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Rethinking college education

February 24, 2010 in Guest blogger, In the news by Katie Kadue | No comments

Due to tuition hikes, many Berkeley undergraduates will have to cut college short, and young students statewide may find higher education entirely foreclosed. For anyone who cares about the University of California, or who values the public university more generally, this is a travesty. Instead of serving as the engine of social mobility by providing top-tier schooling to Californians who can’t afford to go private, UC campuses will increasingly cater to those from wealthy (and out-of-state) families, ultimately reproducing existing class structures rather than shaking them up.

If you’re a Berkeley graduate student invested in the future of your institution, you know all this already. But in all the debate swirling around the lamentable fee increases – most prominently, how best to protest them – another issue is at stake. It’s heresy around here to suggest that anyone who wants and works for it shouldn’t have access to a college education. But does everyone really want a college education?

As San Jose State professor (and Berkeley Ph.D.) Mike Rustigan argued in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, many young Americans are more interested in working with their hands than sitting behind a desk, and to insist that everyone aspire to a four-year degree discounts the value – not to mention national economic necessity – of learning a trade. Caitlin Flanagan’s polemical (and pretty much universally derided) critique of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley serves as the reductio ad absurdum of our unblinking devotion to a liberal arts education at the expense of any practical knowledge. Arguing that school garden programs rob students of valuable time with civics textbooks, Flanagan accuses Alice Waters and her “ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting” acolytes of preventing migrant workers’ kids from getting into college, which is the only way they could possibly escape their fate of diabetes and underemployment. (Waters’ suggestion that working in a garden can prove pedagogically useful is unlikely to breed a permanent underclass of sharecroppers, but if it asks students to write recipes as well as coherent paragraphs about The Crucible – if it produces people who can effectively communicate information rather than haughtily parade their cultural capital in The Atlantic – is that really such a bad thing?) Read the rest of this entry »

Things to do: The Albany Bulb

February 17, 2010 in Guest blogger, Things to do by Colleen Morgan | No comments

As winter covers most of the US in a big blanket of snow, it is just the right time of year to go check out the Albany Bulb. There’s a certain appeal to the sight of fresh, blooming springtime flowers covering tangled, rusty rebar and spray-painted construction debris. Or maybe I’ve just been watching too many of the post-apocalyptic movies that have come out recently. The Albany Bulb truly does inspire survivalist fantasies and visions of the post-human reclamation of urban landscapes–pick a clear day and bring your camera!

Located about 3.5 miles northwest of the Berkeley Campus (take the Buchanan exit off 80 and head west), The Albany Bulb was an active construction landfill until 1987 and is now part of the Eastshore State Park. It’s not marked on Google Maps, but you’ll recognize it if you follow the coastline up from Gilman until you see, well, a bulb extending into the bay. Take a nice, meandering walk (or ride) from the parking lot and you’ll be treated to breathtaking views of San Francisco and the bay as well as giant sculptures by local artists and graffiti-covered construction debris. Head leftish on the path to Mad Mark’s castle, then wander north along the shore to find large murals and amusing uses of the large chunks of concrete scattered throughout the island. On the north shore you’ll encounter huge sculptures by artists Osha Neumann and Jason De Antonis–I like to get to this part of the bulb by the late afternoon, so I can watch the sunset light up the city and the sculptures.

On any given day you will run into dog walkers, mountain bicyclists, anarchists, graffiti artists, photographers, and people who might rather not be disturbed. The east side of the bulb is where there are more permanent encampments and the dogs who guard this area are not particularly friendly. Stick to the well-trod paths and you’ll have a blast. I bet you didn’t think that the apocalypse could be this fun!

