Bacteria have fascinated scientists for centuries and still do. One of the first to see bacteria under the microscope was “probably the Dutch naturalist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who in 1683 described some animalcules, as they were then called, in water, saliva, and other substances” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). A modern understanding of bacteria developed in the 19th century. Ferdinand Cohn first classified bacteria according to their size, shape and structure, while scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, “established the connections between bacteria and the processes of fermentation and disease”.

Fermentation and disease are also central to the Synthetic Biology Research Centre here in Nottingham. Some scientists at the centre use various types of engineered bacteria, mostly from the Clostridia family, to try and turn waste gases into greener, more sustainable, fuels through fermentation; others try to tackle health issues around Clostridium difficile infections and cancer by working with bacteria.

Working with bacteria and putting bacteria to work

Over the last two years or so Carmen McLeod and I, a cultural anthropologist and a linguist respectively, have observed and interviewed scientists, such as those at the SBRC for example, who work with bacteria and put bacteria to work. The analysis of Carmen’s interviews and observations has now been published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science under the title “Working with bacteria and putting bacteria to work: The biopolitics of synthetic biology for energy in the United Kingdom”.

The results of the ethnographic fieldwork show that at least some synthetic biologists face two challenges. One challenge is how to balance the curiosity-driven and intrinsically fulfilling scientific process of working with bacteria to find out how life works with the task of putting bacteria to work in order to achieve extrinsic economic value and generate growth for industry. The other challenge is how to do this within the new science governance framework called ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ (RRI), which demands time for reflection, anticipation and debate.

Some social scientists have said that “Responsible innovation means taking care of the future through collective stewardship of science and innovation in the present.” In our article we explored the topic of stewardship more closely, both in terms of stewardship of bacteria and in terms of stewardship of scientists.

Stewardship of bacteria

For the scientists on the ground who participated in our research, the most important aspect of their work was care, stewardship, and responsibility for ‘their’ bacteria in the present, which involves giving these bacteria due respect. They also care about the near future in terms of finishing their PhDs and post-doctoral studies. Furthermore, this care of the personal present is linked to their ambition of taking care of ‘the planet’ and the more distant human future. Scientists co-opt their bacteria in efforts to carry out science that is socially beneficial; that is, in principle, they engage in RRI even without using the term.

This science stewardship (and stewardship of the bacteria) in the laboratory incorporates elements of anticipation, reflection, engagement, and responsiveness (central components of RRI) to varying degrees. There are some problems though which are related to time, space and pressure.

Local and global stewardship

We found that scientists are comfortable working at the human scale, both in terms of space and time. They assume control and responsibility over their labs and its human and bacterial inhabitants. They also carefully manage the time spent in the lab and with the bacteria and lavish as much time as possible on research and teaching activities. However, there is some anxiety when it comes to responsibility at the larger, especially the global scale, and with regard to the increasing speed and acceleration of research and innovation.

While scientists may want to ‘save the world’, they find it more difficult to create ‘wealth from waste’; while they love and value working with their bacteria and finding things out about them, they find it more problematic to put bacteria to work to create economic value; and while they readily assume responsibility for what they do in the lab, they find it harder to assume responsibility for the world at large.

Limits of stewardship

Our participants also expressed three key anxieties that impinge on their work with bacteria: (1) time pressure to produce marketable ‘products’, while at the same time reflecting on short-term and long-term risks and responsibilities; (2) the problem of ‘scaling up’ from the laboratory to the factory in a global energy market beyond researchers’ control; and (3) the perceived dilemma of engaging in public dialogue without overselling what can actually be achieved and without invoking the ‘spectre’ of another GM controversy.

There is an assumption that scientists have unfettered agency and power to embed RRI principles within their work. That is, however, not really the case. Scientists can control, to some extent, how they use bacteria for research safely and responsibly – they have power and agency in this context. Control and agency become more difficult the further away scientists get from their bacteria and labs and the more distant or abstracts risks related to their research become.

Scientists have no control or power, for example, over the world economy, oil prices and so on, which impinge on the success of fourth generation biofuels, saving the planet, and over generating growth and wealth. They have control over basic science and safety procedures in the lab. However, they find it more difficult to demonstrate control over ethical responsibilities that emerge from the RRI agenda, such as anticipating distant futures, foreseeing changes in political circumstances and making guesses about the future impacts of the science and technologies they build in the present, using bacteria in their labs.

Stewardship of scientists

RRI is based on the notions of responsibility, care and stewardship. Scientists working in synthetic biology take care of bacteria and assume control and responsibility for minimising risks to other humans and non-humans. However, their work is also controlled by various agendas, structures and systems that are beyond their control, such as the growth-agenda and the RRI agenda, which, we argue, has been largely co-opted into the growth agenda.

Surprisingly, the policy makers and funders setting these agendas do not assume the role of stewards themselves. They are, on the whole, not taking collective responsibility for the people they ‘work with’ and that they ‘put to work’. They also tend to overlook that calls for ‘scaling up’, as well as promissory discourses of profitable futures, create tensions and conflicts with the ethos and methods of science and scientists.

Policy makers and funders who impose an RRI agenda and an agenda of stewardship on scientists need to also assume responsibility for stewardship of the people they deploy.

It remains to be seen how the expectations generated by RRI can be managed in the future and how they can be collectively, responsibly and sustainably incorporated into the work of scientists and the work they make bacteria perform.

Image: The image of P. vortex colony was created at Prof. Ben-Jacob’s lab, at Tel-Aviv University, Israel) This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

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On Monday 26 June I went to Oxford to participate in a workshop on the microbiome organised by The Oxford Interdisciplinary Microbiome Project (IMP). This was what one might call a meta-workshop. Its aim was to find questions that social scientists can sensibly ask about the microbiome, or in the words of the organisers, this was about establishing a “social-scientific research agenda about the microbiome and its implications for public policy and social change”. The workshop ties in with some of my older and newer reflections on the microbiome.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the microbiomes in two ways, as “[a] population of microorganisms inhabiting a specific environment; a microbial community or ecosystem, now esp. that of the body” (first attested in 1952) and as “[t]he collective genomes of all the microorganisms inhabiting a specific environment, esp. that of the body” (first attested in 2001).

The workshop was held at Wolfson College (see featured image), where I did my JRF in the history of linguistics between 1985 and 1988. It was really nice to be there again and see all the new additions and extensions.

Questions, questions questions

In advance of the workshop we had been sent 120 questions and were asked to vote for 10. At the workshop itself each of four tables/working groups was given a list of themed questions and we were asked to select two high-level ones and two reserve questions. The general aim was to establish about 20 questions overall.

At our table we dealt with the issue of how the microbiome is being conceptualised. One question we found interesting in this context was how the microbiome, a still rather abstract and contested concept, is being imagined and visualised in the public sphere (which is, of course, not the same as visualising microbiome datasets).

While we were discussing this, I quickly had a peek on Google Images and what I found was quite intriguing. So when I came back from Oxford, I had a closer look. Of course, I cannot provide an answer to the broad question of how the microbiome is visualised in the public sphere in one blog post, but perhaps I can stimulate some discussion.

People can also look at other image sources in the future, such as Pinterest, Shutterstock, or the Science Photo Library, for example, which have images of the microbiome that seem to be quite different to the Google Images sample.

