Calibrating Myself through Science Memoirs

Gene Machine - Venki Ramakrishnan's story of rivalry in ribosome chemistry

Earlier in my journey of getting into physics research part-time, I used to think that if I wasn’t spending time doing ‘hard work’ - like the things below

• talking to my supervisor

• choosing problems

• solving problems,

• coding

• physical experiments

• computational experiments,

• doing math or

• writing up results

then I was doing something suboptimal in pursuit of physics research. These things that I’ve listed above feel like ‘hard doing’ actions. They’re part of the all-important schlep - like chopping logs to make a house. I think all of those things above feel difficult. Their difficulty (hard things mean you have edge) combined with the feeling of getting a tangible output (results or discussion) makes me feel like that these actions are basically the exclusive set of best possible decisions you can take when deciding what to do with your day.

As relatively new to physics research, I still think that these types of hardcore activities are the best way to spend most of my time. Because that’s what research involves.

But I also think that there are some softer, but really valuable ways to enhance my experience overall. These are the types of things that I would aim to do maybe five percent of the time. Like when I’m tired, or if my brain is fried. One obvious way is improving the organisation of my research - like refactoring code, or in general trying to make life easier by improving the way I label things. Another way that I found was reading about the history and philosophy of science.

But the thing I wanted to talk about in this post is enhancing myself through reading personal accounts. I really think I underestimated the value I got from reading biographies or memoirs about scientists!

And the more biographies of scientists I read, the more I learned that those scientists also read memoirs, which is quite meta. Professor Fei-Fei Li, a pioneer in AI, and Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, who I’ll talk about later, both mention reading about the lives of physicists in each of their books. Accounts by famous scientists and engineers frequently reference reading about Richard Feynman as a way to figure out how to learn best.

I’ve been travelling a lot lately, and whilst travelling I’ve been spending my own time reading scientific memoirs over the past few months. This has been a valuable exercise, and I’ll explain why it’s been useful to me as someone trying to start out in their scientific career. So here are some reflections

Specific reasons to read science memoirs

I think the main reason I read memoirs is self-calibration. By calibration, I mean tuning your expectations about what is needed to get a particular result. I think calibration is important because if I’m stuck, it helps me better decide what I should do.

Suppose that I’m stuck on a really ‘grindy’ problem, like compiling a dataset, and I’m feeling like I have no will to live because I’m so bored, or worry that I’m being ineffectual, or confused about if there’s a better way to do things. I often find comparable hard times in memoirs, and learning about the amount of effort helps me judge if I have actually spent enough time on a problem. Often times, I find that the memoir’s writers have stuck with grindy problems for a lot longer than the amount of time I’ve spent on a problem and start to feel bored.

I’ve already applied these lessons to my own work on protein datasets - a fairly taxing and boring task, but something that I think is important.

I think this kind of resilience learning is useul since I’m only doing physics part-time and don’t have much exposure to senior scientists day to day. Scientific memoirs or biographical works help me calibrate my parameters on what is required of excellent scientific work. This guides someone like me, working on physics research part-time. It gives me a compass direction of where to go, effort and style-wise, when I’m stuck.

A lot of the parameters I care about are the outright amounts of ‘work’ required, in absolute terms, to get publishable results of interest to the community. Like the following

• How long does it take for someone to do find a results of strong interest to the community? Possibly decades.

• How many failures and false leads should I expect before a publishable result? A lot.

• How boring is it to actually run experiments?

• How much bullshit / politics do I need to take when lobbying and selling research ideas? A lot more than I thought.

And a bunch of these parameters are also about ‘ratios’ of how to spend time as a researcher. Admittedly, this isn’t as clear cut as the above. I really think well chosen ratios of ‘thinking’ versus ‘doing’ can set apart good scientists from great ones. For example, I ask myself the following questions when I’m trying to think of research ideas

• How much time should I spend asking questions versus answering them?

• How much time should I spend reading versus doing?

• How much time should I spend theorising versus experimenting?

• How much time should I spend talking to people versus working by myself?

Again, scientific memoirs give me a great lead on the thinking behind how to allocate my time effectively to maximise my impact. The main thing that I’ve learned so far is that I should probably spend 80% of my time doing experiments and working, and 20% to research strategy.

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An example of a great memoir

I found Gene Machine, a memoir by Venki Ramakrishnan on his contributions to the structure of the ribosome, to be especially (despite implicitly) illustrative on each of the points above. I might be biased here because he does biophysics (which is my field as well), but let me explain why.

From what I’ve gleaned from the book Professor Ramakrishnan worked on the time scale of five years to decades experimenting on different approaches in labs. It is no secret that lab work is grindy, and so it’s a great story of resilience working on a single problem. He also worked on a protein structure that wasn’t really well known at the time, and it took decades required before recognition. I think what makes the book great in particular is that it doesn’t mince words or try to be nice about what the experience was actually like. There were many paragraphs where I felt ‘yikes, I’m kind of glad that I don’t do academic research full time’.

I think it would be a really interesting exercise to compile a survey of the epistemological effort required by major scientists to get good results.

I also found it personally relatable because professor Ramakrishnan originally studied physics before switching fields to biology - which is something that I am also trying to do. This isn’t the first time I’ve anecdotally read about physicists attracted to problems in the life sciences, and it’s really valuable to learn about the struggles of trying to enter a different knowledge area.

I found it to be the book to be a great insight into how someone chooses research fields and problems, if not a little reassuring. I’m planning to write more on why this particular switch resonates with me a lot, and why particular biology as a field of interest. I found that the book was written with a biophysics tilt featuring a fair bit of crystallography.

On a purely emotional level, one thing I will never get bored of is reading from others how much of a grind academic research is. Honestly, this is therapy to me. The book also contains other nuggets like the author non elite institituion, and moving around from place to place.

And whilst I wasn’t actively trying to read about it, the book also gave a surprising description about competition in science actually feels like. How it feels to compete and get annoyed by scientific peers, along with the politics of prize winning.