The Realities of Synthetic Biology

February 6, 2010 in Guest blogger, Research by Felix Moser | No comments

If you pay attention to the biofuels efforts in the Bay Area or read online science magazines such as Wired or New Scientist, it’s likely you’ve heard of Synthetic Biology. More of a movement than a field, Synthetic Biology envisions biology as an engineering discipline waiting to happen. Essentially, Synthetic Biology aims to circumvent or control the complexities in biology in order to build novel, effective biological systems reliably and quickly for such applications as diesel production and tumor killing bacteria. For example, imagine you want to engineer yeast to make red beer that tastes like lemon. Synthetic biology would have you pick up a “red” gene and a “lemon” gene, plug them into the yeast in a standardized, programmed way, and presto: Red lemon hefeweizen! Unfortunately, the realities of biology require much more than that. In reality, biology is so complex, few things we do ever work as expected or intended. Because of this, most synthetic biology projects quickly run into difficulty and often take years to hack together. But this hasn’t stopped synthetic biologists from making broad claims about the potential of their approaches. It’s been said that cheap biofuels, cures for diseases, and fantastic new biotechnologies are in the pipeline. Recently, however, Synthetic Biologists are encountering resistance as reality has begun to catch up to the hype.

A recent news feature in Nature Biotechnology asked some of the most prominent synthetic biologists how they define their field. The diversity and vagueness of the responses highlighted the difficulties the community has had centering itself on a set of focused objectives. Because Synthetic Biology is such a new field with no central discovery to mark its launch point, and because the application of systematic engineering to biology is so fraught with problems, the Synthetic Biology community has had trouble defining itself in concrete terms. This comes despite such efforts as the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), an NSF-funded consortium of faculty across various universities that is intended to facilitate joint research efforts within Synthetic Biology. Some responses in the article suggested that Synthetic Biology had become more of a buzzword meant to garner federal research dollars than a productive field. For those of us in the field at the moment, this hit painfully close to home. Read the rest of this entry »

Conference Dispatch: Law and Literature at USC

February 1, 2010 in Conference dispatches, Guest blogger by Katie Kadue | No comments

Photo by brianwallace

L.A. has a reputation for being a cultural and intellectual wasteland, but at the 8^th Annual West Coast Law and Literature Conference, held January 13 by USC’s Center for Law, History and Culture and Department of Comparative Literature, I found a welcome oasis. I came across it by accident; I happened to be in town, I knew one of the professors participating, and parking was provided (probably the deciding factor). Since the papers were accessible online, I already knew that the panelists – Bernadette Meyler of Cornell Law School, Julia Lupton of UC Irvine, and UC Berkeley’s Victoria Kahn – would be presenting work on topics ranging from England’s 1660 Act of Oblivion to joint-stools, Hannah Arendt, and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. I was anxious to find out just how all this (most pressingly, the joint-stools) could be connected under the proclaimed theme of “Early Modern/Post-Modern: Inventing the Political Subject.”

For some, the field of Law and Literature is symptomatic of the American university’s fetishization of interdisciplinarity, geared more towards marketing appeal than genuine intellectual inquiry. Depending on your perspective, it’s a way to make literature more relevant by relating it to the outside world, or a way to pretend to be engaging with the outside world while still remaining comfortably ensconced in academia. Debates over intellectual jurisdiction often ensue.

To my relief, the presenters at the one-day, single-panel conference didn’t waste time making the case for Law & Lit, opting instead to close-read and cross-examine each other’s arguments. All three panelists questioned the emphasis placed on “historicism” – briefly, the idea that texts should be understood in their historical contexts – and what the over-determined and often undermined term even meant. At one point, Kahn wondered whether “thinking with Shakespeare,” the project proposed in Lupton’s book of the same name, could really be called “historicist,” or if it could better be called simply “thinking.”

The relevance of this particular disciplinary intersection – between early modern law and literature and post-modern law and literature – was perhaps most aptly articulated by Kahn, who, in discussing her paper on “Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza and Arendt,” posited that because early modern texts created the conditions for modernity, looking back on these texts can help us diagnose contemporary problems and give rise to alternative modes of thinking about the present. We might not be so flummoxed by current crises of political theology, from Islamic jihadism to Christian fundamentalism, if we paid better attention to how influential writings on the topic have been read and misread in the past.