Thematic clusters

When you search for ‘microbiome’ on Google Images, you get not only images, but Google also provides you with a list of ‘themes’ (in various colours). (I searched on 27 June)

I am not sure how these themes are generated, but they are really interesting. Here they are without the colours – followed by my attempts at interpreting these thematic clusters:

• skin, gut, lung, human skin, colon, stomach – this theme seems to deal with loci of various types of human microbiome
• nature, role, health, diet, environmental, food – this one hints at various contexts of the human gut microbiome and how it is fed or maintained
• plant, animal, host – here we are dealing with a simple (almost) dichotomy between plant and animal hosts of microbiomes
• obesity, disease, cancer, diabetes, dysbiosis [microbial imbalance or maladaptation on or inside the body, such as an impaired microbiota], ibd [inflammatory bowel disease] – this theme encapsulates various illnesses or diseases linked to a disturbed microbiome
• Scientific American, New Yorker, Time Magazine, National Geographic, Nature Review, The Economist – here we have a list of the main outlets for microbiome images
• core, cell, body, root, fibre, sequence – this list leaves me a bit perplexed – comments welcome
• infographic, map, heatmap, pie chart – here we have a list of various types of visualisations of the microbiome
• bacterial, microbiota, fungal, candida, candida albicans [a type of yeast that is commonly used as a model organism for biology], C. difficile – this list homes in on various types of microbiome as well as one of the most talked-about afflictions, Cdiff, linked to a disruption of the microbiome in the human gut
• human gut, rhizosphere, human intestine, insect gut, phyllosphere [a term used in microbiology to refer to the total above-ground portions of plants as habitat for microorganisms] – here ‘gut’ seems to be a core theme around which other types of gut cluster thematically
• fish, chicken, lefse [a traditional soft Norwegian flatbread], milk, poultry – this might refer to ways of enhancing the microbiome through various types of food
• immune system, metabolism, digestive system, antibiotic resistance, hygiene hypothesis – these are scientific topics discussed in the context of microbiome research, and they were also discussed at the workshop
• hospital, home, stable – these are, it seems, some places that might affect the microbiome
• alpha diversity, relative abundance, beta diversity – comments welcome! Alpha diversity refers, it seems, to the diversity of species at a specific site (local species pool), while beta diversity represents the differences in species composition among sites
• metagenomics, metabolomics, next generation sequencing – these are high-level science topics as well as technologies relating to research in microbiomics
• human milk, saliva, blood – this might refer to interactions between a mother’s breast milk and a baby’s saliva; I am not so sure about the blood
• dog, ruminant, pig, swine, bovine, equine – this indicates that microbiomics deals not only with humans but also animals that humans keep and eat
• short chain fatty acid, tmao [Trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) is a small colorless amine oxide generated from choline, betaine, and carnitine by gut microbial metabolism], bile acid – comments welcome!
• drosophila, human genome, coral, zebrafish, termite, mosquito – these might be model organisms used in the study of microbiomes (apart from the human genome)
• sem [scanning electron microscope], 16s rrna sequencing [the component of the 30S small subunit of a prokaryotic ribosome that binds to the Shine-Dalgarno sequence] – science!
• pca [principal component analysis], hierarchical clustering, gastric bypass, otu [operational taxonomic unit] – I am not sure what gastric bypass is doing in this list!

Overall, these themes provide some insights not only into who generates most of the images, i.e. which journals are involved, or which types of images and visualisations are used, but also, and more importantly, what topics these images and visualisations are supposed to illuminate, from types of (human) microbiome, through various loci for microbiomes, through (domestic) animal microbiomes, to ways of studying the microbiome in certain fields of science and by using certain techniques, technologies and machines. Surprisingly, these themes did not mention Faecal Microbial Transplants, which are increasingly being discussed in the context of the microbiome.

Types of images and visualisations

I then looked at the first fifty images that were displayed when I searched for ‘microbiome’. I sorted them roughly into the following groups and I list them below in order of importance:

• Outlines of human body/bodies/head/hands
• Rod-shaped bacteria milling about
• Microbiome as a word with or without other text
• Various types of bacteria or cells milling about (sometimes) under a microscope
• One cartoon

Surprisingly, I could not immediately see an image of a human gut – the most popular location of the microbiome. (Such images seem to be much more prominent on Shutterstock; while rod-shaped bacteria seem to be the domain of the Science Photo Library).

The images based on outlines of the human body were mostly outlines with arms slightly raised; sometimes there were two outlines, for example, of a man and a woman (skirt) standing beside each other; sometimes there were several outlines; sometimes the outline merged with an image of the double helix; sometimes there were outlines of a head or of two hands. The outlines were mostly inhabited or surrounded by round or rod-shaped outlines of microbes. This type of image also included the logo of Human Microbiome Project which adapts Leonardo de Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to the genomic age:

The images that displayed the word ‘microbiome’ were also interesting. Sometimes I just saw the word ‘microbiome’ surrounded by bacterial fuzziness, or else as part of a wordle; or ‘Microbiome 101’ against a background of swirling bacterial soup. There were also images that displayed texts such as: ‘What is the Microbiome?’, ‘Gut Feeling’, ‘The importance of your gut microbiome for your optimal health’, ‘Your body is mostly microbes’, ‘How to feed your microbiome’, and so on. Interestingly, the focus of the words, rather than the images, was on the human gut.

Conclusion

The images and visualisations of the microbiome displayed on Google Images provide a unique and also biased insight into what types of images are out there of the microbiome. There were three surprises: the absence of faecal microbial transplants as topic or theme; the absence of the human bowel as an image; and the focus on the human gut in the words but not in the images. At the moment I can’t provide an explanation for this. More research needed!

PS: And here is some microbiome ART by Sonja Bäumel!

Being Encounter

FIFTY PERCENT HUMAN

Images: Wikimedia commons

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I was looking through my twitter timeline on 12 June, when I came cross a tweet by Dietram Scheufele which said “’bend nature to our will.’ #CRISPR frame in new #Doudna book might resonate differently across audiences […] #scicomm”. The tweet made reference to an article by Sharon Begley in STAT News about Jennifer Doudna’s new book, co-authored with Samuel Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution, in which they reportedly write that it “won’t be long before CRISPR allows us to bend nature to our will”. I became curious about this new book and its grand claim.

The book: publicity and reactions

On 16 June, Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer in a new way of modifying or ‘editing’ genes called CRISPR Cas9, came to the UK to talk with Adam Rutherford about her new book at a Hay Festival event held at the Royal Society. CRISPR Cas9 is based on exploiting the way that bacteria snip out parts of an invading virus’s DNA “and keep a bit of it behind to help them recognise and defend against the virus next time it attack”. Scientists, like Doudna, have “adapted this system so that it could be used in other cells from animals, including mice and humans”.

The blurb for the event (which I could unfortunately not attend) says: “’A Crack In Creation’ also asks us to consider what our new-found power means: how do we enjoy its unprecedented benefits while avoiding its equally unprecedented dangers? As Doudna argues, every member of our species is implicated in the answers to these questions. Somehow we must consider and act together. The future of humankind – and of all life on Earth – is at stake. This book is an essential guide to the path that now lies ahead.” (From what I can ascertain, unicorns were not mentioned at the event)

It appears that Jennifer Doudna wants to stimulate public debate about this new technique for genetic manipulation or gene or genome editing. This is a great example of what some call ‘upstream’ engagement with an emerging technology by one of its founders. This is also an example of what people would now call responsible innovation. As one reviewer of her book, Peter Forbes, says: ”It’s always difficult when something like this [gene editing] happens to sort the hope from the hype, but anticipation is now intense. Doudna does, though, sound many notes of caution.”

Another review of Doudna’s book by Nathaniel Comfort, is a little bit more critical and says: “Rather than guiding us through the ethical thickets of precision genetic engineering, or providing a candid, warts-and-all look at one of the great scientists of our time, the book mainly polishes her ‘good scientist’ image and rationalizes the unfettered self-direction of human evolution, within liberal bounds of safety, efficacy and individual choice.” I became more and more curious.

Unicorns, dragons and flying pigs

Let’s get back to the article mentioned in the tweet by Scheufele. After reading that tweet, I read the article by Sharon Begley for STAT news entitled, intriguingly, “CRISPR pioneer Doudna envisions a world of woolly mammoths and unicorns”. We are told that: “This Doudna doesn’t hold back. We are ‘on the cusp of a new age in genetic engineering and biological mastery,’ she and Sternberg write, dangling the prospect of ‘life-changing treatments’ and ‘lifesaving cures.’ She says she is ‘not kidding’ that CRISPR could bring about ‘woolly mammoths, winged lizards, and unicorns. … It won’t be long before CRISPR allows us to bend nature to our will.’”

Wow, I thought, these are some claims. I also asked myself whether this is really how one sorts “the hope from the hype”? And I wondered whether and how the unicorns were picked up by other news articles reporting on the book (they were not mentioned in the Forbes and the Comfort reviews).

