Bluesci Issue 54 - Easter 2022

Easter 2022 Issue 54 www.bluesci.co.uk Cambridge University science magazine

FOCUS

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Conservation Science . Acculturation Activism . Pseudoscience

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Cambridge University science magazine

Contents Regulars

Features 6

On The Cover 3 News 4 Reviews 5

Conservation: Subjective, but Still Science

Kate Howlett illustrates how applied science is firmly rooted in its social context 8

Why Patient Experiences Should Shape Medical Knowledge?

FOCUS

Jacob Smith explains why and how patient experiences should shape our current medical knowledge 10

Q&A with Stephen Braren

Maria Bolevich interviews a fellow researcher about his personal journey in scientific discovery 12

Exploring the Zooniverse

Julie Tang discusses how citizen science facilitates scientific research 14

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Manuel Morales Alvarado shares with us his experience of acculturation in four different countries during his four years of PhD Laia Serratosa walks along the fuzzy, dreamlike borders between science and everything else

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Sticking to the Science?

James Ball explores the delicate boundaries that delineate research, advocacy, and activism in the scientific community 26

​​Pro-Science? Fight Anti-Science Compassionately

Naomi van den Berg explains how guarding against misinformation helps us fight imminent crises more

BlueSci was established in 2004 to provide a student forum for science communication. As the longest running science magazine in Cambridge, BlueSci publishes the best science writing from across the University each term. We combine high quality writing with stunning images to provide fascinating yet accessible science to everyone. But BlueSci does not stop there. At www.bluesci.co.uk, we have extra articles, regular news stories, podcasts and science films to inform and entertain between print issues. Produced entirely by members of the University, the diversity of expertise and talent combine to produce a unique science experience.

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A PORTRAIT OF THE SCIENTIST AS A YOUNG ARTIST Livia Lisi-Vega reveals the personal journey of the scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Acculturation in the Life of an International Student

Pavilion: the Eye of the Beholder

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Genes, Carpets, and Mediaeval Manuscripts

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Bartek Witek discusses the broad applications of phylogenetic techniques

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The Toys That Made Us

Maria Julia Maristany delves into how toys make who we are

Weird and Wonderful

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Treating C.diff Infection with ‘Crapsules’ A Less Glamorous ‘Circle of Life’ The Mystery of Stabilimenta

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Contents 1

Issue 54: Easter 2022 Issue Editor: Gladys Poon Managing Editor: Georgina Withers First Editors: Jessica Corry, William Guo, Andrew Smith, Lauren Moon, Hayoung Choi, Ailie McWhinnie, Chisomo Zimphango, Timothy Birkle, Emily Talbot, Laura Chilver, Bartek Witek, Devahuti Chaliha Second Editors: Ailie McWhinnie, Sarah Lindsay, Timothy Birkle, Laura Chilver, William Guo, Hayoung Choi, Emily Talbot, Yoann Launay, Biliana Tchavdarova Todorova, Lauren Lee, Georgina Withers Art Editor: Pauline Kerekes News Team: Yan-Yi Lee, Jung Chen, Andrew Smith Reviews: Lily Taylor, Elizabeth English, Bethan Charles Feature Writers: Kate Howlett, Jacob Smith, Maria Bolevich, Julie Tang, Manuel Morales Alvarado, James Ball, Naomi van den Berg, Bartek Witek, Maria Julia Maristany Focus Writer: Livia E. Lisi-Vega Pavilion: Laia Serratosa Capdevila, Aina Serratosa Weird and Wonderful: Lily Taylor, Laura Chilver, Philip Myers Production Team: Gladys Poon, Georgina Withers Caption Writer: Gladys Poon Copy Editors: Andrew Smith, Yan-Yi Lee, Adiyant Lamba, Georgina Withers Illustrators: Anna Germon, Josh Langfield, Biliana Tchavdarova Todorova, Eva Pillai, Aina Serratosa, Mariadaria Ianni-Ravn, Sumit Sen, Pauline Kerekes Cover Image: Anna Germon

Who Scientists Are THE WORLD IN A ONE-LINER has to be an oxymoron: it is full of hesitant decision-makers, cynical believers, peaceful protesters… and subjective scientists. We use dichotomies to perceive and understand the world, and that is destined to fall short. This issue of BlueSci shines light onto the humanity of science — what is bias-free objectivism in ideation but a human endeavour in its applied capacity, driven by evidence, as well as values and beliefs.

Our writers and illustrators have come together to paint a picture of ‘Who Scientists Are’ for readers of BlueSci Issue 54. Passive observers in blinded experiments are led outside of their laboratories, away from their benches, and we are shown how their own beliefs, personal interests, and cultures shape scientific development. We provide a ground for discussion of the responsibilities and duties of scientists as human beings capable of making decisions.

Starting with conservation science, Kate Howlett illustrates how applied science is firmly rooted in its social context and how long-term conservation strategies depend on the identities of people involved. Moving on to the medical context, Jacob Smith explains why and how patient experiences should shape our current medical knowledge. Zooming into the roles of individual scientists, Maria Bolevich interviews a fellow scientific researcher about his personal journey in scientific discovery. Julie Tang next discusses how citizen science facilitates scientific research and has potential benefits for both citizen scientists and professionals. This is followed by a heartwarming piece from Manuel Morales Alvarado who shares with us his experience of acculturation in four different countries during his four years of PhD, a phenomenon, albeit less extreme in most cases, common in the modern-day scientist’s experience.

In our FOCUS piece, Livia Lisi-Vega takes us onto the personal journey of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and reveals how his artistic inclination fueled his Nobel-winning work that laid the foundation for modern-day neuroscience. As Cajal’s drawings become appreciated globally, he serves as a brilliant example of how scientists are not — or should not be — defined only by their discoveries in the lab.

In her two poems, Laia Serratosa walks along the fuzzy, dreamlike borders between science and everything else. James Ball explores the delicate boundaries that delineate research, advocacy, and activism in the scientific community. He challenges our readers to consider the need for transparency when decisions are made based on values and warns against potential corruption of science. Continuing on the theme of crises faced by science, Naomi van den Berg explains how guarding against misinformation helps us fight imminent crises, like climate change, more effectively. Bartek Witek discusses the broad applications of phylogenetic techniques, from genes, carpets, music, to mediaeval manuscripts.

Finally, we end with Maria Julia Maristany’s perspective on how toys, despite seemingly inconsequential, make who we (scientists) are.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (unless marked by a ©, in which case the copyright remains with the original rights holder). To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

2 Editorial

Even with the best of intentions — in a world where people come from all walks of life — conflicts are inevitable. While science can bring evidence to the table, the evidence is not a resolution in itself. The value of good science can only materialize when evidence is combined with sensible interpretation and policy making. Thus, it is only through understanding the human side of science that we are able to contextualize our scientific efforts, with regard to our place as scientists in society, and that is paramount for how we conduct and utilize science Gladys Poon Issue Editor #54 Easter 2022

On the Cover SCIENCE ORIGINATES FROM the Latin ‘scire’, meaning knowledge. It is the study of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Throughout history it has been the scientists that have built scientific knowledge, but how has the individuality of the scientists influenced the progression of science?

In the centre of the piece is a clock: a human invention that represents all time. Why is the clock not whole? A segment of it is being taken by a hand. Who owns this hand? The clock lies in the palm of two hands. Is it being offered? By who?

Like a fruit, it is almost decaying, sections never to be seen again. What will be left when time runs out? Spots grow in some areas of the clock. Is the clock dying and living simultaneously?

A low hanging piece of fruit is ripe for the pickings of the scientist. Or is it the personality of the scientist that saw that segment ready for the plucking? Why are certain areas of the clock left in the dark? What does a number mean, compared to a full clock? Do you think a machine could take this segment? Better than a hand?

Each response to the questions asked will be unique. This highlights the variation in Who Scientists Are: how our minds see the world differently, and hence, how our understanding of the universe is also different Anna Germon IG: @queengerm_ Cover Artist

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On the Cover 3

News

Check out www.bluesci.co.uk, our Facebook page, or @BlueSci on Twitter for regular science news and updates

What Happens When Legislation Does Not Catch Up With Thriving Surrogacy industry?

Beep-boop: How Brains Struggle to Detect Change During Dementia

Whilst the Russia-Ukraine war rages on, some Ukrainian women are struggling to give birth in shelters in the heart of the war zone. They are not leaving for neighbouring countries for refuge — why? These women are bearing babies as surrogates for the commissioning parents from the relatively wealthy Western countries. Ukraine has been the hub of commercial surrogacy services in Europe for decades — an emergent industry that isn’t yet legal in many other regions of the world. Under such circumstances, they cannot flee to give birth to surrogate babies in another nation due to legal restrictions.

How has listening to beeps whilst watching a David Attenborough documentary helped identify brain networks affected by dementia?

Not only in wartime is it difficult for surrogate babies to make their way home to intended parents.

The transnational reproduction and surrogacy journey involve complicated legal issues that require international cooperation, involving various stakeholders — the surrogates themselves, gamete donors, intended parents, medical clinics, the court, attorneys, and the expected babies. In this process, a host of problems may present themselves — for instance, the birth certificate issued by the surrogate’s country may be rejected by the host country, making it hard to obtain a passport for the baby to fly home. If legislation fails to respond timely to the growing transnational surrogacy service, it is quite possible that more babies around the world — not only in Ukraine — would be left ‘stuck’ in their surrogate countries, unable to make it safely to the hands of their intended parents. JC

Dementia is a collection of symptoms caused by different neurodegenerative diseases that involve the accumulation of misfolded proteins in the brain, with Alzheimer’s being the most common cause of dementia. One common symptom is the difficulty to cope with change.

To investigate the brain regions responsible, Dr Thomas Cope from the University of Cambridge and colleagues performed a study on people living with different types of dementia. The participants listened to a series of beeps whilst watching a silent episode of Planet Earth to draw their attention.

Intermittently, some of the beeps would vary, and signals from the participants’ brains were monitored. The basic auditory systems of dementia patients displayed reduced signals in response to the altered beeps compared to the healthy controls, showing that they were less able to detect the changes.

The researchers studied brain regions called multiple demand networks, which are involved in general intelligence, and found that damage to these networks was responsible for the reduced responses in dementia patients.

This highlights a common mechanism for how people with dementia struggle to detect, and so cope, with change. AS

How Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Impacts Science and Scientists Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has heavily impacted the operationalisation of Ukrainian scientific projects. Since day one of the war, there have been stories about Ukrainian scientists rushing into their labs to collect and pack their specimens. Academic heavyweights in Ukraine have also been appealing for aid in maintaining the scientific structures that the country has worked incredibly hard to build. Fellowships abroad and other opportunities have been opened for Ukrainian scientists, as a form of refuge and career support. Help continues from different areas of the world, but it does not seem to keep up with what Ukrainian scientists need at present.

On a larger scale, many are concerned about how politics may shape the course of both current and future scientific projects.

In the past couple of weeks, some key questions have been thrown out: will sanctions affect funding for major science projects?