The event’s format deviated from the norm of scholars reading their papers and fielding audience questions. Each of the three papers, copies of which were available at the conference, was introduced by another panelist’s commentary, to which the author could then respond; additional comments from other legal and literary scholars followed before the forum was opened up for questions. While feedback was delivered mostly as prepared remarks, the proceedings were enlivened by a spirit of collaborative openness. Kahn’s discussion of Lupton’s paper noted the early modern simultaneity of common law – in which the wife was considered her husband’s property – and canon law, under which a suitor must earn a woman’s consent through courtship. Using this legal lens, Kahn proposed, could lead to an alternative conception of Kate’s personhood in The Taming of the Shrew. Lupton said she found this idea useful, but pointed out that canon law didn’t necessarily endow women with any real agency: a “woman’s consent” to marriage often had little to do with the woman herself, but was instead used as a rhetorical strategy by men (like when Capulet waxed moralistic about his daughter’s consent in Romeo and Juliet).

I didn’t quite follow all this, and I’ve probably grossly misrendered whatever problematic was being (re-)problematized. But I did get the impression that the attendees were really, for the most part, engaging with each other. As someone new to the conference circuit and still at sea in my own field, I found the conversational, mutual-presentation format extremely conducive to, well, not zoning out during talks. No matter how eminently readable, the most riveting arguments can be difficult to follow when recited in monotone; by the time a paper is deemed worthy of sharing, I’ve sensed, the author is already weary of it. Having someone else explain, or question, what the papers were about kept things fresh for both the authors and the audience. For those who hadn’t read the material beforehand, the co-panelists’ commentary – which included both summary and critique – helped both focus the articles’ salient aspects and make them accessible to a diverse audience. I study French and English literature, and I attended the conference with my mother, a recent American History PhD and recovering lawyer, and we both came away invigorated by fresh ideas – this despite her wariness of Comp Lit jargon and my usual response of catatonia when confronted with legalese.

I hope to attend more conferences that work like this: interactive and well-organized, interdisciplinary but intellectually focused on the timely and the timeless, putting literature in conversation with politics without putting it on trial. Though I admit, I never quite figured out how the joint-stools fit in.

Food Rules, “Edible Food-like Substances” Drool

January 24, 2010 in Guest blogger by Katie Kadue | No comments

I tore open my copy of Food Rules, the slim new eater’s manual by Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan, with an appetite well whetted by his earlier In Defense of Food. The fun-sized Food Rules packaging suggested the literary equivalent of a bag of chips, but I was glad to see Pollan better targeting his intended audience; the kind of person unwilling to turn on the stove is unlikely to commit to a full-length book on eating better. In all his work, Pollan supplements a no-nonsense attitude towards food with investigative rigor and a dash of wit, a recipe that appeals to any graduate student with a culinary conscience.

Food Rules elaborates and expands Pollan’s pithy food protocol – “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” – into 64 “rules.” Pollan’s goal is less to chastise than to serve up advice in bite-sized pieces (“Pay more, eat less”) and offer mnemonic devices (“The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead” – yikes!). Pollan recognizes that the standard American diet, invested by corporate money and government policy with an aura of natural inevitability, is a hard habit to break, and complicated criticisms of the food industry’s fourberie can be difficult to digest. Exposing our diet’s absurdities – and offering appetizing alternatives – makes the case better than just telling us over and over that we really shouldn’t be eating those Cheetos.

Pollan is most convincing when he plays the bricoleur, taking useful tools for thinking about food from both nutritional science and traditional wisdom (which, as he demonstrates, is often eventually backed up by science). He counsels us to “eat our colors” because, as mothers have known for centuries, brightly-colored vegetables are good for you (or because, as scientists have recently found out, they contain polyphenols, flavonoids, and carotenoids). His appeal to simplicity helps counter the notion that only well-educated elites have the time and means to enjoy good, healthful food. Not everyone can afford organic, and busy working moms might scoff at “slow food,” but we can all agree to spend less money on soda and stop obsessing over antioxidants. Pollan wants to suggest that, if we just consult our common sense, we can have our occasional local, grass-fed, organic beef and eat it too.

