Ever on and on.

'The Hobbit' opened this last weekend. And this JRR Tolkien verse came to mind in thinking about my post this week:

"The Road goes ever on and on // Down from the door where it began. // Now far ahead the Road has gone, // And I must follow, if I can, // Pursuing it with weary feet, // Until it joins some larger way, // Where many paths and errands meet. // And whither then? I cannot say."

'The Hobbit' was one of my favorite books growing up. I'm taller, don't have furry feet and only have one breakfast a day, but in my attitude towards adventure, I am decidedly Hobbit-like. Bilbo had to be forced into adventure. I'm barely there in my own life. I stay safe in too many ways.

I know one theme in this blog is to serve as an example of what not to do as a postdoc. It's really the most useful function I can serve. 

How do I push myself to be less risk-averse? And when I say risk-averse, I often feel that I don't 'deserve' to use the fantastic digital tools we have access to these days. Or it's OK that I have a Gmail account, but couldn't possibly sign up for two; That's for people who have 'real' things going on. Nor use all of its features to enhance my productivity, organization and life. Staying small and in my comfort zone is usually where you can find me and I find that frustrating. I'm not enough and so don't get to partake of what everyone else does routinely.

Being timid isn't good for a life in science or anywhere else. SciCurious wrote this post about what she wished she'd known in grad school. Wish I'd known them better too; the commenters have some great suggestions too. I would say that mistakes are harder to take in an environment when your scientists are having a harder time finding steady jobs where we make a decent living for our level of education. It's enough to keep me up at night...so many stupid mistakes.

I watched 'Losing Control' this evening and came away with the message that applying laboratory and scientific thinking to everything isn't a good idea to be applied to life generally. The movie does capture the thinking (or at least my thinking) of scientists and our world pretty well.

I know I've mentioned 'Daring Greatly' ad nauseum in my posts. It really is a good book & I think Dr. Brown has hit upon something pretty profound (at least to me). For this post close to the end of 2012, I've decided to do Dr. Brown's checklist for 'wholehearted living' as printed in "Daring Greatly", page 8. Wholehearted isn't a term that resonates with me, but I see what she's getting at- Let's see how I'm doing:

Wholehearted living feature on the left. whether I've achieved the goal or not at right in bold (followed by annoying asides I like to make...:

1. Cultivating Authenticity (letting go of what others think): No (though I am progressing; unabashed Whovian here). 

2. Cultivating Self Compassion (letting go of perfectionism): Yes/No (Now that I know what self-compassion actually is, I'm practicing it more,  still have to remind myself very actively to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good).

3. Cultivating a Resilient Spirit (letting go of numbing and powerlessness): NO, not really. @#$%! 

4. Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Yessish...I'm doing ok with gratitude. Joy is hard to come by.

5. Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith (Letting go of the need for Certainty): NO.  

6. Cultivating Creativity (Letting go of comparison): NO, though I think I'm doing a little better here. Comparing things is just what scientists do. 

7. Cultivating Play and Rest (Letting go fo exhaustion as status symbol & productivity as self worth): NO! 

8. Cultivating Calm and Stillness (letting go of Anxiety as a Lifestyle): NO (Unfortunately :-/).

9.  Cultivating Meaningful Work (Letting go of self-doubt and "Supposed to": NO (I too often feel I'm supposed to be _____. Blank = better, married, wealthier, more tech savvy, more practical, bolder, extroverted, less depressed). 

10. Cultivating Laughter, Song and Dance (Letting go of being cool and "Always In Control": NO.  

Of course, this is subjective scoring on my part, but it does reflect how I feel (I started this post days ago and am coming back to my initial answers and I feel the same now as I did then. I don't have a definitive yes at all. Ouch. Something to work towards. This blog is a help as well I think: I hope I've found my voice this year. Or at least am more comfortable expressing myself- keeping things in hasn't done me any favors (I realize writing on the internet may not be the best way of expressing my views/doing something useful, but I do like to write it). If I help someone (even myself) function better in the world of science (by being mostly an example of what not to do), then this blog has done its job.

Here's hoping 2013 sees the launch of Ian 3.0. 

Bias.

I have been trying to explore alternate careers to working at the bench and been having a hard time in doing so. I am more and more convinced I don't belong in academia, though that doesn't provide an instant idea for what I do want to do. 

I've also been told that if I leave academia, it's almost impossible to get back in. Which is likely true. I've also been told it's harder beyond the ivory tower to have a stable job (I would argue that there's not much stability within the ivory tower anymore either). 

Something most postdocs, grad students, and a few PIs are increasingly mindful of  the bias within the academic system to keep people within academia, pursuing that path alone. Leaving science is still considered 'failing' or dropping out; as if it's as bad as dropping out of high school- you're ruining your bright future! Never mind that there are plenty of successful people outside of academia. 

