Dr. Shellie

Here’s an interesting article. When a baby is born, it has to "learn" to see– to interpret all the shapes and colors and patterns of light and dark as recognizable objects. How does this process happen? It’s hard to test infants directly, since they can’t talk to us to describe what they are seeing and experiencing.

To understand the development of vision, Pawan Sinha, a professor at MIT, is instead studying children who "learn" to see later in life. These children were born blind, but due to poverty and lack of access to medical care, their conditions were not treated until they were older. Once the kids are treated, the researchers can watch to see the process by which their visual skills (such as color recognition, object recognition, and face recognition) develop. Unlike infants, these kids can describe what they see and so participate in extensive and detailed visual tests.

Sinha has started a comprehensive project in India to identify blind children whose condition is treatable, provide them with treatment, and then study their visual development. I think this is an interesting example in which scientific objectives and humanitarian objectives fit together well.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make an impact.

First, there’s my research. By now, I’ve written a lot of papers, and people have cited them a fair number of times. So that’s good. But I am surprised by which papers have become popular (=cited more that others). They weren’t necessarily my favorite papers, or the ones that I felt proudest of, or the ones that were most creative or required the most work. I couldn’t have predicted that they’d be popular.

Then, there’s teaching and mentoring. I haven’t done a lot of formal teaching, but I have done a variety of tutoring and volunteering here and there. For a year I tutored Spanish-language GED students. You would think that would be very useful, and yet I’m not sure that any of my students even passed the GED in the end. (Due to the way the class was organized, new students were constantly coming and going, and they had widely varying levels of formal education, making progress difficult.) Quite possibly, the most useful mentoring I’ve done so far only took one hour. A few years back, I ran into a classmate who looked a little down. We got to talking, and it turned out that she was really unhappy in her research group and wanted to switch. I gave her a few tips, and she found a new group. A few weeks ago, she told me that she is planning to graduate this year, and that she didn’t think she’d still be in a PhD program if it hadn’t been for me. I was really touched. I really didn’t do much at all! I just happened to help a tiny bit at exactly the right time.

I like it when I feel like I’ve had an impact on other people’s lives. As an aside, I do wonder sometimes whether that is gendered– why am I not as happy and proud about my paper citations as I am about helping others? Am I too timid to aspire to be a Great Scientist? (The male students writing to ask me for research positions all claim to be aspiring to this goal!)

But anyway, my biggest impact might be the least expected of all. Next week I will be a bone marrow donor. Before you all pat me on the back for my tremendous sacrifice, let me point out that this does not involve giant needles, "spooning" out of marrow, or excruciating pain. Thanks to recent medical advances, all I have to do (more or less) is get a few shots and then donate blood. Through no effort of my own, I happen to have the right genetic makeup to be compatible with my sister’s immune system. And so, right now, my cells might possibly (hopefully) save her life. Pretty dramatic. How’s that for unexpected impact?

Skookumchick said, in one of her posts, maybe half a year ago, that not too many people identify themselves as both a scientist and an engineer. So which one am I?

Way back in grade school, I was part of a student club called Future Problem Solvers. Each semester, we would read up on a some major global problem– like "Water" or "Energy" or "Environment". At the end of the semester, there was a structured problem-solving exercise around that topic. The whole thing was actually a contest to see who could come up with the most creative and workable solutions to these topics. The packet we wrote up was sent off to the state capital somewhere, where the volunteer coaches would grade it and determine who got to go to the State competition– and if you did well there, the Nationals. Think of it as varsity sports for nerds. I thought that whole thing was pretty fun.

Later on in grade school and in high school, I signed up for various summer programs for kids interested in science. Sometimes I picked very abstract and theoretical-sounding topics (like "Genetics", which in my mind didn’t seem to have many practical engineering applications at all, though it could explain your hair or eye color) and sometimes I picked the topics that sounded very applied (like "Chemistry in the Environment"). Then, in high school, I read "Brief History of Time" and set off to learn physics, become a theoretical cosmologist and explain the origins of the universe. What I definitely was not was an engineer– because being an engineer meant being good at egg-drop contests and paper-airplane flying races. I had direct evidence of not being any good at that.

Well, that plan to become a cosmologist didn’t pan out. It turns out that it takes something like 7 years of study before you have even the remotest idea of what cosmology is about, not to mention the mathematical tools for doing it. Along the way, a number of practical factors intervened– like that fact that the summer research internships I could find were in experimentally-intensive, applied fields that needed undergrads to measure data and plot graphs. Theoretical cosmologists had no need for undergraduate labor. Then there was the fact that most of the pure science grad students I knew where finishing their PhD’s and heading off to work for McKinsey, or on Wall Street. Why should I get my PhD to go to McKinsey?

