As my term as BPS president draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on what we as a scientific society have accomplished in these short months. In the President’s Message in the December issue of the BPS Bulletin, Executive Officer Jennifer Pesanelli, with a little help from me, summarized the outcomes of our strategic planning initiative, which brought into focus our values and goals moving forward. In other monthly columns, I focused on issues like diversity, equity, and inclusion; mentoring; and the persistent challenges hindering real progress for women. In this month’s column, my last, I have a few more things to say about these matters, in part as reminders to myself that there is much left to do.
Rescue Parents
“Career women must work like they have no family and parent like they have no job.” This was a viral meme in 2022 that resonated with many. For several decades, despite the challenges, we women had managed to pull it off, mostly by gravitating to partners wanting to share equally in home activities and obligations. It wasn’t easy, but a precarious balance making career and family possible was struck. Then came the pandemic, and the childcare so essential to making it all work evaporated. The density of workers at the lab bench diminished in response to the higher calling of children at home. Many mothers and fathers found themselves grounded at one end of the work-life teeter-totter.
Those of us trying to keep the laboratory operation afloat can kvetch, but there is little we can do in the near term about the shortage of childcare and its day-to-day unpredictability. We need a more resilient childcare system that has more availability and a deeper pool of workers to fill in when the inevitable spread of illness affects them as well. As we try to regain our momentum in this peripandemic time, we should rattle the cages of our universities, companies, and statehouses to do more to ensure a more stable, more equitable workforce by supporting more childcare services. In the meantime, we must continue to support the parents of young children in our employ by allowing the flexibility they need to tend to their children’s needs while maintaining their own career trajectories. We ignore the issue at our own peril: many studies show that, in the absence of adequate childcare, women choose to work rather than have children. The ramifications for our future workforce, in all aspects of society are obvious.
Don’t Just Sit There, Do Something!
I have tried to use my platform as BPS president to actively fight racism and other forms of bigotry. I still wonder whether writing this column is doing something, since I am mostly just sitting here. But perhaps a more tangible example of my efforts is the Black in Biophysics Presidential Symposium, borrowing the moniker, and the inspiration, from the Black in Biophysics movement. The symposium, a showcase event at the BPS Annual Meeting in February, features an amazing lineup of speakers talking not about the importance of diversity, which they are often expect-ed to do as a highly demanding but uncompensated and poorly acknowledged side-gig. Instead, they will embody the true power of diversity with a superb scientific program as a new generation of trailblazers. Commentary will be provided by Bil Clemons and Theanne Griffith, who are leading advocates for the importance of such events.
Related to the historical challenges of racism is the persistent and insidious problem of overt and subliminal bigotry toward women and other minoritized groups. Remember the Heidi and Howard experiment at the Columbia Business School in which two student groups were asked to evaluate the same high-profile resume, one under the name Heidi and the other, Howard? Both candidates were deemed highly qualified for the job, but the one group just didn’t like Heidi—she seemed aggressive, and they weren’t sure she could be trusted. Howard, on the other hand, was considered a great catch, a real go-getter. He was a good “fit.” It is true that likability has different criteria for men vs. women in our society, and maybe there’s not much we can or should do about that. But we can, and should, stop this measure from playing such an important role in our evaluation of candidates for jobs and leadership positions, and examine our unconscious biases that get in the way of building a more diverse and highly capable work force.
In a study out of the University of Toronto reported in Administrative Science Quarterly, African-American or Asian job applicants who “whiten” their applications by deleting references to race or culture receive more interviews than those who don’t (Kang, S. K., K. A. DeCelles, A. Tilcsik, and S. Jun. 2016. Whitened résumés: race and self-presentation in the labor market. Admin. Sci. Q. 61:469-502). The effect is more than two-fold for African Americans, even when dealing with companies claiming to value diversity. Within BPS, we have worked hard over the years to promote women and minoritized groups; let us apply the same intentionality on the home turf of our own university departments and other workplaces. There, the barriers can be even greater. We know each other a little too well, like siblings, and the wish to evolve can turn into battles that are hard to win. I will be making efforts to “call in” my colleagues, rather than calling out. “I know you are, but what am I?” will not get me very far!
As the award-winning writer and social commentator Roxane Gay said in her 2017 Winter Institute WI12 speech, “We no longer have time for allies and allyship. We cannot afford to allow ourselves the comfortable distance of allyship. The challenges the underrepresented, marginalized, and vulnerable face have to be challenges we are all willing to take on, too. Everything is now political, and we have a responsibility to make the political personal. We have to fight for and with each other.” I would love to hear from the BPS membership what you have been doing to fight racism and bigotry, when you’re not just (figuratively) sitting there. And let’s keep the ideas coming—promoting diversity is foundational to BPS as an explicit goal moving forward.
