The Lab Tourist

Hello world –

Hope this message finds you well.  My name is Stephen Fried, and I am training to become a scientist. With this blog I invite you to join me as I venture into a strange but wonderful world – the scientific world.  As I cross certain milestones in this journey, I hope to share with you the triumphs and travails that come with this odd line of work that I have chosen for myself.  Along the way, I also plan to tell a few funny stories and philosophize a bit too.

For most of us, science is a closed book (I for one didn’t open up my science textbooks in high school).  Medicine is something that we all experience directly (and often viscerally) when we go in to get a check-up or hear about a friend in the hospital getting surgery.  Technology we use and hear about everyday; we know first-hand that our lives would be very different without it.  Science is often thought of as standing abreast with the likes of medicine and technology – but for most, our primary relation to it is faint memories of a 10th grade class that was poorly-taught, rather hard, and not particularly fun.  Even those of us who are enthusiastic about science and defend it, our inspiration comes more often from Star Trek or sound-bites from pundits, than it does from direct (or even indirect) exposure with data, models, or theories.

Why is this?  The most important reason is that science, unlike medicine and technology, is not tangible.  You can’t touch Newton’s laws like you can touch an iPhone or a leg prosthetic.  You can’t sell science on the stock market, or use it to go to Hawaii.  On a number of occasions, I’ve been asked to give a lab tour, normally to a younger sibling of a friend.  The “tourist” is normally a bright young kid, with a lot of enthusiasm and a tad nerdy (as I was!).  At the end of an hour of pointing out and explaining a number of instruments and materials I use, the lab tourist normally says, slightly disappointed, “Well – I liked it, but your lab looks like all the other ones.”  And it’s true; most labs (at least in biology and chemistry) do look alike (I sometimes wonder if it was intentionally planned that way).  “That’s because,” I explain, “what makes each lab different from other labs is not their instruments, but their ideas.”  Science does not live in a place.  It lives in that sudden spark when it all just makes sense. It lives in the conversations between scientists – sometimes cordially discussed, sometimes heatedly argued.  It also lives in conflict, ambiguity, and contradiction.  At this point, the lab tourist is exasperated with me, and it’s time for him (and it normally is a him) to get on with the day. As for myself, I am left a bit unnerved that I was unable to successfully express my enthusiasm for what I do, especially to someone who should have been pretty easy to convince!

The second reason why science is closed off to many of us is a much simpler and rectifiable one: we simply don’t know any scientists from whom we could hear a primary account.  Many Americans have a doctor or engineer for a relative, friend, or neighbor; but how many of us keep a scientist in our company?  And even for those who do have scientist friends, how often are we willing to probe them, and when we do, how often is the response we elicit a deferral: “Well, I’m not an expert in such-and-such.”

There are a number of large hurdles for those people who want to engage with science, but cannot spend their entire lives studying it.  This blog is about my small attempt to break down those barriers.

I want to share with you what goes on in science.  I want to give you a glimpse into this (my?) world.  And most importantly, I want to talk to you frankly about science as a process, not as a finished pristine product, which is the only form of science we encounter in NY Times articles and sound-bites.  Basically, I want to give you a lab tour, albeit a somewhat unconventional one.

So join me and read along.

Chances are it will be more interesting than 10th grade.

2 comments

Leave a comment