of our times, but this one instance of raciness might do more than a hundred well-meaning “public engagement” exercises to show people that researchers are just as good – or bad – as anyone else.

Some of my happiest moments have happened in the dark.

I have a thing for darkrooms. Perhaps it was a bias promoted in early childhood; my father is an artist and during my formative years he was in the process of transforming from a lithographer and painter into a purveyor of older forms of photography. The smell of fix and developer used to waft out of the basement of our house in Ohio when he was puttering around, and to me these essences are associated with comfort. What could be more magical to a child than images slowly appearing underwater in a tray of smelly witch’s brew? One of my earliest memories is seeing a row of wet transparent rectangles hanging by my mother’s clothespins from a line spun across the darkroom area, bathed in a red glow – the safest sort of light I can imagine.

I didn’t do a lot of dark room work myself until I was in my final year of university. I was taking photographs of plant cell spreads and karyotypes and was trying to get that perfect exposure under a vast, rickety camera contraption. If you asked me to operate one now, I’d have no idea, but I have a strong memory of having to wave my hand over the things I was shooting in order to ‘dodge’ the best exposure, and of mixing up all the developing solutions myself, just like my Dad used to do. (Why didn’t we send these off to be printed professionally? I have no idea.)

In graduate school and beyond, I practically lived in darkrooms. I remember the first time I felt comfortable enough to march right in to a place and unpack my film without a safelight – that amazing proficiency you eventually command with performing tasks blind. The sounds take over: the rippling noise of a film as you shake it out of its heavy foil bag, the snick of scissors clipping the corner for orientation, the beeping and hot breath of the X-OMAT machine. They may have automated the process, but the solutions – decanting through stained tubing into the sink – still smelt exactly the same.

In my department we had only normal doors, so going to develop your film was a solitary experience, though proceeded by a cheerful queue of people down the corridor, clutching their metal cassettes and film boxes as they speculated about how disastrous or glorious their results would be that day. About halfway through my graduate stint, Enhanced Chemical Luminescence suddenly hit the scene and there used to be a lot of tension between people like me doing radioactive Southern blots and sequencing gels (in and out in a jiffy) and those who were so paranoid and unfamiliar with the new technology that they insisted on mixing their reactions in the dark – thereby making the rest of us fret in the queue outside for much longer. I remember the first time someone showed an ECL-generated film at a lab meeting, and we marvelled at the exposure time scribbled on its top: “2 sec”.

It wasn’t until my first post-doc at the Cancer Research UK that I encountered the rotating-barrel door of a modern multi-use darkroom – what a brilliant idea. Rolling into the red-lit room (another characteristic sound, like the rumbling of a train) was a revelation: four people stood inside, calmly working in tandem – at least, I eventually worked out that there were people there as my eyes adjusted to the light. I soon determined that the composition of people in a darkroom determines how chatty they are, and the introduction of a new person can catalyze either gossip or silence. I’m not ashamed to admit that I sometimes conducted social experiments on my own colleagues. Something about the darkness changes the way we interact; it’s like being in a lift, but somehow nowhere near as awkward because no one can see your face.

Above all, darkrooms have been the scene of a thousand little personal scientific dramas. Nearly every major result I ever gathered culminated in that tense, two minute moment waiting for the finished film to emerge from its slot and fall noisily onto the plastic surface of the X-OMAT machine. I’ll describe the most exciting moment of all another time, but even the trivial controls and pilots have all engendered that same heart-pounding attack of mixed emotions: anticipation, fear, longing, wild confidence and crushing pessimism.