With its piecemeal approach, Food Rules is more concerned with making eating better easy on an everyday basis than with tackling the deeper issues that make eating well so hard. But Pollan does plant the seeds for how our food choices can help restore ethical and economic balance, on a personal and a societal level. Yes, farmers’ market produce can cost more; but cutting back on meat, restaurant meals, and mindless snacking is good for your body, your bank account, and the planet, and that’s no coincidence. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan outlines how traditional agriculture’s perfect economy – cows eat grass; cow manure fertilizes grass; cows eat grass – has been ruptured on both ends: cows eat processed corn; toxic cow manure requires fiscally and environmentally costly storage. It’s easier to see how absurd, unappetizing, and inefficient our diet is by looking not only at multiple pictures, but also at a single bigger picture, by situating our alimentary attitudes in a larger social, political, and economic context.

Some readers of Food Rules may find it not quite substantial enough to satisfy their hunger for nutritional information. The book’s breezy tone, and its reluctance to address its premises, are understandable: publishers, like snack-food manufacturers, push products that require minimal processing on the consumer’s part; we want things that melt in our mouths, not stick in our teeth or wedge stubbornly in our brains. After all, if you suggest too strongly that the way we eat has everything to do with the way we work, sleep, play, medicate, produce, and consume – in short, with the very fabric of our society – you’ve far exceeded the bounds of a snack-sized airplane read. But for those whose tastebuds are tantalized by Food Rules, Pollan offers up heartier fare in books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, with analysis that, for all its density, is surprisingly easy to swallow (if you’re willing to chew a little first).

Pollan’s philosophy can only become a staple in our cultural cupboard if we abandon the notion that our bodies can be hermetically sealed off from the body politic. Just as we should aim to eat whole foods, not polysyllabic nutrients or numbers of calories, and adopt whole diets (like that of the French) instead of just their most appealing aspects (more red wine, anyone?), we need to live whole lives, choosing diets that make sense in our own social, political, and economic contexts. The fact that “food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies” requires further consideration than the passing acknowledgment Food Rules affords it. Italian cuisine, driven in large part by fresh seasonal produce, may translate better than the Inuit reliance on seal blubber, but even European eating strategies are incompatible with many Americans’ workaday lives. After all, you can only “After lunch, sleep awhile. After dinner, walk a mile,” as rule #54 prescribes, if your schedule allows for siestas. If Professor Pollan’s students take his advice, he might end up with some sleepy afternoon seminars.

Real Bay Area Residency

January 19, 2010 in Guest blogger by Colleen Morgan | No comments

If this is the second semester of your first year, a belated welcome to the Bay Area! If you have been here a little while, chances are that you have filled out your paperwork to become a California resident, giving up your old state driver’s license and gaining the requisite tuition reduction. Even if you have been here your whole life, how much do you really know about the ground beneath your feet? Who lived in your apartment before you did?

I have to admit that I didn’t feel much of a connection to the Bay Area until relatively recently. I missed my home, where I was familiar with the local history, geology, and native plants and animals. Did you know that nearly half of trees species you see around Berkeley and San Francisco are originally from Australia and New Zealand? I didn’t, until I had a look inside Mike Sullivan’s The Trees of San Francisco, available for check out from the Bioscience and Natural Resources Library. The blue gum eucalyptus grove, native to Australia, contains the tallest trees on campus, indeed the tallest stand of hardwood trees in North America.

If you don’t have a lot of interest in the not-so-local plants, take a look at Oakland Geology, a blog dedicated to local geology. Andrew Alden highlights the rocks around town. According to Alden, “every neighborhood in Oakland with a “mont” in its name has bedrock exposed.” You’ll know you’ve got it when you can tell the difference between serpentine and blueshist.

