I was very pleased to come across this blog post by David Crotty – “Science and Web 2.0: Talking About Science vs. Doing Science”.

It covers a lot of the ambivalence I have about holding a blog. I wonder if I was one of the 40-odd that was updated in the month surveyed? Perhaps – but barely. I was trying to do – or at least to favor the doing of – science.

One commenter mentioned:

[Blogging conferences and by extension, blogging] might attract scientists who have a subspecialty but also have a general interest in science (e.g. the communication aspect) so they end up talking about their common interest (communication) and not their field of science.

This is definitely true for me. I can count the number of times I actually discuss developmental biology, or molecular biology, on a hand or two. Mostly because talking about what I love to do is, curiously, not very interesting for me – it’s teaching something to a faceless audience, and hard to tell if I am putting them to sleep (as opposed to an amphitheatre) when they don’t comment back. Which is often the case.

I suspect Jason’s suggestion to have Science Online-style sessions at specialist conferences would work at some and not others. Some conferences are hardly aware of the existence of blogs and Twitter and other live-transmission, and are frightened of the implications. Others appear to be less so.

However, I came across an interesting perspective. Self-promotion in blogs, which we all do to some extent, can be helpful to rally people around ideas. The Open AccessOpen Science movements were certainly helped by the personalities of certain individuals who have promoted good ideas.

As mentioned:

When you promote ideas, you give people something to cheer for. You give people a cause to support. People, in many ways, are selfish. They promote the things that make them feel good. Your accomplishments aren’t likely to make them feel good, but your ideas do. Your ideas might inspire hope, thought, or action . . . but as a general rule, good ideas inspire something.

This weekend, I stated in fine company my opinion that “Hypotheses are cheap”. That was taken as a slapdown, which it was not intended to be, but simply a statement that I find it incredibly easy to think of lots of ways to explain the world. Some of those ways are testable.

I have hit on something then, should I ever suddenly crave fame. When I no longer have the means to actually carry out my research because NONE of my grants get funded for years on end, I should just generate ideas. Lots and lots of hypotheses. They have to be good, too ground-breaking to get funded, but not completely off the wall. I’m actually pretty good at that.

(Remember, although few ideas are genuinely unique, your expression can be.)

Well, even ideas can be unique if they are based on sufficiently arcane facts. Unique is no gauge of quality, but it helps in getting a patent.

Actually, reading through the comment thread, I see that some are of the opinion that ‘the sharing of knowledge is power.’ (teaching is noble and will earn you love and respect – not sure I buy that) and that women are often brought up to be useless in self-promotion (well, yes, generally).

[Women] aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so.

During a meeting I attended this week, a team-building activity was a variant on Truth or Lie? (as opposed to Truth or Dare, which would have also been interesting in that company). I was sweating bullets and made a remark to that effect – I hated the idea of lying (even half-truthing) to people whom I respected. And then I did it just fine. So, I’m not yet lawyer material, but it might explain that I yam where I yam today.

A talker, more than a doer, but a doer nonetheless.

Turns out I had already been asking myself this question; it comes up periodically. Steffi relaunched the 2010 edition.

The subsections were:

• What made you start blogging?

As I wrote a while ago -

“Like Steffi, my ambition was to help non-scientists (read, starting with the people who know me) understand the day-to-day job of it. I’ve rather given up on that goal now, and it’s become more of a diary than a series of articles, but there seems to be a small, constant group of people who remain interested and check in on both sites. Motivation enough to continue for now.”

• Is a sense of community an important part of blogging for you, or do you prefer blogging ‘solo’?

The “sense of community” is the same one that I feel in the scientific setting. Colleagues whom I end up respecting more or less, for different reasons – some are highly interesting people to me for non-professional reasons, others are so incredibly competent in their professional capacity that I can overlook some rough edges. This is the human side of human endeavor – and blogging is another one of them. It’s what made me stick with blogging off and on, whereas fiction or poetry writing, true solo endeavors, are much more off than on. When I’m retired from science, perhaps I’ll get back to these more seriously, and then I can join a writing club and get the mutual intellectual masturbatory effect that I believe is what I seek out in my interactions with other scientists and other bloggers. As uncomplimentary as that sounds. And then I am sure I will stop blogging.

• Are there blogs you stopped reading for some reason or that might be interesting, but turn you off right away? If yes, why?

Yes. Two reasons – when the comments are too inflammatory and offensive to me, even if they don’t target me personally, and when the blogger over a period of years starts to touch on the same subjects over and over again and I learn little new. Unless I feel that famous sense of community with the blogger, a connection that is similar to that of a friendship, in which case I gladly keep reading and go for the subtle changes over time. I have made new friends, real friends, thanks to blogging. I never really believed that would happen to me.