What role will Russia and Ukraine play in international science projects from here on? As it is unlikely for scientific organisations to truly remain politically neutral, these are questions that merit urgent discussion given how circumstances are unfolding. YL Artwork by Eva Pillai.

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News

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Reviews Review of Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the Science of Life by Kat Arney Cancer is often portrayed as a disease of modern life, a consequence of our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, processed diets, and polluted environments. However, geneticist and science writer Kat Arney explores the history of cancer in the human race — to show that it has likely existed as long as we have. In fact, cancer is the price we pay for multi-cellularity and longevity.

Arney delves into the incredible evolutionary tactics cancer cells employ to make them such a formidable nemesis and draws fascinating parallels between their behaviour and other organisms like bacteria. One scientist working to outsmart cancer is Cambridge-based clinical geneticist Professor Serena Nik-Zainal. Nik-Zainal’s precision oncology thinking shifts emphasis from cancer-driving genes to mutational landscapes of individual tumours, which could help direct clinicians to the most appropriate treatment.

Kat Arney takes the reader on an humorous and hopeful exploration of the evolutionary game of chess that scientists use to drive cancer into a dead end. It is an informative scientific synopsis of the history, evolution, and future of cancer. LT

Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning Through Making Materials science is the most important subject that no one has heard of. Experts often use this joke to introduce the topic. But the science of materials underpins our modern lives, without which we would have no skyscrapers, planes, or phones. Dr Anna Ploszajski sets out on a journey to understand this crucial subject in her book Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning through Making.

Rather than merely dictating why we should care or rewriting textbook definitions, Ploszajski invites us to join her own journey of discovery. As a materials scientist by training, Ploszajski realised that while she could recite formulas, she felt disconnected from the materials themselves. So, she set out to learn from masters of their crafts: blacksmiths, clay workers, glassmakers, and build a narrative around how different materials fit into our society. Each chapter is dedicated to one material, the history and importance of which Ploszajski weaves seamlessly with her own experiences — for example, how working with supposedly simple clay led to advanced technologies and also helped Ploszajski recover from depression.

Handmade is not just a popular science book but a tale of how human stories and craftsmanship underpin the materials we use every day. BC

Brain Connectomics Throughout The Life Outcome: In-Person Conference at the MRC LMB

Following countless virtual conferences during the pandemic, I was thrilled to attend an in-person conference for the first time on January 25th. The event was hosted at the prestigious Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the site of many Nobel-Prize-winning discoveries.

We were welcomed by Professor Löwe, LMB Director, who introduced several well-known Cambridge-based neuroscientists as conference speakers. I appreciated how the day was structured, with presentation topics taking us on a journey from the developing to the ageing brain. These talks discussed how studies, from animal models to clinical scans and computational biology, have helped to inform understanding of the neuronal connections formed in development and throughout life, and how and why these networks vary between individuals. The speakers explained their work with clarity and enthusiasm, enabling others to understand their research and be inspired!

As a dementia research PhD candidate, I particularly enjoyed hearing neurodegeneration experts, Professor Rowe and Dr Goedert, discuss their cutting-edge research.

Refreshment breaks provided networking opportunities with other attendees, whose work ranges from molecular biology to psychiatry. It was certainly refreshing to recognise how varied neuroscientific research is: diverse ideas and research methods are crucial to progressing our collective knowledge of our complex brains! EE Handmade book cover courtesy of Bloomsbury Sigma.

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Reviews 5

Conservation: Subjective but Still Science Kate Howlett illustrates how applied science is firmly rooted in its social context and how long-term conservation strategies depend on the identities of people involved SCIENCE IS AN APPLIED endeavour. It sits within the rest of human society, alongside its geopolitics, social contexts, and cultural idiosyncrasies, and within its economic systems.

The idea of science as conducted by objective researchers is true only to those branches that deal with pure theory but not to science in its applied capacity. Although experimental design and data analysis must always be objective, which questions are asked — and even how and which data are collected — is inescapably subjective. This is an unavoidable artefact of scientists being humans who sit within wider society.

There is no better illustration of this than conservation science, the branch of biology concerned with protecting the natural world, including its species, habitats, and ecosystems.

While its experiments are designed to be as objective as possible, decisions of what to conserve where, and how to achieve this, are irrevocably tied to the identities of the scientists, funders, and policymakers involved.

TO REWILD OR NOT TO REWILD? | Rewilding has gained significant traction over recent years and has migrated into the public domain. True rewilding is really an ideology — leaving an area of land to regenerate naturally without any human intervention. In practice, rewilding often starts with human interventions such as tree planting or the reintroduction of keystone species, like beavers, that help natural processes re-establish themselves.

Understanding the mechanics of rewilding, such as which species establish themselves first and how they interact with each other to contribute to ecosystem processes, is underpinned by objective data gathering and analysis. The adoption of rewilding at any given site, on the other hand, depends on the goal and, ultimately, on who is holding the pot of money.

If the aim is to remove human impacts from a system, then rewilding is the best, and only, approach. If, however, the goal is to minimise species loss, maximise biodiversity, and restore full ecosystem functioning, then the best strategy might depend on the ecosystem.

The Scottish Highlands have become a prominent example of high-profile organisations working to achieve rewilding at scale. Here, it is often hard to make agriculture profitable, and the extant landscape is homogeneous, supporting relatively few species. Allowing woodland to regenerate has the potential to spawn increased tourism, contribute to carbon sequestration, and support other ecosystem services, such as downstream 6 Conservation: Subjective but Still Science

flood prevention. It also produces large, joined-up habitats capable of supporting top predators like wolves, lynx, and white-tailed eagles. This is especially true if the trees that establish are a mixture of native deciduous and coniferous species, since these are likely to be the best candidates for boosting the populations of otherwise struggling native species, helping to mitigate biodiversity losses.

Contrast the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands with the heavily managed nature reserves of the southeast of England.

Here, nature is fragmented and hemmed in, unable to expand into neighbouring urban or agricultural environments. These spaces are smaller than the vast uplands of Scotland, so their chances of supporting the large, charismatic species that best satisfy humans’ yearning for wildness is minimal. However, the nature reserves of southern England support greater numbers of species than rewilded areas of Scotland. There is a higher diversity of plants, invertebrates, songbirds, and wetland birds, and a greater variety of habitats within a given area. Just one nature reserve can contain saltmarshes, sandbanks, rivers, wildflower meadows, scrubland, grassland, and woodland, each supporting its own community of species. Leaving these areas to regenerate naturally and ceasing the human management required to maintain this heterogeneous, mosaic landscape would result in a habitat closer to that in the rewilded uplands, and a more ‘natural’ landscape, but the total number of species supported is likely to be lower as a result.

Neither strategy is scientifically better or worse, or supported by more or better-quality evidence. The decision of which approach to take in which location depends on the ultimate aim of conservation and on who decides this. Is the goal to return a system to its natural, historical state? If so, to which historical state? Humans have been managing the land to some extent across what we now call Britain for millennia. Is the goal to remove all human influence from the landscape and allow the land to regenerate as it chooses? An ideological philosophy, perhaps, but still valid. Or is the goal a more practical one: to minimise species losses, to maximise ecosystem functioning, or to prioritise the ecosystem services that local people need the most? A set of goals which may or may not be compatible at any given site.

HERE BE KONIK PONIES | Species introductions are wrought with similar debates. Given the potential for unpredictable negative effects on native species, is introducing a non-native species always a bad idea? Is the fact that it was Easter 2022

never part of the system’s historical state enough to rule it out?

Or can introducing a new species that is functionally equivalent to one long since extinct contribute to restoring ecosystem health? A good example of this is the Konik ponies introduced to Wicken Fen, just northeast of Cambridge. These are a Polish breed of horse, neither native to the Cambridgeshire Fens, nor fully wild, but they now graze this fen, preventing its succession to woodland and recreating the role that species long extinct from the area, such as bison, would once have played.

Again, whether or not the introduction of such species is the best conservation strategy depends in part on the scientific evidence and ecological profile of the landscape, and in part on the cultural and historical contexts. Should the management of Wicken Fen, for example, always prioritise native species in an attempt to prevent their population declines or restore lost ecosystems of the past, or should there be flexibility in this approach? Furthermore, the desires and needs of those living within or close by a site can be very different from those of communities living further afield. What a landscape looks like, for example, is of utmost importance to someone who’s bedroom window looks out onto it, but for someone who lives downstream, the same landscape’s contribution to flood prevention is likely to be more important than aesthetics.

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CONSERVATION SCIENCE AS PHILOSOPHY | There are many more conservation strategies, each one with differing mechanics and methods of application, which we understand through objective science. However, this information sits alongside the long-term goals of conservation, for which the identity of the conservation scientists, the funders, and the people who live, work, or otherwise depend on an area all matter.

Science is not just a pure pursuit of objective knowledge. On the contrary, applied science is firmly rooted within its social contexts. Appreciation of how science sits within the society that created it better equips us with an ability to apply the scientific method where it is most needed — to gather evidence on the best way to achieve an aim. Science is really a branch of philosophy, and there is no arm of science that illustrates this better than conservation science Kate Howlett a final-year PhD student in zoology at Newnham College. Artwork by Anna Germon.

Conservation: Subjective but Still Science 7

Why Patient Experiences Should Shape Medical Knowledge?

Jacob Smith explains why and how patient experiences should shape our current medical knowledge MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS IS based on the principle that those suffering from an illness or disease have unique and useful knowledge about it; patients provide some knowledge to the doctor, who can then use that information to figure out their ailment. Yet, in 2019, #PatientsAreNotFakingIt began to trend on Twitter accompanied by countless stories of patients being accused of outright lying or doctors simply not taking their experiences seriously. It became clear that there was a common problem — the validity of patient experiences was being disputed, particularly when they conflicted with established medical knowledge.

HOW PATIENT EXPERIENCES CONTRIBUTE TO MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE | When it comes to patient experiences contributing to medical knowledge, rare diseases are a useful case study. Rare diseases are rare, the UK defines them as diseases that have a prevalence of less than 1 in 2,000 people. This makes them challenging to study as randomised controlled trials (the gold standard in medical research) rely on having large, representative samples. Some diseases are therefore entirely reliant on anecdotal accounts of patients’ experiences in order to be understood. For example, in the case of 22q11 Deletion, or DeGeorge’s Syndrome, a set of concerned families provided evidence of a link between the syndrome and certain psychiatric disorders. This evidence, stemming from their own experiences, led to a redefinition of the syndrome. Scientific and medical understanding of rare diseases is therefore based on clinical reports and patient profiles rather than trials and largescale studies — this emphasis on the patient naturally leads to their knowledge being valued.

However, for some chronic illnesses, the story is very different. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is poorly understood in every sense — causes, symptoms, and treatment — which naturally lends itself to dispute. In 2021, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published updated guidelines for treating ME/CFS which, unlike the previous iteration, did not recommend cognitive behavioural therapy or exercise therapy. This was largely in line with the experiences of ME/ CFS patients, many of whom reported 'post-exertional malaise' after exercise, and who disputed the reasoning behind using CBT — a psychological tool — to treat a physiological illness.