I found an article for CBC radio that notes: “Imagine a world where genetic diseases can be edited and cured, where pigs can be ‘humanized’ to use their organs for transplants in people — and where we might even run into unicorns or winged dragons.”

Here lizards have turned into dragons. Interestingly, dragons had been discussed in the context of gene editing, but one of the co-authors of the book had intimated that they would not be created: “Dr Sam Sternberg – formerly of the University of California’s Doudna Lab, which pioneered work with CRISPR-CAS9 – said […] he is not hopeful genetic engineers could ever cross the Rubicon to create dragons.” (BBC interview, 3 January, 2016)

The other article appeared in The Daily Beast and was entitled “New DNA tech creating unicorns and curing cancer for real”. Unicorns and dragons are here joined by yet another mythical creature: “Scientists say that CRISPR-Cas9 may soon allow them to perform miraculous fixes to eliminate or alter mutations that cause everything from some cancers to Parkinson’s disease. More whimsically, the technology could be used to create, say, a unicorn, or a pig with wings; though it’s unlikely they could make swine fly.” Lizards have turned into flying pigs….

Unicorns in context

I was now thoroughly hooked; I ordered the paperback edition of the book; and read it. It is a breezy and enjoyable account of the whirl-wind in which Jennifer Doudna found herself after the discovery of CRISPR Cas9, a new way to target and edit genes.

This rather personal account of excitement and collaborations is interspersed with cautious reflections on the social and ethical implications of CRISPR, but also with references to mastery (“over the code of life”, p. 113; “to rewrite the very molecules of life anyway we wish”, p. 119) and control (chapter 4 is called “Command and Control” echoing the subtitle of the book: “The New Power to Control Evolution”). Control and caution jostle with each other.

I also found the unicorns. They make their appearance in chapter 5 entitled “The CRISPR menagerie” (paperback, p. 117). Here is the quote that got some people so excited: “Within a few decades, we might well have genetically engineered pigs that can serve as human organ donors – but we could also have wooly mammoths, winged lizards and unicorns. No I am not kidding.”

The next paragraph goes on to say: “It amazes me to realize that we are on the cusp of a new era in the history of life on earth – an age in which humans exercise an unprecedented level of control over the genetic composition of the species that co-inhabit our planet. I won’t be long before CRISPR allows us to bend nature to our will in the way that humans have dreamed of since pre-history”. We are back to the tweet that set me off in chase of unicorns.

I couple of pages later the book’s sometimes breakneck foray into a new CRISPR world populated by novel plants and animals, including unicorns, is somewhat slowed down by a note of caution: “We have a responsibility to consider the ramifications in advance and to engage in a global, public, and inclusive conversation about how to best harness gene editing in the natural world, before it’s too late.” This is a call for ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ or RRI.

Unicorns and responsible language use

A Crack in Creation has, it seems, three aims: firstly and mostly to convey the excitement of CRISPR; secondly to point out emerging risks (especially with relation to germline editing); and thirdly to stimulate public debate. My question is: are unicorns the right way to go about stimulating this debate?

I have written quite a few posts about CRISPR, some more about responsible innovation, and some others where I try to include responsible language use in the RRI agenda. I have also written an article with Carmen McLeod entitled “The dilemma of raising awareness responsibly”. The book certainly exposes this dilemma.

Viewed from the perspective of RRI and responsible language use, A Crack in Creation might therefore not only stimulate public debate about CRISPR; it might also stimulate debate about responsible language use. As we have seen, unicorns grab public and media attention; but are they good examples of responsible language use, especially since they can easily morph into flying pigs?

Master builders

This episode in the history of gene editing and public engagement reminded me of the early days of nanotechnology, where excitement mingled with concern and public discussion. At the time (around 2003/2004), a former colleague of mine, José López wrote about the trope of the master builder which he saw running through some of the early nanotech discourses, a trope that is also commonly used in science fiction. In an interview he pointed out:

“’Looking at science fiction helps us understand how we talk about nanotechnology. Science fiction usually relies on revolutionary technology or a major event to define how society works. Nanotechnology gets talked about like that—some argue that it will change everything,’ López says. This world-changing technology or event is called a novum—time travel and parallel universes are classic examples. Science fiction then typically includes a master builder who interacts with the novum and drives the story line. ‘With this mindset, we perceive nanotechnology—and the scientists driving it, the master builders— as a way to reconstruct a new world,’ López says. ‘We’re speaking the language of hubris to think we can control the future in this way. We have to remember that nanotechnology is still in its infancy.’”

This is perhaps something we should reflect on in all the excitement and promise surrounding gene editing today, as it has implications for science, society and science communication.

PS: Matthew Cobb has just published a review of Crack in Creation in the New York Review of Books

And here is one by Jerry Coyne; and one by Adam Rutherford

Image: A unicorn, woodcut after C. Gessner, 1551, Wikimedia Commons

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I, like many others, from Leibniz to Lakoff, think that metaphors are important for human thinking and acting. They make us see the world in different ways – for good or evil. So, one should keep an eye on them. Recently I have read two articles which seem to imply that metaphors matter less than I had thought. That is interesting. One article dealt with attitudes to germline modification and the other with public understanding of the scientific consensus on climate change. Let’s have a look at them.

Germline modification

At the end of May, a paper by Steven Weisberg et al. appeared in Frontiers in Public Health dealing with public attitudes to CRISPR (more specifically, the use of CRISPR in germline modification). The paper is entitled ‘A CRISPR New World’, a title that plays both with the ever-punnable word CRISPR (see for example: ‘Genome editing: That’s the way the CRISPR crumbles’) and also references the ever-present biotech cliché of ‘Brave New World’. The title and various phrases in the article itself (revolution, tipping point, game changer) make it sound a bit breathless and slightly hyped. (The article also doesn’t mention any other gene/genome editing surveys, of which there are quite a few; the most recent one by the Nuffield Foundation)

However, the meat of the article is quite interesting. It explores US American attitudes to germline modification, commonly known as gene editing or genome editing. Participants were recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the authors used a vignette study designed to test whether various metaphorical framings of germline modification would influence attitudes towards that new science and technology.

The results are a bit startling. The people they surveyed supported, on the main, genetic modification research. This was the first surprise. The second one was that their attitudes were not influenced by the framing of this type of still quite futuristic genetic modification. Metaphors, such as genetic modification, engineering, editing, hacking and surgery did, on the whole, not influence attitudes. Neither did, and that’s the third surprise, a risk framing (there were variations, though, with regard to various demographics, see article). (On the gene surgery metaphor, see my blog post here)

This disconfirmed the authors’ initial hypothesis that “the way information about new technology is presented influences people’s attitudes” (p. 2). They conclude: “We did not find that common metaphors used to describe genetic modification influenced people’s attitudes. From our data, there is no evidence that the media’s use of language influences people’s attitudes in ways that scientists might not intend” (p. 7).

The authors explore some possible reasons for this, such as that “this sample of participants with a relatively high degree of support for research in genetic modification may have been at ceiling such that they were insensitive to modulation by framing metaphors.”

The results puzzle me, as I always assumed metaphors would have some sort of impact on people’s attitudes. On to the second article.

Climate change consensus

The other paper that found that metaphors didn’t really have a communicative effect dealt with the issue of how best to communicate the climate change consensus. This paper was published in 2014, but I only recently stumbled upon it. Van den Linden et al. asked “to what extent can descriptive text, pie charts and metaphors influence people’s estimate of the scientific consensus? Second, do any of these three approaches have a comparative advantage in terms of their ability to improve public understanding?”

Their findings were, again, rather unexpected: “First, regardless of whether the message is in the form of a metaphor, descriptive text or pie chart, providing people with information about the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is effective in and of itself and can significantly increase people’s estimates of the scientific consensus […]. Second, as a communication device, the pie chart and descriptive text were most effective at conveying the scientific consensus on climate change” – not the metaphors! As I said in a tweet – a pie in your face is probably easier to understand than a metaphor in your brain…

Do metaphors matter?

Again, I was somewhat surprised, and, to be honest, disappointed about these results, especially since I had just read yet another paper exploring the potential of metaphors to shape people’s attitudes. Paul Thibodeau (a specialist in this field) et al. argued in a recent paper “that certain metaphors for the human-environment relationship can lead people to adopt a more nuanced and responsible conception of their place in the natural world.”

