Engagement and inclusion #2

After writing my post yesterday about some aspects of a science engagement talk that I found problematic I emailed the speaker about my concerns. He replied and we had a fascinating conversation which he has given me permission to reproduce here. I've omitted his name and a couple of paragraphs that were specific to the content of his talk rather than relevant to the general discussion.

Speaker:

" Thanks for the feedback and also for giving me the chance to reply.
I admit that your post has caused me concern and I will look into what I can do. There are some of the things I can address straight away though.

I really hope that I am not sexist or racist and am alarmed that I could even appear to be so.
I did that talk 3 times today and the volunteer ratio averages out. Today I had 15 volunteers, 8 boys, 7 girls. Perhaps I shouldn't have gone for a group of friends, that was laziness of my part.

First off the werewolf, is simply because he is currently the most famous werewolf I could find. I am, I admit unaware of any female werewolves in cinema. Similarly JoJo the dogfaced boy is I think the most famous person with werewolf syndrome. Superman was chosen because it is supermale syndrome, it was just the best access I had to a chromosomal mutation. I don't know of any other superheroes I could have used to make that work. Maybe there is a problem with superheroes as a topic as a whole. I don't know of any transgenic female heroes, and Spiderman is the best known even if there are ones I have not heard off. I don't know of any. Similarly, the Hulk is the only radiated superhero I know of. That is the simple reason why there were no female superheroes- there are so few in general and I don't know of any that would have worked with the genetics I was talking about.

For infecting the volunteer with a virus- I have 3 pegs, I have always put two on the shoulders area and the final one in the hair, just because it gets a laugh. I do this regardless of the volunteers age, sex, ethnicity. I have no idea why this could be thought of as racist.

Regards Beyonce- I will be more careful here. Maybe I should just end on the cats. It was not intended as anything more than a joke, I was struggling to find an ending. I will alter it.

That is the reason why Dolly the sheep is called Dolly the sheep. It is a fact, but I think you are right, maybe not one worth sharing. I slipped that slide in last minute bearing in mind that I was talking about the names of clones and thought that I should mention Dolly somewhere given that she is the most famous clone in the world. I will remove it.

I think where I have to be careful was saying bacteria are slags. I hadn't considered that it is considered a gender specific term, and it really is isn't it. I wanted to communicate that they are not even fussy what species they get their DNA from this is a very difficult concept for pupil, but fundamental to genetically engineering bacteria. I will need to use a better word. Promiscuous would be wrong, its too formal and the kids would not get it, tomorrow I will say that "bacteria are a bit loose".

There is no such thing as a lowly volunteer. I talk to anybody who talks to me and would gladly have had a chat.

I hope that my replying has been useful and thanks for pointing these things up as I would hate to be misconstrued.

All the best."

Me:

"Thanks very much for getting back to me. I'm sure you're not sexist or racist but I'm sure you hold unconcious biases, just like we all do including myself. I think it's much like using blinding in scientific experiments; just like when we know we're more likely to judge ambiguous results in a way that favours our hypothesis we put a system in place to prevent that from happening, the important thing is to be aware of these biases. Thanks for letting me know about how volunteer selection averaged out through the day - I'm glad it was approximately 50/50, but as kids would only have gone to one talk I think maybe it's important that it balances out in each?

I do appreciate that there are fewer widely recognised female superheroes, but I do think it's important that girls should have at least one active character in the talk they can empathise with, otherwise the only females being shown are just there for passive attributes like their appearance.

I guess Mystique would probably be the best known female superhero - chameleons can change their skin colour and octopuses can change both colour and texture, but I do appreciate this is hard to link to human genetics. There are plenty of female characters with superhuman strength - Wonder Woman, Ms Marvel, Rogue from the comic book version of the X-men - and maybe this could be linked to mutations in the myostatin gene? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myostatin#section_3 I realise I'm getting even more obscure but maybe Elastigirl from The Incredibles could be linked to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehlers%E2%80%93Danlos_syndrome#section_2?

The hair thing is because often Black peoples' hair being touched is a bit of an issue - I know it sounds bizarre that enough people would just walk up and mess with a stranger's hair for it to be a common experience, but it certainly seems to have been for the majority of my Black friends, white people feeling they have the right to just stick their hands in or stroke or pull their hair. In part because of this many Black people feel that having their hair interfered with is a bit of an insult to their bodily autonomy. On top of this hair has quite a lot of meaning in Black culture, as it was used as a marker for discrimination and as natural Black hair became something that had to be straightened or modified to look European to fit into society, so now hair is an assertion of identity. Because of all this I tend to avoid touching anyone's hair unless I have their express invitation.

