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Life after data collection

So do you believe in life after death?

Awkward way to start a blog, right?  I know! If you do, then I’m sure you’ll paint me a portrait of how it’s better than your current life. Where there will be no guns, no wars and hopefully no sugar tax. I guess if you want to get out of this life alive, there’s always a need to believe in something bigger and better than rising petrol prices and the depreciation of the Rand. So why do I ask? Well, because that’s exactly how I felt about my research. If you’ve read my last blog entry, you’ll know that my Master’s journey has been nothing short of novel drama. To keep myself sane during that period, I just imagined a time after data collection where I would just analyse my data, start writing up and submit after a week. For the most part, that dream kept me going — but imagination and reality are two different things.

When things don’t go your way through the practical phase of your MSc or PhD, you imagine your last day of data collection. You daydream about how nice it will be and how you’ll virtually have your qualification in your hand.

It’s only when you actually get all that data when reality really hits you like a one ton truck. When you fill in the last digit on your diary, you breathe a sigh of relief. Happy, and reminiscing about all the days when you thought your experimental diets would run out, or when load shedding nearly killed your day old chicks; surely nothing can be worse than that. It is only when you open your Excel sheet that you realise that a new chapter in your Masters tale is about to start: your “life after data collection” chapter. Having to punch in data acquired over a seven week period is no child’s play, especially if the data that you have is for more than 10 dependent variables.

My data capturing was kind of fun, I mean I had been looking for this data for 2 years and finally I had found it. I felt like I owed it to the Almighty to push on with a smile on my face. The crazy part is that as each digit left my diary and into the excel sheet, so did my smile. By the time I finished entering my data I was tired, exhausted and so drained.

With all the data sorted, the next step was data analysis. I think this is the part most students dread. Having to sort your data is one thing, but knowing what it all mean is a challenge for most. At what level are you testing? What does the output mean? How do you express this data? I bet these questions make most postgrad students wish they had paid more attention to their Biometry lectures.

Fortunately, at University of Fort Hare, we are blessed with minds that eat data analysis for breakfast, lunch and supper. Who knew having to wake up early everyday to attend the experimental design and data analysis class would help? (Hahahaha I hope my supervisors won’t be reading this.) The thing about analysis programs, is that if you can’t speak their language then you are doomed, if you can’t tell it what you want It to do then you’re better off sleeping in your room. For me, the program was fine … the problem was with the user (me). I had an idea of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to express the data but the way I’d analysed my data didn’t allow me to. I was busy running up walls and pulling out my non-existent hair!

That was till I decide to speak to my varsity friends and mentor, Thuthuzelwa Stempa, Xola Nduku, Soji Zimkitha and Lizwel Mapfumo. Having to brainstorm my intended outcomes and data expression made an HUGE difference.

So here I am, sitting at the lab and finishing up my graphs and writing up, imagining myself walking up to collect my second degree and making my family proud. I hope that this time my imagination won’t be too far off.

So what did I learn? Life’s filled with challenges, and the very same sentiments echo through your research life. Be it admin, data collection, data analysis or writing up. Your life after data collection might be better than mine or worse, but the moral of the blog as always is about grinding it out, spin those numbers to letters and making sure you graduate in time.

 

Posted on by ScientistSim

The dangers of misinformation and miscommunication

I will start this article, I’m fairly confident, the way that no good story has ever started:

I was standing in the line at home affairs last week. I happened to strike up the usual conversation one has at these places; “Why is the line so long? Do you need photos?  (It amazes me that no one ever knows the answer to this question!) Are we going to be here so long that the sun will absorb all of our moisture and when our families come looking for us all that will remain is our tortured souls still hoping for our passports?” Having run out of things to complain about, I asked my fellow brave soul what he did for a living. He was a very high powered investment banker who also had a PhD. I learnt that day that education truly is not enough when ignorance is a dominating plague.