Recently I’ve been happy to find myself in a biochemical phase in my lab work. Cell biology is intriguing and can result in beautiful images, but somehow a scientific result doesn’t seem real until you see the bands on a Western blot. The people in my institute aren’t that chatty in the dark, I’ve found, but yesterday evening I shared the room with a congenial man with a New Zealand accent who was quite willing to pass the time. (In that quirky way of large institutions with few darkrooms and an itinerant population of students and post-docs, I actually have no idea who he is and would probably not recognize him if I passed him in the corridor today – the red reflection on his shaved head wasn’t exactly diagnostic.) In addition to talking about the weather, discussing a controversial program about the genetics of race and intelligence he’d watched on telly the night before, and opining that the more pessimistic you feel, the more likely you are to have a good film result – so not true! –, this unknown man also taught me an incredibly useful lesson: you don’t have to wait until the machine beeps to feed in the next film!

“Just stick it in on the opposite side and away you go,” he told me, gallantly demonstrating with his own film when I proved too nervous to try it out myself. I needed empirical evidence, you see. When the next guy rolled into the room (a taciturn specimen who killed the chatty atmosphere in a microsecond), he asked if the machine had beeped yet and Dr Kiwi let me tell him the good news.

It’s nice to know that after forty-something years in darkrooms I still have something to learn.

In my life as a scientist, I am continually struck by the modest miracle of the microscopic writ large. I think about this every time I streak a solution of invisible bacteria onto a Petri plate and come in the next morning to a sea of pale colonies scattered across the agar surface. Or when I amplify DNA from a clear droplet of liquid in the PCR machine and end up with a string of violent pink bands bristling on the gel under UV. Yesterday, my benchmate and I were marvelling at yet another manifestation of the tiny made tangible: E.coli transformed with a man-made DNA plasmid encoding a fluorescent tag called mCherry, so bright that after overnight growth, the bugs glow ruby red even by daylight:

The color became more intense after she spun the bacteria down in a centrifuge:

And, true to the laws of color mixing, when I miniprepped the DNA for her as a favor, the blue tracking dye turned a lovely shade of lavender:

It’s little observations like these that add a dash of wonder to my everyday lab experiences. But I was thinking this morning as I walked across the Quad, leaves fluttering down around me in the crisp air, that nature is the master of crafting invisible components into a gloriously omnipresent whole. The ochre and scarlet of autumn leaves are just conglomerates of microscopic pigment molecules; the blades of grass are mere chains of microscopic proteins. Even the mould that stubbornly sprouts up in the interstices of my bathroom tiles between bleach attacks is just another manifestation.

But nature does this so effortlessly. And we have become so divorced from the natural world that repeating its tricks in the lab seems like something original and clever.

A good scientist is never off-duty, which is perhaps why researchers throughout history have experimented on themselves. The 18th century anatomist John Hunter is said to have tested the infectious nature of gonorrhea by applying a patient’s pus to his own pertinent organ. In the 19th century, James Young Simpson proved that chloroform is an excellent anesthesia by knocking himself out, along with two unlucky assistants. And as recently as 1982, Barry Marshall could truly be said to have earned his eventual Nobel Prize for proving that ulcers are caused by Helicobacter pylori bacteria – after drinking a lovely cloudy solution of the microscopic culprits.

The other day, I was having lunch with my friend Daniel Glaser at the champagne bar in St Pancras International station. The item that most tempted me on the menu was a risotto with mussels, although I hesitated ordering at first. I tend to avoid shellfish, mostly because having a PhD in Microbiology indoctrinates you with a deep-seated squeamishness about all things Salmonella-related. But a few weeks previously, I’d decided to face my silly fears and had downed a gorgeous seafood pasta at Paradiso. It didn’t give me food poisoning, but almost immediately after finishing my lips started tingling, my eyes began to water and I developed mild respiratory problems that lasted a few days. After googling a bit, I decided it had probably been a mild allergic reaction – apparently quite common in adults, even if they’d never reacted as children – but I didn’t know which had been to blame, the prawns or the mussels.

So here I was, presented with a good experimental opportunity. If I ate the risotto and didn’t react, it was likely to have been the prawns that had troubled me earlier. But if I succumbed to the allergy, I’d know it was time to kiss mussels goodbye forever.

