What is unique about these narratives?
The narratives featured in the Biotales blogs were co-created with the participants in three immersive online workshops. These workshops had three main sessions:
In the first session, Your origin stories: Participants explored formative experiences which led them to develop an interest in life sciences. Participants were asked to write letters to younger selves or other young people describing these experiences. Many of these letters are featured under “self in science”.
In the second session, Experiences of the research process: We began with word association activities around “laboratory,” “field,” “pain,” and “excitement” to enable participants to tap into their emotions around their research. Participants then collectively read and annotated the final chapter of the biography, A feeling for the organism by Evelyn Fox Keller, a text that discusses Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock’s unique approach to scientific inquiry, built on a worldview and epistemology built on the intimacy with the organism that she studies rather than with existing academic protocols. The evocative nature of the text was revealed in the way participants responded to it, the reflexive observations they brought on the capacity for surprise and fascination in biological sciences research, and the conditions that would enable it. This editorial piece discusses how a feeling for the organism also came to constitute the guiding philosophy of the project.
Following this, participants described their relationships with an entity in their lab or field site — be it an organism, technique, or instrument — and developed these into creative pieces during and after the workshop. Many of these are featured in the blog sections- a feeling for the organism, field notes, and laboratory life.
In the third and final session, You in your research, participants reflected on how their personalities shift before and after entering the lab. Participants offered interesting observations about what changes, in terms of their personalities and behaviours within and outside laboratory spaces. being controlling, precise, and orderly emerged in particular as “inside the laboratory” personality traits. We tried to collectively think about how aspects of what we understand to be our personality may also be linked to our identities. In two of the workshops, participants read Banu Subramaniam’s allegorical story, Snow Brown and the Seven Detergents which discusses how identity shapes how one is perceived and treated in research spaces. Subsequently, participants drew self portraits of themselves as researchers, many of which are featured in the self in science section of the blog.
A distinctive feature of the project is its unique use of art as a tool for storytelling and reflection. Art carries emotion, and therefore has a powerful role in communicating a true picture of scientific work where a wide spectrum of emotions, positive and negative, are at play. Our workshops aimed to bring together both reason and emotion in participants’ stories of doing science.
The work produced by participants in the workshop was further developed in conversation with the facilitators following which the designer and illustrator in the team worked on the illustrations and layout of the piece. In this piece, she talks about her process of engaging with the material and the kind of considerations she brought to bear on the illustrations and the design.
Furthermore, the narratives are autobiographical in nature. where participants fleshed out personal experiences of doing science, as well as their emotional states when engaging with research. Much of the science communicated in the narratives should be accessible to an undergraduate audience. Below I elaborate on some of the key points of focus of these stories.
Science focused stories
The science focussed stories include interesting accounts by early career researchers of doing science, often discussing important concepts and ideas within the areas of molecular biology, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology. For example, this story is a first person account of a young molecular biologist’s journey with the model organism Cenorabhditis elegans, how her initial fascination for it gave away to boredom and eventually respect and care.
A set of stories [1,2] by an evolutionary biologist discusses his journey of working on a fascinating class of ant mimicking spiders. His article grapples with contested ideas such as, “what exactly is a biological species?” Similarly, through an evocative painting of conjoined birds, this piece by a young evolutionary biologist discusses her initial foray into the field of evolutionary biology and why the field felt right to her.
Another illustrated account by an ecologist takes us through her experiences of collecting plant fragrances from Meghalaya and analysing them in her laboratory in Bhopal.
The field of biological sciences is highly interdisciplinary, encompassing a range of laboratory and field-based approaches. This account, by an archaeologist, who works with biologists on the question of human evolution, discusses his process of conversing with paleolithic artefacts ( bones, teeth, stone tools) to figure out its story- such as what is it? And Where did it come from? With a view to answering bigger questions such as who are we, and how have we come this far? Another pictorial account by a field ecologist who studies freshwater fishes talks about his challenges of bridging the nature-culture divide as he studies communities of fishes as well as communities of people with whom they are in a socio-ecological relationship.
An important aspect of doing science is failure. It is very rare that an experiment works in the first trial. The reasons may be multiple- which include limitations of the experimental setup, weather conditions, damaged reagents, erroneous instruments, or problems/limitations in the hypothesis itself. Early career researchers, who do the bulk of the experimental work in laboratories, often find themselves facing these constraints, and helpless when it comes to working around them. These first person accounts, one describing a failed attempt at cloning a protein, and another on researching the mechanism of Small Extracellular vesicles on cellular stress, discuss such experiences.
Stories revealing the emotions of doing science
These stories constitute evocative accounts of the emotional states of doing research, very central, but often missing in popular accounts of doing science, revealing a range of emotions, from contentment, and happiness to pain and anxiety. Some stories [1, 2, 3, 4] use light-hearted humour as a way of talking about experiences that may be frustrating or reveal the drudgery of day to day research-
These pieces by an early career biologist [1, 2] depict her emotions as she observed the dissection of a mouse for the first time.
She writes,
“This was an animal that was scuttling around in its little box a while ago, squeaking, nibbling at the food pellets and poking its pink little nose out of the grilled lid. I closed my eyes. I had smelt its acrid odour when alive, sneezed at its dander and was now hit in the nose by the metallic smell of its blood. Then I opened my eyes… It was not easy for the seniors who had been doing this for years, it was hard on me too. Over time, I have made peace with the experiments and hope for a future that has simulation models to take the place of mice models. “We call it a sacrifice and not a killing, to recognise the contribution of mice to the cause of science,” I have been told.”
In another deeply evocative piece, a young cancer biologist talks about the deep entanglement of her personal life and laboratory life and her struggle with depression. She also writes about how she wants to be seen as a “researcher, and not a scientist”, offering important insights on the nature of biological sciences research and pointers on how to create more supportive spaces for early career researchers.
Beyond the travails of executing cell cultures, The hierarchical culture of biological laboratories is another factor that emerged in the discussions in the workshops. In this piece, for instance, the researcher uses dynamic crayon sketches to talk about her interactions with the laboratory space, which she experienced as toxic.
She writes “Now I am outside of the lab, still trying to find myself, trying to feel joy again, to trust people again. Though I am an outsider again, I know the reality of the lab, and now keep away from its influences.”
An invitation
The Biotales project is an invitation for all of us within and outside the scientific community to think about how we bring ourselves into the science that we do, teach and dream about. I see the material in the website as inviting ‘care’-ful attention to the little things that matter when it comes to doing biology research- looking at the organisms that we study as organisms with self respect, how we relate to the people whom we do our research with, across the hierarchy – in the laboratory and in the field, as well as being in touch with what keeps us excited about biological sciences research and what kills it.
I end with a prescient quote from A feeling for the organism that is revealing of a major challenge that confronts biologists today:
“There remain, of course, always a few biologists who are able to sustain the kind of “feeling for the organism” that was so productive-both scientifically and personally-for [Barbara] McClintock, but to some of them the difficulties of doing so seem to grow exponentially. One contemporary, who says of her own involvement in research, “If you want to really understand about a tumor, you’ve got to be a tumor,” put it this way: Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot; things that are so completely alien … that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modem scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction.”
indiabioscience.org (Article Sourced Website)
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