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A year ago, when I was struggling with my own scientific career, my partner, Natalie, dared me to read Infinite Jest. She bet me I couldn’t make it through 1,079 pages of dense prose intended to simulate the crushing boredom of navigating rehab.
But I’m a scientist! I’m the best at boring reading! I plowed through DFW’s page-length sentences and each footnote. And I didn’t feel cheated by the ending, because all science papers end with “more research is needed!”
Jamie Zvirzdin’s plea for a more literary science would certainly make its products more palatable. But the dense mass of abstractions, journal articles, and textbooks that try to pass off as “communication” do serve a literary purpose. Scientific texts employ their form to communicate the confusion and drudgery of doing science. Like Infinite Jest, science is about turning the page when it’s hard and you don’t know what’s going on.
Here’s an example of what I think Zvirzdin would consider a well-crafted story in the canon of science: the tale of Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics.
Mendel’s work established the basis of inheritance and explained both why and how children are like their parents. A humble monk in Austria, he experimented by breeding different varieties of common garden peas. He crossed different strains to see what happened when two varieties of peas with different features (such as purple and white flowers) were mixed. The patterns of traits he observed lead him to theorize about hidden biological factors (later named “genes”) that produced these traits, and he described their patterns of dominance, segregation and assortment.
It’s a classic science story: a likeable main character, a charming pastoral scene. The sort of experiment simple enough for an elementary school science fair, but so powerful it propels the genial Mendel into the lofty pantheon of science with greats like Darwin and Newton.
But Mendel definitely did not feel that way. For him, his life wasn’t a teachable moment. It was a tragic saga.
Pea plants in Mendel’s time did not come from the Burpee (R) seed catalog in true-breeding varieties. White and purple flowers were intermixed. Mendel couldn’t even start without creating pure strains. And so, each spring, he would plant fourteen gardens, each one selecting for a single trait. He labeled each carefully, and planted them far apart to avoid accidental cross pollination. To further control the plant’s promiscuity, he’d carefully wrap each flower in a gauze bag to keep out passing bees. He’d carefully dab each flower with pollen from a like-colored pea. Months later, he’d harvest the seeds, and count them through the winter by candlelight, taking careful notes.
Next spring he’d plant again, and hope that he hadn’t made a mistake. Each missed flower would mean another year of effort before he could begin. His standards were high. He required that a pea plant “breed true,” and produce the same trait each year for eight generations. Eight years of work just to trust his sample’s purity. Boring, meticulous work while working two other jobs as a friar and a meteorologist.
And when he was done with the eight-year project? When he had his purebred seeds? Then he was ready to begin. Imagine his anticipation when he crossbred the purple and white flowers. Just think! In just one year he would find out what had happened!
The next year, all of the plants came up purple, and he had no idea why.
Years later, when Mendel finally did understand why, he published his work. Alas, everyone was too busy reading Darwin’s bestseller. Mendel died with his dissertation tucked away on a shelf in the monastery. It was thirty years before someone noticed it was important. He gave up all of his summers and died without meeting someone who cared.
My own grandfather is a luckier scientist. He published some of the very first research describing the heart-health dangers of trans fat. This was not popular research in the ‘40s and ’50s. He was satirized as being a corporate stooge of big butter-and-egg producers and lost his research funding. But he was stubborn. And so he resolved to outlive his critics.
Every day, he ate a balanced meal, studiously avoiding the trans fat in margarine and baked goods. At noon, he went swimming. And one by one, over seventy years, his critics died. Now he is 102, and lived to see a trans fat ban and falling rates of heart disease.
Natural processes are slow. Peas sprout once a year, in spring. A heart takes a whole lifetime to break down. Being a scientist means tying one’s life to a natural process and hoping to see something interesting before you run out of time. Science requires the patience to trade one’s whole life for the chance to ask the world a question. Answers not guaranteed.
I agree with Zvirzdin that we need a more welcoming science. Science museums, and science scholarships for young women are necessary. She’s right to stress the importance of education and ability of the sciences to deliver personal meaning and social good. And more emotive scientific narratives can play a part.
But I also want to be honest with the people I’m welcoming into science. I don’t want them to think it’s fun. In my experience, there are a large number of scientists who got into the discipline because they were told they would be curing cancer, or winning a Nobel Prize, and are disappointed when they discover years later that they won’t be.
In the future, let’s welcome folks into science by conveying that the confusion, boredom, and sacrifice they feel on an ordinary day is not evidence of failure. There’s a passage in Stanley Kunitz’s poem King of the River that captures for me the image of Mendel in his garden or my grandfather keeping his heart healthy in the pool:
If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly’s blood . . .