• Who are you blogging for/who are you talking to?

Anyone who bothers to stop by. For myself, mostly, since I know I stop by. I’d love to say it’s for my audience but I have little idea who that audience is, and when I do, it’s embarrassing – former students, family members, and a few of my “community” members whom I believe show up more out of kindness than for what my writing really brings them. I have little idea of what my audience would like from me, and it’s perhaps better that way. I’ve been told that I am too much at the service of other people.

• Do you think you may be getting people exposed to some science through your blog who otherwise wouldn’t be?

That was the hope, but it continues to be the case that I get the least visible comment feedback the more I focus on science for certain posts, and so it’s a little hard to tell. I’m not keen on surveys, but perhaps should learn.

• Do you think any non-blogger cares about any of the above things?

Surely not. As GrrlScientist wrote, it’s a question of frame of reference. Oh, and I picked “navel-gazing” as a tag before I saw that GrrlScientist had done the same. Yep.

photo © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC: Attribution-ShareAlike

Paris Combo’s Aquarium was going round and round in my head today. Until someone came along and replaced it this afternoon with Quizz, in which the lead singer Belle de Berry asks the trivia question, what am I? “I am: (1) in 1903, in France, Nobel Prize in physics, but I don’t have the right to vote… (2) in 1909, I can wear pants in public… (3) in 1945, I’ve been deemed to be worthy of equal rights by the U.N.” I am…

The French lyrics to Aquarium are here. This is my attempt at a translation, since it’s nearly impossible to find translations of Ms. de Berry’s always clever songs into English.

In this vast, eclectic and unique world,
We travel cathodically
Take cruises on channels – Hertz or satellite.
We so admire the Inuits, Southern countries, Karabah,
And, why not, Patalipoutra.
Imagine, Pondichery populated with 240,000 beloved ones!

I’m going round and round in my little square box
Like a fish in a furnished apartment.

Do not hope for more than a passing resemblance between us,
Nor that we are rolling on the same axle
Although we will certainly spend the rest of our lives together
Until we get old.
In sum, we all live on the same little paving stone.

I’m going round and round in my little square box
Like a fish in a furnished apartment.

On earth, the little parcel of kilometers that separates and unites us.
We live the lives of others, Live!
Artificial in paradise
We earthlings are not all equal.

Minnows, we are all brought onto the same boat*
I’m going round and round in my little square box
Like a fish in a furnished apartment.

(*in colloquial French, this also means “We are all deceived the same way”)

In other news, and this should probably be at the top of the post, rather than at the bottom, Uri Alon has done it again, and written a great little piece in Molecular Cell on how to get a research group charged up.

“Motivated group members experience a full sense of choice: of doing what one wants. Such behavior shows high performance, is enjoyable, and enhances innovation. This essay describes principles of building a motivated research group.”

If you have a hard time getting to the essay and want a personal copy that you promise me you won’t reprint and make bucketloads of money from that since Elsevier would be upset, I can make it happen.

The Toulouse student left, not with the results she had hoped for, but with the satisfaction of knowing that it was not due to her own technical shortcomings as I was able to quickly transfer her to another experiment that did work out with exploitable results. So she did see the whole week-long procedure from beginning to end. She left, motivated and happy.

My other master’s student left only for the weekend, unhappy, as she had heard some unfortunate exam results. She’s a trooper, though, because she kept the fire lit for knowing the results of what she had begun in the morning right up to when her train was scheduled, and even departed with a smile on her face about our taking stock about the results on Monday morning. Things could be worse.

My postdoc is, I believe, recovering well from some health problems, and with any luck I might also see her on Monday before heading across the pond. A box of chocolates from the young denizens of the room this week for us old-timers might make her return to the bench a little sweeter.

I’ll only be able to take some time to go round and round in the little box once I am on the plane Tuesday morning, and what a relief that will be for the following eight hours of pure, unadulterated passivity!

This is a linky post, only. My son is home with a nasty virus that’s going around like wildfire in Paris, that I am praying I won’t get myself just when I am going to leave town next week.

In lab, one student is doing in situ hybridizations (very brief explanation here and typical images from when it’s ugly here or when it’s slightly prettier and still open access, here). The other one is still sequencing our gene-of-the-month in patients and non-affected controls. I got a poster printed for an ex-student, rolled and on its way to the conference much of the lab will attend at the end of the week. If you missed the link on POSTER – don’t. It’s really worth reading, even repeating, and certainly spreading virally. It’s not the poster itself, but some easy-to-assimilate advice on making an effective poster in general by the gifted Colin Purrington.