However, others argued that this went against evidence from clinical trial results supporting the efficacy of these treatments, and that NICE was motivated by politics rather than evidence.

A series of back-and-forth arguments ensued between doctors (some of whom supported the change and were pejoratively described as ‘ME activists’), NICE members, and ME/CFS 8 Why Patient Experiences Should Shape Medical Knowledge

patients. The evidence was, and remains, fairly inconclusive; both sides have countless arguments for and against any given trial or study.

The 2021 NICE guidelines came many years after patients first raised these concerns; it is likely that many people with ME/CFS received inappropriate treatment as a result of patient experiences not being listened to earlier. Even since 2021, it remains a controversial area with many patients still reporting that medical professionals are not listening to them.

This begs the question of why, faced with limited empirical evidence, patient experiences of rare diseases are so highly valued, but their experience of chronic illnesses are not?

WHY SHOULD PATIENT EXPERIENCES CONTRIBUTE TO MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE? | In the above cases, the value of patient experience is linked to its ability to further medical understanding. Whilst this clearly is incredibly useful, the value of patient experience goes beyond that — to the care that a patient receives. One systematic review found strong positive associations between doctors listening to patient experience and quality of care received.

Another study, which drew on healthcare ethics, argued that decisions about treatment must account for all relevant evidence including patient experience.

To that effect, the NHS has recognised the value of patient contributions, which now forms an important part of how they analyse the effectiveness of the care that is given.

Looking at the question of how patients receive better care through being listened to, one interesting explanation is ‘evidence-based activism’. This describes the scenario where patients, or patient advocacy organisations, are able to combine their own experiential knowledge with existing scientific knowledge to insert themselves into the medical conversation and push for change from within. Their aim is Easter 2022

not necessarily to contribute to scientific knowledge (though this, as seen earlier, is useful), but rather to create connections between separate groups and institutions. Through activism and use of scientific knowledge, patients and patient advocates are seen as more ‘legitimate‘ by the medical establishments, and are therefore able to push for positive changes in the care they receive.

Evidence-based activism was used to great effect in the context of the AIDS movement of the 1980s. Though there was plenty of ‘traditional’ activism involved in pushing for better treatment, it was the evidence-based activism that proved more effective. The activist group ACT UP became famous for its militant approach and direct action, but it was likely their co-opting of scientific knowledge, data, and language that allowed ACT UP activists to be so impactful. Beyond the impact in the medical world, the evidence-based activists were also able to effectively push for positive changes in wider socio-political issues of stigmatisation and acceptance of people with AIDS. It is clear that evidence-based activism, enabled by patient knowledge, is a powerful tool for change, and this provides a useful explanation for how listening to patients leads to better treatment and experience.

THE RISKS OF PSEUDOSCIENCE | Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a major patient advocacy movement was active. Combining many of the themes identified earlier — poorly understood illness, rejection by medical professionals, use of scientific data and language — this movement became incredibly popular. This was a movement in support of those injured by vaccines based on the belief that the MMR vaccine caused autism. This was, of course, proven to be completely untrue, and perhaps shows the issues of following patient experience.

Parents were coming forward with anecdotal examples of harm, at odds with the population-level epidemiological studies that the government was producing. Other patient advocates reviewed over 70 vaccine safety studies and concluded that none adequately refuted the harm of the vaccine; Easter 2022

a clear example of evidence-based activism.

It is important to be sceptical, but we can see how activism can derail into a distrust of science; people begin from the assumption that their experiences are true and the scientific evidence, if it disagrees, must then be wrong. In this case, evidence-based activism becomes about trying to use patient experience to refute the conclusions from the scientific data; instead, it should be about trying to synthesise the two evidence strands.

It is easy to conclude from this that we should treat patient experiences with scepticism and not always listen to them.

However, there is also an argument for listening more: the parents felt ignored, both by individual doctors as well as the medical establishment more broadly. Large epidemiological studies did not help to convince anyone, because it ignored their own reality and experiences. Population studies were too broad and ‘not looking in the right place’ as one parent argued, ‘they are not looking at our children’. There is much to learn from the MMR case about effective science communication, but one thing is clear: patients (or their carers) must feel listened to. Valuing the contribution that patient experiences can make to science is not just about the actual knowledge contributed, but a way of allowing them to relate to science and follow it.

WHERE NOW? | It can be challenging to find a balance: on the one hand, listening to patient knowledge can improve their experience and the care they receive, but on the other it is important to identify and reject pseudoscience. In some domains such as rare diseases, this balance is achieved effectively; in others, such as ME/CFS, it remains elusive.

Patient advocacy and activism can often have a bad reputation, but it is incredibly valuable for both increasing knowledge and understanding, as well as for improving patient experiences and outcomes.

Many of these problems are also structural. Doctors have an extremely limited time per patient, and can struggle to keep up-to-date with the latest evidence on every illness. These are not things that will simply be solved by listening to patients, but valuing patient experiences is a good first step Jacob Smith is an MSc student in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh, having just graduated from Natural Sciences at Trinity Hall. Artwork by Josh Langfield.

Why Patient Experiences Should Shape Medical Knowledge 9

Q&A with Stephen Braren Maria Bolevich interviews a fellow researcher about his personal journey in scientific discovery WHEN YOU WERE a child, you probably had many thoughts and questions about pretty much everything. Maybe you dreamt about being a musician and having your own band. Maybe you hoped to become a film star. Or, maybe, at some point you wanted to find out more about how children can learn new words, how they think, perhaps questioning why music education raises the IQ level in children. In other words, you wanted to learn more about cognitive development and neuroscience. Many school leavers every year are making decisions about whether to go to university, perhaps dreaming about a particular career or worrying about how they will cover the costs. These decisions are difficult, and thoughts on specific careers can change; according to a study published in 2018, half of all people pursuing careers as scientists at universities drop out of the field after just five years. However, do not let that discourage you — in this Q&A we find encouragement that it is never too late to make a change, and even to become a scientist…

Stephen Braren is a scientist interested in how neurophysiological synchrony between the parent and child can transmit or buffer stress, but previously he was a musician and composer. He did not have an easy start, but he became very interested in cognitive development and how higherlearning processes like scientific reasoning develop, mostly because of his own personal experiences and struggles with learning and education.

Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he performed very poorly in school. However, looking back, he realises that his environment was central to these problems, rather than himself: ‘I nearly failed all my math, science, and history courses. They barely let me graduate high school because my grades were so bad. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Previously, I had always thought that something was “wrong” with me and that’s why I did poorly in school. But, as it turns out, changing the context of learning changed how I learned. Our external social world shapes us far more than we realise. Investigating what these social factors are that influence us psychologically, and how they operate, is exactly what my research is about’, says Braren.

When it comes to the mechanisms and principles of child development, what do scientists still not know?

‘Well, there’s certainly much we don’t know. This is at least partly due to the fact that, unfortunately, most of the research in neuroscience and psychology is still very focused

10 Q&A with Stephen Braren

on investigating the individual in isolation. The problem is that this ignores the social and relational aspects of human functioning that are essential to our real lived experiences.

Also, most of this research has been through the lens of white, wealthy, western people — both researchers and participants.

We need to be better about diversifying our samples, making them more representative of specific populations, and appreciating variability in the things we’re studying’.

When we talk about translating neuroscience into education and health policy, what are the most important steps and what are the biggest challenges?

‘I think the biggest and most important part comes down to communication. I think researchers can do a better job about being proactive in reaching out to people outside of their immediate field and communicate their research in a comprehensible and helpful way. Likewise, policy makers should make it a point to actually seek out and find researchers doing relevant work. There really needs to be a partnership between researchers and policy makers so that they are working together continuously to use research to solve realworld problems’.

As we have seen in other contexts, better communication of scientific work to people outside of academia is a growing concern.

During the pandemic, for example, we have increasingly realised the importance of raising awareness among people on the importance of vaccines, especially among parents who do not believe that vaccines are useful.

The pandemic affected his work, but it also spurred the launch of the non-profit organisation Social Creatures with his colleague Dr Rose Perry. As he explains, the basic idea is giving research back to the community so that they can benefit from it. They created The Creature Times, a newsletter, with the intention of making scientific information freely available and accessible to anyone. ‘One of our first campaigns was raising awareness and funds for low-income children and families who didn’t have internet access or digital devices to stay connected and functional while socially isolated. This was especially important

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because so many low-income kids needed access to school, which they didn’t have otherwise. More generally, we hope that Social Creatures is an organisation that allows us to apply our skills and knowledge as researchers and scientists to solve real-world problems, especially for marginalised communities', says Braren.

The COVID-19 pandemic particularly affected marginalised communities, low-income households, with many families pushed into poverty. One key question is, what does this mean for the development of, for example, critical-thinking skills?

'There are many ways that poverty can impact cognitive development and critical thinking skills. One of the most salient ways is through stress. Living in poverty is associated with numerous risk factors that can increase levels of psychological and physiological stress. Persistent or chronic exposure to elevated levels can actually interfere with how cognitive functions develop over time by structurally changing the brain areas that underlie our critical thinking and executive function skills’, says Braren.

You are the author of the study ‘Maternal Psychological Stress Moderates Diurnal Cortisol Linkage in Expectant Fathers and Mothers During Late Pregnancy’. What was the most interesting part of the study for you, and how can the results of the study be useful in the longer term?

‘I think the most interesting part of the study was that we found that expectant parents’ daily stress hormone activity was highly similar — it was synchronised. This means that fathers are similarly impacted by their partner’s pregnancy but in a different way. This also suggests that the father, who traditionally has been overlooked in child development research, might play an important biological part in child development even in the prenatal period by influencing the pregnant mother. Hopefully, this can be useful in the longer term by highlighting the importance of integrating the father more into programs and activities during pregnancy’.

I read that weekly music lessons at school for five- and six-year-old children raised their IQ, suggesting that musical training in childhood can have a beneficial effect on the brain’s ageing process. Additionally, it is known that women are more sensitive to music during pregnancy. Do you plan to include music in your future research?

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‘Indeed, one of my first interests at a young age in both music and science was in understanding how music and sound can influence our emotion, cognition, and biology. This is a fascinating area of study and, I think, one that we have learned a lot about in the decade or so. What I would like to do is to take some of this research linking specific features of music and sound to improved health and functioning and apply it to real-word contexts targeted at specific populations. One broad application, for instance, could be designing music to reduce stress’.

You returned to college in your 30s and said ‘it is never too late to come back’. Your journey is very inspiring, and we do not often have a chance to hear stories like this.

What makes you especially proud, and would you change anything? You are sending a message that it is never too late to become a scientist, which is very powerful.

‘Well, thanks. I think what makes me most proud is just overcoming my own fears and not conforming to other people’s traditional and conservative expectations. No, I wouldn’t change anything. Although I’ve certainly made a lot of mistakes, I think I have grown because of them. Absolutely, it’s never too late to become a scientist, go back to school, or do almost anything. It’s difficult, for sure, but anyone can do it. I hope that can be inspiring to anyone’.