Thanks again for getting back to me and for taking what I said on board."

[Incidentally I'm very aware that I'm a white person explaining Black people's feelings about hair here, if anyone can link me to a better explanation or feels like writing something let me know and I'll stick it in a new post]

Speaker:

" Yeah I do try and balance volunteers not only regards their sex but regarding what school they come from, position in the auditorium etc too, sometimes I just fail.

Elasto girl is in- I simply had not heard of her. It will take me a few days to incorporate her, but sounds like a great one.

Maybe this is a general problem that male role models are heroes while female ones are pop stars. But just because Hollywood and the worlds of pop music are sexist does not mean that I should be. I simply aimed to engage with popular culture and use it to explain some hard stuff, but I must have let it impact my talk negatively. That was never my intention. I have never wanted to offend or alienate anyone. I will take more care in future. Thanks.

I am going to give my volunteer a hat now. That way I can avoid any issues.

All the best."

Edited to add: anyone interested in more inclusive superheroes or comic books could do well to start here.

Engagement and inclusion: we can do better

I spent today volunteering at a major science event aimed at children. As you may have noticed I'm quite passionate about science communication, both because I feel that everyone deserves the chance to hear about something I find so fascinating and because I believe passionately that the more people of all ages but especially the more children are exposed to scientific ideas the more will realise that science is something they too can become involved in, and like every evangelist banging on about Apple products or Brompton bikes I'd like to think that something that has enriched my life so much could enrich the lives of others too.  For this reason I was delighted to be assigned to help out with some of the talks, and looked forward to seeing how the experts did it.

I have to admit that how they did it horrified me.

The first speaker gave a talk that was in many ways very good - he used superheroes as an engaging hook to capture children's interest, and designed some very novel and interactive demonstrations to convey some very complex concepts.  I sincerely hope that this post is taken in a spirit of constructive criticism that would allow him, and others designing similar engement activities, to make them truly excellent.  Where it fell down though was in the quite startling degree of sexism it demonstrated.  I'm not going to name the event or the first speaker, as I'm sure the biases and sterotypical thinking displayed were entirely unconscious rather than deliberate (after all the very definition of privilege is having the luxury to be unaware of such issues) and because I doubt he is alone in exhibiting them - rather than a critique of a single event I think this should be an opportunity for everyone to think about making our science communication more inclusive.

The speaker mentioned a number of people, real and fictional in his talk.  Males mentioned were the werewolf from Twilight, Superman, Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk - admittedly the werewolf character was probably written as eye-candy but the rest were discussed as admirable characters and powers that would be desirable to share.  Females mentioned were Dolly Parton (in the context of a joke about Dolly the sheep being cloned from breast tissue) and Beyoncé Knowles twice: the first time in the context of the fly with the golden bum named after her (yes really), illustrated of course by a picture of Beyoncé's bum in a gold lamé dress, and the second in the context of how wonderful it would be if we could all clone a copy of her.  Men, in short, were shown as heroes with agency (with the possible exception of the werewolf) whereas women were either the butt of jokes or objects of admiration, in both cases for their physical characteristics.  Given that half of the audience was female this certainly wasn't a message I wanted them to be taking away from a science fair.

Scaptia beyonceae

Another issue was the selevtion of volunteers, all five of whom were male.  Admittedly the first four all came from the front row, and as kids tend to try and sit next to their friends it's possible that there was a cluster of boys in the place where the speaker liked to take volunteers from, but the final volunteer was chosen from the side of the hall and was also a boy.  I'm sure that the speaker wasn't doing this on purpose, but it did seem to me as though he was subconciously choosing volunteers on the basis of his mental image of who would be interested in science.  The trouble is that the fact that the people on stage where entirely male may have helped reinforce any biases or insecurities the audience may have held over who should be doing science too.

On top of this one of the demonstrations struck me as potentially rather racially insensitive: the demonstrator asked for a volunteer from the audience and started putting pegs in his hair. I don't know whether he would have modified this part of the demonstrator if the volunteer had been Black, but I would have found a Black kid on stage having their hair messed with by a white man incredibly uncomfortable and really there was no need to do it at all.