I’m going Tuesday here and then, Thursday, another meeting here (where I regret that I won’t see Kristi in the end, but I will find a couple of other former colleagues and friends on Saturday) and I just couldn’t combine everything.

The last grant application for the time being is almost out the door, too. I ran around compiling local signatures this morning, came home to not make lunch for my son but to keep him company, and will head back in town within 30 minutes to pick up those signature sheets and scan them to the U.S. partners. Secretarial work, but someone has to do it. Then off to the doctor’s office.

BUT WAIT – I promised links, and here they are. Kathy Ceceri has a great blog about homeschooling her children in chemistry- and now in physics. I only just now discovered Home Biology and here, the triops kit has been waiting since the holiday to be hatched in warmer weather. Great minds do think alike. Check it out! Courtesy of all that fun stuff on the wonderful site GeekDad.

Today was a day that reminded me why I am a scientist.

Today, I learned something that was true, and significant, about the workings of the universe. And it unleashed a new series of questions, that none of us in the group can wait to try to round up again once they’ve grown and matured. Well, two of us in particular today. Everything else falls by the wayside for a while. We don’t sleep at night, and fulminate against people with whom we need to share web-based resources nine or twelve time zones away for hogging them at their peak hours.

We open bottles of champagne. And drink them. Cigarette smokers say to hell with the rules, and open the windows rather than stand outside. Coffee drinkers take a fifth thimbleful in one hand, to offset the bubbly in the other. We high-five and clasp hands.

The day did not start propitiously. It was raining buckets of cold, near-freezing water in Paris. I got to lab late. The administration involved in shipping two frozen vials of cells from a Japanese group to ours was insurmountable. When I got the quote for shipping – 500+ euros EACH WAY, I nearly fainted. We usually put tubes on dry ice and cross our fingers, but the would-be collaborator (or would she? I now have my suspicions) said that she didn’t have the right to ship like that, and it had to be on liquid nitrogen fumes or not at all. I’ll skip the rest of this painful episode. Result: none of these cells in the near future.

I can’t really give many of the details, because, for once, how we arrived at this result is just as exciting as the result itself, because it should apply to lots of other situations. Nature, here we come? Perhaps. We’ll sleep on it, possibly, in the next few weeks, and see what kind of progress we’ve made.

Of course I was twiddling my thumbs the last month, so all the useful lists I’ve made since the beginning of the year are going to rapidly rack up the red-highlighted tardy tasks.

It’s all worth it.

I’d have liked to quote another apt poem in the post title instead of referring to front lines, but the only one that comes to mind is Dulce et Decorum Est which is not quite the reference I wanted to make.

Since there is not a lot of good my physical presence would do right now in Haiti, I have stayed put where I can make my own little contribution to setting the world right.

First, over the last month or so, I’ve been cleaning my old lab room. This needs to be done periodically, especially as we’re in a 40 year old building with windows that need to be opened if we are to breathe, and that lets in lots of dust and pollution over time.

It is now possible to see that the bench is white, not grey, and this is where an undergraduate trainee is working as of last week. She will be joined by a masters-level student for a week as of January 25th. On the right is the (protected) lab computer. That’s not a challenge to you hackers out there, and we also have little on it for now. Someday I hope to recruit someone who is comfortable in Linux and wants to take all our great ChIP-sequencing data that’s sitting on DVDs, and use FindPeaks that our own Anthony Fejes has developed and offers lots of support for, but no magic genies, to generate the fabulous results we so crave. Another time.

I’ve been sequencing candidate genes, or teaching the student to do the same, recently. This is my lab notebook. What’s in pink turns out does (or does not) need to be redone, contrary to the first impression; what’s in green definitely does on the right page. For the left, a total of only 6 PCR reactions – or 12 sequencing reactions – for three patients. On the right, different gene, it was six patients and 24 PCRs (48 sequencing reactions). Obviously, not all always work the first round. We’re doing what’s known in the official jargon as “filling in the holes”.

To get ready to work, I need in the foreground, the blue foam ice bucket, the pipetters – from a famous brand that Jenny will recognize – hanging in their custom paper clips on the side of my shelf, but on the right I don’t actually need the red-hooded dissection microscope or the black micromanipulator. Through the backless shelves, one can observe against the grubby windows a different kind of hood, built twice with my own two hands (and lugged from my basement after the move, into the lab on a weekend. And then I brought the boxes back to my basement). It filters the polluted air and maintains an ultra-clean volume in which to work when necessary.

My laptop is tucked in at 90 degrees just to the left, after my lab notebook.