When asked what the most fascinating thing is about his job, he said that it is the ability to ask new questions, postulate new hypotheses, and test ideas about human behaviour and functioning. ‘Being a researcher is like being a detective; you’re always trying to solve a mystery. You have to be book-smart, of course, but you also have to be creative and clever. Doing good research requires having a sense of wonder, curiosity, imagination, and exploration. If you lose those things, you stop growing’, says Braren. ‘Expanding our horizons — even just a little — and learning more about what it means to be human is what I try to do at my job every day. It’s incredibly challenging, but the possibilities are fascinating’.

Science is not easy, there are so many things waiting to be discovered. Stephen’s story and experience is proof that even when you think that it is hard, or that you are bad at something like he was in math, it does not mean that it can’t be done and that you cannot be a scientist; it just means that you might need to find a better and braver way Maria Bolevich is a science, health, and environmental journalist based in Croatia. Artwork by Anna Germon.

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Exploring the Zooniverse Julie Tang discusses how citizen science facilitates scientific research and has potential benefits for both citizen scientists and professionals I STARE AT the column of numbers, trying to parse meaning from the words written more than 150 years ago. I pause at one row, briefly unsure. Having familiarised myself with the handwriting of this page, I am fairly confident the number written down is a 3 and not a 5. I note that on this day, 2nd February 1863 at 8am, the H.M.S. Eclipse experienced an air temperature of 63oF, secure in the knowledge that my contribution will aid scientists in modelling the climate.

I am on Zooniverse, ‘the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research’, with 1.6 million registered participants spread out over 234 countries. Its goal is to ‘enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise’, by utilising the power of volunteers accessing and analysing datasets uploaded by researchers. This format lends itself well to hosting projects that cover a range of subjects beyond more traditionally scientific fields, like history, language, and literature.

The Zooniverse platform grew from the project Galaxy Zoo launched in July 2007, which aimed to classify nearly one million images of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey into morphological categories. Several hundred thousand volunteers participated, with each image categorised an average of 38 times, such that the general public could classify sets of galaxies with a similar accuracy to professional astronomers.

Since then, more than 380 projects across a diverse range of disciplines have been launched. More than 600 million classifications have been submitted, and over 250 articles have been published using data from these citizen science projects.

Citizen science, where scientific research is conducted in collaboration between non-professional volunteers and professional scientists, is by no means a recent concept — astronomer Edmund Halley in 1714 requested curious citizens to note down observations of a total solar eclipse visible in England. He received many ‘good Accounts’, which were ‘sufficient to establish several of the Elements of the Calculus of Eclipses, so as for the future we may more securely rely on our Predictions’. The advent of the Internet has facilitated mass access to citizen science; while Halley credits only 24 observers of the solar eclipse, now thousands of volunteers can contribute to a single project.

Due to the sheer number of volunteers analysing the data for Zooniverse projects, reliable results can be produced by combining these individual contributions in a ‘wisdom of crowds’ approach. Whilst programming a computer algorithm would require a lengthy and complex process, Zooniverse

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projects take advantage of humans’ inherent ability of pattern recognition. By completing a few simple tasks, regardless of their level of expertise, volunteers with minimal training can analyse data, saving researchers time and resources. In fact, projects have used volunteer-made classifications to train machine-learning algorithms or used algorithms to sort data before presenting it to volunteers. Machines and humans working in collaboration can create superior classifications over either one working alone.

Having so many contributors, Zooniverse projects are in the unique position of facilitating what are described as ‘Known Unknowns’ and ‘Unknown Unknowns’. An example of the former is from the Exoplanet Explorers project, where volunteers are tasked to identify planetary transits from timeseries photometry data taken from NASA’s K2 mission. The first discovery made by citizen scientists was the five-planet system K2-138, announced at the end of a three-day program of Stargazing Live featuring the project.

Particularly interesting are the ‘Unknown Unknowns’ — serendipitous discoveries driven by the human ability to notice the unexpected and having a platform designed to facilitate such discoveries. Each project has a discussion board where volunteers are encouraged to discuss their observations with each other and with researchers directly. The ‘green peas’ of the Galaxy Zoo project exemplifies this — after citizen scientists repeatedly noticed compact green shapes within the data set and set up the ‘Give peas a chance’ discussion thread, researchers worked with the volunteers to identify them. These objects are now known to be low-mass galaxies in low density environments with high star formation rates, creating a new category within galaxy type taxonomy.

Researchers can derive potentially huge benefits from citizen scientist contributions — however, what benefits can citizen scientists receive in return? Citizen science in general engages the public by exposing them to genuine scientific experiences.

Projects promote greater interest in not only the science behind them, but also how research is conducted, developing participants’ scientific literacy.

Citizen scientists may therefore derive greater benefits from more ‘hands-on’ projects. A case study of youthfocused community and citizen science programmes which monitored coastal sites and local pollution showed these programmes helped foster a deeper appreciation for the site’s ecological importance and the impact of human activity. The programmes additionally aided in the youths’ understanding

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of environmental science, and in using their gained expertise as a foundation for change. They concluded that having a longer programme enabling participants to explicitly contribute to authentic research while strengthening a connection with the site encourages the development of environmental science agency.

Zooniverse therefore, simply by the less personal nature of the platform, is more limited in the scope of its potential benefits.

Nonetheless, we should not dismiss the platform.

In a survey of 1,921 volunteers participating in five projects, the participants were asked to respond to science quizzes where they needed to identify objects presented in a series of images.

The researchers found a significant and positive correlation between the level of active engagement with the project and project-specific scientific knowledge. The majority of volunteers also self-reported that they believed they were developing their scientific literacy by participating in Zooniverse projects. However, another study carried out with 1,476 Galaxy Zoo volunteers found that project participation was not associated with an increase in astrophysical content knowledge. The authors note that perhaps a better measure associated with content knowledge is the activity level on related social networking spaces such as discussion boards and blog posts, based on anecdotal evidence of self-study by some volunteers within these spaces. This is perhaps unsurprising as it corroborates with the above conclusions that greater engagement promotes a deeper appreciation for the science behind the project. Zooniverse actively enables this by cultivating a platform wherein users are encouraged to ask questions and discuss their results.

were females. Though this may simply reflect existing research that females volunteer more, as the authors note. The study is the first of its kind focusing on young people in online citizen science projects and has a very small sample size, so overarching conclusions should not be drawn. It is nevertheless an encouraging thought. Regardless, Zooniverse is an easy-to-access, lowcommitment stepping stone facilitating potentially further scientific discovery for both citizen scientists and professionals.

Besides, for me there is something both satisfying and humbling in that, while I can relax performing the low-effort task of transcribing weather observations, researchers will use my results alongside that of over 1,700 other volunteers to improve estimates of the pre-industrial baseline climate. This is the Weather Rescue At Sea project, where to fill in the lack of early industrial era observations in climate datasets, volunteers transcribe ship logbooks from ships sailing in the 1860s and 1870s. The logbooks are a rich resource, as they provide usually sub-daily observations of measures such as air temperature and wind speed, alongside the ship’s latitude and longitude from locations across the world.

Ultimately, maybe this is what the Zooniverse is: a small gateway open for anyone to get a glimpse of the rich scientific background of your universe Julie Tang is a third-year undergraduate studying Natural Sciences at Newnham College. Artwork by Josh Langfield.

The ease of access of the projects may also facilitate participation from a more diverse range of people. An interesting finding from a study of 104 users aged 5-19 years old is that, in contrast to what the authors describe as the largely white, middle-aged males who predominate citizen science field-based programmes, over half the surveyed users

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Exploring the Zooniverse 13

Acculturation in the Life of an International Student Manuel Morales Alvarado shares with us his experience of acculturation in four different countries during his four years of PhD ON MY BOOKSHELF, among folders filled with course notes, rough paper, and supervision reports for undergraduate students, there is an old wallet. Inside the wallet, there is no money, but only flight tickets. Some of them remind me of relaxing holidays and interesting trips. There are, however, three tickets that I believe to be the most meaningful to me: the ones that took me from Chile, my home country, to Europe, where I have spent the past few years of my life doing my postgraduate degrees.

Interacting with new cultures has been an important part of my life for the past couple of years. Over the past four years I have lived in four different countries with four different cultures and, in particular, four different languages. I have always loved travelling, and I used to be thrilled by the idea of travelling as a scientist, attending conferences and giving lectures. In any case, my journey in fact began with a rather trivial event: a short conversation in the aisle of the physics department when I was about to complete my bachelor’s degree. An acquaintance mentioned that one of his friends was studying 'high energy' physics in Europe, and this sparked my interest in an overseas master’s degree program. The technical aspect of the degree was interesting beyond question but I didn’t even know how to count to three in either French or German and was considering a program involving one year of study in France and another in Switzerland! Still, my curiosity spurred me to take on the journey and I left for Europe. I decided to follow the path of many people before me, as scientific research is fundamentally a global endeavour.

Scientists who choose to participate in international projects, like myself, inevitably come to interact with people from different cultures and backgrounds. The intercultural interaction, an active process of participants experiencing change in their nature, is actively studied in sociology and psychology. When a majority and a minority culture come into contact, two major types of process can happen: assimilation and acculturation. There are important differences between them. Assimilation is the process in which a person (or a group) of a minority culture acquires the habits, history, and sentiments of the majority culture. It is fundamentally a unidirectional process whereby the minority totally merges with the majority, and loses its original features, while the majority culture is left unchanged. Many times, this process takes place when the minority culture looks for acceptance in an unfriendly foreign environment. On the other hand,

14 Acculturation in the Life of an International Student

acculturation is the process whereby the minority culture adopts traits and pieces of the majority culture, while also keeping its original identity.

Acculturation is usually

understood as a bidirectional process, as the minority culture survives, coexists, and interacts with the majority.

Throughout my career, as I grew up scientifically, my interaction with different cultural environments matured as well. At the start of my journey, in France, I was in an assimilation phase. I was in a foreign environment and did not know how friendly it would be to outsiders. It became easier for me to absorb the culture by being more like them. However, after a few months, when I felt more comfortable with the things I was learning and my new group of friends, I could be more open with my original way of being. This created a whole new dynamic, where in our interactions the majority culture also got to learn about our way of being in Latin America and, in particular, Chile. A process of acculturation had started. This continued the following year, when our group of friends moved to Switzerland to continue our studies. Now, having lived in Cambridge for a year, I have definitely acquired some British

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customs. I have given up the Chilean ‘once’, which is a tea break that we have at around 6pm, and replaced it with dinner (which would have been at 9pm in Chile). After 3pm, I do not drink coffee anymore, but a nice ‘cuppa’. Things are not ‘extremely good’ or ‘extremely bad’ anymore, but ‘quite good’ or ‘quite bad’. My friends and colleagues have also picked up very interesting Chilean expressions, learned about our country and history, and even explored the taste of Chilean food and spices. We have established a bidirectional interaction, where I learn about their culture, and they learn about mine.

These days, it is almost necessary to get in contact with a foreign culture to develop a career as a scientist and researcher.