I had a moment the other day listening to a podcast that showed me just how deep that bias is instilled within me as a scientist. Cara Santa Maria is a science correspondent at the Huffington Post. She has a video series there called 'Talk Nerdy to Me' (good use of a pun there), she's frequented a lot of the podcasts I listen to as a guest to talk about science- usually neuroscience as that's her background. I'm a fan of her work and her mission to communicate science to the public; ideally increasing scientific literacy (it helps that she looks like she can rock out too). And similar to me, she's fairly open about her experiences with depression; something that does seem to afflict science-types more frequently than the general population.

I like her, but I found myself cringing when she was introduced as a 'scientist'; my visceral reaction was 'No, she's not'. In a technical sense that's true- she's currently a reporter. I don't think she's in a lab doing experiments. However, that is a narrow definition of a scientist. Once you've done work in a scientific field and move on, does that revoke your scientist card? Cara was smart, I think, and got out at a master's degree and is now successful in her role as science correspondent at the HuffPo (I say that since it is increasingly apparent that very few grad students/postdocs will get academic posts these days). And I don't think that the fact she doesn't have a Ph.D. was the reason for my reaction. 

I have drunk the Kool Aid as it were that there is only a narrow definition of a scientist. A science box as it were. I would compare it to 'the man-box'; where there is a narrow definition of what a man should be; and I'm trying to move away from the 'how I should be' way of thinking. People are diverse. So are men (and women!). So are scientists.

The bias that academia, and toiling away in the lab is the only place for scientists clearly runs deep. I remember hearing stories about how Carl Sagan was somewhat Ostracized by fellow astronomers because he spent a lot of time communicating with the public (OK, so I give him flak too for his intonation of 'Billions and billions'*). It does seem that things are changing. The next generation of scientists seem to engage and communicate more than in the past. But I do wonder if people like Neil deGrasse Tyson get guff from 'real astrophysicists' for his public engagement (there's no question that he's a nerd celebrity). I think he still is a scientist who does some research still though. 

I am trying to be mindful of my own biases (just read previous posts- I am biased against myself a lot of times), but this one struck me deeply. No wonder I have a hard time stepping out from behind the bench to really go after a 2nd career path. The bias against it is really deeply seeded inside me. It's not that I wouldn't stay in academia, I do, however want to openly explore other things I might do. And right now, in my head, I feel pigeonholed. 

The lesson: Be mindful of how you're feeling and figure out where your biases are that might be holding you back from exploration. 

*It has been pointed out to me that Carl Sagan never said 'Billions and Billions'. And after some brief research, indeed, he didn't, but apparently did emphasize the 'b' in billion (from Wikipedia):

Billions and billions

Sagan with a model of the Viking Lander probes which would land on Mars. Sagan examined possible landing sites for Viking along with Mike Carr and Hal Masursky.

From Cosmos and his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Sagan became associated with the catchphrase "billions and billions". Sagan stated that he never actually used the phrase in the Cosmos series.^[37] The closest that he ever came was in the book Cosmos, where he talked of "billions upon billions":^[38]

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars—billions upon billions of stars.

—Carl Sagan, Cosmos, chapter 1, page 3^[39]

However, his frequent use of the word billions, and distinctive delivery emphasizing the "b" (which he did intentionally, in place of more cumbersome alternatives such as "billions with a 'b'", in order to distinguish the word from "millions" in viewers' minds),^[37] made him a favorite target of comic performers, including Johnny Carson,^[40] Gary Kroeger, Mike Myers, Bronson Pinchot, Penn Jillette, Harry Shearer, and others. Frank Zappa satirized the line in the song "Be In My Video", noting as well "atomic light". Sagan took this all in good humor, and his final book was entitled Billions and Billions, which opened with a tongue-in-cheek discussion of this catchphrase, observing that Carson was an amateur astronomer and that Carson's comic caricature often included real science.^[37]

He is also known for expressing wonderment at the vastness of space and time, as in his phrase "The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."

Creationism.

I'm going to tackle this topic even though I know it is polarizing. 

I read a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education today asking to scientists who support the theory of evolution to be kinder to creationists- and at least to not treat them like their idiots. Some of them clearly are not; you can present them the evidence for evolution and a creationist will just say 'I think there is a different set of facts' (no, there aren't, but I'm not here to convince anyone- I think it's futile to do so, people have to be convinced on their own, make their own discoveries). 

The thing I get confused about with creationism is that it seems like such a limited view of what God created with the universe (or even more than one universe, possibly). 