I feel like Zvirzdin is asking scientists to make the water clear and still, so that it’s easier for non-scientists to see what’s going on in there. But the scientists are saying what they see. The water is not clear. The water is not still. Also, we keep bumping into rocks, and that’s painful and confusing.
Ultimately, my disagreement with Zvirzdin isn’t about whether scientists should communicate with literary techniques: they should. I just think that science is being truthful when it says it’s not for everyone. That’s a familiar idea to writers: the world of literature is very comfortable with the idea that not every book will be a bestseller. It’s enough for a work to speak clearly to someone. It’s a success even if only a few itchy, obsessive people find it readable.
More than eager listeners, scientists need a break from the struggle for attention and grant money. I wish scientists could stop feeling like failures because they haven’t found their answer. Science has the stark beauty of the natural world. It speaks primarily in deeds. It drained the terror from smallpox and polio. It lit the night. It touched the moon. But those are the last lines on the last page in those science stories. On all the preceding pages science wrote: “Today was a day of hot stoop labor in a floppy hat.”
Comments from other contributors to the Poetics of Science online discussion:
Jamie Zvirzdin: Patrick, I appreciate this response and I feel that it qualifies the original article in excellent and needed ways. Your comparison of messy, prolonged scientific inquiry to reading Infinite Jest—which, coincidentally, I just started reading (I’m on page 68, wish me luck)—is a fabulous one, and one that I do agree with. Careful science is not all fun and games and glory, and students do need to know this. Those who make funding decisions do too, just as you said, giving researchers space to breathe and time to “enter upon a few speculations,” as Michael Faraday did.
My desire for more accessible science writing does, in part, stem from the frustration at feeling locked out of knowledge that I want to understand, and time and patience are the instruments needed to pick the damn lock. I also recognize that, economically and practically speaking, much of the world cannot occupy the calm garden space-time that Gregor Mendel did, even if they wanted to; nevertheless, their lives could drastically improve with the kind of science writing that doesn’t make one feel like a trespasser.
I also liked your response because writers as well as scientists need to understand that “the confusion, boredom, and sacrifice they feel on an ordinary day is not evidence of failure.” A good reminder for all.
Patrick D. Watson: I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say this: I’m sure you’ll make it through all the pages, but no one actually finishes that book!
Your central goal of making science more welcoming resonated with me, because I feel that scientific culture is unnecessarily cutthroat and competitive in a way that erodes collaboration and good communication. What’s more, I agree that the inaccessible language is a big barrier to entry, and that it’s mostly there for posturing, rather than precision. The full toolkit of literature is surely a better way!
It was the little bit about the need for science writing to correct popular misconceptions at the end of your piece that worried me, because it seemed to argue that accessible language tools are valuable for their ability to advertise science. Science has plenty of ads screaming: “Cancer patients are dying because there aren’t enough scientists!” and, “A science career is rewarding and fun!”, but those serve to make science seem like lofty and unattainable pursuit for angels. Boosterish science ad copy treats science like beauty ads treat bodies: obsessed with a narrow definition of what they “ought” look like. It largely serves to remind us that we do not and will not ever look that way.
But that unwelcoming impulse misses the way the world really is! Cancer is not caused by career choices. Science practice isn’t all rockets and baking soda volcanos. And I think the best way to communicate how things really are is with a literary science that’s welcoming and honest. Just like the beginning of your piece that discussed your experiences in science editing. As an imperfect thing. A worthy, important, and imperfect thing!
Jamie Zvirzdin: Patrick, posturing rather than precision, as you said, is a fabulous way to sum up competitive language in science writing. Your comparison of science ads with beauty ads is right on. Yet I do believe that there is a place for advertising the pursuit of science and the importance of the process, difficulties and all.
As a young woman growing up in Utah, where there was significant pressure to forego any kind of serious science career, I craved a welcoming, honest science atmosphere, and there were very few people in my life who provided that. In fact, one of the people who encouraged me the most when I was in high school was Thad Roberts, a student from the University of Utah who had just started an internship at NASA—the same man who just a few years later stole the moon rocks and spent six years in prison. (It’s quite the story.)
But my point in sharing this is that there is still a great need to promote science—as a worthy, important, and imperfect thing. Maybe this endeavor is separate from science writing that already has a readership, however. I like the idea that there may be different registers of science writing, from novice to expert, child to adult, but all can be more welcoming and accessible, certainly.
Leah Falk: Patrick, I love the clarification of the idea that scientific discovery is the “last page” of inquiry. What do you think of science communicators whose interest is primarily in transmitting the excitement of that “last page” to the public? How could they focus more closely on the pursuit itself, and do you think that would that change the way the public thinks about scientific findings?