istockphoto/AndreasReh
My latest story for Science Careers is up– about women who took extended family breaks from their careers and came back to the laboratory. I was impressed with these women’s creativity in crafting career and family life in ways that worked for them.
What surprised me a little when I was doing the interviews for this article was that no one had really planned her break. Circumstances came up– new parenthood, illness, trailing spouse issues– and they figured out that staying home was best for them and their families. When circumstances changed, and they felt ready, they made moves back toward the workforce.
After I thought about it, the apparent lack of planning makes sense– how do you really know in advance how long you’d want to stay home with your children? Or if you’re dealing with a health issue, how do you plan a timeline for treatment? In many ways, you simply can’t.
But at the same time, if you have an idea that you might want to return at some future date, wouldn’t it be nice to have guidelines, to know that you have options? I hope the article shows women and men that they have choices, even though the road might not be easy.
When I spoke with Elizabeth Freeland, she mentioned a resource from the Institute of Physics– a best-practice guide for career breaks, and even some ideas for planning them. In a way, some of that information is common sense: stay in touch with mentors and employers and remain plugged into the science community by reading the literature and even attending conferences.
I think stories are more important than guidelines. If you know that others share the same struggles, made similar decisions, and have had successful careers, you know that all your hard work is not in vain. Universally, these women at some point in their journeys wondered if they were completely alone. Over time, they slowly met others who had made similar choices and had similar career aspirations. I’m grateful that they took the time to share their experiences and struggles with me and with the broader scientific community.
The overall message I hope scientists get from the story– yes, you have options when it comes to career and family. And most of all– however you decide to manage family balance– you’re not alone in the journey.
It’s evolved into women in science month here at Webb of Science.
On October 9, I saw Gioia De Cari’s one woman show, “Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through MIT’s Male Math Maze” at the CUNY Graduate Center. Larry Summers’ now infamous comments about women in science inspired her to turn her own experiences as a math graduate student at MIT (she got a Master’s degree) into theater. My immediate reaction: this woman gets it. She articulates the experience of being a woman in an insular male-dominated world.
To be fair, I expect that chemistry is more female-friendly than mathematics, but some of De Cari’s stories– the office mate who professed his love to her even though she was married and the macho dynamics of other offices– complete with posters of nuclear weapons– reminded me of some of my post-undergraduate experiences. Though I did my Ph.D. with a woman chemist, I spent a year in Germany in a department where most of the women were secretaries (one ran the stockroom, and there was another woman, an American, doing her Ph.D. on another floor). My adviser and my immediate colleagues– though all male– were tremendously supportive.
But I still had one jarring incident where I left a computer lab for a few minutes and returned to find a screensaver installed– a digital bare-breasted woman bouncing across my screen. I didn’t know how to deal with a situation like that in English, much less in German. I suspected that a student from another floor, a frequent user of the computer lab, had rigged up “bouncy babe,” but never knew for sure.
A chocolate Nobel Prize
On Monday, I mentioned that it was a good week for women in science. Well, it got even better today with the announcement of the chemistry prize. Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science becomes the fourth woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (sharing the prize with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Thomas Steitz of Yale University).
The science is essential for life, understanding the structure and workings of ribosomes. These packets within living cells that take the master plans encoded within geness and manufacture the working parts, proteins.
For an upcoming story, I’ve been thinking a lot about research careers, work-life balance, and the “choice” that’s often drawn in the sand, particularly for women, between work and family. Some of that comes out in Yonath’s interview on the Nobel website:
[AS] Yes. And perhaps particularly special to be a woman who receives it?
[AY] I’m sorry that I can’t, I can’t think this is because of my gender. And, I don’t think that I did something that is specially for women, or the opposite. During my time I had some very difficult years and I had very pronounced competition, all by men. But I don’t think that this is because I was a woman. I’m pretty sure that if I was a man too they would compete, if the men would get to where I was at that time. I think that it doesn’t help to be a woman in science. Maybe now, but not when I was progressing. But I don’t think that it disturbs, in my opinion. I may be wrong. I may be wrong: women try to explain me all types of things. And I think that women can make … women need, actually, they’re fortunate because if they don’t want to do science they can say, “I want to be with my kids.” And this is understandable, whereas a man cannot do this. So if we look at it from the other point, but this means also stopping science.
The Nobel recognition is about Yonath’s science, not her gender. But I find this quote fascinating, and it skirts around the main issue. She’s of a different generation (born in 1939), and I see one point: motherhood was considered a socially acceptable– maybe even socially sanctioned– reason for a female scientist to leave the laboratory. A man would probably get more backlash for making a choice to leave the laboratory to raise his children.