“Go for it,” Daniel advised, reasoning that knowledge was power and it would be good to know one way or the other. It was easy for him to say. Scientific curiosity notwithstanding, I was marginally less enthusiastic: the respiratory symptoms had made it difficult to sleep last time, and I wasn’t thrilled about going through all that again so soon. Also, food allergies can be dangerously capricious: hives one day and anaphylaxis the next.

“Don’t worry,” he added quickly. “I trained as a paramedic in the Israeli army.”

Reassuring.

I’m sure you know where this is going. Dear reader, I ate that risotto. And about a minute after finishing, I experienced the same symptoms – plus a few new ones.

“It’s unlikely to be psychosomatic,” Dan said helpfully, when – a bit of iPhonery later – it turned out the added extras also fit. “You wouldn’t make up symptoms you weren’t expecting.” Then his eyes narrowed. “Actually, we could have designed this experiment a lot better.”

As I coughed discreetly into my serviette, he outlined a plan designed to reproduce the day’s results and delve further into the important question of whether I had to eat the actual mussel or whether sauce containing mussels would be enough.

“You need to go to Marks and Spencers and buy all the permutations as ready-meals!” he said. “Then you draw a matrix and test all the possibilities. Of course you’d have to take a few days in between if you’d reacted, just to clear your system…and maybe you could try it with and without a prophylactic dose of antihistamines…oh, that’s a lot more permutations…”

I don’t think I’ll be eating shellfish again, experimentally or otherwise. I can report that prompt intake of over-the-counter antihistamines does seem to alleviate a food allergy – the symptoms were milder and only lasted few hours. Of course I can’t really prove it, but I like to think that in a parallel universe there was a control me, miserable and coughing into her pillow later that night.

For those of you following the previous conversation about my opinion that the Times’ new science magazine Eureka is male-centric, but who aren’t likely to wade through the 100+ comments, just to let you know that its editor, Antonia Senior, has been kind enough to defend her position on that thread (near the bottom).

I’ve reproduced her comment below, and the discussion rages on over at the original post – but feel free to add your thoughts to this update if you’d find it easier.

I’m the editor of Eureka, and yes I am a woman, and a very committed feminist. I have been following your blog, and reading your comments online. It’s taken a while for me to reply because I’ve been furiously busy, apologies for that. I do want to reply because I think you all raise incredibly important issues.

I would like to just explain our thinking about the number of women in the issue. Yes, we knew they were under-represented. Yes, we agonised about it. (I’m stung by the suggestion we didn’t notice, or that the graphics are dictated by marketing!)

But I, and my female picture editor, are absolutely committed to the principle of including ideas and pictures based on merit alone. We were looking for 15 astonishing ideas, and only 4 of the ideas we loved were being championed by women – Libby Heaney, Angela Belcher, Laura Chamberlain and Rachel Armstrong.

At one point we nearly put in a few more ideas, solely to have more pictures of women in the photo essay, but rejected the idea as patronising and ridiculous.

As for the columnists being male, I make no apologies for that. We wanted Martin Rees to be our guest columnist for our launch issue, but there will be women in that slot in the future (suggestions welcome!). The Times’ environment editor and science editor are male – but as a lifelong Times employee I can assure you that this is coincidental; there are plenty of women in positions of real power here, just not any in those two jobs. Ben Miller is male, but the market for comics with a scientific background is a niche one.

In a previous incarnation I was Deputy Business Editor of The Times and faced a similar problem; women were under-represented in senior roles in business, and getting them into our pages felt like a struggle. I came to the same conclusion then: our job is to report the world not invent it as we would like it to be.

I know that many of you felt that the furniture was male, and you are probably right. We could make more effort with the graphics etc.

I have plenty of plans for championing women in science in future editions, but I’m afraid I will not be shoe-horning women into any issue in just for the sake of it.