It works. It’s not very tidy. Just for fun, I should snap a shot of my former tech’s notebooks. They were a model. But she would take notes on a scrap notebook first, and copy them back into the official notebooks at the end of each day. I haven’t prioritized record-keeping among my daily activities, so if it gets put in on the online lab notebook (which they have not been for a while) or the physical one, it will only be once and future historians of my life should count themselves lucky to have it even once.

A year and a half after my presentation at Science Blogging ‘08, which I won’t embed, I don’t think there is still any consensus or extremely easy lab notebook widescale adoption that will be presented at Science Online ’10. But I’d be very happy to be proved wrong. Any way of better keeping an (online, preferably!) lab notebook really easily, with the minimum investment of time, is a winner in my eyes. Meanwhile the students will keep physical notebooks just like the many generations preceding, until further notice.

This feels like a major cop-out. But while I admire Jean-Claude, Steve and Cameron’s commitment to Open Notebook Science, it has to be worth the effort in terms of communication and collaboration. A single person keeping up a potential network single-handedly is not worth it, and the energy hump to learning even modest markup has prevented even the slightest manifestation of interest from my staff. There is so much else that needs to go on the computer.

While Science Online ‘10 may not address this particular scientist’s need, there are a lot of fun talks upcoming about citizen science initiatives, among other topics.

So, that’s what’s going on in laboratory this week. Next week, we’ll be reading the “experimental” (read, affected patient) sequences, testing the changes on some 200 healthy DNA samples (this is underway, and we didn’t seal the tubes well enough, so I actually pipetted for 400 samples in the last two days), purifying templates for probes that tell you where in specially prepared human embryonic tissues a given gene is actually being used. Bench work, what.

Your reporter, Dr. Etchevers, signing out from the embattled front.

Wow. Another post for the Best of…. There have been some real humdingers, lately.

Benoit and Jenny’s exchange some ninety-odd comments in which it had all happened, puts me in mind of our own recent paper rejection, which discouragement and re-addition to the mountain of tasks is one of many, many reasons for my lack of blog posts lately. It also put me in mind of the yet more grant applications underway this week, because of a slew of other rejections. Yet for some reason, we do keep plugging on. Not getting as much science done as we’d like, but the struggle is all part of it.

So I was going to respond to Jenny’s “bobbling against the ceiling like a helium balloon whose string has slipped through someone’s idealistic fingers” with my usual awe at the beautiful visual aptitude of her phrase, but I will have to react instead to the beautiful gustative aptitude of Benoit’s “rejection combined with personal attacks on my aptitude as a scientist really add a bitter taste to the whole process” .

This seems off topic, but I received a mixer-blender-miracle-machine this holiday season, that among other extraordinary properties is supposed to be able to make apple juice from fresh fruit. I went to my greengrocer this morning and asked her to recommend which varieties to blend. Turns out the best apples to make juice are not the sweetest ones alone (a fortiori for cider). One must mix in the bitter ones as well, that give the drink some flavor and depth. (A public thank you to certain NN denizens, who know who they are, for being only sweet.)

So all of these diverse and often difficult experiences we collectively go through, are they not helping to make our lives more dimensioned and our approaches to science, from above, below, within or apparently on the sidelines, more artistic, more human, and therefore more true, somehow?

I’d like to think so, but I’ve been accused of being a Pollyanna more than once.

I’ve been staring into the depths of the abyss, too, lately, (cf Jenny’s latest tags) and it’s a long way down and a long way across. That very image was evoked in recent conversation. As Jamieson mentioned, it must be that time of the year, or perhaps it’s the last decade of politics and science funding policies in first world countries that has finally shaken all of us to our (apple) cores.

But, it’s not any easier in any other career path, I’m quite sure. Do what you like and like what you do, as a wise friend of mine has quoted, from these folks. Optimism has not quite yet gone out the door, and it is not only possible but mandatory to forge your own path.

It’s not mine, though.

Do it with conviction and passion. This is the essence of the advice all great creative minds offer to those of the next generation who are still willing to listen.

They never say anything about doing it with an intractable migraine and under the gun.

Once again unto the grant-writing breach.

Not only could I use a wife and a secretary, I could really use a patron and a sense of humor. I have a new student, though, for the next six weeks.

Then again, in the subfreezing Parisian temperatures, I have found my regulars along the walking commute from my train to the laboratory, and they sure help keep things in perspective. Especially the occasional pigeons huddled on the stubs of their feet, who have no more energy to begin to walk out of the way.

The handsome fellow who runs the dry cleaners smiles and lifts his chin as I look in the window. I’ve seen him checking out girls’ asses along the passageway as they trot for their trains in their heels and he takes a smoke with an employee or two of the supermarket. He clearly recognizes that I work in the neighborhood. A community feeling.

