Back to the future

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: September 8, 2011

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Did you have a plan to be a fireman? Maybe. An explorer? Possibly.

But what about a scientist? Probably not.

There are many misconceptions about who scientists are. In classic depictions, scientists are frequently shown as mad, with crazy hair, in chaotic labs surrounded by bubbling liquids and solving complicated equations. These stereotypes have been embedded in our society and have the potential to make people turn away from a career in science, or not even consider it.

As we have shown through our journey to get to know those who make up the Blast lab at Imperial College, London, this is not the reality. The truth is, researchers are usually far from these stereotyped images. Scientists are normal people.

But still we wondered, did any members of the Blast lab want to be a scientist when they grew up?

“Ha…no, in short! Superhero, yes; Surgeon, maybe; Engineer, occasionally; Soldier, possibly; But Scientist, never! However, it is the one profession that combines all of my childhood aspirations, allowing me to dream, tinker and solve everyday.”

”I’ve never really thought about what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve always been interested in understanding how things work. I’ve always made things and taken things apart… sometimes even put them back together! If you’d have told me then that that’s what scientists and engineers get to do everyday I’m pretty sure that’s what I’d have wanted to be. I’m pleased that’s what I am.

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Question, investigate, and share

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: September 2, 2011

Editor’s Note: Anna Perman and David Robertson contributed equally to this article.

Sara and Gina are collecting baby teeth, to build a palace.

Gina: “The experiment has gone so far, without even being made, that it’s become an interesting journey. What we saw as the end was actually the start.”

Sara: “And the end doesn’t matter so much.”

Gina: “There is no end. But I don’t want to be sticking teeth to a sculpture for the next ten years.”

Gina Czarnecki is a Liverpool-based artist working on a sculpture made of donated baby teeth, to be displayed in the Science Museum. Her collaborator, Professor Sara Rankin, a member of the Blast research group, works next door to the museum at Imperial College, London. Sara is not an artist. The sculpture is something that she does on top of her successful career researching on stem cells.

Her First Baby Tooth Comes Out By Andrew Griffith, http://www.flickr.com/photos/waldenpond/2185704104/

Gina and Sara chose to use baby teeth as a material for the sculpture because, although considered something that can be thrown away, they are actually a source of valuable stem cells. They can be used for science, but the teeth bring up issues of belief and myth because of their association with the tooth fairy. There are also issues around consent, in that the teeth have the added value of having been donated.

But the project seems to have moved away from science, which brings into question whether the artwork, or the science is more important.

“For me, the science is a priority,” Sara explained. “I don’t want to become a science communicator, and I think my value is in bringing my specific knowledge and expertise to any project in terms of the science.”

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems that if the science is hidden in an artwork, the tangible returns from such science outreach is tiny. It is unlikely to have a profound impact on most of the audience, and generally, outreach is of little benefit in an academic career. So why do scientists like Sara bother with projects that bring their work to a wider audience?

Andrew Phillips, another member of the Blast group, runs more traditional workshop-based outreach with the Royal Institution. Like Sara, the problem is not lack of motivation to participate in outreach projects. He explained how getting the time to and funding to fit these projects in is often prohibitive for scientists.

“Everything is time – that’s probably why these masterclasses are so expensive,” he said. “Many outreach projects don’t require much in the way of raw materials, but the thought, planning and administration needed means that the time spent adds up quickly.”

The motivation for any individual scientist to reach out with their work will vary, from promoting their research to loftier aims of enlightenment and a vast range of more nuanced positions in between. But one common thread is likely to come up time and again: they enjoy it.

An important reason that Sara’s project works is the enjoyment she gets from her collaboration with Gina. When we interviewed them ideas flowed between them seamlessly. They got lost in the implications of the project, and it was hard not to get caught up in their enthusiasm.


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Modeling reality

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: August 12, 2011

Mathematical models are convenient ways for scientists to represent, understand and predict what happens in the world outside of the lab. But any model is a simplification of what it represents, and we need to ask: how closely do models fit the real world?

For the Blast research group at Imperial College, London, creating a realistic model of the human body, and in particular the legs, is a vital part of research. Despite being a difficult, complex process, the group has created some of the most sophisticated models used in research today.