An old Sanborn fire insurance map showing the lay of the land along Shattuck Avenue in 1894

Finally, how old is the building you live in? Was your aging south-side Victorian always chopped up into 12 tiny apartments with hallways for bedrooms? You can do a little detective work by looking up the old Sanborn fire insurance maps, available digitally through the UC Berkeley library. It helps to click on the index first to locate the pages containing the street nearest to you. I found out that my old apartment was built right next to Strawberry Creek before the city moved the stream underground. Also, most street margins on the major thoroughfares around town have trolley tracks underneath them—the Key Route system served most of the East Bay until it was dismantled as part of the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. If you happen to live in Oakland, Michael Migurski has done a lot of the heavy cartographic lifting for you at Old Oakland, where you can select and overlay different historical layers.

Welcome to your new home!

Reflections on a First Semester

December 31, 2009 in Guest blogger by Katie Kadue | No comments

Photo by John-Morgan

Since I’ve been home after my first semester as a Comparative Literature graduate student at Berkeley, I’ve spent a lot of time fielding questions from friends and relatives about what, exactly, I’ve been doing. My usual response – “Oh, you know; comparing the literatures, to see which one is the best” – tends to elicit nervous, confused laughter, and only thinly veils what I’ve actually spent all semester doing: wondering what, exactly, I’m doing.

As an undergraduate, I regarded graduate students with a certain baffled admiration. Their language was both idiosyncratic and predictable, as if codified in some dictionary whose existence it was their duty to deny. They all talked with the same calculated haltingness, in the contained cadence of seminar-speak. Where did they all learn to discreetly smirk at Lacan, question whether violence was being effaced on the level of the text, and wonder about the role of “affect”? Where did they learn to speak as if everything was in quotation marks (and/or parentheses)? And where could I learn to do that too? (This is a good place to start.)

As much as I rolled my eyes at this kind of academic posturing, I had an overwhelming desire to crack the code and join the ranks of this secret society. I also really liked reading things and writing about them. So I applied to graduate school, struggling to frame my questions of purpose as statements, awkwardly incorporating snippets of that foreign grad student language and hoping that by the time I got there, I would be problematizing, historicizing, and reifying with the fluency of a native.

Berkeley’s Comp Lit students, however, turned out not to be the jargon-spouting aliens I had feared. Worse: they were human, and spoke English, and were perfectly nice and friendly, and I still didn’t understand what was going on half the time. I felt like there were certain unsaid assumptions shared by everyone else about how to approach texts, assumptions too obvious to put into words and thus impossible to ask about. I became quite sure I didn’t know how to read, and wondered what it was I had been doing to books all these years, since it certainly couldn’t be called reading. The areas I thought I was interested in now seemed like they weren’t “areas” at all. I realized I didn’t know what “area,” or any other remotely abstract word, even meant. After stumbling through my first few seminars, never sure if I was saying what the professor wanted to hear or exactly the opposite, I took some solace in the fact that the rest of my cohort seemed as lost as I was. Second-years, third-years, and even seasoned dissertators assured me that they still didn’t know what they were doing, but I didn’t believe them; their claims of confusion were suspiciously coherent. They dutifully asked me if I had any questions about the program, and if they could offer any guidance, but I was too confused to even know what questions to ask.

Sitting around wallowing in a vortex of self-doubt, and dragging my peers in with me, turned out not to be much help in figuring out what I was doing in graduate school. What did help was actually doing stuff: immersing myself in texts, trying to work through them, tentatively venturing ideas about them. A professor’s advice to consider seminar papers as works in progress, potential springboards for further exploration on a topic, helped quell my anxieties about my general lack of direction. It also reminded me why I wanted to go to graduate school in the first place: I think literary analysis is really fun.