But that choice, by a scientist of either gender, comes with consequences. I doubt that many of today’s women use motherhood as a smokescreen for a waning interest in research. They leave for many reasons: because they decide to apply their knowledge in new ways, because they don’t see enough opportunities, and maybe even because they want to make more money. Some of them discover that the research lifestyle isn’t compatible with the family life that they’d like to have, particularly in the early years of their children’s lives.
Working on this upcoming story already had me thinking about my own decision to leave the laboratory. My choice didn’t come down to a line in the sand between career and family. I was single throughout graduate school and defended my dissertation shortly before my 30th birthday. But those issues colored my decision. By the time I finished my Ph.D., I sensed a culture of inflexibility. I realized that I didn’t want to feel locked into lab work, and I wanted to be able to pursue other creative interests, and, yes, eventually have a family. Did those desires make me a less capable scientist? Absolutely not, but conventional wisdom would say that I didn’t want it “bad enough.” If I had sensed more flexibility– an environment more compatible with my personal goals– would I have considered staying in research? I don’t know.
It’s Nobel Prize season again, and the science behind this particular award for Medicine feels like a familiar friend. I got my crash course in telomeres and telomerase from a group meeting talk that one of my lab colleagues gave almost exactly a decade ago.
The science recognized was done a quarter century ago. DNA sequences have protective caps called telomeres that are maintained by a riboenzyme, telomerase, but the implications for the scientific understanding of aging, cancer and stem cells remain active research areas. Telomeres get shorter as we age, and maintenance of telomeres in cancer cells may help them continue to survive and divide. Part of the understanding of stem cells and their capacity for regeneration (or to cause cancer) will come from a better understanding of their telomeres.
This Nobel Prize story has many of the plot points associated with great discoveries, particularly the discovery of the telomerase enzyme, by Carol Greider in Elizabeth Blackburn’s laboratory on Christmas Day 1984. But notably, this award goes to two women: Blackburn of UCSF and Greider of Johns Hopkins University (They share the award with Jack Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School).
Though I wish that there were enough female Nobelists to make a double double-X chromosome Prize in Medicine less notable, it’s definitely a good day for women in science.
NOVA scienceNow has a cool new web feature– “The Secret Life of Scientists”– that I explored today (thanks to Facebook and Symmetry Mag).
It’s clear that this series is right up my alley– I probe my past experience and talk to scientists, in part, about what makes them tick. I’m constantly coming back to the fundamental question: what makes a good scientist? The general themes throughout the three stories that are up: persistence and creativity.
What I think this series does particularly well is adapting a video format to the web and deliberately telling scientists’ stories in small chunks. There’s a 10 questions feature (similar to, but far more effective, than the feature on Jay Leno’s new show), and, in another feature, the format also challenges the scientists to describe their research in 30 seconds. What’s the “secret” part? One feature explores each researcher’s outside passion– so far cooking, photography and long-distance running have made the cut. It walks the scientists-are-real-people-too line without turning it into a cliche.
Clearly NOVA has a proven track record in telling science stories with video, but I really like this site and will be coming back. In my own brief experience as an intern for TV news, I gained an appreciation for both the power of the medium, but also its difficulty and labor-intensiveness. Sometimes it tells stories in the way that no other medium can, but it’s also so easy for it to just fall flat. So, I’m thrilled with how well this format works for the web.
Here’s a link to one story from “the Leech Man.” [Science: The Bottom of Things [2:47] Shared via AddThis]
Note: I love the way the long, convoluted name of this hippo leech just rolls off his tongue as if he were saying his mother’s middle name. If you’re particularly squeamish about blood-sucking creatures and oddly disgusting body parts, start with a different video.
Madagascar golden orb spider (Nephila madagascariensis) Photo by Rhett A. Butler
Followers of this blog might have noticed that the Molecule of the Week (MotW) feature took a summerish hiatus. I’ve decided to expand the feature to include interesting materials, which are often more complex mixtures, either of synthetic or naturally-made compounds. So, I’m adding Material of the Week (MatotW in blogospheric shorthand) to help round out the idea.
This week, a material near and dear to my Webby heart: spider silk.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York is now displaying a length of cloth made entirely from Madagascar golden orb spider silk . At a half million dollar price tag and requiring 1 million spiders, this is the fabric of kings (maybe even Louis XIV) and involves some some serious production snags (See the NY Times or Wired Science for more on those issues).