Understanding the composition of the millions of different elements of a single bone, and how they respond to the forces they are subjected to is key to understanding the dynamics of an injury.

However, a model is only as good as its inputs and programming. An older man with osteoporosis will have a dramatically different bone make-up than a young athlete. A previously damaged and healed bone may have unpredictable weaknesses. While the Blast Lab has accounted for some of the real world variability in their models, their estimations are not perfect.

The ultimate aim for the group – or any model creators dealing with complex and chaotic systems, from medicine to climate science – is to devise something that represents the real phenomenon accurately and generates the information needed to make useful, practical decisions. The level of detail they’re seeking may seem pedantic, but with every small modeling advancement, their goal of understanding, and therefore preventing, blast injuries becomes to be a little easier to reach.

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The Beat of the Scientific Drum

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: August 4, 2011

The Blast lab at Imperial College, London, is a percussionist’s dream. During experiments, which examine the effects of explosions on humans, metal plates are bashed upwards under pressure, weights clang against each other and wooden planks are used for forcible adjustments to the machinery. These sounds happen over and over as the scientists run dozens of tests, seeking enough data to draw meaning from the noise. Taken out of context, a single action in the lab means little, but when orchestrated correctly, a coherent story about biomechanics can be told.

We spent an afternoon recording members of the lab as they performed repeated blast tests. The work would seem familiar to any musician – tuning instruments, setting up recording devices and repeating the same actions to get the desired result.

This video was constructed from scratch, using real sounds and footage from the lab. Some adjustment of the raw sound was necessary, and string sounds had to be recreated using stringed instruments. As with any complex project, pulling together the disparate pieces was a real challenge!

While it may seem lighthearted, there’s a strong message behind the video. The finished product of a scientific investigation, like a song, is inevitably the result of days of practice, experimentation and collaboration. A scientist might have an idea of what they want their investigation to sound like, but the process of science will throw up challenges, test creativity and occasionally uncover entirely new melodies.

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Money Makes The Lab Go Round

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: July 19, 2011

Caduceus By mnd.ctrl, http://www.flickr.com/photos/76578669@N00/2494389754/

Editor’s Note: Lizzie Crouch and Ben Good contributed equally to this article.

The Blast research group at Imperial College, London, is unique, from the people who carry out the research to the experiments themselves. And so when we looked into the financial support for the Blast lab’s research, it didn’t take long to uncover its unconventional nature.

“We have not supported research in the past,” explained Mrs Alison Gallico, trustee for The Soldier’s Charity (formerly The Army Benevolent Fund). But in spite of precedence, generous donations from The Soldier’s Charity, as well as a number of other veterans’ charities are the source of roughly 45% of the funding which makes the work of the Blast group at Imperial College, London, possible. This is all highly unusual.


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The Blast Mosaic

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: July 4, 2011

Over the past month or so, we’ve been spending a lot of time with the Blast crew. We’ve had a chance to sit in on their research meetings, watch them set up and perform experiments, interview them and explore their laboratories.

During some of that time, we had a camera with us, and captured dozens of as-yet unseen movies and hundreds of stills, some which we can’t show you for privacy and security reasons, but most that we simply haven’t had a chance to use so far. This video is a chance to share some of what we’ve seen with you.

The sequences loosely show a day of experiments in the lab: working away, setting up the machinery and finally, performing a blast test. We hope you enjoy.

Watch out for next week’s blog, as Ben and Lizzie tackle the ever-important issue of funding.

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Scrambled Science

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: July 1, 2011

How much can you learn from the words that make up a scientific paper? When they are in order and presented in the traditional scientific way, a great deal. However, even when they are taken out of context, you can still learn a lot about the research.

In this post we have taken a recent research paper published by the Blast research group at Imperial College, London, and created a word cloud where the size of each word varies, depending on how often it’s used.


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Call My Bluff, Science edition

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: June 27, 2011

You might think that the biggest challenge in scientific research is the research itself. But communicating science can be just as difficult. The words that a researcher might use to describe something might be unintelligible to a member of the general public, or someone from another research field.