To top it all off he ended with a slut-shaming joke, saying that all bacteria are slags because they'd share DNA with anyone which apart from anything else may not have been appropriate for such a young audience.

The second talk was far better, with no sexist jokes, one of the three kids selected as volunteers being a girl and videos shown of children of all sexes and ethnicities doing experiments. I did notice however that again the three demonstrators were all white and male: perhaps not a problem in isolation but coming straight after the first talk may perhaps have reinforced the impression that science was not for everyone. Both talks were repeated in the afternoon, but I was too busy to pay attention to the balance of volunteers.

I did wonder whether I was overreacting, seeing problems where most wouldn't notice them, until one of the class teachers stopped me on the way out and begged me to feed back how awfully sexist the talk was to the demonstrator. I'll try, though as a lowly volunteer I doubt I'll get the chance to talk to him, but I genuinely believe he was acting with the best of intentions, completely unaware of how problematic some aspects of his talk were, and I doubt that this issue is unique to him; for this reason I hope that this post will serve to feed back to some extent to the scientific communication and engagement community.

16/3/13: Edited the add that the speaker has now responded to me and taken these points on board.

Freaky Friday: Isopod and chips?

As something of a connoisseur of creepy things with lots of legs, you can imagine how exited I was when a member of my knitting forum posted about two odd creatures she'd found in the mouth a snapper she's just cooked (I was in fact so excited it took me a couple of months to get around to blogging about it, but that's purely a reflection of my disorganisation rather than the awesomeness of the find). I won't say it's the coolest thing I've ever seen in that forum, because it also introduced me to Fatty Thor, but it came pretty damn close.  The knitter who found it doesn't want to be identified in case she is forever known as Snapper Tongue Louse Girl, but she was kind enough to send me some high resolution pictures of them which I've put behind a link because I know that my Dad sometimes reads this blog and I suspect he'd never eat again if he saw them.

Picture 1

Picture 2

So what are these marvelous mouth monsters?  They're female and male Cymothoa exigua, known to their friends as the tongue eating louse, and look only slightly less terrifying when not baked in a salt crust.  This aquatic distant relative of the woodlouse glories in the distinction of being the only parasite known to functionally replace the organ it destroys - the female (the larger of the two nightmarish nibbles in the pictures) enters the fish's mouth through the gill slits and eats the helpless creature's tongue, then using her pincers attaches herself to the stump and spend the rest of her life serving as a replacement, living on food and mucus in the fish's mouth.  The smaller of the two, romantically roasted with her, is the male who would have been clinging to the gills in the hope of a bit of tongue action.

All in all you might think that after going through all that, being baked in a salt crust probably came as a blessed relief for the poor red snapper, so I'll leave it to Bec Crew to explain how having an alien in its mouth could have been an advantage if the fish was shy talking to the lady snappers.

Happy Christmas! Have some sprouts!

Have some sprouts!

MRI of Brussels Sprouts from the amazing Inside Insides!

Wshing you all a creepy crawly Christmas!

And here's a suggestion for a last minute educational Christmas present for kids and adults who think they're kids: an Incredible Arthropods colouring book from The Bug Chicks:

There's still just about time to order it in the US or UK and it's guaranteed educational, doesn't require batteries and doesn't make an annoying noise.

It's also available as a digital download, allowing you to print the pictures on transparencies and stick them on your window - if you colour them with Sharpies they looks like stained glass when the sun shines in and scare your naighbours after dark when the light shines out.

Why yes, London is cold, grey and miserable

If you don't have access to transparencies you can also make cool stained glass by tracing the pictures onto greaseproof paper,  or make shrinkable art to make jewellery or button badges by tracing the pictures onto food containers then cutting them out and baking them in the oven. Do make sure you use the right type of plastic though, you want number 6.

Happy Christmas!

What is Chemical Ecology?

One striking thing that  I realised from the discussions about Rothamsted’s wheat trial is how little was known about chemical ecology - it’s very easy to get so absorbed in your own field that you forget that what you’re working on isn’t common knowledge in the wider world.  It’s also a fascinating example of how words can have very different associations to different people – to me chemical ecology is a fascinating field of study, but I actually noticed one protestor I was talking to recoil in horror at the juxtaposition of the friendly, positive word “ecology” with the word “chemical”, with all its unnatural connotations.