Lead with Love
If there is one thing I can do right now, it is to combat despondency and the need to cocoon. This was a common reaction to the pandemic. While some found new motivation working from home, the flip side is a loss of camaraderie and the collaboration and support that comes from working together in the same physical space. I’m thinking especially of graduate students, who sometimes sit alone in their offices or at the lab bench, their clinking glassware the only echoes in the halls of academia. It can be a lonely experience. Supervising faculty need to see this challenge for what it is and what it is not. We need to fight the malaise that happens when esprit de corps flags, and not blame it on a lack of a trainee’s self-discipline. We need to get more involved in generating energy in the laboratory, to help regenerate the magic we experienced previously. Maybe they’ll want to show up more with a little more encouragement. A little more support. A little (dare I say it?) unconditional love. Tell them you believe in them, even (or especially) after they are conspicuously absent the day before. As BPS member Edwin Antony offers, “I prefer to take a positive spin on it. [The pandemic] did teach me to redefine success in research. All around, the importance of paying attention to the mental state of the team [has risen] to the top of the list.” If that strikes the curmudgeons in the audience as coddling or indulgent, hold a mirror up to your face the next time you walk into a room and are greeted warmly by one or more of your colleagues. I’ve noticed even the toughest among us grinning like children getting a warm hug.
Emerging from pandemic paralysis requires a focus on the mental health of our trainees (and ourselves). I keep a stack of an old book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns, in my office cupboard and hand it out to trainees as if it were a cure for the common cold. The book takes a cognitive therapy approach, providing a set of mental exercises to retrain the brain to think in a different, more positive, more productive way. It worked for me when I was a graduate student; maybe it’ll work for you, too. And whether you are a graduate student or Nobel laureate, try not to say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to your best friend. Or your dog. In fact, talk to yourself like you would your dog, per another popular meme: “Hey sweet girl! Look at that beautiful belly! You’re so clever! Want a treat?”
Think Bigger
On the scientific front, I propose more aspiration. In our recent BPS strategic planning exercise, we landed on the following for our vision: to harness the full potential of biophysics to seek knowledge, improve the human condition, and preserve the planet for future generations. A Council member not able to attend the meeting later asked, reasonably, are we really doing anything to preserve the planet? As citizens, we recognize the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate change; as individuals, we may have resolved to take fewer plane trips, drive electric vehicles, install solar panels, or eat less meat. But how can we, as a scientific field, help forestall climate change or other catastrophic threats?
I’m spit-balling here, but I’d like to start the conversation. Our colleagues have already made some important, or even transformative, inroads. For example, did you know that plant-based meats were developed using thermodynamic principles and condensate biology? Experimentalists have manipulated biopolymers of plant proteins and polysaccharides at different concentrations, pH, mineral composition, and temperature to undergo phase separation through thermodynamic incompatibility and coacervation, via repulsive or attractive interactions, respectively. Ultimately this process produces the fiber strands we critically associate with meat. Given recent reports that plant-based burgers generate 98% less greenhouse gas emissions than meat burgers (Bryant, C. J. 2022. Plant-based animal product alternatives are healthier and more environmentally sustainable than animal products. Future Foods 6, 10.1016/j.fufo.2022.100174), this emerging industry is proof that innovation using biophysics methodologies can effect real change.
In many national laboratories and research institutions around the world, work is focused on planting non-food bioenergy crops such as switchgrass, energy sorghum, or poplar on marginal, nonagricultural land. Much focus is on the remaining biomass after sugars are extracted, particularly engineering microbes to improve biomass deconstruction and maximize yield of aromatic monomers that can be used as fuel or useful chemicals. According to Tim Donohue, Director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, “biophysical approaches will help address this grand societal challenge by contributing to the cost-effective synthesis of fuels and chemicals from renew-able resources, sustainable food production, and providing new sources of energy for use by all citizens of the planet.”
Lest I sound like Mr. McGuire in The Graduate (“One word: plastics.”), I’m not suggesting all biophysicists should study plants. We should continue to skirt the diffraction limit of light and find even more ways to measure force and resolve structure at the nanoscopic scale. But in so many ways our field is, by definition, interdisciplinary; the future of biophysics holds power and promise as we step across boundaries, technical and social, to protect and expand our world.
—Gail Robertson, President