Where does this leave us? One or two studies obviously don’t make a summer, so to speak. But they perplex me. I’d love to hear from other metaphor analysts, especially those studying the function of metaphors in persuasion, about what they think about the studies and about the matter of whether metaphors matter or not in shaping understanding of and attitudes to scientific issues. Understanding these issues better is important for science communication.

Image: Pixabay

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Yesterday, feeling rather under the weather, I whiled away my time as a sniffling wreck by sitting on twitter and watching the world tweet by. I also diverted myself by watching the James Comey testimony in the US. Then I watched the exit polls for the General Election in the UK. Then I fell asleep and woke up to an unexpected world where ‘hope’ seems to be in the air – in various ways.

Both the events in the US and in the UK made me think about the semantics and pragmatics of hope. In the UK the noun was foregrounded, in the US verb; in the UK the meaning of hope was quite clear; in the US the pragmatics of hope was not so clear. In both cases language and politics are intertwined in interesting ways.

Hope – the US

In the US, a crucial part of Comey’s testimony rested on the interpretation of President Trump’s alleged utterance ‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go’, which Comey took as a ‘directive’, while others wanted to take it ‘literally’, as an expression of hope. As one headline said: “Comey’s testimony is all about hope”.

So, to get the meaning of the verb ‘to hope’ clear in my mind, I had a quick look in my old friend the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and my new friend Merriam Webster. They both link hope to expectation and desire. Merriam Webster provides somewhat shorter definitions, which I’ll quote here.

As in intransitive verb ‘hope’ means: “to cherish a desire with anticipation :  to want something to happen or be true: hopes for a promotion hoping for the best I hope so.” As a transitive verb it means: “to desire with expectation of obtainment or fulfillment: I hope she remembers. hopes to be invited” and “to expect with confidence :  trust Your mother is doing well, I hope.”

However, this overview of the semantics of ‘to hope’ doesn’t quite give us an insight into the pragmatics of ‘I hope [that]’ as a ‘speech act’. Pragmatics deals with how words and sentences are used by people and what effects they have on the world – this can include legal ones, as when an authorised person says ‘I hereby pronounce you husband and wife’. Words can functions as actions or deeds (See J. L. Austin: How to Do Things with Words, 1955).

In ordinary language, the phrase ‘I hope [that]’ can express an expectation, but it can also be used, for example, to soften the expression of a command. This is similar to when one says ‘can you pass me the salt?’. When using that phrase one doesn’t ask whether somebody has the ability to pass the salt; one is trying to be polite…. Similarly when I tell my child ‘I hope you have finished your homework’, I expect and desire that this has in fact been done.

But, of course, language is always ambiguous to a certain degree and it is not possible to gain clear insights into the intentions of a speaker by just looking at his or her utterance. You need context, intonation etc. to interpret an utterance. Such an interpretation is always quite subjective and culture-specific – and can also be wrong.

In Comey’s case, his own interpretation of ‘I hope …’ as ‘directive’  was embedded in cultural and linguistic knowledge, as the following exchange demonstrates – summarised in Vanity Fair:

“Do you take that as a directive?” [Sen. Angus] King asked Comey of Trump’s question.
“Yes, yes,” Comey replied. “It rings in my ears as kind of ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ ”
“I was just going to quote that,” King replied.
The line is a reference to King Henry II, who was often at odds with Becket and angrily floated the idea that someone should do away with the “meddlesome priest,” a line that basically operated as a death sentence and inspired his followers to kill Becket.”
Most people today likely remember the line from the 1964 drama Becket, starring Richard Burton as the ill-fated religious figure, and Peter O’Toole as the belligerent monarch. The movie earned 12 Oscar nominations, and earned writer Edward Anhalt a statuette for best screenplay. For Comey, the reference earned a handful of laughs from anxious politicians—and a new wave of Google searches for “meddlesome priests.” (For more info see here)

It’s not yet clear how the pragmatics of hope will play out in the US; so lets go over to the semantics and pragmatics of hope here in the UK.

Hope – the UK

When I woke up this morning I saw that Jeremy Corbyn attributes the massive swing towards the Labour party in the General Elections to the message of hope that he was able to convey. He stated that ‘People voted for hope‘. This assessment was echoed by many people. George Monbiot, for example, wrote an article for The Guardian entitled “I’ve never voted with hope before. Jeremy Corbyn has changed that”.

In this case the semantic constituents of hope, namely expectation and desire (of a better world), have performed a desired rhetorical and political function – to make people vote in a certain way. As John Locke said in his 1689 Essay concerning Human Understanding: “Hope is that pleasure in the Mind, which every one finds in himself, upon the thought of a probable future enjoyment of a thing which is apt to delight him.”

So hope is in the air. We’ll have to see how things develop – whether hope means hope. We’ll also have to see how the politics of language use plays out both here in the UK and even more so perhaps over in the US.

PS an interesting reflection on implicature – a staple of pragmatics – here

Image: Pixabay

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With political and moral life here on earth being in utter turmoil, images of/from Jupiter beamed down to our little planet by the Juno space probe have recently kept me sane (as far as that’s possible). They brought with them glimpses of beauty and moments of wistfulness.

A year or so ago, I wrote a blog post about Juno, the space probe, and Jupiter, the planet, when Juno was approaching Jupiter. There you can find some more info on the mission. In this post I just wanted to marvel at some of the images which Juno managed to beam down to us. While doing this, I found something out about these pictures that I didn’t know! (And the scientists pouring over them found out that there is lots they don’t know about Jupiter!)

Marbled paper, wallpaper and famous paintings

First I saw this image of Jupiter’s cloud tops (on twitter). It reminded me of a special type of paper used in old books! In the case of Jupiter the marbling occurs naturally but I wonder whether there is some overlap in the physical and chemical processes involved. If you want to know more about the extremely interesting culture and science of marbling, read on here.

The subtitle for this marvellous marbling image says: “This enhanced color view of Jupiter’s cloud tops was processed by citizen scientist Bjorn Jonsson using data from the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The image highlights a massive counterclockwise rotating storm that appears as a white oval in the gas giant’s southern hemisphere.”(bold added) Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Bjorn Jonsson 

When initially searching for this image in order to put in this post, I also found another one (or rather, it seems, the same, but rendered differently). I came across it in a blog post that asked whether people associated it with Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, or, indeed, cotton candy.

The subtitle to this image says: “The swirling clouds on Jupiter, shown in an image captured by the JunoCam instrument on the Juno spacecraft, and processed by citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko.” (bold added) Credit: Roman Tkachenko/NASA

From these sub-titles and from the blog post in which this last image was used, I learned that these images are produced by citizen scientists, or rather, as I’d call them citizen science-artists. The blog post explains: “The raw images that JunoCam sends back to Earth usually don’t look like much, but they contain information that can be extracted with imaging processing and color correcting. The resulting images can highlight particular features in the cloud tops, or re-create what the planet might look like to human eyes up close. Most of the work that has gone into processing the JunoCam images has been done by citizen scientists. The JunoCam team posts the raw image files online, and anyone can take them, process them and post the final result on the JunoCam website. Some users do extreme processing, creating amazing works of art, while others work on the images in such a way as to reveal new features and assist in the pursuit of knowledge about this planet.”

When searching for the first image, I also found yet another image called “Jupiter wallpaper”

The description below this image says (I have left out paragraphs): “When team members from NASA’s Juno mission invited the public to process JunoCam images, they did not anticipate that they would receive back such beautiful, creative expressions of art. The oranges and grayed-out regions of blue-green in this tiled and color-enhanced image resemble a color scheme much like Romantic era paintings, but more abstract. The lack of discreet objects to focus on allows the mind to seek familiar Earthly shapes, and the brightest spots seem to draw the eye. Eric Jorgensen created this Jovian artwork with a JunoCam image taken when the spacecraft was at an altitude of 11,100 miles (17,800 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloudtops on Dec. 11, 2016 at 9:22 a.m. PT (12:22 p.m. ET).” (bold added)

I hadn’t realised how much citizen-science art goes into the creation of these images! Popular images of galaxies beamed down by the Hubble space telescope are usually artistically rendered by NASA scientists, as far as I know. They have been studied for the way they get their colouring inspirations from Romantic paintings, for example. This type of analysis should also be carried out for these citizen-science-artists. One might even want to ask them about where they get their inspiration from!