If any of you have ideas for women whose work you think we would like to know about because the work is astonishing, then I would be delighted to hear about them. I can be reached at antonia.senior@thetimes.co.uk

I would also like to highlight Maxine Clarke’s response:

But there are just so many women doing great scientific work – as I mentioned above, it really is not hard to find them. They are not invisible. I am afraid I absolutely do not buy the argument put forth by Henry and maybe others that it is harder to get women to write. I have personally commissioned literally hundreds of articles over the years, and have never found it a problem to publish those by women as well as those by men. I think every commissioning editor, whether of Eureka, or of a Nature or other scientific journal, or anywhere, can find people who are fully representative of the scientific world – gender, geographical location, etc. It really is not difficult. And if it takes an extra five minutes of phone calls/search to find a woman who isn’t into self-promotion bigtime but is doing superior work, then that is five minutes well spent.

Finally, I would again point out that numerous studies over decades suggest that what is considered ‘astonishing’ (whether it be a CV, a grant application or research impact) is strongly subconsciously influenced when the gender of its creator is known – and that both men and women fall prey to this.

What is it like to be a scientist in the modern world, and how does the reality measure up to the average person’s view of the scientist? I’ve been fascinated by this question for years, and now I’ve been asked to speak about it at the next gathering of Skeptics In The Pub in London, with a talk entitled Boffins and geeks, madmen and freaks: why are scientists still such a PR disaster?

What I plan on exploring is the following: scientists as a group call up very specific images in the public imagination, typically not very flattering ones. This distorted view is reflected in depictions of scientists in fiction, but also tends to spill over into how they are portrayed in more factual accounts, such as documentaries and in the news media. In a world growing increasingly reliant on the latest scientific, medical and technological advances, possibly for its very survival, the expert accounts of scientists are nevertheless often simply disbelieved, which could be due in part to the unease and distrust that the prevailing stereotypes engender. The meme of scientists as out-of-touch/cold/arrogant/mad meddlers has ancient roots and has evolved in interesting ways to the present day. But whose fault is all this – are scientists themselves partially to blame? If people knew the truth about what modern scientists are really like and really do, would science as a whole be a more sympathetic, persuasive profession? And if so, how we can turn it around – and is it even possible?

I’d like to come at these questions from a non-predictable angle and to get beyond the standard clichéd material, into territory that might be a bit more honest and productive.

I’d be happy to see many of you in the audience this coming Monday, 19 October, from 7:30 PM at the The Penderel’s Oak, 283 High Holborn, London WC1V 7HP. You need to book in advance, and entrance is £2. According to the website, 143 seats have already been booked, leaving a little more than a hundred remaining. They are very strict about these limits. Come early if you want to actually sit down!

Ever since the Guardian axed its weekly science supplement a few years ago, there hasn’t been a single British broadsheet that considered the topic interesting enough to devote more than a few sporadic column inches in the main news pages. All the major papers have magazines or sections dedicated to sport, travel, television, family, literature, money, arts and other topics, but science has been left out in the cold.

Until now. I have been awaiting the arrival of ‘Eureka’, the Times’ new weekly science magazine, ever since I first saw the advertisements in the Underground. An issue was duly procured at the newsagents, this debut morning, and I flipped through it eagerly on my morning commute. The magazine looked superficially good – lots of articles and intriguing topics, nice graphics and layout. And I was happy to see it wasn’t just a series of features about scientific facts and findings; there were many profiles of real, working scientists – most of them gratifyingly young and non-famous. But as I worked my way to the end, I slowly realized what was wrong.

‘Eureka’ was almost completely male. Of the twenty practicing scientists either featured, or asked to air their opinion, only four were women. But the masculinity cut much deeper than that, much more subliminally. The imagery, too, was almost totally male. Whenever the designers had to choose an arbitrary human figure to illustrate an article, they almost invariably chose men. There is a man’s face on the cover (appropriately labelled ‘the future face of science’, dovetailing quite nicely with the predominant gender of the young up-and-comings celebrated within its pages). There are male long-distance runners, male actors on their whimsical ‘quantum of cool’ scale, a man holding up a baby, even a male zombie. There are pictures of Robert Fitzroy, Kevin Spacey, Sam Phillips, Clarence Darrow, Richard Hammond, Charles Darwin and Bill Bryson. Aside from the four female scientists featured, women appear only in stereotypically girlish roles: a wide-eyed lover mocked up on a Mills-and-Boon-style romance novel cover; a Thirties woman playing with her nylon stockings; a scantily-clad woman in a see-through dress. The only gender-neutral sketch is of a woman yawning (probably because science is ever-so-boring to the fairer sex, isn’t it?) Oh, and there’s a snippet about how getting tromped by a stiletto packs more power than an elephant.

