With my degree in hand and an idealistic dream of making some groundbreaking contribution to TB research in mind, I arrived amidst the chaos of the official opening of the state-of-the-art research facility that had been drawn up by Dr. Walker and the K-RITH steering committee in 2009. The shiny new building quickly filled with brand new laboratory equipment, brilliant scientists from all over the world, precious samples from patients suffering from TB and HIV infection, and a few idealistic recent college grads like me. Between the smart people, the millions of dollars, and the myriad fascinating scientific questions to be answered, it seemed like all of the ingredients were in place for realizing the ambitious vision born six years prior at HHMI.
In late 1905, two biologists from Clark University — Oris Polk Dellinger and David Gibbs — worked in a continuous relay for six days and five nights to observe several Amoeba proteus in their “daily lives.” Recording their hourly movements, Dellinger and Gibbs tried to discern whether the amoeba’s life patterns fell into the rhythmic ebbs and flows of work and rest — tied to the search and attainment of food — that were the basis for all known animal life. Observed under a microscope, diagrammed in their zig-zagging movements, and photographed landing their prey, the biologists found that the amoeba too exhibited these characteristic patterns. Viewed in the context of their behaviors, Dellinger and Gibbs concluded, the amoeba must be considered a rightful member of the animal kingdom. Much anthropomorphizing ensued. The following quotes and images can serve as a summary of their 1908 paper, “The Daily Life of Amoeba Proteus.“
This kind of making sense of the material world with these radically different representations that come from diverse organisms is critical for making sense of these complex urban ecosystems. They give us this immediate feedback cycle, where we’re not just looking at some sort of blank array of distributed low power sensors. The vision of the “smart city” is that we’ll have these sensors everywhere, electronic sensors that will somehow make sense of things. But we can see that with the battery of what we use to make sense of water quality — dissolved oxygen, turbidity, pH, salinity — even water quality experts can’t tell you what that means. But if the mussels can survive, if they can thrive, or if they don’t thrive, or if their flapping in panic, or if they’re clammed shut and not singing—I trust a mussel more than the data! There can’t be any decimal point errors or recalibration issues when their lives depend on it.
So this idea that we can make sense through and with these diverse representations and these non-human organisms and is really part of the story of how you make sense of things in order to act on them, to improve and change our relationship to natural systems. The goal is to redesign this relationship so that we actually can increase biodiversity and increase water quality, using living infrastructure to make these places more habitable.
Stranger still are those scientists who appear to have known things long before they could possibly know them. Stories of such people are incredibly rare and must be treated with caution. Like that popular misconception, the Eureka Myth, narratives of visionary foreknowledge tend to be apocryphal, presenting discovery as a result of individual insight rather than a process of investigation, calibration, and collaboration. But among the noise, do real visionaries — those who appear to ‘see’ the scientific future — really exist?
Simultaneous discovery and visionary foreknowledge hold a special place in the imagination because they appear to defy logic and reason. But humans, not machines, conduct science. And as such, discovery can be organic and surprising, unpredictable and messy. Discoveries are made, not found. If these stories really are true, how and why they happen — and whether they constitute an intrinsic part of scientific research or are a condition of temporally specific contexts — are important questions.
A fruit fly develops very quickly. Just three hours after the egg is fertilized, the original single cell has divided 14 times, yielding about 6000 cells. The embryos at this stage look like tiny footballs, with all of their cells on the surface and yolk in the middle. The cells look similar, but they actually already know what part of the body they will become.
Consider also the “moonshot,” a phrase used today by Google X, the division of Google that explores inventions that would satisfy some larger human dream — not unlike how the Wrights satisfied the urge to fly, and the Apollo missions were the final push of a chain of inquiry stemming back to the earliest astronomers. The phrase means risk, a distant goal, and uncertain payoff outside of a wider, scientific glory. And yet in Google’s context, the phrase now describes self-driving cars and broadband-by-balloon. While both are certainly technological feats, it is difficult to say whether they would usher in a new era of human history. What does the “moonshot” mean to us today, when we are still struggling to get back to the moon? Why aren’t Google X’s “moonshots” actual, literal moonshots?
But it’s not just what climate scientists say that’s important, it’s what they do—in the field, in the lab, and in conversation with other scientists. The allegations of fraud made against climate scientists during Climategate made it clear that members of the public hold widespread assumptions about what is “normal” scientific practice. But except for climate scientists themselves, very few people actually know about the process of climate science “in action”—how scientists build climate models, how they interpret data, and how they interact with other relevant groups in society.
A polemical cottage industry runs on religion, naturalism, and the war between their houses. All the same, many men and women worship on weekends and return, come Monday, to telescopes, spectrometers, and flow cytometers. Often this requires some clever compartmentalization: imagine particles caught in crisscrossed electromagnetic fields of the kind used to isolate antimatter, as if allowing science to touch faith would produce an especially energetic kaboom. In that spirit, William Saletan pointed out in Slate last year that while Young Earth Creationism can’t pass scientific muster, some Young Earth Creationists do leave belief at the laboratory door. But for other researchers, faith is never especially far from the front burner. The most striking are probably those who practice—for a living—both Catholicism and astronomy: the stargazers of the Holy See.
“I was trying to find ways to compare other people’s structures,” Jane said. “The entire first year or two [at Duke] was just learning how to do those drawings. So it was very gradual. I’m not an artist. I can’t draw other things all that well.”
Since proteins are too small to be photographed directly, representations of them are often based off of earlier representations. One strategy their lab used was to paint the backbone of the wire model with a special paint that glowed under UV light. With the lights switched off, they took photos, and those photos ended up being a key inspiration for Jane’s later ribbon drawings of protein backbones. Focusing just on the backbone, it became a lot easier to show the folds and curls of the protein. But it was still not easy.
“A lot of good illustration is, as you probably are aware, taking things away so that you’re left with the essential picture,” said Dave. “The issue, of course, is that you might cut off something vital and that it might never be recovered.”
“The big deal is to really look at the drawing critically and ask whether it really shows what you mean it to show,” Jane said. “You have to try to forget all of what you know and try pretend that it’s new.”
On the press preview day of the Collider exhibition in the Science Museum London, a journalist asked Peter Higgs about how he himself visualizes the Higgs boson. Higgs responded that he doesn’t visualize it at all.
That’s because the Higgs boson isn’t really a ‘thing’ in the way that a non-particle physicist might understand the term. Rather, it is a perturbation, a ripple in an energy field. In 1964, Peter Higgs proposed that fundamental particles get their mass by interacting with an ever-present energy field. To prove the existence of the Higgs field, it has to be excited to create detectable ripples. If the Higgs field is an invisible sea, the Higgs boson is a wave on the surface that requires very expensive equipment to be able to ‘see’.
![“I was trying to find ways to compare other people’s structures,” Jane said. “The entire first year or two [at Duke] was just learning how to do those drawings. So it was very gradual. I’m not an artist. I can’t draw other things all that...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/5473c591aa2b19aa1914ee64d29ebf96/tumblr_nkk8etfQqR1tcp3wso1_640.png)