Those interested in this topic can read Elizabeth Kessler’s book Picturing the Cosmos or Coloring the Universe by Travis Rector, Kimberly Arcand, and Megan Watzke.

A glittering geode and a song

After marvelling at these marbling images, I then saw in image of Jupiter’s south pole that was truly stunning and quite different. It reminded me of the geodes I collected with my father many years ago. These “are spherical rocks that contain hollow cavities lined with crystals. The name geode comes from the Greek word Geoides, which means ‘earthlike.'” For me, there is nothing earth-like about this one though (apart from its shape); but it’s certainly a jewel.

The subtitle for this image reads: “This image shows Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). The oval features are cyclones, up to 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in diameter. Multiple images taken with the JunoCam instrument on three separate orbits were combined to show all areas in daylight, enhanced color, and stereographic projection.” Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles (I am not totally sure who Betsy Asher Hall and Gervasio Robles are, but a related image of the south pole was created by citizen scientist Gabriel Fiset.)

This image also reminded me of some verses of the song “Starry, starry night”, namely: “Starry, starry night; Flaming flowers that brightly blaze; Swirling clouds and violet haze”. Other people may have other associations, of course. A “blue marble, shimmering with swirling gold sand“, perhaps…

Is that Orion that I see before me?

The last image I came across before drafting this post was of Orion, my favourite constellation, but seen from a totally different angle, namely, through the ring of Jupiter – I could see Orion from another world!

The description explains: “As NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew through the narrow gap between Jupiter’s radiation belts and the planet during its first science flyby, Perijove 1, on August 27, 2016, the Stellar Reference Unit (SRU-1) star camera collected the first image of Jupiter’s ring taken from the inside looking out. The bright bands in the center of the image are the main ring of Jupiter’s ring system. While taking the ring image, the SRU was viewing the constellation Orion. The bright star above the main ring is Betelgeuse, and Orion’s belt can be seen in the lower right.” Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI

All this brought to mind (yet again) the oft-quoted passage from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” I just wish that more people would make that connection between the starry heavens above them, which we can now view in every-increasing detail, and the moral law within them, of which we are losing sight.

Science, art and citizens

It is interesting that these images the Juno gave us of Jupiter are so other-worldly, but at the same time we feel so at home in them. This is partly because we make these images in our image. We render the unfamiliar familiar by seeing the images of the starry heavens above us through the lenses of art and culture. These images are not just marvels of science and technology. They are also products of our imagination. This imagination, which feeds art and science alike, is shared by scientists and citizens and, of course, citizen scientists/artists. It should be shared as widely as possible among us citizens of the world.

Public participation in the Juno mission is actively encouraged. As Calla Cofield at Space.com points out: “The JunoCam project not only lets citizen scientists process Juno’s raw data and create amazing images, but also welcomes citizens to vote on which features JunoCam should photograph during each flyby.” And “The creators of the JunoCam outreach program wanted to ‘involve the public in every aspect of what an imaging team would ordinarily be doing,’ according to Candy Hansen, a Juno co-investigator and head of the JunoCam team.” Go to the JunoCam website for further information- participate, create, share and communicate!

Featured image: Wikimedia commons

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On Monday this week (22 May, 2017) our Synthetic Biology Research Centre symposium on metaphors, synthetic biology and responsibility took place at the East Midlands Conference Centre at the University of Nottingham. The weather was marvellous and showed off University Park in all is spring glory. We started with a pre-conference dinner which, in a way, set the tone for the symposium: conviviality and hospitality. The symposium was organised by Carmen McLeod and Louise Dynes and I am extremely grateful for their work and enthusiasm. Thanks go also to Aleksandra Stelmach (Nottingham) and Barbara Ribeiro (Manchester) for helping to chair sessions and to Les Levidov (Open University) for asking thought-provoking questions.

Throughout the conference, people from all backgrounds across the natural and social sciences, arts and humanities spectrum happily mingled and conversed with one another. Most importantly though, they were hospitable to each other’s ideas and approaches. They listened, learned and laughed.

Participants

Speakers and participants came from towns across the UK (Nottingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Edinburgh, Lancaster, London), from countries across Europe (the UK, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands) and even from the US. One speaker attended the conference virtually, while at the same time being anesthetised for a little operation. As he said in the audio-file he sent us, this was his first conference paper given while being unconscious.

Participants work in a variety of disciplines, fields and endeavours, such as microbiology, genetics and genomics, synthetic biology, Science and Technology Studies, history of science, philosophy, linguistics, science and health communication, the arts… – sometimes in several of these simultaneously.

Themes

Everybody contributed to the exploration of the interrelations between metaphors/language, synthetic biology and responsibility. Many explored the dangers and pitfalls of metaphors; some defended their usefulness for ‘energising’ science and society and the media. Some managed to speak, quite enthusiastically, two languages at the same time, for example that of yeast science and that of societal metaphor analysis – something I myself can only aspire to (but never achieve!). Quite a few delved into the history of synthetic biology and the history of science to illuminate the philosophical and linguistic roots of present-day scientific thinking and working. We heard about Loeb, Leduc, Oparin, Haldane, Schrödinger and many more, as well as about developments ranging from prebiotic chemistry to metabolic networks and beyond.

During the conference, I tried to tweet some of what the speakers said (but I am not really overly good at that) and captured these then in this storify account.

Jon Turney (Bristol), a science writer, provided ‘workbench’ intuitions into what it means to ‘do’ science writing with metaphors, talking in particular about his current assignment – to write a short overview of neuroscience. We got great insights into the historical layers of metaphors that have been used to talk about the brain, from a piano to a computer, about how far science writers can innovate responsibly when it comes to metaphors, given time and space constraint, and much more. Juli Peretó (Valencia), Joachim Boldt (Freiburg) and Martin Döring (Hamburg) explored foundational metaphors for synthetic biology, namely engineering and machine metaphors, from a history of science, a philosophical/ethical, and a linguistic/media point of view.

There were some interesting cross-overs, especially when Juli talked about how scientists tried to avoid using the phrase ‘creating life in a test-tube’ and how this attempt at avoiding hype misfired when US President Lyndon B. Johnson veered away from the script and announced that some geniuses at Stanford University had ‘created life in a test-tube’! Control over metaphors is as difficult as control over life, even back in 1967.

From Jon’s exploration of ‘plagiarising’ metaphors in science writing (an unavoidable necessity), we veered into the plagiarising of life with Hub Zwart’s (Nijmwegen) talk. Hub also explored the way that life was ‘literated’ in all sorts of endeavours to crack and write life’s alphabets, before being almost literally ob-literated in this enterprise. Hub also reflected on the implications of the metaphor of ‘nature as a living laboratory’ in the context of actual laboratory practices. Erika Szymanski (Edinburgh) provided deep insights into how linguistic practices, including metaphorical ones, constitute and define not only our knowledge of yeast but (synthetic) yeast itself (in this case Saccharomyces cerevisiae 2.0 – with 2.0 itself being a metaphor) – and of course this entails certain responsibilities to the language used to ‘organise’ this synthetic organism.

One theme that began to run through the conference was that of agency and, more importantly, loss of agency – a topic that directly links up with responsibility, with scientists taking responsibility, discussing responsibility with various publics and, perhaps, abdicating responsibility to the market or automation, or even rejecting the imposition of additional responsibilities. While Leah Ceccarelli (Seattle) explored this topic through an in-depth linguistic analysis of two seminal ‘letters’ on recombinant DNA and genome editing research, written in 1974 and 2015, respectively, Carmen McLeod (Nottingham – soon Oxford), Stevienna de Saille (Sheffield) and I encountered reflections on the loss of agency in our analysis of transcripts of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshops and the photos we took of the metaphorical Lego models participants built.