Even worse, one word might have multiple meanings, which one you use will depend on which area of science you specialize in. This is often the case in the Blast research group at Imperial College London. In a previous post, which introduced members of the lab through their personal ‘ingredient lists’, we showed that the group as diverse as the number of toppings you could put on a pizza ”. Because of this, a new language, universal to the group, has to be learnt by all. Engineers must learn the precise words to describe the regenerative medicine aspect of the groups’ research while the shock physicists must understand the military phrasings.

1/365 [dazed & confused] By PhotoJonny, http://www.flickr.com/photos/photojonny/2268845904/

We wanted to find a fun way to illustrate the potential confusion that might result from using highly specialized terms. We turned to a popular British radio, turned television, show Call My Bluff. This is a game where two three-person teams take it in turn to give three definitions of an obscure word, only one of which is correct. The other team then has to guess which is the correct definition, the other two being “bluffs”.

See if you can have a go at our Blast lab adapted version. Here are three words used in the group’s research – can you guess which is the real definition?

Word 1: mesenchymal

So which definition do you think it is?

 

 

Word 2: friedlander

So which definition do you think it is?

 

 

Word 3: Shock

So which definition do you think it is?

 

Coming up with fake definitions and recording them saw us reduced to hysterical laughter more than once, but there is a more serious side. Clear communication is essential in making knowledge accessible to all – for scientists and science communicators out there the correct choice of words is essential.

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The responsibility of research: the dual use dilemma

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: June 22, 2011

Editor’s Note: Anna Perman and David Robertson contributed equally to this article.

“Do you worry that some of the research you do might be exploited in a way that harms people?”

Adam pauses. He leans forward, hands clasped. We’ve been embedded in Imperial College’s Blast biomechanics lab, of which Dr. Adam Hill is a key part, for about a month. It’s the first time we’ve seen a crack in his composed, assured demeanour.

“I do worry that understanding the vulnerabilities in things, that might…” He struggles for words for a few moments. We are sitting in a Westminster cafe looking out over the Thames, on a sunny day, which is strangely incongruous with the weighty topic at hand.


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The Blast Sampler

By Inside Knowledge Team
Posted: June 15, 2011

The Blast lab at Imperial College, London, is a research group with many flavours. There’s military personnel mingling with civilians; professors with PhD students; surgeons with mechanical engineers; rugby players with motorbike drivers; the list goes on. This isn’t unusual in scientific research; people come from all over the world, and from all walks of life, to add their skills and expertise to the mix. No two labs are the same, and we’re only just beginning to figure out who makes up each part of the unique ‘Blast blend’.

To help us, and you, get to know the group a little better, we asked them to give us a taste of what they’re like. What’s their academic background? What, if anything, do they eat for breakfast? Mac or PC? We were interested to explore how they defined themselves. Contrary to stereotypes, such as those which depict scientists as mad professors wearing lab-coats, they are regular people, and we sought to show you this in a different way.

To have a little fun introducing the members of the lab, we wanted to describe their personalities as a custom coffee recipe, listing the various ingredients that constitute the Blast lab. But, it quickly became apparent that coffee alone wouldn’t be enough to represent the group. So we had to expand the menu.

The Inside Knowledge kitchen was hub of activity, creating a product range to represent the group members we’d caught up with. By the end, we were like advertising executives trying to work out the best way to capture the essence of these products. However, we were unable to channel the charisma of Mad Men and instead had just gone a little mad. We were thinking of people’s attributes as food and vice versa. The store cupboards had been chaotically raided, the printer was running hot and we were waving desk lamps and torches around freely.

We managed to rein in the madness, and the slideshow below is our unusual way of introducing you to seven of the Imperial Blast group members. Warning: products are a representation only. Real contents may differ. If in doubt, consult your physician.



You’ll be seeing and hearing from these people more as Inside Knowledge progresses, so it’ll be worth checking back to see if they live up to what’s on their packaging!

******
Next week, we’ll be exploring the difficult issue of dual-use research. What should we do when studying subjects with potentially dangerous applications, and how does this affect the people at the forefront of the research?

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