I am sure that none of this was deliberate, absolutely certain. And I’m not going to give up on ‘Eureka’ for something so superficial – not yet, anyway. But things like this do actually matter to me, and probably to other women scientists out there who’d like their portrayal in the media to match more closely to the situation in real life. Possibly in common with other science bloggers amongst you, I received an email from ‘Eureka’ today, asking if I would join their forums and help steer their editorial direction. This is definitely an issue I will be bringing up.

On Sunday evening I typed the words ‘The End’ after 129,488 preceding ones, thereby completing my third lab lit novel – the tale of a new group leader whose collaboration with a pair of strange epidemiologists soon leads to more than she bargained for. Having ferried my beloved scientist characters to the end of another journey, I was very aware of how the story of writing this one differed significantly from my previous experience.

Send in the fat lady

Experimental Heart took about three months to write and about three years to revise over a series of about twelve major drafts. I didn’t know very much about writing fiction when I started that novel, and I learned an awful lot on the way. As a result, the second one (whose title is currently under discussion) took only two months to write, but what came out was much closer to a finished product, meaning that I needed only about six months to revise it over three major drafts. During that process, in my waning months in the Netherlands, I started a third one with as much fire and inspiration as the previous two. By the time I reached England to kick off my new career in publishing, I was on page 122.

But then something happened. Of course I was very distracted, not only by changing countries and careers but also by a major upheaval in my personal life. To make matters worse, my then agent decided she would stop trying to sell Experimental Heart after (what I assumed was a mere) nine rejections, preferring to abandon it and focus on the second one. My opinion differed, so we parted ways soon afterwards. But the thought of producing novel after novel into the void, with no pipeline, was just too depressing to contemplate. So after tidying up the second novel, my activity more or less dribbled off.

Over the next four years, I eked out about 125 pages of Novel 3, all of it painfully. Most of my work was in fits and starts: when I was on sabbatical at the EMBL, for example, or over a few weekends when guilt drove me to at least try. But no sooner had refreshed my memory about what I had already written that the window of free time would be over. I no longer felt like a real novelist, and there were times when I seriously doubted I’d ever finish another book again.

Everything changed when I got a book deal. It was a wake-up call: I was a novelist, so I’d better start acting like one. The inertia, however, was still killing me. It wasn’t until I went on my writing holiday that something finally re-clicked for me. Slowly at first, and then with increasing fluidity, I began to produce – by the end of it, at page 347, I was writing as prolifically as any of those dreamlike times in Amsterdam, when twelve hours would pass like twelve minutes. In short, I had got my mojo back.

So what now? Lots of revisions on Novel 3, and the germ of an idea for a fourth. I am toying with the notion of writing about scientists from the point of view of a non-scientist character, which will offer an intriguing perspective on this singular profession that I so love poking and prodding from every possible angle.

Mired as I am in manuscript revision, the conversations of other people in the group office often float past unnoticed, deflecting off the bubble of concentration I try to maintain around my computer. But sometimes, the things people say are so unexpected that I can’t help listening in.

“Let me guess,” one of our post-docs said. “You want to borrow my rack again.”

“Yeah,” said the Ph.D. student from down the corridor, rather sheepishly, as he leaned against the door frame. “Mine hasn’t been working.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“I did buy exactly the same thing,” the student hastened to add, “but yours seems to be lucky.”

“Well, there’s nothing special about it,” she replied. “But help yourself.”