A scientist's job, through the empirical method, describes nature as well as they possibly can. Through that study, the evidence suggests that the universe is very old, 13,700,000,000 years old. That there are atoms made up of quarks and a whole host of other sub-atomic particles that are not obvious to the naked eye and zoom around at nearly the speed of light- 299,792,458 meters/second. These small particles and fields they represent make up everything in the universe. Life on Earth is ~2,000,000,000 years old, the Earth, 4,600,000,000 years old. The oceans formed, continents moved! Volcanoes erupted in massive and destructive explosions! Life has had myriad forms and dynamics over its history and we humans are a current incarnation of the mechanism of evolution, in a deeply philosophical sense, we are a way for the universe to know itself. Our brains have 83,000,000,000 neurons that form even more synaptic connections. Our bodies interact with microbes and other parts of the natural world- like plants!- that enables us to live and function on this Earth (all have DNA too- a rather elegant molecule for data storage). As humans, we've progressed far enough to be able to send the Voyager spacecraft to the edge of the solar system- 11,000,000,000 miles away! And there's a ton we just don't know or understand even still. Nature is complicated and doesn't yield secrets easily. The fact that our brains have comprehended as much as we have is impressive. 

This astounding complexity would make me say, if I were religious, 'Dear God, you created something incredible!!!! Far beyond what's written down in The Good Book!'. I am assuming that God, all-powerful, wouldn't allow us to know things we aren't allowed to know, of course.  

The numbers and mechanisms of the universe create a hugely richer picture of the universe than a 6,000 year old Earth with everything intact all of a sudden. The logistics of Noah's Ark boggle the mind if you consider the millions of species of animals out there (including the insects?). did he also take on all the plants of the world (250,000 flowering species alone- most wouldn't survive a flooded Earth)?

Is the more epic universe that science has painted a more uncertain place? Probably so. But therein lies the mystery and the frontiers of exploration. Living with uncertainty is hard (believe me, read previous posts here, uncertainty is quite difficult), but none of it means you can't still be a very decent person and do your part to make the world a better place. 

None of it precludes believing in a God it seems to me; It just deepens what God actually did in creating the universe. Staring at the night sky as a kid was one of the most inspiring things ever to me. And to realize that it's more ancient and grander than I even knew then, well, that's amazing! The part of the universe we're aware of constitutes ~4% of what's out there...96% is other stuff we have no idea about yet. 

So to the extent that I'm spiritual, the evidence of science suggests God did so much more than what's enumerated in The Bible- a book that gives some good guidance on how to behave in the world, not a manual for how the world goes, to paraphrase Galileo. 

I can get how the Renaissance Catholic Church would feel threatened by any view that wasn't what they said was 'how things are', but in 2012 in a democratic society, it seems like there's something else going on that makes creationists reject modern science (and in my mind, not give God his/her full due). And I must underscore, accepting a bigger vision of the universe in no way means you can no longer be religious, or a believer, or destroy one's faith. 

I'm sure people smarter and more articulate than I am have made a similar argument as I've outlined here, but I'm writing it again myself to get it out of my head- it's something I think about fairly often. 

My goal is not to convince anyone. I do think there needs to be a respectful voice in articulating our points of view and reasonable people can disagree. I do see how scientists (I feel this way too sometimes too) get frustrated when a whole community (like creationists) rejects what is overwhelming evidence that evolution happens; many scientists went out exploring nature and came back with natural selection as a mechanism for life to evolve. Evolution has had practical impact on all of our lives as well; from our crops we eat (selectively bred) to vaccines and antibiotics that kill harmful microbes, but spare us (by targeting things specific to the bacteria, not us- reflecting vast differences in DNA/cellular make up). Scientists don't come upon mechanisms of how nature works easily and we fight it out amongst ourselves until a theory emerges that stands up to most challenges (and even then, it continues to be challenged and refined). So to have our hard work rejected is hard to take, especially when it seems to a lot of us that we've uncovered some new piece of creation, that deepens our understanding of nature- making God, if you're religious- all the more impressive. 

So scientists often see limits to creationist thinking (it's all in that one book?); whereas scientists went directly to the primary source- nature itself. 

Scientists also tend to reject absolutist thinking. Science is a process, not an absolute way of knowing things, but a way to be more certain. We stare into the void often enough and get rejected by our methods of trying to understand what's going on so often that we realize anything we say comes with some level of uncertainty. Which makes scientific theories all the more impressive; Gravity, evolution, cell theory, The standard model, relativity, have all been vetted so thoroughly that scientists have accepted their veracity and continue to use them as a basis for experiments. 

That doesn't mean that scientists can be mean to creationists and belittle them (that will convince no one to come to accept evolution), but does explain why scientists have a hard time understanding a Creationist point of view- an absolute view oftentimes. When presented with evidence counter to a hypothesis we hold to be true, scientists do something remarkable; we change our minds- often slowly, but we do.