Starting graduate school at Berkeley just as the university was hit with budget cuts and their fallout both amplified and helped refine my existential woes. I started to wonder more and more about the economic value of intellectual labor, especially in the ostensibly insolvent humanities. How do we assign a monetary value to the pricelessness of literature, and why should I be getting paid to study it? (That last one I didn’t want to question too rigorously.) These questions ended up informing my academic interests, and both of my seminar papers touched on the relationship between literature and money. Graduate school, for better or for worse, turned out not to be as isolated from the “real world” as I had imagined.

Though I’ve tried not to think too much about school since I turned in those seminar papers, I do feel like I have a little bit of a better idea of what I’m doing than when I started. I’m starting to understand how my more-experienced peers could express their confusion with such calm countenances, and that a lot of graduate school is realizing that we don’t know what, exactly, we’re doing, but that trying to figure it out – by reading, by writing, by exploring, by interacting – is a worthy and rewarding goal in itself. And if all else fails, I can always say that I’m engendering the linguistic construction of the specular economy with an eye to the historicization of desire.

Conference Dispatch: The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS)

December 5, 2009 in Conference dispatches, Guest blogger by Graham Bullock | No comments

Photo by robbyb on Flickr

Most academic conferences we attend are actually the annual meetings of particular academic associations – the American Political Science Association, American Chemical Society (ACS), etc.—and most of these have been meeting for decades (the ACS was founded in 1876). So it is a rare opportunity to be able to attend the founding meeting of an academic association, which I was able to do back in October. The University of Wisconsin, Madison hosted the first annual conference of the Association of Environmental Studies and Science (AESS), which was started in 2008 to “serve the faculty, students and staff of the 1000+ interdisciplinary ‘environmental’ programs in North America and around the world.” One of the goals of the new association is to build bridges between the different social science, natural science, and humanities disciplines that study the environment, and the conference was their first major attempt to do so.

As I learned during the main conference dinner, Wisconsin has a fascinating environmental history and rich legacy in environmental research (Aldo Leopold’s shack, for example, is near Madison), and so it was a fitting place for the first AESS meeting. But the campus is not the easiest to get to – I ended up flying through Milwaukee and taking a two hour bus ride because there was no reasonably priced direct flight available. But once I arrived, I found the town of Madison to be very nice – quiet and quaint, although also quite cold. On the third day of the conference, we woke up to find it snowing, and this was the beginning of October! It will be hard indeed to take a job back East…

The conference’s morning keynote speaker was none other than Jane Goodall, the legendary chimpanzee researcher, speaking to the group via a web-based videophone from a research camp in Costa Rica. After a few technical glitches, she spoke eloquently about environmental issues and the need for continued strong environmental research. It was a nice beginning of the conference, and reminded us of the urgency of ecological conservation.

The conference itself was organized into 9-10 concurrent panel sessions, which included topics such as environmental education, measuring environmental quality, religion and the environment, marketing and the environment, and environmental risk (click here to see the full schedule). A good percentage of the panels dealt with the nature and development of interdisciplinary environmental studies and science programs, and the best ways to prepare students for a “green economy.” But others were more focused on specific environmental topics, and there was a good mix of disciplines represented, from ecologists to economists to sociologists to business scholars to critical theorists. This range demonstrated the diversity of ways of studying environmental issues, and the challenge of effectively bringing them together.

I presented a paper as part of a panel on “environmental law and policy,” which was a sort of microcosm of this dual challenge and opportunity. The other panelists included a professor of law who spoke on the history of environmental law, a professor of international relations who talked about the intercontinental transport of air pollutants, and a graduate student in public policy who presented on the diffusion of automobile emissions standards internationally. My own presentations was on eco-labels and environmental ratings of products and companies. On the surface, it is difficult to see a common theme in these talks, but as the panel progressed, we identified several interesting connections that provided valuable perspectives on each of our areas of interest. I had long and helpful conversations with two of the other panelists afterwards, and I look forward to staying in touch with them in the future.