Now, it’s science’s little secret that many of us, despite our rational veneer and extensive scholarship, are actually quite a superstitious lot. I’ve had a colleague who insisted on using a particular pipettemen because he was convinced it was imbued with a mysterious lucky charm; yet another insisted that her reactions worked better in blue Eppendorf tubes. There was even one lab mate who felt he had to wear lucky pants for that big experiment. But the student in question did not strike me as that sort of bloke.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’ve come here to borrow her test-tube rack because you think it’s lucky?”

They both just looked at me pityingly. And so it transpired that I was confusing rack

with Rac

My mother always told me not to eavesdrop.

Yes, I have finally surrendered to the inevitable. After seven days straight sitting at my desk welded to ImageJ, the public domain, Java-based image processing program, my chronic repetitive strain disorder is starting to seriously impair my ability to use a computer. (I’ve long since lost the battle with both a right- and left-handed mouse, so when even the trusty tappable trackpad starts to hurt me, I know I’m in trouble. It’s the computer equivalent of vancomycin-resistent tuberculosis.) ImageJ is free, and lovely, and damned good at turning even the most proprietary of evil corporate image formats into tiffs, but it’s very laborious and click-intensive to zap your photos into anything you’d feel proud exposing to your boss, let alone a referee or two.

So after a long day doing the same 27 actions over and over again, joints throbbing in protest, I started to think about making a macro. Now, we used to be able to sweet-talk our dearly departed French post-doc into crafting these for us, mostly I think because he enjoyed the challenge more than some of the things he had to do in the lab. When my bioinformaticist collaborator was visiting and I started complaining about my hands, he suggested we take a bash at one ourselves. Recording the 27 actions was the easy part – ImageJ is great for that; the difficult bit was working out how to ask the macro to visit every file in a given folder and, most importantly, to give the output file an intelligent name. I got some advice from our microscope guy, who suggested pillaging other pre-existing macros for ideas, which got me a long way. Then the bioinformaticist added a few more touches. But I couldn’t get the damned thing to run. I was quickly frightened off the few geeky forums I tried to scan – like most of that ilk, they seemed ludicrously scathing and quite happy to wipe the floor with any newbie who might have missed something while RTFMing. Finally, I showed it to Richard and he immediately saw that I was missing a few braces at the end, thereby failing to close the subroutine. One hour later, while I was drinking tea in the common room, the brand-new, shiny macro had unpacked all 7000-odd tiffs, tidy as you like.

For want of a brace, the battle was almost lost. (Well, at least that’s what we Americans call them; the British prefer the lovely phrase “curly brackets”.) And it all reminded me of how much I used to love programming. I’ve never been formally trained, but I taught myself a bit of C during a summer stint at the NIH in the Waste Management Services. Desperate to work in a lab but unable to secure a research position, I fell into a sort of weird troubleshooting internship, just doing whatever needed to be done at a moment’s notice. Looking back, it was one of the most interesting jobs I’ve ever had, for sheer variety. I remember having to learn how to program a bar-code reader, to set up and train people in an ingenious new toxic waste biosensor employing fluorescent micro-organisms, and essentially teaching myself C from the Kernighan and Ritchie bible so that I could set up a database of all the chemicals on campus and what you had to do to neutralize them in case of emergency.

Not one day after my database was up and running in beta version, our WMS headquarters got the call: there’d been a massive chemical spill on campus, and the emergency services wanted to know what to do. I could hear sirens in the background, and everyone was staring at me. I asked someone to phone in the names of the chemicals, and I looked them up in my database and called the guys in moonsuits and told them what the recommended containing procedure was.

Disaster averted, faster than you can type ‘grep’. Looking back, it seems ludicrous: did they really base their actions on the advice of a 20-year-old intern? It doesn’t seem possible, but that’s actually how it happened. Since then, I haven’t done any more programming, but having inspected my 7000 tiffs, and seeing immediately that each is going to need an additional 5 actions to make them perfect…well, brace yourselves.