No single country on its own can fund big experiments like the Large Hadron Collider or the Atacama Large Millimetre Array, so we have to travel and interact with people that come from very different places. Moving to another country and interacting with locals can be a bit scary, but there are definitely a couple of things I like to remember when this happens. First, we have to hold back our assumptions about the majority culture, leave space for

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s quote, 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, resonated with me very deeply. Then, I understood that to truly interact with the majority culture I had to learn their language, the sine qua non of acculturation.

Another lesson was learned from the United Kingdom. After a couple of months in total lockdown, I properly came into contact with British culture; I started going to the office and having in-person meetings; I became aware of the personal traits here, particularly in the academic and professional context. It has taken a while, but after many interactions I now understand much better what my fellow researchers mean. If a British colleague disagrees with you, they might phrase it in a more conciliatory manner: ‘I am not entirely sure I agree with you’. This is quite different from the more crisp ‘I disagree with you’ that a Swiss or a French colleague might use. These two different ways of conveying the same idea, whilst seemingly being a mere difference in intensity, is really due to a more innate difference in culture.

I find genuine happiness in sharing what my country and my people are like. To discuss your origins with other cultures puts your identity in perspective, it makes you look in the mirror and understand the way you are. We can only understand ourselves when we look at ourselves from a certain distance.

You understand your and your cultures’ traits, and you learn what things you like about them, and what you would like to change. It is a process. It takes time, but we must not forget to enjoy the journey and cherish that privilege that we, as scientists, often have. That is why, in the middle of all the chaos of my bookshelf, the plane tickets still hold their place Manuel Morales Alvarado is a second-year PhD student in the High Energy Physics Group at DAMTP. Artwork by Biliana Tchavdarova Todorova.

people to express themselves and listen. In this regard, I found it quite useful to go through a short assimilation phase to grasp as much of the environment as possible. Second, we must strive to learn the language of the majority culture, as this is the only way in which genuine acculturation can take place. Finally, it is important to be open minded and understand that conflict many times comes from misunderstanding and misinterpretation, and not from genuine incompatibilities.

Throughout my time abroad, I have learned several life lessons as well. My first ‘newhome-country’ was France, and the cultural differences here were important. It was particularly challenging since I had signed up for a master’s degree taught fundamentally in French, without speaking any French. At first, I felt quite powerless as I could not participate even in the most trivial interactions, and

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A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Artist: the Diary and Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal Livia E. Lisi-Vega takes us onto the personal journey of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and reveals how his artistic inclination fueled his Nobel-winning work that laid the foundation for modern day neuroscience ​​IN 1906, SANTIAGO Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) was the first ever Spaniard to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his ‘work on the structure of the nervous system’. He was one of the first scientists to characterise nerve cells and to methodically study the organisation of the human brain. Through his research into the mechanisms governing the morphology and connective processes of nerve cells, he developed a revolutionary new theory, the ‘neuron doctrine’, in which he proposed that the brain’s basic unit of organisation is individual microscopic cells. One could safely say that modern neuroscience stands on the pillars of Ramón y Cajal’s legacy.

A Google search soon reveals a myriad of articles on the scientific achievements of Ramón y Cajal and their impact on neuroscience and the scientific community as a whole. However, commentary on Cajal’s personal journey and how this influenced his way of approaching science is scarce. This is not only applicable to Cajal’s life, but reflects a pattern extending to the bibliography of most of our celebrated scientific figures. History focuses on scientific achievements rather than the person behind them, and rarely acknowledges failures encountered along the way. This builds an idea of successful science as being ‘unattainable’ and leads the public to think of distinguished scientists like Charles Darwin or Marie Curie as ‘superhuman’ and unrelatable, ultimately contributing to the inaccessibility of science.

Fortunately, in the case of Cajal, we have his autobiography entitled Memories of My Life, published in 1917, to help conjure a picture of the life surrounding his discoveries. In the book, he remembers his childhood and recounts his scientific experience. As Cajal’s great-grandnephew (a cancer researcher) writes in the prologue of the book Cajal: Un grito por la ciencia (Cajal: A Cry for Science), Cajal should not be viewed by scientists today as an ‘alien’ or a one-of-a-kind scientific figure. Instead, he

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should be used as an example to inspire the numerous talented scientists upon whom the future of the scientific community relies. This article aims to do exactly that: to add a new dimension to Cajal’s legacy by discovering the person behind the scientist.

PUTTING CAJAL INTO PERSPECTIVE — CHILDHOOD AND BACKGROUND | Cajal never wanted to study medicine. You read it correctly...

One of the most prominent figures in the history of neuroscience was not born with a ‘calling’ for medicine, biology, or any kind of research for that matter. In fact, Cajal’s autobiography soon disproves the common misconception that scientific geniuses need to be extraordinarily inclined towards their subject of study from an early age. Cajal always wanted to be a painter and he studied medicine just to fulfil his father’s wishes.

As a child, Cajal was mischievous and explorative.

He was particularly fascinated by nature, its forms and its colours, an interest reflected in his drawings.

However, Santiago never really stood out at school, which worried his father. He went away to study his baccalaureate at a religious school in the small village of Jaca, in the Pyrenees, but due to his poor performance, he was required to transfer to another school to finish his studies. Despite his father’s disregard for painting as a legitimate occupation, a young and passionate Santiago managed to negotiate with his father: he would improve his performance at school if he studied baccalaureate in the city of Huesca, where he could attend a school of fine art and drawing. This was the start of Cajal’s journey trying to reconcile both his scientific and artistic interests.

The story of Cajal’s father is in and of itself an insightful one. Cajal's father was a self-made man of humble, rural origins. He studied medicine late in life, with great effort, determination, and ambition.

He desperately steered his son's life in this direction,

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while overlooking his artistic ability. This was the prelude to their complicated father-son relationship years down the line. Regardless of their frequent clash of opinions, Cajal really admired his father.

Most importantly, Cajal’s father was immensely supportive of his son when Cajal faced challenges in his academic life. He taught Cajal anatomy and dissection during his first year of medicine, and also supported him during the hardship of trying to attain his professorship in Madrid. In his autobiography, Cajal writes the following passage about his father: 'From him I adopted the beautiful ambition of being someone and to spare no sacrifices in order to achieve my goals and aspirations. He taught me to never give up on my journey just because of second motives or small inconveniences.'

THE PERSON BEHIND THE GREAT SCIENTIST | As a scientist myself, reading Cajal’s Memoirs has been utterly fascinating. Despite being a world-renowned scientist by the time he wrote it, Cajal’s way of conveying his own story is rather modest and quite humorous at times. His autobiography is completely void of pretentiousness or any sense of self-admiration and that is, paradoxically, in itself admirable. In one section of the book (xxvi), Cajal talks about his first experiences of academic milestones, from receiving the title of doctor, to applying for professorships in anatomy, and trying to set up his first ‘lab’. It was on his trip to Madrid to take his doctoral exams in 1875 that his passion for histology was born. There, he had the opportunity to access some beautiful histological microscopy slides and their beauty struck Cajal profoundly. As a result, he resolved to set up his own microscopy lab on his return to Zaragoza.

Years later, when writing his autobiography, Cajal admitted that at that point, he actually had no idea how to prepare or carry out even some of the simplest microscopy analyses. After all, he was driven first by curiosity and the extraordinary beauty of biology rather than by the means or possibilities available to him at the time. When he got back to Zaragoza, Cajal could not find anyone that was familiar with microscopy at all. The faculty of medicine, that he was part of also had very limited financial means and the only microscope available was in the physiology lab. He managed to gain access through a friend, Dr Borao, and used this opportunity to observe physiological phenomena like blood flow for the first time at the microscopic scale.

Retrospectively, Cajal reflected on how substantially

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this time fired up his budding interest in microscopy.

When, in 1876, Cajal decided to get a good microscope of his own, he spent all of his personal and family savings to do so. He also bought several other microscopy accessories as well as numerous books on microscopy and histology, determined to master the art himself. What is more, since this was not a very developed field in Spain, Cajal subscribed to French (such as the Journal de Micrographie) and English (The Quarterly Microscopica Science) journals on the topic. Cajal’s beginnings in microscopy were not easy, but as he writes in his Memoirs, what he lacked in terms of facilities and expertise, he surely made up for in enthusiasm and willpower.

There are countless moments in Cajal's autobiography that any scientist today will still find relatable. Even in chapters solely dedicated to describing his science, Cajal always found a way of showing how his scientific endeavours ultimately moulded his personality from a naïve young man to the outstanding scientist he later became. There were several points in his life where Cajal sought refuge in science to escape personal struggles. One striking example came after Cajal accepted a professorship in Barcelona and his family moved to the city. Both his daughter and son fell extremely ill, and his daughter died only weeks after contracting meningitis.

Throughout this period, Cajal was immersed in intense scientific activity. Cajal wrote about how his daughter’s image still lives in his memory in sad contrast with one of his most beautiful discoveries; ‘the cylinder-axis of the cerebellar granules and its continuation to the parallel fibres of the molecular layer’. To conclude this chapter he wrote the following: 'Unable to sleep and defeated by fatigue and sadness during those late hours, I developed a fixation on the inebriating light of the microscope with the aim of putting to sleep this cruel torture. One night, when the fog was starting to creep on an innocent being, a sudden brightness invaded me with the light of a new truth…'

WHEN ART MEETS SCIENCE | During his younger years, Cajal was torn between his love for art and his father’s insistence that he pursue a career in medicine. The dichotomy between Cajal the scientist and Cajal the artist slowly became a source of inner conflict. It is not until much later that he partially resolved this by making use of his drawing skills to depict all the beautiful histological structures that he studied under the microscope. Cajal is a brilliant example of how scientists are not — or should not be — defined only by their discoveries in the lab.

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Scientific achievements and artistic inclination or a love for the humanities should not be regarded as mutually exclusive. As many more before and many after him, Santiago Ramon y Cajal had interests outside of science. As did Leonardo da Vinci, an amazing painter but also well-versed anatomist and inventor, and Einstein, who played the violin. If anything, great scientific ideas — just like great art, music, and literature — are based around creativity.

In fact, Nobel Prize laureates are 2.85 times more likely to cultivate an artistic hobby than the average scientist. Cajal championed this idea, and argued that the best scientists would be those: 'With an abundance of restless imagination, [who] spend their energy in pursuit of literature, art, philosophy, and all the recreations of the mind and body. To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality, they are channelling and strengthening them.'

Art is a stimulus for science and, vice versa, science is a stimulus for art. Nowadays, although still appearing in textbooks, Cajal’s drawings mostly appear in exhibitions all around the world. In 2018, Santiago’s drawings left Spain for the first time to be displayed in their very own special exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery in New York and the MIT museum in Boston with the title The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Cajal’s drawings are scientifically precise but also extremely expressive, almost as if they were surrounded by a mysterious aura. After being awarded the Nobel Prize, his drawings started to reach a much wider audience. Well-known artists from the 20th century were inspired by his work. You can see ‘neuronal’ influences in the art of surrealists like Dali, in Argus, or Yves Tanguy, in Automatic Drawings (for more see Long Before MRIs, Santiago Ramon y Cajal Revealed the Inner Workings of the Brain) or in conceptual sculptures like those of Eva Hesse, whose interconnected designs closely resemble the ‘orderly disorder’ of neuronal assemblies and brain circuitry, such as Metronomic Irregularity I, 1966 or No title, 1969-1970.