I wish I had told this man I was a struggling actor or an astronaut – but then again he would have had an opinion on that too. “An astronaut? Really? I heard the earth is flat and the moon is Gorgonzola. Is that true? Wait, I know it’s true. So don’t respond.” I didn’t though. Sadly I said I was a HIV researcher and his face darkened. A frown dug its way into his forehead and I could hear the 10 ton piano that was about to fall on me strain in its support. “You know,” he said in a suddenly condescending tone, “I don’t buy this whole ‘HIV’ thing. (He actually did the inverted commas with his fingers, which somehow made the whole thing worse.) I heard that it was the Americans.” I realised by the way he sneered the last part of his sentence that nothing I said was ever going to change his opinion. Valiantly I tried to explain that HIV was a zoonosis and had jumped species on at least 3 different occasions. (Read more about why this doesn’t happen that often.) I spent what felt like an entire lifetime trying to convince him about the scientific evidence. And in the end, the best line emerging from this conversation was his, “Well, you can have your opinion and I will have mine.”

The benefit of having a science degree is knowing that the most popular opinion is not always the right one. Having been trained to question everything, I’ve since understood, is not a skill everyone has. In society, the loudest (most obnoxious!) person is the one who gets heard (once again think Donald Trump) while in science you will get laughed off of a conference stage without any data. This is possibly the root of misunderstandings in science. The people listen to the strongest voice and all the while the white coats are in a corner throwing around statistics. Even when scientists are completely right, some rapper may still convince a few people the earth is flat (see this hilarious exchange between B.O.B and Neil Degrasse Tyson – thank goodness for him!).

Another huge contributor to the hall of misunderstanding and strange theories is the media. Now let me be clear; it is not just the journalists who misinterpret. It is the job of a scientist to simplify and explain their work. One of my science heroines Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (co-discover of HIV), who I was privileged to hear speak, said that at the end of your life you do not remember the journal articles you published or how high their impact number was, but the lives you have changed with the work. If you can’t communicate and translate your work, who will it ever truly benefit? I find that if you can explain your project to your Granny so she understands why you are doing it and how it may help the world, you really understand it yourself.

As a postgrad it’s easy to feel lost; to feel that your work is too far removed from any kind of real-world application. It is easy to think that you’re just doing this to get a degree. However, it’s good to communicate your science for lots of reasons: 1) you can prevent misinterpretation, 2) you can make people feel that they can engage with science and not have their heads explode, 3) you can help scientists in queues at Home Affairs retain their sanity when non-scientists begin to ask questions and 4) you can feel relevant. It’s important to remember it really is our duty to not lock ourselves in a lab, but to reach out: to teach not only the uneducated but the ignorant too. It’s up to scientists to add their voice, otherwise we may be drowned out by the loudest opinions. It’s up to us to build public trust in science. If we are only heard when there is crisis then we are never heard in calm (see this article by Tolu Oni).

 

Scientist news cycle
How science communication works… (www.phdcomics.com)

There have been miscommunications that have done very serious damage too. One is most certainly the notion that vaccinating your child will result in autism (read here why this isn’t true). This has resulted in 100s of unnecessary deaths from measles in small children. Another is that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, perpetuated by our very own ex-president Thabo Mbeki. Some “facts” are even started out of fear as a rumour: in a small town called Vulindela, wonderful things are being done by the organisation we work with (CAPRISA), to try to reduce unwanted pregnancies and HIV incidence. One of the proposed ways to do this was to insert IUDs into young girls following extensive education on the matter. The programme had to be stopped because one of the girls told all her peers that maggots would grow internally. Naturally teenage girls were then hesitant about IUDs. A far more famous case of misinformation is what happened to Hendrietta Lacks in 1951. With questionable ethical practice, doctors treating this woman took samples of her cervical cancer and made a cell line (cells that are descended from one cell and have the same genetic features) that was able to be kept in culture indefinitely. This cell line is one of the most widely used in clinical trials today; a form of which we use to test the efficacy of HIV vaccines. This woman had no idea what these doctors and scientists were doing and many years later, her family thought that she was still alive because scientists had “immortalised” her cells (Read more about this incredible story in Rebecca Skoot’s novel).

Miscommunications in science can be deadly and disturbing and we have to find ways of changing this. As a PhD student it is my job to pick the hard questions and find answers but, it is imperative that I find ways to explain the hard questions in a way that anyone can engage with them. Solutions can come from the strangest places, even the line in home affairs.