The silks are made of structural proteins, chains of amino acid building blocks, that in different combinations do the work of living systems and make up other sorts of animal fibers such as hair. The animals use different combinations for different purposes: making webs, catching prey, building nests, or wooing a mate, notes Cheryl Hayashi’s UC Riverside website. (She studies these materials and garnered a MacArthur grant in 2007 for her work).
istockphoto/Taho_H
I’m already making plans to go see the spider silk fabric (and still trying to imagine lining up spiders in harnesses to produce it– quite the mental image). But spider silk reminds me of how much we humans can learn from our fellow inhabitants on this planet. Sure, the military and industry might find all sorts of uses for these threads from armor to moorings. But in this moment I’m simply awed by the natural engineering process and its outcome — a spider hanging from a single super-strong thread, spinning a lacy net to catch prey, and a few dew drops.
Reflecting E.B. White’s words back on Charlotte: “Some Web.”
How did I get so lucky? Seriously.
A little while ago, I came across this post in Nature News’s blog about the new kids’ album from They Might Be Giants. And. The. Videos. My neighbors probably heard me scream with glee, and then I made an impulse buy on iTunes–which I rarely do. Honest. Wow, I’m gushing, but this is sooo much fun.
“Like a box of paints that are mixed to make every shade. . . ” And, yes, “elephants are made of elements.”
As I was watching– and though I know I’m dating myself as a late Gen-Xer when I make this statement, I couldn’t help but think, “This is the best thing since Schoolhouse Rock!”
Which leads me back to somewhere between 10 am and noon, I was listening to a segment on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC (my local NPR station) about the healthcare reform bill. All the sudden I heard something along the lines of “clearly he learned his civics from Schoolhouse Rock!” complete with the matching audio clip. I’ve had “How a Bill Becomes a Law” in my head all day. Note: I’m not the only one of Brian’s listeners who had a “SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK!” moment (see comment #12 from M in Brooklyn).
They Might Be Giants singing about chemistry + Schoolhouse Rock = a fun day in my world.
Considering that I don’t have a school-age child, is this geeky or childish or both?
“So do you consider yourself a scientist or a writer?”
An undergraduate student asked me that question last fall when I guest-lectured about communicating research for a social-scientist friend’s seminar course. I immediately said, “A writer, but I write about science.” But I do understand why he was confused.
Even having done it, I wouldn’t recommend a Ph.D. in Chemistry as the direct route for getting on this particular career highway. But the student’s question made me really sit down at the virtual mirror and process the reflected frequencies of light shooting back at me. And to some extent, I do have a dual identity, but wordsmithing is at the forefront of what I do, no matter in what context.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any number of loose ends. read more…
NGC 6302 (Butterfly Nebula, Bug Nebula) Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
I love big, beautiful Hubble pictures, and these most recent ones are no exception. When I was working on the new astronomy exhibits at Griffith Observatory a few years ago, I marveled that I got paid to dig up spectacular images like this one. In a time where basic science rarely makes the local evening news, even these photos got a mention on the 11 pm news last night.
But though I’m awed by the pretty pictures, I’m also amazed that a nearly 20-year-old telescope continues to churn out amazing science and that NASA had the wisdom to continue to service such an incredible eyepiece into the universe. Somehow it generally seems easier to build something new without seeing potential in a tune-up for an older instrument. (And– just to be clear– I’m not saying that we shouldn’t build the Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope– no relation to Webb of Science, BTW, though no quarrels with sharing a very good name).
I guess the Hubble is also reminding me how valuable refurbishing something old, but made with quality– like a well-made piece of furniture or the Birkenstock sandals I’ve worn to death over the past 4 summers– can be in the long run.
On a spring afternoon walk earlier this year, I obsessively took pictures of New York harbor garbage. A buildup of plastic bottles, crates, driftwood and furniture fragments littered the rocks along our coastal walkway– a strange jumble of junk.
May 2009 photos of NY harbor garbage in Brooklyn
But my local trash doesn’t come close to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch– our global oceanic trash dump– where swirling currents collect garbage and have created an oceanic desert. I can’t even fathom a clump of refuse the size of Texas.
How did we get to this point? A few plastic bottles here? A few cheap plastic items there? In August, researchers took a closer look at the Patch to see our garbage’s impact on the ocean environment.
First off, they found even more garbage than they expected, according to the Associated Press.
“It’s pretty shocking — it’s unusual to find exactly what you’re looking for,” said Miriam Goldstein, who led fellow researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at U.C. San Diego on the three-week voyage.
Plastics in the ocean are (at least) a three-pronged problem from what I can tell:
- Wildlife get tangled in the junk or choke on it.
- The plastics break down into smaller pieces that interfere with the life cycles of smaller organisms.
- Then there’s the unknown of how much these plastics break down into their essential chemicals. As organisms are living in this water, how much do these chemicals build up?
I’m haunted by that floating Texas in the Pacific, the largest “landfill” in the world. Want to be even more depressed? There might be another one at least as large and just as nasty in the Southern Hemisphere.
P.S. Thanks, Suzanne, for the story tip.
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