Science! Words are stupid.
Trigger warning: In the end I describe a somewhat gruesome procedure performed on rats in the course of scientific research.
The Cult of LK99
When I was in high school, in the year 1999, I took part in a youth summer camp at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Over the course of two weeks we were embedded in various labs and did our best to be useful to the scientists. At the end of the summer we were meant to write a paper explaining the work we did and the purpose of the study in which we participated. My first assignment was in the physics department, with a young researcher who worked on superconductors.
The subject matter proved a bit too complicated for me at the time, given that I had 10th grade physics education and knew nothing about quantum mechanics yet. If you are unfamiliar, superconductivity is a set of phenomena in which some materials, under certain conditions, exhibit behaviors that are near magical.
The how and the why this occurs is well beyond my comprehension, but I do know that it involves cooling down some special ceramics that contain copper to extremely cold temperatures. This then causes the material to have some mind boggling properties, such as conducting electricity with effectively no resistance, and things like the Meissner effect, which is often demonstrated by little freezing disks levitating above a magnet.
This topic has been studied extensively for over 100 years at this point, and is still a fascinating frontier in science, with incremental advances every year. Part of the motivation that propels the field are some of the potentially game-changing applications of what’s known as room-temperature superconductors.
These are still firmly hypothetical materials, i.e. they exist only in our imagination currently, however, once every few years, someone emerges from the woodworks with some great claims. These inevitably fail the Sagan standard (“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”).
Dr. Angela Collier breaks down one such case from 2023, in which some folks from Korea submitted a “eureka!” paper, which was then immediately shown by actual scientists to be replete with falsehoods. Despite this, it was lauded by misinformed science enthusiasts on Twitter.
Dr. Collier explains with great detail, yet in an accessible manner, the various ways in which this paper does not hold up to even basic scrutiny. She then goes on to elaborate on the process of the scientific method, peer reviews, the importance of replicating experiment results, and how to analyze a scientific paper through a critical lens.
I believe that this sort of science communication is especially important with the preponderance of misinformation surrounding us, along with the risk of cognitive surrender. A good reminder to reclaim the reigns and stay skeptical!
One of my favorite moments in the video is when Dr. Collier quotes a colleague of hers who said: “Ten minutes in the library will save you ten years in the lab”. I believe this is a paraphrase of a tongue in cheek adage associated with Frank Westheimer, a highly esteemed 20th century chemist. The original version was something akin to “A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.” Either way, reading the literature is essential, and I am often humbled as I consider that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Definitely would have served me here.
Furthermore, as I begin my new position at Retool, I am reminded also of Chesterton’s Fence, and I hope to abide the wisdom of listening before suggesting.
In any case, back to high school: due to my inability to really contribute much to the physics research I was attached to that summer, I ended up being reassigned to a life sciences lab. The team there was studying the hormonal cycles of rats, which had potential implications on human reproductive health (see here for why rats are often chosen for this type of study). It also happened to be where my crush was assigned and not in a basement surrounded by intimidating math equations scribbled on whiteboards.
The work involved harvesting egg cells from rat ovaries, which meant I had to trap them in a little tub with a cotton ball soaked with what I think was ether, and wait for them to expire. For the impatient, there was another method known as “cervical dislocation”. This involves grabbing the animal behind the ears with one hand, holding its body in the other, and then yanking it rapidly to sever the spinal cord and kill it instantly.
After I killed the rat, I proceeded to make an incision in its abdomen, find the ovaries, and then use a pipette and a microscope to retrieve the tiny egg cells. It was quite difficult to do manually with a dropper style implement, and so a special device was used that required displacing the air with my lungs, that is, I had to suck up the things with a little glass tube in my mouth.
I’d like to say that I performed a miniscule part in advancing the field and contributed to research, however I suspect that whatever samples I was able to retrieve were probably contaminated with my teenage slobber. I am grateful for the opportunity though, and despite the somewhat traumatic experience (especially for the rats!), I remember the time fondly.
Music of late
There is an uncanny feeling coming across the original track that one knows only via a much more popular sample. I definitely felt this when I encountered the Tom Tom Club recently, specifically their song Genius of Love. Only a few years prior to my engaging in rodent euthanasia in the name of science, I was obliviously rocking out to Mariah Carey’s Fantasy, and Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack.
In any case, their entire eponymous album is full of gems, for instance:
Words of nuance, words of skill
And words of romance are a thrill
Words are stupid, words are fun
Words can put you on the run