Despite having inspired some of the most prominent artists of his century, Cajal was not particularly fond of modern art. He published some papers on the psychology of artists and on the evolution of art during the 19th and 20th centuries.

In these papers, Cajal wrote about his admiration of the principles, intended to represent nature and reality, followed by classical painters. He even highlighted his disappointment of art critics trying

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to leave the classical painters and styles behind to embrace the avantgarde. I wonder what he would say if he saw his drawings exhibited as genuinely modern, alongside the work of contemporary artists.

In Cajal’s work, science became art, allowing him to produce absolutely unique drawings. After all, it is not often that you admire art with the very own subject of it.

CAJAL’S LEGACY: A MESSAGE TO 21ST CENTURY RESEARCHERS | Cajal was a passionate advocate of research and viewed the mentoring of budding young scientists as a crucial part of his activity. As such, he laid the foundations of what is now known as the Spanish School of Neurology.

Cajal’s disciples went on to make remarkable contributions of their own to neurobiology, with several of his pupils developing histological staining and preparatory techniques of nervous tissue. One of Cajal’s students, Rafael Lorente de No, went on to synthesise tetraethylammonium (TEA), a compound still extensively used in electrophysiology to block potassium channels.

In several chapters of his autobiography, Cajal put forward his principles and beliefs regarding the practice of research. So what makes a great scientist according to Cajal? He seldomly focused on his major discoveries when deliberating on the most important output of his scientific career. Instead, he highlighted the importance of finding fascination and enticement in what others may classify as boring.

In one chapter, he mentioned how he once spent 20 hours at the microscope just looking at how a dying leukocyte tried to detach from a capillary (II, i). Cajal very passionately described what he believes to be the attributes of a good researcher and what his main mistakes were when beginning his scientific career.

He underscored the importance of patience, as well as dexterity and skills, to conduct research. The most important quality of a researcher according to Cajal is one’s versatility when it comes to adapting your beliefs and quickly amending any mistakes made.

Nowadays, in spite of all the technical advances, if there is one thing that we share with researchers of the past, it is that the lab teaches you that one should not become too attached to their own hypotheses: 'I take it for granted that in the flow of time, my insignificant personality will be forgotten; and with it, no doubt, many of my ideas will be shipwrecked.

Nothing can escape this inexorable law of life. Against all the claims of self-love, the facts initially linked to a man will eventually become anonymous, lost forever in

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the ocean of Universal Science.'

With science still as unpredictable as ever, Cajal’s philosophy and work ethic remain a great example for young researchers. First and foremost, a great scientist should cultivate resilience and be open to innovation and discussion, while also defending their ideas and principles. Just as a young Cajal was: be stubborn!

Cherish your individuality and creativity, which can so often be discouraged by rigid and systematic educational systems, and strive to continuously search for new topics that fascinate you. Doing so will foster a greater spontaneity of thought, allowing you to bridge ideas and tie concepts together. Nothing is out of reach for the artist’s imagination and we should embrace this in our scientific endeavours, as Cajal himself did Livia E. Lisi-Vega is a second-year PhD student in Cancer Biology (Haematology) at Downing College. Artwork by Eva Pillai and Pauline Kerekes.

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FOCUS 21

Beyond bitten nails and lamppost-facing benches, there was something free about Natalie. Her eyebrows were thick and she never went to church on Sundays. One morning, she decided to become a Scientist. She wanted to know about things in the world. She didn’t know, yet, that everybody knows about things in the world.

But Scientists, she suspected, could tell her about why she liked green fat plants and things like that.

Scientists did not have good answers when she came.

They were looking down at a cell and knew nothing of their character. They said ‘Natalie, Come look with us’ and she knew they were looking at different pictures of the same Henrietta – still pieces of a black woman, packed full of ink.

Natalie the Scientist

22 Pavilion: the Eye of the Beholder

fashions from the start; every discovery had been true – for good and bad alike the fabric of the universe had always been belief.

velocity, which, having been found relative, worsened accidents all around the globe – nature had been shifting in

disease. The poisonous miasma morphed into bacterium, protists, fungi and more, plaguing any informed soul in sight. A similar occurrence to

Just as the earth sprang out of the centre of the solar system under Galileo’s telescope; as soon as Pasteur thought it, it was true: germs caused

Discovering

Pavilion: the Eye of the Beholder

Laia Serratosa Capdevila is a writer, research associate, and founder of a one-person neuron tracing company. Artwork by Aina Serratosa Capdevila.

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Pavilion: the Eye of the Beholder 23

Sticking to the Science? The Role of Climate and Conservation Scientists in a Polarised Political World James Ball explores the delicate boundaries that delineate research, advocacy, and activism in the scientific community SCIENTISTS PRIDE THEMSELVES on being objective in their outlook. While this conceit serves to lend authority to their work, its reality fades when we consider the humans behind the job title. Each has values, passions, and experiences that shape their decisions in life and research — most cancer researchers have had someone in their family who has had cancer. However, in fields that directly inform major political action, the boundaries that delineate research, advocacy, and activism are delicate.

relationship with the media serves to perpetuate specific movements and narratives. Publication bias means that interesting results obscure important negative findings. When results are published that are counter to the prevailing narrative, they are not picked up or circulated meaning their impact on the field and policy is stifled.

Climate and conservation scientists are acutely aware of the potential dangers of global ecological change, and so take on responsibility for guiding society away from harm. But accusations of agendas and politicisation often detract from their message and prevent effective action from being taken.

How should scientists engage in a partisan political sphere while maintaining the public trust in science that is required for effective, evidence-based policy?

IDEOLOGY CAN CORRUPT SCIENCE | In the mid-20th century, Trofim Lysenko, director of the Institute of Genetics at the USSR’s Academy of Sciences, led an agricultural rebellion against natural selection and Mendelian genetics. He promoted a (Lamarckian) model in which the characteristics of a parent, acquired through its experiences of its environment in its lifetime, could be passed onto its offspring. His determination to demonstrate theories that were compatible with the prevailing Soviet ideology led him and his colleagues to distort evidence and draw fantastical conclusions on the potential of crop techniques. This led to millions of people losing their lives in famines across the USSR and China. Additionally, around 3,000 biologists were dismissed, imprisoned, or executed in trying to stand up to Lysenko.

Such overt ideological distortions of science are largely in the past, but insidious forces continue to degrade the quality of research and diminish the public benefit of science. This is clear in the financing of science. Commercial manipulation of research has led to loss of life from new drugs (for example, Voixx trials) and delayed effective action on climate change (for example, fossil fuel funded scientists Willie Soon and David Legates). Even when funding is clean, scientists are incentivised to ‘spin’ their research in the rhetorical jockeying that is part of securing limited research council funds.

Beyond funding, the current publishing model and its 24 Sticking to the Science?

SCIENTISTS AS ACTIVISTS? | The ideal of science as a neutral and value-free pursuit must be maintained but, to improve scientific practice, we must look at the reality of science as a highly political domain within a complex social and political context. What responsibilities do individual scientists have in addressing this? Climate and conservation scientists are often torn as to whether they should engage in political advocacy or activism.

Many feel their involvement is necessary as traditional political processes operate too slowly to avert the interlinked climate and ecological crises. Others feel unfulfilled — too Easter 2022

distant from social change — if they stick only to their work in the lab or behind the desk. William Laurence, conservation ecologist and James Cook University Distinguished Professor, believes that ‘scientists must actively engage policy makers and the general public, as well as other scientists’. Laurence’s research outputs can often be mapped to more evocative political commentary. There is a worry among some in the field that such a headstrong drive towards specific agendas clouds judgement and risks evidence being selectively massaged to fit the desired narrative.

David Sedlak, Professor of Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley (in J. Environ. Sci. Technol) believes that maintaining trust must come first: ‘[Activism] undermines the standing of academics as objective seekers of truth … [and could] jeopardise the social contract that underpins the tradition of financial support for basic research. Just because it is simpler for scientists to get by, and get paid, if they do not speak up, does that mean it is the right thing to do?'.

Some argue that it is possible to maintain credibility while applying political pressure. ‘In my view it is fine for scientists to advocate for change, but they must take care’, said Simon Lewis, a global change researcher at UCL and the University of Leeds (in PhysicsWorld). ‘Scientists must do their best to be as scrupulously honest in analysing the data and reporting it as is humanly possible. But that should not be traded-off against expressing political opinions in a separate arena. Being clear when you are speaking as a scientist and separating when you are speaking as a citizen, or on behalf of a group can help’.

Practising such ‘care’ may be difficult given the subconscious biases that influence individuals’ decision making. William Sutherland, Miriam Rothschild Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Cambridge, is sceptical: ‘The question is, can you really wear different “hats”? It is very difficult to do so and others can’t perceive it when you switch from one to another’. David Coomes, Director of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute (UCCRI), sees more room for impassioned researchers but notes that, ‘Often researchers and research institutions have a mission, so it is important to recognise when research is done for conservation as opposed to research on conservation’. There is undoubtedly a great diversity of motivations among climate and conservation scientists, but should this be celebrated or constrained?

The truth is that the most profound, positive change has happened when scientists (especially women) have chosen to speak up and take an active role in the political sphere.

Rachel Carson, American marine biologist and author of the seminal Silent Spring (1962), is credited with kickstarting the environmentalist movement. Her contributions helped to generate the atmosphere that allowed for landmark legislation, including the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Air Quality (1967) and Clean Air (1970) Acts, and the ban of DDT (1972).

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Wangarĩ Maathai, Kenyan biologist and environmental activist, advocated for indigenous grass roots environmental conservation and established the Green Belt Movement (1977).

In recognition of her contributions, in 2004, she became the first African woman and first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

BUILDING A FAIR, TRUSTWORTHY SYSTEM | Scientists have a responsibility to facilitate evidence-based policy that provides social and environmental benefits to all; good science and good politics go hand-in-hand. This requires us to aspire to the ideal of separation between politics and science, while recognising the messiness of the society in which science operates.

To start, scientists must advocate more strongly for scholarly autonomy worldwide. Solidarity should be shown to scientists, such as those in Brazil, who are having their independence restricted. Scientists should push for greater democratisation of science and work to remove barriers, such as publication fees, that might prevent scientists from the Global South from engaging in discourses. Through greater democratisation, valuable indigenous knowledge can be allowed to come into the mainstream and lead innovative policies that protect globally significant ecosystems.

Scientists should push for institutional innovations that can hold politicians and the media to account. In the UK, a royal charter, such as that which allows the BBC to exist, could support an independent, transparent organisation that allows scientists to critique policy and media output while not fearing government pressure or censorship.

It is extremely difficult for climate and conservation scientists to balance ideals with the messy reality in the face of global crises. More needs to be done as part of their training to help them navigate the difficult landscape.