Colloquially, the word “chemical” has come to mean something artificial, some unpronounceable synthetic substance with unpredictable effects cooked up in a lab somewhere, but it’s important to realise that in the technical sense the word chemical simply means a collection of atoms.  Using the technical definition every physical object we encounter is made up of chemicals – water is a chemical, so is the oxygen we breathe, the vitamins, sugars and proteins that we eat, the keratin in our hair.  (The fact that this field of study was named something that seems so off-putting to some perhaps just goes to show that science doesn’t have access to the sort of slick PR machine many assume it does!).

The science of ecology involves the study of the relationships between different organisms, and between organisms and their environment.  Chemical ecology is a particular subsection of this discipline, which studies those interactions that are mediated by chemicals; semiochemicals which convey information, for example smelly compounds which alert organisms to the presence of suitable or unsuitable food, mates, or danger, pheromones which allow individual organisms of the same species to coordinate behaviour (for example the queen mandibular pheromone of honey bees that prevents workers from laying eggs), and defensive compounds that species use to wage chemical warfare on one another – the formic acid wood ants squirt at attackers, the antibiotics secreted by some fungi to prevent the growth of competitor bacteria on their food or the signals used by the parasitic weed Striga to parasitise its host plant  for example.

Queen bee surrounded by workers, image from Wikipedia.

 

My own research on the smells that attract the fly that transmits trachoma to the tears it feeds on and the faeces it lays its eggs on, and so the aspect of chemical ecology I’m most familiar with, involves semiochemicals – the volatile molecules that diffuse through the air and convey information to the creatures that smell them.  These are often oil-soluble chemicals – if you try to think of some of the strongest smelling things you encounter aromatherapy oils are probably on the list somewhere – but they can also be things that humans can’t smell, like carbon dioxide or water.  Insects in general have very acute sense of smell – a bee, for example can smell the equivalent of a single grain of salt in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.  (This highly acute sense of smell, incidentally, is why bees are being trained to sniff out drugs and explosives.)  So if you’re hoping to learn how insects interact with their world, and maybe to control how they do so, smell is a good place to start.

 Sniffer bees in action

There are various ways to find the odours insects can detect, but one of the most direct is to eavesdrop on what’s going on in their brains using a technique called electroantennography.  A nerve impulse is fundamentally just a spike of electrical charge, so by very carefully inserting one electrode into the tip of an insect’s antenna, and another into the area of an insect’s brain responsible for smell, you can measure how the difference in charge between the two electrodes varies when the insect is exposed to different smells you think might be important to it and by doing so find out which ones trigger a nerve impulse – which ones it’s smelling.  From there you can go on to do laboratory and field tests to find out how the insect reacts to these smells; does it fly towards them, away from them, or do something in response to them, like feeding on what smells like tasty food or laying eggs on what smells like a good place for its young to develop?

Exploiting an insect’s sensory word has one great advantage over many other pest control methods – as different smells mean different things to different insects, taking an approach informed by chemical ecology allows you to target one particular pest species without affecting others, unlike blanket insecticides for example which may be just as harmful to beneficial insects or a pest’s natural predators as they are to the pest itself. Take the coddling moth for example, a pest of apple trees whose caterpillar is the traditional “worm in the apple”.

Coddling moth larva damage, from Wikipedia.

Adult females of this species produce a characteristic pheromone which the male can smell from a great distance away, and he can then follow the perfume trail to find her and mate.  Instead of spraying orchards with insecticide farmers can now use traps baited with synthetic versions of this pheromone in a technique called mating disruption – overwhelmed by the strong perfume wafting from the traps the male can no longer find the female, they both eventually die alone and frustrated and the apples are protected.

The coddling moth isn’t the only insect species whose chemical communication can be its downfall.  Contrary to popular belief bedbugs don’t actually live in bedlinen, but spend the day hiding in “refuges”, cracks in walls or furniture.  Dozens huddle together in these refuges, waiting out the day, and find each other using their characteristic smell, sometimes described as reminiscent of cilantro or coriander (although I won’t be sprinkling bedbugs on my Thai curry any time soon).  They’re not the only ones who can use this smell though – bedbug infestations mean big business losses for hotels so they need to be tipped off at the first sign of infection.  The most sophisticated bedbug detectors out there use the smell that bedbugs produce to find them, and then signal that they’ve done so...by wagging their tails.

Bed bug detection dog

That’s right, the best bedbug detectors out there are dogs.  Well, the sniffer dogs need something to do if the bees are displacing them at airports.