I suppose I do belong here after all.

Before I went to bed last night, I wondered briefly to myself if I should send holiday greetings to a student who had stayed in my home a couple of weeks last spring, and whose name I had neglected to add to our houseguest list in the “year in review” that I was rather proud to have sent out before much of 2010 got underway.

At 6 AM, I woke up in a lather. In my sleep, I had dreamt that the aforementioned student was to give a talk at an important international conference to which we had been invited. The flight was at 3 PM. Of course, as I try to write it, the details slip out of my fingertips, leaving only the essentials.

There was something about being stuck in roadwork in my car, in the rain, and a large noisy group of schoolchildren at the Place de la Concorde (which I crossed on foot last week with my aunt, uncle and cousins in the chilly sunshine).

Then, the student was to give a practice talk on her work with me for the people at an institute that had hosted us in Paris, not my own, but an anonymous one slightly resembling the one that had welcomed me to Grenoble in the way its amphitheatre was fitted out. (The list mentioned in that earlier post is still underway, but progress has been made.) I went upstairs to pack and got lost when using the lift, which stopped on every floor on one side and every half-floor on the other.

Lest you think this resembles a scene out of Being John Malkovich, there is an elevator like this in the 30’s-era surgery building at our hospital.

When I came back down, I was at the back of the room, and one Eminent Personality was whispering to his neighbor, “What a terrible waste of my time.” I then looked at my watch, and the plane was going to take off in twenty-five minutes. It took me a conscious amount of time to try to calculate in my head how long it would take to get to the airport (by teleportation?!) and navigate to the ticket counter, and… forget it. Wake up. Calm my racing heart.

This hardly needs analysis, does it? Back to work and school tomorrow… and my flight is only at 6:30 PM. Plenty of time still.

Last week – no, a couple of weeks ago, now! On December 17th, therefore, there was a special prize ceremony held by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in the hallowed halls of the Collège de France, complete with champagne, foie gras, and misty eyes. My name was not printed on the list of honorees on the sparkly paper. Nonetheless, I personally was greatly honored.

Starting in the year 2000, the INSERM has distributed special honors, at the hands of the Minister of Health and Sports, and the Minister of Higher Education and Research, as well as the general director of the INSERM.

The INSERM prizes are not the Nobel prizes; they are more intimate. The proportion of real friends and family to hangers-on and photographers is greater. My goodness, the cloud of photographers who followed our two ministers, Roselyne Bachelot and Valérie Pecresse, into the amphitheatre, not to mention hovering around my boss, Arnold Munnich, special counselor to President Sarkozy on scientific affairs! How can that not affect the quality of one’s work, one’s relationship with the people one needs to get things done?

I am very grateful not to be famous and be obliged to make use of that special interface which is the press rather than speak with my small public directly, and I hope that any future fame I may accrue will do so only to the extent that it did to tonight’s honorees.

Every scientist would like to be honored for their work and contributions, and to know that they are inscribed in a long and robust lineage of illustrious, productive intellectuals. One can and should dream.

Two of the honorees are in my direct scientific lineage. It’s just like family, in that case. Professors Nicole Le Douarin and Stanislas Lyonnet (I will have to write his Wikipedia entry and make it more accurate than Mme Le Douarin’s!) received the Prix d’Honneur and the Prix de la Recherche, respectively. I was one of Madame Le Douarin’s last Ph.D. students. I am currently working in a research group co-directed by Stanislas. Both of them are warm, human and highly competent scientific leaders.

I have the greatest affection and respect for both of them, of different generations. Stanislas is like an older cousin or perhaps a young uncle, and will clearly have many more honors ahead of him. Not only is he a brilliant geneticist, but he knows how to bring out the best in others, and to inspire loyalty in the people who are privileged enough to work with him. Madame Le Douarin is the mother of so many, that as is often the case in large families, the youngest siblings are often also raised by the older ones. This creates a great sense of loyalty (that word, again!) and family with all that can imply. No one has offed anyone permanently in my immediate circle, though there have been a couple of nicked earlobes, here and there.

I knowingly use these words, family, generations, lineage.

Not only are we dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants but those of us who have followed traditional ways of training, through college, graduate school and post-graduate apprenticeships, have integrated a kind of guild. It only remains to us to recognize, sometimes, just how privileged we are. On occasions where members of our tribe are honored, is a good time to remember that.

As a change from remembering all the good things we intend to accomplish this year! May it be a happy and successful one for all of you, and don’t forget to look back and around, as you look forward into that virgin territory of 2010.