HUMANISING SCIENTISTS | Scientists come from an incredible diversity of backgrounds. Each scientist has to use their own judgement when deciding their level of political engagement and has a responsibility to guard against their own biases. Ultimately, for there to be a healthy relationship between science and politics we need greater empathy for individual scientists as feeling humans. On a daily basis, climate and conservation scientists deal with distressing issues while attempting to balance the need for action with the ideal of neutrality. Instead of the unreasonable, puritanical expectations of objectivity, we should aim to better understand and communicate their tensions and dilemmas. By being transparent when decisions are made based on values, and sharing the lives of scientists through public outreach, we can build the trust needed to implement transformative, evidencebased policy James Ball is a third-year PhD student at the Department of Plant Sciences and Magdalene College. Artwork by Anna Germon.

Sticking to the Science? 25

Pro-Science? Fight Anti-Science Compassionately Naomi van den Berg explains how guarding against misinformation helps us fight imminent crises more effectively HUMANISING SCIENCE | ‘SO, HOW DO you explain [insert questionable piece of information], since you are the scientist here?’

Many of us will find such confrontations familiar, be it from birthdays of relatives or bars filled with strangers. You may even find that these situations trigger ‘fight-flight-or-freeze’ responses — after all, it is a lot of pressure to represent the gigantic and infallible institution that is Science. And fair enough — as (prospective) scientists, we are trained to chase and esteem the objective truth, garnered via the rigorous ways of the scientific method, and regard it as this superhuman entity that transcends all that is flawed about human thinking. Science is often presented as the collective legacy of what is our (perhaps arrogantly self-assigned) distinguishing feature as a species: our intelligence.

However, while perhaps not the easiest thing to admit to relatives holding you to account as a vessel for objective rigour, it seems to be a universal experience that the longer you stay within science, the more obvious its issues become. As most of us are aware, the ‘making of science’ is done by humans and is hence not free from human flaws, biases, and bigotry. It remains important to acknowledge that, in the name of ‘making science’, people have been hurt — minority groups disproportionately so. Minority groups have also been (and continue to be) harmed by underrepresentation in clinical trials and scientific spaces in general. Science, in its institutional form, is by no means a pure pursuit and any such ideas about it need to separate scientific institutions — tainted by human flaws — from the scientific method itself in order to apply sufficient scrutiny and make progress in the conducting of science.

This is important not just for the betterment of science, but also for its appreciation by others within much wider society.

Indeed, regarding science as less of a divine entity, and more of a malleable and fallible process, may increase its accessibility not only for yourself but also for those you communicate with about your scientific endeavours. Humbleness towards our own understanding of science (taking into account things like the Dunning-Kruger effect), as well as compassion towards that of others, can be hugely transformative in how we define ourselves as scientists — and thus, how we talk about it to those distant relatives at birthdays confronting you with their Facebookamplified Anti-Science ideation. And these conversations really matter — especially nowadays.

26 Pro-Science? Fight Anti-Science Compassionately

DISMANTLING MISINFORMATION | After the past two years, it is no hubris to say we are in a Pseudoscience Crisis (also aptly called the ‘info-demic’). It is a crisis that, on its own, has contributed to much societal damage. Perhaps less well-known is how intricately the Pseudoscience Crisis intersects with many other modern crises. For instance, the Climate Crisis suffers from misinformation on climate change, and world hunger suffers from misinformation on genetic engineering of crops — two examples where misinformation is still percolating through the policy- and decision-making arena, and hence obstructing much-needed progress. Misinformation is becoming an important tool in geopolitical crises as well, now that modern warfare is increasingly hybrid — a painful reality exemplified by recent affairs in Eastern Europe. The Pseudoscience Crisis partially derives from its exponential nature: misinformation is generated far more easily than scientific fact, and then travels at least six times faster across online spaces. In addition, it should not be overlooked that anti-science thinking often offers a path towards a warm and welcoming community: a less daunting alternative to reading up on the overwhelming and often over-complicated body of scientific literature.

Misinformation is fast-evolving, and its ever-optimising clickbaity-ness — in an environment that rewards clicks — means it can continue to reach and ‘infect’ more and more people. Perhaps intuitively, one may think that the solution to the crisis thus lies in changing the environment where misinformation festers: for instance by restricting algorithms to make their clicks less rewarding, or imposing bans/censorship to make their clicks not possible at all. Yet, it may be risky to put the solution of the crisis on the end of information platforms/ distributors. Perhaps it is more effective to put the solutions in the hands of the information consumers themselves. After all, as seen elsewhere, we cannot afford to wait on the multibillion social media industry to change their profit-generating algorithms, nor do we have time to argue the ethics for or against free speech in each individual case of proposed censorship or media bans.

What is needed is a change in discourse across all sectors.

Internally, within the scientific community, we need to break through the culture where communication about and garnering public support for science often dangle at the bottom of priority lists. And even if any such effort is regarded seriously (and not patronisingly), we need to get rid of the false but prevalent

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notion that the problem of science denialism lies in a lack of scientific literacy — this is not the case. Strategies relying on such assumptions disregard the important role of social determinants in susceptibility to pseudoscience and hence are at best incomplete and at worst counterproductive. This ignorance towards social determinants is also prevalent outside of the academic sphere. For instance, the Dutch Prime Minister, Rutte, has on several occasions openly dismissed the social

behind pseudoscience and science denialism is required if we really want to be effective in fighting this crisis and empower everyone with the tools to consume high-quality, factual information. The humbling reality is that none of us are immune to pseudoscience, and this vantage point inadvertently adds compassion to one’s idea of science and those that are distrusting of it. Thus, to go forward, it is essential to make the pro-science narrative more humble and

science behind civil disobedience and anti-science ideation during the country’s COVID lockdowns. Similarly, the French President Macron’s vow to ‘piss off’ the unvaccinated only serves to feed the ‘us-versus-them’ narrative without acknowledging, and thus providing actual solutions to, the underlying problems leading to vaccine-hesitant or anti-vax ideation.

inclusive, more interdisciplinary, and less polarising; both within the institution(s) you occupy, as well as in encounters with individuals who have lost their faith in science. The role of compassion in future discourse around pseudoscience will be critical in defining not only Who Scientists Are but, most importantly, who is with us

Any attempt at countering misinformation or antiscience ideation is not effective if the overall result is further marginalisation or polarisation. A deeper understanding and appreciation of the social and cultural determinants

Naomi van den Berg is a second-year PhD student at the MRC Toxicology Unit, member of Darwin College, and VicePresident (External Affairs) of Cambridge University Students Against Pseudoscience (CUSAP). Artwork by Mariadaria Ianni-Ravn.

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Pro-Science? Fight Anti-Science Compassionately 27

Genes, Carpets, and Mediaeval Manuscripts Bartek Witek discusses the broad applications of phylogenetic techniques, from genes, carpets, music, to mediaeval manuscripts CHRIS HOWE IS a professor of biology, specialising in photosynthetic organisms. Although photosynthesis is his life’s passion, his group explores topics outside of typical biology.

He recalls a dinner debate at High Table with visiting fellow, Professor Linne Mooney, and Dr Fred Ratcliffe, the University Librarian. At the time, Professor Mooney was an English scholar, interested in the copying history of mediaeval manuscripts — specifically, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Before the advent of the printing press, mediaeval manuscripts had to be copied painstakingly by hand. During the process, scribes often accidentally (or deliberately) introduced errors, sometimes even changing the meaning of the text from the original. To see the copying history, scholars manually construct ‘stemmata’: treelike diagrams, showing the relationships of various versions of the text to earlier manuscripts.

Chris’ group realised textual scholars and biologists face the same fundamental problems in trying to understand relationships between texts, or organisms. Biologists construct trees and networks that represent an organism’s ancestral lineage, showing how it has evolved, in a field called ‘phylogenetics’: ‘phylogenetic tree building is basically the same as stemma building in texts’. There already exists a breadth of computational tools available for analysing biological sequence data — so, ‘it should be relatively simple to translate them to the analysis of texts’, which are also just sequences of letters!

CHAUCER’S THE CANTERBURY TALES: THE WIFE OF BATH’S PROLOGUE | Fast-forward a year: in 1998, the interdisciplinary team of humanists and biologists published an article in Nature, representing the first ever proof-of-concept application of phylogenetic tree building to texts.

They analysed 850 lines of 58 surviving manuscripts of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and constructed trees using two different analytic methods (figure IA) — work, which would have taken traditional scholars months. Each node in the tree represents a common ancestor and the branch length represents the number of changes between texts (how accurately it was copied) — longer branches mean more changes.

They found manuscripts group together, descending from a single and distinct common ancestor. Interestingly, analysis suggested their ancestor (Chaucer’s original copy) was likely not

28 Genes, Carpets, and Mediaeval Manuscripts

finished, but a working draft which contained Chaucer’s own notes and alternative drafts of sections. Like Chinese whispers, the message changed subtly, leading editors to produce radically different copies of The Canterbury Tales.

ORLANDO GIBBONS’ PRELUDE IN G | Phylogenetic techniques can also be applied to music. The complexities involved in printing musical manuscripts meant music was propagated by handwritten manuscripts, even past the invention of the printing press. Chris collaborated with musicologists to investigate Orlando Gibbons’ Prelude in G — the final piece in the Parthenia collection of keyboard music (the first printed keyboard music collection in England). Changes introduced in copying often resulted in audibly different versions. For each location in the music, each variation was classified by pitch, note pattern, ties, ornaments, and rhythm. They found sources can be split into two main groups, suggesting two main versions of the text were circulating — which could have been derived from Parthenia itself.

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND PERSIAN CARPETS | Chris discussed how phylogenetic analysis has been extended by others in anthropology. Anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani was interested in classifying the evolution of Little Red Riding Hood-like folktales from around the world. Phylogenetic analysis became a powerful tool used by Jamshid to reveal their geography of circulation and oral evolution — overcoming previous problems in tracking the history of orally transmitted stories. Where does the ancestral tale come from? East Asian tales could be the missing link, found to form a new separate group. The ancestral tale could have originated in the East, and later spread to the West by trade, finally splitting into two lineages that gave rise to the familiar Little Red Riding Hood.

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1A: The Wife of Bath’s Prologue copy history

Bacteria

Archae

Eukarya Plants Fungi Animals

1B: The tree of life

Jamshid also applied phylogenetic analysis to the evolution of Turkish carpet designs. Tree analysis revealed that textiles arose through natural design evolution, rather than trade and cultural borrowing. The ‘consistency index’ is used as a measure of retention of a trait through the tree — a low index indicates a trait is gained or lost independently in separate lineages over time. Jamshid was interested in how war affected textiles following the Turks’ defeat in 19th century; the lower consistency index indicated more borrowing of designs and motifs. Thus, phylogenetics revealed a greater dependency on trade which changed the driving force behind textile design.

SIMILARITIES WITH BIOLOGY | For Chris, the most remarkable finding is the striking similarity of copytransmission to biological evolution (figure IB): ‘we use words as analogies of mutations in DNA in textbooks, so why don’t we use DNA as an analogy of words?’. Each error is replicated in future editions of a text — and, as errors accumulate, each text lineage adopts a subtly different meaning. The same happens during evolution: mutations in DNA are passed down and accumulate, creating new species. Chris’ team found scribes sometimes switch exemplars mid-way, resulting in a final copy that is a hybrid of two sources — something which scholars termed ‘contamination’. This is akin to the biological process of ‘recombination’, where DNA molecules mix between organisms to produce new genetic mixtures, creating variation in traits.