In Kenya a novel farming system exploiting chemicalecology is being pioneered to control stem borer caterpillars.  These are the larvae of a number of different moth species (Chillo partellus, Eldana saccharina, Busseola fusca, Sesmia calamistis) that basically do exactly what they say on the tin; chomp their way through the stems of maize plants, boring out the centres, which obviously doesn’t do a lot of good to either the maize or the farmers who want to eat it.  The moths find the maize plant to lay their eggs on by smell, and that’s where chemical ecology comes in, using a push-pull strategy of interplanting a plant that smells repellent to the moths with the maize, to mask its naturally attractive smell, and surrounding the maize crop with a plant that smells attractive to the moths to lure them away.  Cunningly the repellent-smelling intercrop is a plant called Desmodium, a member of the bean family that enriches the soil with nitrogen and as a bonus kills the parasitic weed Striga which also reduces maize yields, and the attractive plant is a grass which can be fed to cattle and which traps the stemborers with sticky sap.

An understanding of chemical ecology isn’t just helpful for plant growing either.  Kenyan cattle herders dread nagana, a disease spread by tsetse flies which causes weightloss and death in their herds.  Attractant traps for tsetse flies already exist – blue sheets (a colour that the flies find attractive) baited with carbon dioxide mimicking the exhaled breathe of the animals tsetses feed on. (Incidentally this is why tsetse flies chase cars: a tsetse’s prey is a large moving object breathing out carbon dioxide, and a car is a very large, fast-moving object pumping out large amounts of carbon dioxide).

Tsetse trap, from Wikipedia

But these traps alone aren’t sufficient to protect the Kenyan cattle herds.  The solution came in the form of repellent collars for the cattle, which mimic the odour of animal species that tsetse don’t find attractive.  These are being rolled out at the moment and, in conjunction with traps, serve as a push-pull system for the tsetse.

How about insects pests that transmit human diseases, could chemical ecology be used to control them?  It’s a possibility.  Like tsetse flies, mosquitoes are attracted to the carbon dioxide in exhaled breath, and also to various odorous chemicals evaporating from human skin.  We may already have something that could serve as the pull component of a push pull system – a trap baited with carbon dioxide and a synthetic blend of these chemicals that could be more attractiveto mosquitoes than humans are, and we’re on our way to develop a push.

At present the only effective wearable mosquito repellent is DEET, developed by the US military to protect its soldiers.  Although highly effective it has its drawbacks, sometimes causing irritation or damaging clothes.  Repellents made from lemon eucalyptus look promising but evaporate too quickly from the skin to be very useful at the moment.  The solution may lie in chemicals that we ourselves produce naturally – it turns out that as well as the attractive chemicals we all produce some of us also produce natural mosquito repellents. 

This is not in fact an oven ready scientist but me in a survival bag.  These are used to capture the odours that human beings produce, to analyse for chemicals that are attractive or repellent to mosquitoes, as they’re airtight and have very few odours of their own.  Air that has had all its own odours purified out with a charcoal filter is blown into the bag, and the, umm, miasma sucked out and analysed.  Maybe someday we’ll be able to use these odours to make everyone smell utterly repellent, at least to mosquitoes.

Using chemical ecology to study the stimuli useful to insects gives us a greater understanding of the world from their perspective, and the more we understand about what chemical information they use to find resources important to them the more we can manipulate those resources that are also useful to us, like crop plants or even our own bodies, to reduce the conflict between us.  In an increasingly resource-constrained world, gaining a better understanding of natural systems in order to make fewer, more sophisticated changes to better meet our needs is surely the way to go.

This Halloween, meet the vampire maggot!

Happy Halloween!  Say hello to the blood-sucking larva of Auchmeromyia senegalensis.

Image pinched from Bogleech's brilliant "Top Twenty Coolest Flies"

 This little chap lives in Subsaharan Africa, in dirt floors and bedlinen, and crawls out at night to suck sleepers' blood.  Unlike fictional vampires he doesn't sparkle, but like certain fictional vampires he's not especially bright and is utterly defeated if sleepers are raised off the group on beds (he evolved to feed on burrowing mammals).  Although he seems like a fairly uncharismatic creature, research into other bloodsuckers like leeches has already yielded a natural anticoagulant so who knows what tricks this under-researched vampire may be using to get his dinner?

Sleep tight.