So, I never did study theoretical particle physics. I found another field in the physical sciences, fairly interdisciplinary, relatively applied, something in between science and engineering. And I really like it. Yesterday I wrote a cover letter for my first job application of the season, and found myself writing very passionately about working at the intersection of science and technology, and how that was exactly where I wanted to be.

All of which makes me reconsider, this many years later, whether I am a scientist or engineer. Remember, I had always thought of an "engineer" as someone who fixes his own car, won his high school egg-drop contest, builds robots in his spare time, and loves to perform tedious adjustments of process parameters, perhaps in a paint-manufacturing line. I am not that kind of person. A scientist, on the other hand, sits around and solves equations, does simulations on the computer, runs his experiments, chats with colleagues while drawing on the blackboard and waving his hands in the air, and remains blissfully detached from worldy concerns like "business" and "money." That, I could handle.

Of course, as with any stereotype, the stereotype is not the whole story. I am both a scientist and an engineer, albeit of the "academic" variety. I want to study science that has a chance of solving big problems — like Water, Energy, Environment, or the other topics I used to read about in 4th grade. And this is very hard. Because the thing about breakthrough science is that is often unexpected– it’s hard to figure out what the next big scientific advance will be, let alone whether it will pay off in terms of real applications. And even harder to figure out how those applications will end up impacting the world. If I want to be sure of making an impact, I should get closer to the application and be more of an "engineer". But if I want to find something fundamentally different from what’s been done before, I need to keep thinking like a "scientist."

I think I had heard that someone was trying to make a $100 laptop for kids in the developing world. I even knew that they were bright green or orange to discourage adults from stealing them. But it was just this week that I realized what an incredibly huge, visionary idea this project is.

Go take a look at this map, which shows the countries planned for the pilot program: they span the globe–Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, China, Thailand, Nigeria, and Egypt. The vision is to ship FIVE MILLION laptops to kids in these countries by early 2007, with 250 million to follow in the next year. If the vision pans out, the impact will huge– completely transformative on the global level.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the group behind this initiative, is a non-profit organization spun out of the Media Lab at MIT. They’re taking an unusual approach to the project. Their focus is on the laptop itself– by completely rethinking the hardware requirements, they aim to come up with a cheap, rugged, durable laptop that is uniquely suited to classrooms in the developing world. The screen will be readable in full sunlight, for kids who have classes outdoors. The case will be rugged and durable to survive dust and rainstorms, and a foot pedal on the AC adapter will allow recharging without access to an electrical power supply.

In a way, this project is totally crazy. I think I can believe they can make a laptop– or even 5 million. But what about the other issues? How useful will they be without reliable Internet connections throughout the developing world? Will there be useful software available for them? What if they break– will there be cheap repair services in, say, Nigeria? OLPC is taking the approach that they will worry about these things when the time comes– until then, onward! Since the entire project is non-profit and based on open-source software, anyone who wants to help is encouraged to do so. From OLPC’s wiki:

People say that OLPC has no plan for recycling the laptops, or training teachers, or getting software into local languages, or preventing wholesale theft and resale of the machines, or a host of other things that we clearly should plan for. The fact is that it is too soon to have an announced plan for any of these things. But lack of an announced plan does not equate to lack of planning. Significant numbers of people are putting their best thoughts and other efforts into these problems, and will have much to say at the appropriate times.

So, crazy or no, I really admire this iniative… it’s thinking really big about how technology can have a positive impact on society world-wide. I will be watching with interest to see how it does.

In my "real" life, I increasingly find myself in a position to give my opinion on issues surrounding women and science. This scares me. For as much as I have thought about the matter, I am never sure what it is safe to say. Suppose that you were in a room with three senior, white male professors in your field, ones who were variously former presidents of your professional society, chairs of your department, and members of the National Academy. Would you really want to describe to them how many of the women you know in science have problems with lack of confidence? Or describe how the drop in women’s fertility at age 35 makes it almost impossible to wait until after tenure to have a baby? Inevitably, the question follows: "So, is that a problem for you?" Say "yes," and you are taking a big risk, hoping that they will not interpret what are really systemic problems as something that is wrong with you and your commitment to science– possibly impacting upon your career.

I am using this blog to work out what I am willing to say, to whom, and how. While I write under a pseudonym, the opinions I express in my posts often come up later in real conversation. Having worked out already what I believe, it is much easier to take a stand– and it turns out that most of my opinions aren’t terribly controversial after all.

One of the categories on this blog is "Socially-useful science and technology." So far, this category has gotten short shrift. I have mostly used it to talk about socially useful psychology, in particular work that impacts on gender issues in the sciences. In part, this is due to the giant backlog of women-in-science stories in my head that wanted to get out– see for example "boiled frog." But as I head into this fall’s application and hiring cycle, I’m hoping to give give the question of how science and technology impact society more serious thought, and to figure out where I want to be on the basic science v. applied science continuum.