Trying to reconstruct the ancestral text is akin to ancestral protein reconstruction: where we try to find the original protein sequence, based on the sequences of current and past proteins. A change in sequence in one protein makes changes in another interacting protein more likely. We see the same in music, where one change in notation causes a ‘domino effect’, where subsequent notes adjust to the time signature or alternative chords. Like silent mutations in DNA (cause no change in protein sequence), some changes in musical notation have no audible effect; for example, a semibreve is

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performed identically to tied minim!

TEPID REACTIONS | Have scholars found phylogenetic techniques useful? Chris says the reactions have been polarising: ‘the ones that hate it often misunderstand what we are trying to do’. Scholars and biologists alike think computer-found relationships are prescriptive and binary.

Computational results can be particularly uncomfortable when findings go against years of qualitative intuition from studying the artefacts. In reality, each evolutionary prediction is associated with some degree of uncertainty. In fact, different algorithms may produce subtly different trees.

Tree building can seem like a statistical black box, and Chris believes scientists are partly to blame for mixed receptions: ‘we must try to better explain what we are really doing’.

FUTURE PERSPECTIVES | Since the seminal Canterbury Tales paper, phylogenetic analysis has been applied to a wide variety of artefacts, mapping histories across literature, music, and textiles. So, what can we expect for the future? Chris alluded to future phylogenetic analyses, led by Dr Heather Windram, in collaboration with musicologist Yo Tomita (Queen's University, Belfast) and Terence Charlston (Royal College of Music), on Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier music collection. Thus — in a field now coined ‘phylomemetics’, describing an application to non-biological objects — the tales of phylogenetics continue Bartek Witek is a third-year undergraduate in biochemistry at St. Catharine's College. Artwork by Sumit Sen.

Genes, Carpets, and Mediaeval Manuscripts 29

The Toys that Made Us Maria Julia Maristany delves into how toys, despite seemingly inconsequential, make who we are IT WAS AN UNUSUALLY hot Christmas day — but then again, it is always unusually hot in Argentina in December, every year more than the last. While our parents were napping, exhausted from hosting the entire family the night before, my brother and I revelled in our brand new Christmas presents.

I had received a book, a lovely collection of my favourite comics, and he had got a chemistry set, with all the bells and whistles, little plastic beakers, and colourful substances in small transparent Ziploc bags. Within the hour, I had grown bored of my book and started pestering my brother to let me play with the chemistry set. I was unsuccessful: ‘Es de nenes!’ (‘It’s a boy’s toy!’) he said ‘¿No ves? ¡No es para nenas!’ (‘Can’t you see? It’s not meant for girls!’).

I did not argue — he was, in my mind, absolutely right! The packaging was all blue, and there was a little boy with safety glasses and a coat on the cover, wearing a cap with a bright slogan reading ‘Future chemist!’. The thing is, the Spanish language is highly gendered. That slogan read as purely masculine, which, added to the rest of the packaging, clearly indicated that my brother was right, and I was not meant to play with his present. Of course, my ban on playing with my brother’s new toy didn’t last long — the next day I borrowed it without permission while he sneaked out to play with my barbies behind my back.

Now, here is the thing: while anecdotal, and seemingly inconsequential, this little exchange on Christmas day was anything but unusual. Since the end of WWII, marketing companies for children’s toys and clothes started to gender their products in a simple, but effective, scheme to increase revenue. This corporate strategy lingered, and its effects festered: we find ourselves now, almost 80 years later, standing on a supermarket aisle divided in the middle, blue to one side and pink to the other. On the pink side, we see a mountain of make-up, tiny prams, fake ovens, and small, frankly terrifyinglooking dolls. On the blue side, we find cars, soldiers, toy guns, and plastic trucks.

30 The Toys that Made Us

It has been long established that the high genderisation of products for children affects their development, and has the potential to impact even their mental health and relationships growing up. A study conducted at Purdue University found that toys strongly thought of as ‘feminine’ were associated with physical appearance and domestic skills, whereas strongly ‘masculine’ toys were found to have violent and competitive components. The appearance-oriented princess toys and the violence-oriented soldier toys form a dichotomy that is extremely hard to ignore. However, the issue of gendered toys goes beyond this violent-versus-pretty division. Studies found science- and creativity- related toys, in particular those with a strong STEM focus, are much more likely to be marketed towards boys than girls.

Take the well-known multibillion-dollar company Lego as an example. In many metrics, the biggest toy company in the world: their small plastic bricks are an internationally recognised trademark.

As a company, Lego was built on a remarkably smart idea: instead of selling already assembled plastic toys, they decided to give children the chance to build their own. The company’s success grew exponentially since its beginning, and now, not only does the Lego group rank amongst the world's most reputable companies, but their toys have shown to enhance a particularly valuable set of skills in young children, many of them related to STEM, such as mathematical skills, spatial awareness, and problem-solving. This is all to say, Lego is a pretty big deal, and also a pretty cool toy. It is not a company you would expect to find itself involved in controversy.

However, back in 2011, when a market research study by the company itself revealed that 90% of its customers were boys, Lego decided to jump on the proven strategy of making Easter 2022

a line of their products pink: they launched the Friends line, a product with a heavier emphasis on characters and storytelling, marketed to girls. This decision sparked a huge debate between two very distinct factions of parents. Genderneutral advocates called for Lego to go back to gender-neutral packaging and remove all gender bias from their marketing and products, while parents opposing this view labelled it as exaggerated and overly political. Finally, after a survey revealed their marketing strategies could be impacting the interest girls have in engineering and other STEM careers, the Lego group committed to removing gender bias from their packaging.

Lego is of course not the only example. Construction toys as a whole are overwhelmingly marketed towards little boys, and the differences do not stop there. Telescopes, skeletons and microscopes are usually found in the boy's aisle. Studies show that, beyond marketing, science and maths toys are two to three times more likely to be purchased for boys than for girls. Girls get unicorns and mermaids plush toys; boys get astronauts and dinosaurs.

The movement for gender-neutral toys is not trying to politicise your kids or come for your children’s gender expression, far from it. It advocates for equal opportunities for every child — we are doing children a disservice by gendering toys, preventing girls from the benefits of active, problemsolving gameplay, as well as boys from the perks of emphatic, story-oriented games. One day, hopefully, when you go into a store hoping to buy a present for your sibling’s child, the first question won’t be 'Is it a boy or a girl?'

Maria Julia Maristany is a second-year PhD student in physics at Robinson College. Artwork by Biliana Tchavdarova Todorova.

The effects of these early differences may have repercussions later on. We have heard many times that there is no such a thing as a gender gap, but rather, there is an ‘interest gap’: girls just do not sign up for STEM. Many have made the point that this interest gap is normal, even natural, some go as far as saying that girls’ and boys’ brains are genetically wired to be interested in different things. These claims are not only scientifically inaccurate, but they also ignore the fact that our interests are overwhelmingly influenced by the environment we grow up in. People buy toys for kids before they are even born. We make decisions about what they will and won't like and who they will likely want to be before they can even speak, and surround our ‘sensitive girls’ with caring related toys and our ‘creative boys’ with strategy related ones. Years later, creativity- or strategy-related video games, such as Minecraft or Age of Empires, are heavily marketed towards boys. And in the end, boys are more likely to choose to go into STEM careers and to remain in them. It is important to remark that, beyond creating interest and increasing engagement, there is a myriad of institutional issues within STEM that need to be addressed to support women and non-binary individuals at every point in their careers.

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The Toys that Made Us 31

Weird and Wonderful Treating C.diff Infection with ‘Crapsules’ — Faecal Microbiota Transplants in Capsule Form CLOSTRIDIUM DIFFICILE (C. DIFF) IS a bacterium typically content to hitch a ride in our guts among the trillions of other bacteria that call the human intestine home. However, if the balance of our internal microbial soup shifts, C. diff can quickly dominate, causing a host of unpleasant symptoms. Faecal microbiota transplants (FMT) have been used to treat recurrent C. diff infections for approximately a decade, but the process of administering donor stool via colonoscopy is difficult to standardise and carries a risk of transmitting other infections.

Fortunately, FMT may soon be revolutionised by the development of the ‘crapsule’. Researchers have found a novel way of purifying donor stool to create a capsule containing the beneficial bacteria required to treat C. diff. Recently, one such ‘crapsule’ has shown promise against a placebo but is yet to be directly compared to current FMT practices. Some concerns have been raised against the potency of the pill, yet FMT in capsule form is likely to be more acceptable to patients and safer than traditional methods, with the added potential of personalising treatment.

FMT ‘crapsules’ may be the answer to a much needed standardisation of C. diff treatment in a safe and bespoke manner. LT

A Less Glamorous ‘Circle of Life’ MOST PARASITES TAKE root in the body of an animal and reproduce in the warm comfort of their host. But nature has also produced parasites that control their hosts’ minds, making them behave in reckless ways, and not with their best interests in mind.

L. paradoxum, a worm that lodges in the liver of snails makes their eyes swell and pulsate. The snail then hangs around in the open for birds to prey on. The parasite reproduces in the bird’s stomach, gets shat out again, and the cycle repeats.

There are horsehair worms that induce crickets to dive into water so that they can eat their way through the exoskeleton and escape into the cool depths below. The eye fluke Diplostomum pseudospathaceum finds its way into the brains and eyeballs of unwitting fish which then bob around aimlessly on the water surface and get eaten, thereby propagating the cycle.

There are even fungi that infect ant and fly brains, making them climb to high spots where their spores can burst out and spread far and wide.

There is a relentless procession of zombified animals dying in really quite undignified ways — forming a less glamorous ‘circle of life’ than what we’re used to. PM

The Mystery of Stabilimenta SPIDER SILK HAS many amazing properties — it’s so strong and elastic that it’s used in anti-explosive clothing for soldiers in minefields and in space net designs. The webs themselves are uniquely able to simultaneously serve as a home and prey capture tool. Studies show spider web designs change with different drug exposure. Each spider leg has a separate building purpose, and different web areas serve different functions. But one structure still eludes scientists to this day: the stabilimentum.

Stabilimenta are highly UV reflective structures found in multiple spider species’ webs. They are silk threads arranged in a zig-zag fashion as a line, cross, circle, or spiral within the web. These beautiful structures have been studied for over a century but, still, nobody knows what they are for. Some suggest they are for defending against wasps, attracting prey, preventing bird collisions with webs, and even providing camouflage. Despite extensive research using fake stabilimenta in webs to see how many flies get caught, or how many birds collide with them, their function remains elusive. Spiders expend much energy on stabilimenta production — it takes lots of silk to make a stabilimentum — so they must have a function. What that function actually is, however, remains a mystery. LC Artwork by Biliana Tchavdarova Todorova.

32 Weird and Wonderful

Easter 2022

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