In terms of my own presentation, the biggest challenge was cutting it down to a reasonable length for 15 minutes. I had a lot of preliminary data and ideas I wanted to discuss, and it was like pulling teeth to take things out. But ultimately I was able to find a couple key points to focus on, and I think that very much helped the presentation. My advice to anyone having similar difficulty – try to identify the most interesting complexity to present, but don’t present all of the complexity. And getting feedback from colleagues on campus before you go can also be a huge help.

In addition to meeting my fellow panelists, I also connected with several other interesting people at the conference. They included professors from other UC schools and from around the country, including both large universities and small colleges that I had never heard of, but that have some very innovative environmental programs. They also included other graduate students, including four from the University of Wisconsin, UC Berkeley, Stanford and Princeton who were working on topics closely related to my own interests.

All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet people in this diverse field, and hopefully make connections that will last far into the future. I certainly felt like the conference was a success, and hope that the Association is able to build on the momentum. The next meeting is in Portland; for anyone who is interested, you can check out the association’s website at http://aess.info.

The Complexities of Biology

November 29, 2009 in Guest blogger by Felix Moser | No comments

“Biology is hard.” These underwhelming but wise words were told to me two years ago by a sixth-year grad student who had given up the frustrations of biological bench work in favor of computational biology. At the time, I had some inkling of what he meant. I had spent many long evenings in college working in a biochemistry lab, bent over the lab bench trying to figure out why my most recent experiment had failed. Often, the failure of an experiment meant some mistake on my part: a forgotten reagent, a botched procedure, a badly designed primer; these are all lessons that most biological researchers learn the hard way and make us better scientists. The rest of the time, there were no answers as to why experiments failed. They just did. A gene wouldn’t clone or express, a protein would aggregate or refuse to crystallize, or an antibody wouldn’t blot the correct protein. These failures were the most frustrating because there was little to learn from them. One had to either try something fundamentally different or give up.

After six years of working in the life sciences, I have come to learn that this experience is widely shared among biological researchers. It is simply the nature of the work. But being a scientist, I had to ask: Why is that? What makes biology so hard to predict, parse, and engineer? The answer, left unspoken but widely acknowledged by biologists, is that living systems are simply too complex to be fully understood.

The failures that absorb so much of a biology grad student’s career are usually ascribed to the complexities within the cells they work with. Even biologists sometimes forget that cells, though stunningly well-tuned and elegantly functional machines, are much more complicated than a microchip and much less predictable. Despite over a century of research effort, cells are still “black boxes” full of mysterious chemical mechanisms and machinery that we are just beginning to understand. The magnitude of the complexity of a single cell is truly overwhelming. Even a relatively simple genetic system, such as that of a bacterial virus, can be so complex as to be beyond the supercomputer’s computational capacity to model. It’s not hard to understand why: Imagine a tiny “bag of chemicals” with a menagerie of millions of molecules shoving around inside it like concert goers in a rave, each going about highly specific tasks, together maintaining the delicate balance of life. Since we cannot model such a machine, we can rarely predict what removing or adding a gear to the mechanism will do to it. But this is how we study life: by breaking or introducing gears in the machines and observing how they behave. Yet these approaches are crude and often fail, the reasons why getting lost in noise of millions of molecules.

Genome sequencing promised to shine light into the “black boxes” of life. It was hoped that a researcher would be able to read the genetic code it like an engineer reads a blueprint. This hope has proven naïve. Even with an annotated genetic code in hand, it is often impossible to predict what gene is expressed when, why, and what it does. Each year, science peels away layers of complexity of how the cell controls its myriad functions, usually revealing even more complexity beyond it. Companies that hedged their bets on genomics revealing the intricacies of disease, such as the recently bankrupt DeCode Genetics based in Iceland, are learning the hard way that life and its diseases are far more complex than anyone thought. To grad students like myself who work in the life sciences, though the complexity of life offers much frustration, it nonetheless instills a deep sense of awe and respect for nature, as we realize that we are just beginning to understand it.