Metaphors, the imperfection of language and responsibility

After a panel discussion dissecting some of the themes of the symposium, and adding news ones (Steven Burgess/Cambridge, Darren Nesbeth/UCL, Rob Meckin/Manchester, and myself), Hub said something rather profound which made me think. We always use metaphors that are imperfect. Take for example the word ‘cell’ used for the first time by Robert Hooke in the 17^th century (Micrographia, 1665). Hooke conceptualised the biological entities he saw under his microscope as cells in a monastery. Such cells are rather empty and bare and impermeable, something that biological cells as we know them now surely aren’t. But still, we all now work and think with the word ‘cell’. Without it we’d be rather lost.

Earlier on in the symposium, Darren had talked about the much derided but fundamental term ‘chassis’ used in synthetic biology. Here again we find that the metaphor works but also doesn’t work at the same time. Molecular biologists use the term almost unconsciously. However, when you think about it, a biological ‘chassis’, like a biological cell, is not just an (empty) frame, structure or casing. It is much more. By the way, when looking up the word ‘chassis’ just now, I also found the words ‘skeleton’ and ‘body’ used as synonyms – biological words a man-made structural framework!

All this demonstrates that metaphors are never perfect. And this is good, rather than bad. This makes them changeable, flexible, adaptive – they can evolve! The imperfection of language and metaphors is nothing to be afraid of, avoided or repaired. Rather, without it language and knowledge could not develop and communication could not happen. Imperfection is a necessary condition for the evolution of thought and language (see Darmesteter, 1887).

Responsibility, care and control

This has implications for responsibility. As language is never a perfect transmitter of science, knowledge, thought, and, heaven forbid, truth, we have to be careful in how we use it. We have to take care of it. We should think about how we use our metaphors (for conveying a complex idea, for reducing the complexity of a thought, for education or entertainment), for what audience or community we use it (some people understand the metaphor or ‘refactoring the genome’, some don’t), in what medium we use it (a scientific article, a blog, a tweet), in what cultural and geographical context we use it, and what impact this might have.

However, as soon as we ‘commit’ a metaphor (to use Jon’s expression), we actually lose control of it. Language and metaphors are ‘social facts’, to use the words of the sociologist Emile Durkheim and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. They are the products of individual actions but beyond individuals’ (intentional) control (see Keller, 1994). In this they are similar to innovations and technologies.

We should also keep in mind that, as the science writer Tim Radford memorably said in ‘A workbench view of science communication and metaphor’, “in the jostling and sometimes over-excited stampede to claim access to the space and time available in serious news in newspapers and broadcasting [and, I’d add, access to funding and generating income and impact, BN] – subtle and complex ideas tend to get trampled or flattened, metaphors get mixed and journalists [and, I’d add scientists, BN] get carried away.”

Therein lies a lesson for those pushing the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) agenda and extolling the virtues of anticipating, reflecting, engaging and acting (AREA). There is only so much control a researcher or scientist has over the science/innovation process as well as the public engagement process. Increasingly, in the ‘accelerated academy’, subtle and complex ideas tend to get trampled and flattened, just as much as the researchers who have them and communicate them. Agency gets lost.

Caring for science and metaphors

So, to get back to caring rather than the dream of control. We have to care for the language and metaphors we use, but we can only take limited responsibility for how they will resonate in various contexts and we can’t really anticipate how others will use and change them. This imperfection of language was once seen as a hindrance to science. So, I’ll end on a historical note:

Samuel Parker, one of the early members of the Royal Society, expressed a real disdain for metaphors when he wrote in 1666 that they are (metaphorically speaking!): “wanton and luxuriant fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason”. Furthermore they “do not only defile it by unchast and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things impregnate the mind with nothing but Ayerie and Subventaneous Phantasmes.” John Locke put it more clearly in 1690, when he wrote: “If we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions and thereby mislead the judgement; and so indeed are perfect cheats.” (for more nuanced discussion of all this, see Mouton, 2010)

17^th-century scientists were asked to take responsibility for the language they used. This was an almost impossible task, given that language is and will always be, an unruly beast.  Without acknowledging the intrinsic imperfection of language, that responsibility becomes just mere rhetoric. However, once we acknowledge this, raising awareness of the power of metaphors is not a bad thing. And some, like Brendon Larson and Christoph Kueffer have even tried to establish some “guidelines for the responsible use of metaphors in science writing and communication”, which might be worth reading.

In modern times, scientists have not been asked to control the language they use. Instead they have been asked to take responsibility for how science is used, develops and impacts the world. This too is a rather impossible task, given that scientists have only limited control over the societal context in which science happens and innovation unfolds. Without acknowledging such intrinsic limitations to responsibility, RRI becomes mere rhetoric.

This does not mean that we should not care about science and language. But we have to be given time and space to do this, and there have to be realistic expectations about what can be achieved or not.

Next steps

We will be publishing a special thematic issue of the journal Life Sciences, Society and Policy (edited by Hub Zwart and Ruth Chadwick) entitled “Synthetic biology: How the use of metaphors impacts on science, policy and responsible research”. The guest editors will be Carmen McLeod and myself. We have written our editorial (i.e. an overview of the topic) and this is just being reviewed. It will be published first, followed by articles from the conference as and when they are ready. The open access issue will also be open to contributions, responses and reflections from others who were not present at the symposium. We will soon post more info about the whole process and product!

Image: Wikimedia Commons: Details from Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights (1560), image used in Hub Zwart’s presentation.

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For the first time in my life I participated in ‘Pint of Science’ this year. This festival of science engagement takes place on three days in May in pubs all around the globe, including 26 cities in the UK, such as Nottingham. Over a drink, scientists present and discuss their latest research and findings and then chat with people. There are also opportunities to participate in quizzes and games.

This year the Pint of Science events covered the following topics:

• Mind – neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry
• Atoms to Galaxies – physics, chemistry, maths, astronomy
• Our Body – medicine, human biology, health
• Planet Earth – geosciences, plant sciences, zoology
• Tech Me Out – biotechnology, robotics, computer
• Our Society – law, history, politics, policy, language
• Creative Reactions – art and science come together

My presentation was part of the ‘Our society’ strand. Here in Nottingham the topic for the evening was ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ethic’.

I talked about the way that scientists and journalists talk about genomics and synthetic biology and I tried to make the point that we should not only think about the ethical implications of the science we do but also about the ethical implications of how we communicate science, indeed frame it. In the social sciences framing refers to a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, group and societies, organise, perceive, and communicate about reality, including science. (We’ll discuss this topic much more in depth at our symposium on Monday, 22 May, 2017)

The other two talks of the evening were really interesting: one, by Neil Sinclair, dealt with ethical expertise and the other, by Matt Vassey, dealt with 3D bioprinting.

Creative Reactions

By chance, I also became part of ‘Creative Reactions’. Creative Reactions is a collaboration between artists and Pint of Science scientists to produce artworks related to the science presented at the pubs. In 2017 Creative Reactions was hosted in Cambridge, London, Bristol, Glasgow, York, and of course, Nottingham.

I was paired up with the local artist Kelly Ann Holmes (whose self-appointed title is ‘leading beer can artist’ – and rightly so). Kelly Ann produced a wonderful artwork entitled “Pandoranomics” which was exhibited at the Nottingham Contemporary together with many other fantastic works of art/science.

Kelly Ann is a self-taught, mixed media artist specialising in the use of aluminium cans. She draws inspiration from pop art and popular cultural alongside her own life experiences.

My talk dealt with the ways in which we make sense of the world in everyday life and in science (through framing, images, metaphors). Kelly Ann managed to make sense of (and frame!) what I tried to say and turned it into art!

Kelly Ann and I met several times over lunch or coffee and discussed how scientific advances, for example in synthetic biology, are represented in the media, but also by scientists themselves. We talked about how such representations can evoke hopes (see: ‘together we can change the world’) or fears and can make promises of near-future breakthroughs or disasters. There is also, quite often, hype (see: the Coca Cola frame).

We also chatted about the way metaphors, images and clichés are used in this process of sense-making. When people discuss advances in biotechnology they often talk about Brave New World for example or Opening Pandora’s Box – sometimes forgetting to mention that at the bottom of the mythological box lies ‘hope’. However, as Kelly Ann tried to show in her artwork, hope can be sold in various ways to the public; there can also be false hope of magic cures for example. That’s why, around the word ‘HOPE’, she pasted the words: ‘The urge to cure is a false front for the urge to rule’.

