Dr. Shellie

I know a guy who is interested in, let’s say, lizards. He has been fascinated by lizards ever since he was in high school. And so he became a famous scientist, absolutely #1 in the lizard field, author of several books, etc, etc. And now he is 41, a big-shot tenured professor with his own Lizard Center, and he is quitting it all to act in regional theater and write fiction. Why? Well, here are the reasons he gives:

• Science and technology are progressing towards a horrifying future in which we will all be half-robotic, cybernetic creatures living in a networked world devoid of any vestiges of privacy and civil liberties (note– not that lizard research has even a hope of contributing to said future, even if one wanted to) and he is sick of hanging out with scientists who have no interest in analyzing the consequences of their own endeavors.
• He is no longer interested in lizards.

Well, I can’t argue with the last one. That’s the trouble with basic research. Your research does not serve any particular, immediate good. So if you lose interest in it… that’s it then, isn’t it? This reminds me of something my sister once said about squirrels.

"I don’t know how you study that science stuff, Shellie," she said. "I mean how do you know what to think about and what not to? I mean, if it were me, I might just go crazy. Like, I’d start thinking about squirrels, and then I’d just think MORE and MORE, and then I’d never know when to stop!!! How do you avoid THAT?"

And I suppose she has a point there, since the other day I saw a special on PBS about how a Berkeley researcher is, in fact, doing psychology experiments on the squirrels native to the Berkeley campus.

I picked up a copy of Technology Review yesterday and noticed with interest that:

1) Researchers in India want to use tiny (5-nm diameter) gold particles for insulin delivery. You sniff in the particles, which are coated in insulin, and they get absorbed through the mucous membrane of your nose. Now, why would anyone think this was a good idea? Well, supposedly because it provides a way of getting drugs like insulin (which break down in your stomach) into your body without injections. That is, IF the gold particles do not end up building up in your body and causing harmful effects.

2) A variety of studies are now being done on the toxicity of carbon nanotubes and other nanoparticles in lab animals. One study (Operdorster et al, U. of Rochester) showed that nanoparticles inhaled by rats can end up in their brains.

Hmm… and so the implication of these two articles together…?

Granted. I am certainly not arguing that these two news briefs are conclusive.* But I am growing frustrated with the marketing of EVERYTHING "nano" as a potential cure for cancer, even when the toxicity is completely unknown, or even suspect. It seems like bio-compatability/safety ought to be the FIRST design criterion for new medical methods.

But then again: the x-ray machine, one of the most useful medical diagnostic devices of all time, is itself intrinsically toxic — x-ray radiation causes cancer. It has only been through careful engineering that high-quality images can be obtained using acceptably low dosages of radiation. So I will allow some hope for the alleged medical nano-revolution, if the biomedical engineers can do the job right. Certainly the x-ray proves the principle that basic research in the physical sciences has led to fundamentally-new technologies used in medicine.

* Probably not studying the same type of nanoparticle, animal models don’t necessarily reproduce human reactions, this was only one study, need more research, etc. etc. etc…

Continuing with the theme of my all-time favorite psychology researchers, we have Professor Julie Norem of Wellesley College for her work on defensive pessimism.

Do you back up your PowerPoint slides on a memory stick before each talk, just in case you lose/break/drop your computer? Do you make a list of nasty questions that someone just might ask and write up the answers on index cards? Do you look up the publication records of the speakers preceding you in your conference session to make sure you didn’t forget to cite any of their major, related works? Well, then you are using a "defensive pessimist" strategy.

The brilliant thing about Norem’s work is that she has quantitatively shown (through controlled experiments) that defensive pessimists are just as successful as their counterparts, so-called "strategic optimists"– you know, the ones who just sort of believe that everything is bound to go to well. However, both groups will do worse than usual if their normal strategy is disturbed. If you interrupt a defensive pessimist’s ability to do last-minute (over?)preparation tasks, his or her performance will suffer. Likewise, if you disturb a strategic optimist from spending his or her last minutes before a high-pressure test "relaxing" blissfully, his or her performance will also go down.

The most important implication of this work? Anxiety and self-doubt do not necessarily compromise performance.

Find out more here:

• Are you a defensive pessimist? Take the quiz at Norem’s website.
• CNN review of her book, "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism To Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak"
• Article in the University of Chicago’s alumni magazine

My hero of the week: social psychologist Professor Claude Steele of Stanford University, for his work on stereotype threat. Through carefully controlled lab experiments, Steele and coworkers have shown that people tend to underperform when they fear that their performance might reflect badly on the larger group with whom they identify. So, for example, when a group of math students take a very difficult math test, the female students may worry that their poor performance would be interpreted as evidence that women have less mathematical ability then men. Just worrying about this possibility deflates their scores. When that worry is eliminated, their scores equal men’s. In the experiments, the worry can be removed by telling all of the women and men that on the particular test they are taking, it is well known that women and men perform equally.

Stereotype threat can apply to all people– not just women and minorities– in any situation where someone feels that people "like them" suffer from a negative stereotype for the activity at hand. For example, says Steele, a white person talking to a black person about race is likely to worry that he or she might be seen as racist, and will be more likely to make conversational blunders as a result. Ironically, stereotype threat affects people most when they really care about doing well at what they are doing– e.g. not being racist, or acing at math tests.

The sun is shining. I realize that polarizing sunglasses make the world look awesome. Each leaf on each tree stands out distinctly. So does each wood chip in the flower bed.