Tags: biology

Conference dispatch: The 34th annual Society for Social Studies of Science meeting

November 18, 2009 in Conference dispatches, Guest blogger by Graham Bullock | 3 comments

Washington, D.C. autumn by ehpien

Last month I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, or “4S” for short. This was the 34th annual meeting of the Society, and was held right outside Washington, DC, at the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City. There was no overarching theme of the meeting, and so it had a wide range of panel topics. It lasted for three days, had almost 1000 participants, and included nearly 200 panels.

But, what you may be asking, were all these panels about? What are “social studies of science” anyway? Also known as “science and technology studies” (or STS), this field probably has as many definitions as scholars, but in essence, it is focused on critically investigating the ways in which politics, culture, and the institutions we call “science” intersect and influence each other. Rather than assuming that scientists and the technologies they create are politically neutral, STS scholars study the ways in which ideologies and values motivate scientists and become embedded in the things they create.

I was first exposed to STS in a seminar I took in my master’s program that was led by one of the field’s leading scholars, Sheila Jasanoff, and it has had a big effect on my own thinking. My undergraduate degree was in ecology and evolutionary biology, and I have always had a strong faith that science and reason can help us rise above our partisan politics and collectively solve society’s problems. But the STS literature, from Bruno Latour’s work on laboratories to Donna Haraway’s writing on museum exhibits, showed me how science and politics actively “co-produce” each other, to borrow a term from Professor Jasanoff. While I still believe that science is a unique human institution that can and has greatly benefited humanity, I have come to appreciate its limitations and the need to look critically at its claims.

So panels at the conference discussed the politics of water knowledge and expertise, sustainability and climate science, medical information and ethics, internet cultures, computer code, food technology, chemical regulation, nano-technology, Asian bio-politics, genomics, and more. More theoretical topics included the philosophy of science and technology studies, subjectivities, actor network theory, citizen participation, peer review and expertise, and the privatization of science.

My own panel was entitled “Agents of Sustainable Innovation and Design,” and included talks on actor networks behind geothermal heating and cooling, bioplastics, engineering consulting firms, and the electric car. My own talk discussed actors driving the growth in environmental certifications and ratings of products and companies – the subject of my dissertation. My goal for attending the conference was to articulate and get feedback on ways to apply to STS theories to my dissertation topic, and so it was nice that several people had some positive and insightful comments afterwards.

One of the truths about conferences is that it is the informal times between events that are the most rewarding, and this was no less true for me at this meeting. It is in these interstitial periods that you can make connections that can help you with your research or your career path, or just make new friends. They can also help you deepen existing relationships as well. For example, on the last night of the conference, I went out to dinner with a group of grad students from the Bay Area — 1 UCSF student, and several Berkeley students from my department, sociology, and history (some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t) — and we had a great time sharing our research interests and swapping stories from the conference.

I also connected with some interesting people from other places that were doing research relevant to my own (on environmental standards, regulations, etc.), and I hope to stay in touch with them as well. One of the great things about 4S is that it is very international – one of these people was from the Netherlands, and another was from Japan.

This experience underscores the underlying value of these types of conferences – of course they are great opportunities to present your work, get feedback, provide deadlines to push your research forward, etc., but I think they are primarily about building and maintaining a lifetime of relationships. Whether or not you go into academia or not, you can be a member of these communities and share in their growth and development.

The value and dynamism of the 4S community of scholars was particularly apparent in the plenary session, where both young and old researchers discussed their hopes for the future of science and technology studies – how to become more institutionalized on college campuses, how to more effectively reach policymakers, etc. I realized that you don’t feel this energy from just reading journal articles – you really do have to attend these gatherings to understand the intellectual life of these communities. And so I am grateful for having the opportunity to experience the vibrancy of the STS community, and hope to stay connected to it in the future.

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