As my talk was about ‘framing’, Kelly Ann tried to represent this in her artwork and managed to salvage an old TV ‘frame’. That was great. But it turned out that the TV set was very very heavy. So it took quite a lot of work to hollow it out, cut in in half and use it. And still, the end-result was too heavy to hang on a wall. So the artwork was put on a table. (My photo above doesn’t quite do justice to the 3D-ness of it all)

Lots of people were interested in this piece of art, but one person in particular fell in love with it. This was Paul Fodor, one of the organisers of Pint of Science and a PhD student doing cancer research here at the University of Nottingham. At the end of the evening Kelly Ann gave him ‘Pandoranomics’, and we hope that he was able to carry it home safely. We are both pleased it has found a good home!!

I thoroughly enjoyed both the Pint of Science evening and the Creative Reactions experience and exhibition and I’d like to thank all the PhD students here at the University of Nottingham, especially Elizabeth Radley, Veronika Metzler, Francesco Tarantini and Matharu Gurdip who made Pint of Science and Creative Reactions happen. They are great!!! Thanks also for the support from the Pint of Science organisation and to all those who donated money to Creative Reactions and enabled me to meet Kelly Ann.

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This is a post by Carmen McLeod who participated in a workshop held at the University of Oxford  on 3/4 May 2017 entitled Making Microbes Public. She wrote the original post for the blog of the Interdisciplinary Microbiome Project and it has been reposted here with permission. Carmen is a social anthropologist currently based in the Nottingham Synthetic Biology Research Centre (before that she was part of our Making Science Public programme!). She is moving to the University of Oxford in June 2017 to work on the Good Germs/Bad Germs project and the Oxford Interdisciplinary Microbiome Project (IMP). I am really looking forward to collaborating with the people involved in this project and visiting Carmen in Oxford!

***

Stories about the human microbiome are increasingly being reported in the media and many people –  myself included – are fascinated by the relationship between humans and the microscopic ‘bugs’ that live on, in, and around us. I was part of a workshop last week, where a group of interdisciplinary scholars explored this relationship under the theme of ‘Making Microbes Public’.

The workshop began with an afternoon keynote presentation from microbiologist Anne Madden, who was fresh from delivering a TED talk in Vancouver on ‘bugs and bodies’. Anne gave us a frontline view of the work of scientists working with microbes and especially those who closely collaborate with industry partners. Anne describes herself as a ‘microbe wrangler’ and she focusses on how to harness the positive attributes of microbes and apply these in practical ways that will benefit humans.

The next day, we started with a session on ‘Microbes in Society’, and presentations from three anthropologists. Alex Nading began by introducing us to the bureaucratic routines that are part of the day-to-day biopolitics of food sanitation in Nicaragua. He provided a detailed and nuanced account of the interactions between bureaucrats and citizens that occurs during the food handling certification process. Food workers must undergo a blood test and provide a stool sample for analysis and this process is caught up in different layers of informal cultural practices and formal legal requirements. Alex’s narrative of the Nicaraguan public hygiene system reveals how social relations, understandings about microbes, and bureaucracy become intertwined.

Another anthropologist, Amber Benezra, took us on a fascinating journey which linked the work of scientists in North America to the daily life of poorer people living in Dhaka. This presentation revealed there is a problem when microbial science focusses on a ‘technological fix’ such as probiotics for malnutrition, when infrastructure problems such as open drains and other health sanitation issues also need to be addressed. It seems that by working closely with scientists, anthropologists can help resolve some of the disconnections between the laboratory and the realities of everyday life problems. But Amber also raised the question of who holds scientists to account especially when biological science aims to solve problems which are beyond the scope of ‘the biological’.

The third presentation, was from Eben Kirksey who introduced us to bacteria called wolbachia.  This is an extremely common parasitic species that lives in insects. This species can reorganise the bodies of their hosts at the microbial level, including changing the sex of their hosts. Interestingly, the ubiquitous and sheer numbers of wolbachia in the world, challenges the notion of heteronormative sex.  Eben left us to consider a potential future where polyamorous and promiscuous bacteria like wombachia could survive well beyond human life.

The second session of the day was called ‘Doing Microbiology with Citizens’. This began with Jamie Lorimer and Tim Hodgetts outlining their research on the Good Germs/Bad Germs project. They have been exploring the domestic microbiome through the development of a participatory approach to microbiology. This project involves households in Oxford, going on a ‘kitchen safari’, where participants and the researchers have worked together to design experiments on kitchen microbiomes. Findings from the research suggest it is challenging to move beyond thinking about microbes as pathogens. There has also been positive feedback from some participants who have felt empowered by their involvement in the research design and data collection.

Claire Waterton then provided an overview of her research on the impact of algae (cyanobacteria) blooms on a Lake District community. This interdisciplinary project is tracing the relationship between the microbial organisms who live in the lake and the human residents living alongside it. We heard about how it was difficult to assign blame for the cause of the algae blooms, due to the complex natural and human systems that are in the area. The project set up a collective which enabled different stakeholders’ viewpoints to be incorporated into a complex, and sometimes uncomfortable, debate about community life on the lake.

The next presentation, from social and cultural geographer Emma Roe, described her work engaging health professionals in hand hygiene practices. This research used experimental methods to map the movement of microbes in a hospital setting, including asking two nurses to put UV powder on their gloves and then carry out some routine activities in a ‘mock ward’.  Under UV light, all the places that were touched could be mapped. And it turned out that in a 4 minute bed chance, there are over 200 moments of touch! Emma’s research team have produced a video which encourages health professionals to ‘keep washing, keep caring’.

The final presentation before lunch included a gastronomical experience, where we were able to taste a number of fermented yeast products. Josh Evans, who will be coming to Oxford in the fall to commence his doctoral studies, talked about the relationship we have with microbes through food. He explained how fermentation can be understood as a collaboration between humans and microbes. Josh has been working at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen where some ‘convivial experiments’ relating to fermentation techniques are taking place between chefs and scientists (and microbes!) We were given two liquids to taste as well as a teaspoon of dark paste. Although some of us were a bit unsure about tasting these concoctions, they turned out to be rather interesting. (I especially liked the elder vinegar made from fermented elder berries).

After feeding ourselves (and our microbes) at lunch, we had an afternoon of presentations relating to aesthetic interactions between humans and microbes, and science and art, called ‘Microbial Sense-making’. Microbiologist Simon Park explained his interest in ‘microgeography’ which involves using a portable microscope to examine traces left behind of microbial and human interactions within urban environments. Simon has also worked with several artists, such as JoWOnder and Sarah Roberts, to produce microbial art. These artworks incorporate the activities of live bacteria into their creation.

Simon and artist Sarah Craske were then interviewed by Charlotte Sleigh to give us a window of understanding into the process behind producing a series of pieces called Metamorphoses. This intriguing project involved taking an antique (18thC) book and applying a range of scientific and artistic techniques to it. The interview revealed how exciting and truly interdisciplinary this type of project can be. It also revealed some anxieties during the creative process, such as deciding whether to move from non-destructive to destructive analysis of the book. The project also raised questions about the agency of bacteria, and also thinking about whether we can have an ‘ethical relationship’ with microbes.

The final presentation of the workshop was from Adam Bencard, who is a curator at the Copenhagen Medical Museum. Adam provided us with an overview of the preparations that went into a new exhibition called ‘Mind the Gut’ which considers the link between the gut microbiome and the mind. This exhibition has developed through an ‘experiment in co-curation’, involving a mix of artists and scientists, which involved a lengthy planning process over many months. The exhibition itself follows an untraditional format where different rooms are based around ‘action symbols’ or themes that reflect gut/brain relationships at different times. One of the aims of the exhibition is to display the body as ‘messy’ and complex, and to also demonstrate how science itself is an unfinished project. The exhibition will run for at least 3-4 years and is a must see for anyone travelling to Copenhagen!

Image: Bacteria (free download)

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In this post, I want to return to a topic that started to fascinate me in 2007, namely the microbiome. I published an article (with Iina Hellsten) about the metaphors used to make the microbiome public, but then didn’t do any further research on the topic, apart from writing a blog post stimulated by Jon Turney’s 2015 book I, Superorganism. I recently noticed that over the last few years the microbiome has attracted renewed attention and, indeed, inspired another important book by Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes. So, I thought it would be worth looking again at the origins and spread of this increasing interest in microbes and us. See also the previous post by Nicholas Staropoli.

The Microbiome Project

In the year 2000, scientists published a first draft of the human genome. In 2003 the Human Genome Project, which had begun in 1990, was completed and the human genome was fully sequenced. In 2001 two microbiologists, David Relman and Stanley Falkow, set out their vision for a second human genome project, the ‘human biome project’.

Relman and Falkow pointed out that: “The human body is host to a myriad of microorganisms. We are still woefully ignorant of the composition and variability of our endogenous microflora. Many of these microorganisms depend on humans for their survival, and yet we still do not fully appreciate to what extent human life is dependent on its microflora. In the spirit of the recent ‘human genome project’ and in the hopes of capturing the imagination of the broad scientific community, it is time to embark on a comprehensive genomic inventory of the large portion of cellular life within the human body that has been ignored so far, the endogenous microflora. […] The human biome is as much an unexplored frontier as the collection of life found at deep-sea thermal vents, if not more so.” (2001: 208)

“The concept of the human microbiome was first suggested by Joshua Lederberg, who coined the term ‘microbiome, to signify the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share our body space’ (Lederberg and McCray 2001)” (See NIH microbiome project article, 2009).

So, 2001 was the year that the microbiome became a topic for research.

In 2007, the US National Institutes for Health (NIH) launched the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) (a meta-genomics project), stating that “The Microbiome is the full collection of microbes (bacteria, fungi, viruses, etc.) that naturally exist within the human body. Initiatives in this area would focus on developing a deeper understanding of these communities of microbes in order to determine how they affect human health”. In 2008, the International Human Microbiome Consortium was launched “with the mission of generating resources that would enable the comprehensive characterization of the human microbiome and analysis of its role in human health and disease.” (HMP)

At that time a blogger in a (no longer available) post asked “what field might strike the popular consciousness in the coming years. Could it be that it will be the realization that we are all ‘superorganisms’ […] and that our health does not only depend on our personal genome […] and our environment, but also on the extended genome provided by our very private microbiome?”

At first, this realisation didn’t seem happen and the microbiome didn’t really enter ‘popular consciousness’. However, in the last few years it has and the ‘microbiome’ has become a hot topic in science and in the popular media.

The multiple meanings of ‘microbiome’

Before I demonstrate just how popular the microbiome has become, I want to point out that the word ‘microbiome’ has multiple meanings (you can learn more about this here). There are at least two dominant meanings which have emerged over the last two hundred years or so. Formerly, the main meaning was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: “A population of microorganisms inhabiting a specific environment; a microbial community or ecosystem, now esp. that of the body”. This use is attested in the OED from 1952 onwards (but probably goes back much further). Latterly, the main meaning has become “The collective genomes of all the microorganisms inhabiting a specific environment, esp. that of the body”. This usage is attested in the OED from 2001 onwards and attributed to Lederberg.

The microbiome goes viral

I had looked at early discussions of the microbiome in the news, shortly after the HMP had started. But I hadn’t really checked up on the microbiome’s fate in science and the media since 2008. So, I was surprised when I created various graphs which demonstrated how much the microbiome has risen to prominence, both in science and the media.

Some observers other than me had the same impression. One said: “Over the past decade, research into the microbial organisms that live in and on human beings has exploded dramatically.” Another even talked about a “Cambrian explosion“.

Science

Let’s have a closer look at that explosion. To do that I have used Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature (thanks Barbara Ribeiro for pointing me to Scopus analytics).

The following graph shows how scientific interest in the microbiome gradually grew after 2002 and then picked up speed around 2012.

In 2002 two seminal papers were published to which I shall come below in the media section, and in 2012 The Human Microbiome Project Consortium published two ‘milestone’ papers in Nature and PLOS. Overall, 12,419 scientific papers on the microbiome have been published up to now (according to Scopus, checked on 5 May, 2017). They appeared in the following journals, with Frontiers in Microbiology playing an important role in the recent wave of publications.

The top three institutions involved in microbiome research are Harvard Medical School, University of California, San Diego and VA Medical Center.

They are mostly situated in the United States, the UK, Canada, Germany and China.

Some of the most prolific authors are Rob Knight (paediatrics and computer science), John F. Cryan (anatomy and neuroscience) and Curtis Huttenhower (computational biology and bioinformatics) – with others on a more or less equal footing:

The subject areas that focus most on microbiome research are medicine, biochemistry, immunology and microbiology, and agriculture and biological sciences. There are 67 articles from the Social Sciences and 56 from the Arts and Humanities (as compared to 7971 from medicine).

Media

What about the media, at least the English language ones? The following graph, counting all articles produced by English speaking news (newspapers, some online sources, magazines etc) and captured by Lexis Nexis, mirrors the rise in scientific interest.

The first article that uses the word ‘microbiome’ was published on 1 April 2003 and was entitled “Aliens Inside us: A (Mostly Friendly) Bacterial Nation” (by James Gorman for The New York Times).

One paragraph is quite significant, as it started a myth that has been dispelled only recently, namely that a human being has 10 times as many bacteria as human cells: “There is a world within each of us, a living, evolving ecological system of 500 to 1,000 species of microbes, a ‘bacterial nation’ in the words of Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. In fact, by numbers of cells, a human being has 10 times as many bacteria as human cells. The bacterial cells are much smaller, which is why we do not look like an overgrown petri dish.”

The article was triggered by a paper in Science and a commentary entitled ‘Honor thy symbionts” (by Dr. Gordon, Dr. Jian Xu and others) which suggests that “the powerful techniques of genomic research are providing new ways to investigate the lives of these bacterial cells. In separate reports, scientists describe the genomes of two different, common bacteria. One is Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, a friendly symbiont; the other is a traitorous drug-resistant variant of Enterococcus faecalis, an otherwise mild-mannered garden-variety citizen of the gastrointestinal consortium.”

He introduces the word ‘microbiome’ in the following way: “The possibilities of genomic research into the bacteria of the gut are almost unlimited. Dr. Gordon suggested that one could think of the collected genomes of the bacterial species as a single unit, a microbiome. It would be similar in size to the human genome on the basis of the amount of raw DNA. But it would be much larger, 100 times as large, in terms of actual genes — DNA sequences that code for proteins.”

Jeffrey I. Gordon became, for a while, one of the most prolific metaphor users in the press coverage overall. However, two more articles explored this topic in 2003, one of them written by Lederberg and entitled “We must find a new inner peace” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin, 27 April, 2003).

Gordon framed bacteria metaphorically as communities — either a nation’ or an alien race, while Lederberg waged war against the war metaphor according to which bacteria are our enemies. Instead, Lederberg wanted to make peace with bacteria, that is, between human and bacterial communities.

Media, marketing and confusion

Then, in 2012, the two landmarks papers mentioned above were published and media interest picked up steadily after that with a current peak in 2016. Now the microbiome (like synthetic biology) meets industry, marketing and (like epigenetics) media confusion.

So, as Matthew Niederhuber points out on blog hosted by Harvard University: “There is promising evidence that the microbiome is intimately involved in human health, including brain function and behavior. But there is equally clear evidence that media coverage walks far ahead of the scientific work it intends to report, too often condensing preliminary, correlative and complex data into pat headlines. As a result, the public impression of microbiotic research differs from the present-day reality, creating the serious risk that pre/probiotics will be marketed as miracle cures for a laundry list of physical and psychological ailments under a pseudo-academic purview. The likely end result is the degradation of public trust in the integrity and validity of scientific research.”

I would be great, if somebody had the time to study changes in metaphors and framing of the microbiome over time from 2007 to 2017, as well as shift in topics from the gut to the brain, from probiotics to faecal microbial transplants and beyond, while also keeping an eye on the fluctuating relationship between hype and reality.

Image: Flickr: Tony Webster – uBiome – Microbiome Sequencing Gut Bacteria Sample Kit

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