This BPS 2023 journey began on an airline bench. At noon yesterday, I found myself sitting on another one, waiting for my delayed flight to finally board, missing home, and having just eaten airport sushi for the first time in my life in a fit of hunger and desperation. Gambling with fate in such a way inevitably stimulates thoughts about fate’s sister, that favorite cosmic force leveraged by the scientist: Serendipity.
Scientists refer to serendipity when, by seeming chance, something incredible occurs in our business: a mistake in protocol execution might reveal some striking phenomenon worth pursuing, or perhaps an airplane seatmate by sheer happenstance possesses the expertise to make a key experimental suggestion (the latter happened to my P.I.). The word comes to us by way of Horace Walpole’s English translation of The Three Princes of Serendip, from a French translation of an Italian short story borrowed from a Persian fairy tale from the fourteenth century – the very history of the story smells of serendipitous moments left and right. Of the different elements that make up a scientific meeting, poster sessions are where serendipity in scientific practice shines the brightest: between joyful discussions, spicy arguments, lukewarm agreements-to-disagree, and everything else along the spectrum of scientific communication, for a couple of hours each day, the Exhibit Halls of the San Diego Convention Center buzzed with new ideas, new connections, and new possibilities.
As I shared in a previous post, a fortunate encounter my P.I. had at a poster session in 2017 eventually unfolded into my PhD dissertation – so I naturally view these events as supremely important avenues for a scientist’s growth, mainly by providing a favorable environment for such serendipitous encounters. The scientist might ask: how might we therefore engineer serendipity? For one thing, we know that a good poster session is about the number of meaningful encounters. We also know that the fraction of visitors that actually engage with us in a meaningful way depends on a couple of key parameters – in fact, one can imagine the poster session as lying on a phase space defined by collision terms such as crowd density and audience flux; an aesthetic term that contributes to poster dwell time and overall memorability; some spatiotemporal parameters such as when and where one’s poster is set up; and many interaction terms to do with how we as presenters comport ourselves.
It sounds counter-intuitive, maybe even self-contradictory to think about serendipity as a numbers game. Yet, we all know the feedforward loop of attention: when someone is paying attention to something, we begin to think of it as therefore something of interest. This person knows something I don’t; I wonder what it is. There is a critical nucleation mass, in my experience at least 3 listeners, that then rapidly facilitates the Ostwald ripening of a larger crowd. During a particular dry spell on the very last poster session of BPS 2023 (we’ll return to the importance of timing later), my friend C decided to come and hang out for a bit. As I gave him my spiel, another friend E, whom I hadn’t seen in many years, stopped by and chatted as well. Very quickly thereafter, I found myself explicating the work to upwards of five people at once.
We spoke of an aesthetic term that dictates the first moments of encounter; in other words, the importance of a Hook. Big, bold posters with strong titles and eye-catching graphics more easily grab an audience. All throughout BPS 2023, stunning super-resolution images, evocative molecular structures, elegant mathematical models, and beautiful graphical abstracts decorated our halls. Throughout the week, I saw fun titles to do with Martinis (one of which was positively swamped), strange phraseologies like “the iron piracy code”, “funny currents”, and ”sweet and sour transport”, and acronyms such as SHAMAN, MUMMI, and SMITE. (My overly esoteric title likely did me no favors, but hey, it’s a challenge coming up with bangers in our business! My respect goes out to the expert backronymmers in the biophysics community.)
As for content, we all appreciate the significance of signification – the best posters are as concise as they are lucid, storylike as they are systematic. As literary supplements, videos saved on smartphones and well-crafted analogies popped up here and there, making some stories much more immersive. I did employ one semiotic innovation in my poster – instead of an Abstract, I distilled my project into the following one-liners: “What is known”, “What is not yet known”, “What we did”, “What we found”, and “What we think”. I think it helped many people process our project’s takeaways much better than if I had written it up in the classic formalism.
I mentioned that the phase space of poster sessions also involves interaction terms to do with the poster presenters themselves. We tell stories, after all, and the real storyteller is not the poster text but rather the person explicating it. It’s not easy to speak simply about these, because science communication is no simple thing – as audience members, for example, some of us like reading posters in peace without the pressure of a grinning, eager presenter lying in wait to deploy their well-practiced spiels; on the other hand, some of us actively seek out these effervescent conversations that quickly lead into speculations to high heaven! And as presenters, some of us are more serious and taciturn while others are boisterous and excitable, some of us love focusing on the big picture while others delve deeply into the nitty-gritty of each lovingly developed step in the Methods. The interaction term is rather difficult to define, and the presenter and audience member alike must agree to meet each other where they are – especially as we attendees must wear both hats at any given conference. All I can say in the way of universals is that a happy poster presenter is a magnetic presenter, while a tired, unhappy presenter is no joy to watch. Which naturally brings us to some forces outside of our own control that can impinge upon the Affects: spacetime and circumstance.
The impact of placement is easy enough to think about: if you land on a hot spot, one with lots of audience flow and under nice lighting, perhaps near an eye-catching exhibitor, you’re all set; on the other hand, being stuck on the liminal interstices of the Exhibit Hall might predict two hours of sparse foot traffic. But given enough time, visitor diffusion will lead to the exploration of even the more obscure spaces; therefore the role of time (and timing) is more important in my view. Poster time can be dissected on three levels: what day in the program (t_program), what time of day (t_day), and at what point in the session (t_session) the encounters occur. If Serendipity is some mysterious function of the interest developed at a scientific encounter S(Int), then in the absence of knowledge about the Interest function Int(t_program,t_day,t_session) that describes the evolution of interest along these three timescales, I will intuit from previous experiences that the odds of a serendipitous encounter follow the behavior of a damped oscillation with a period of one conference day – which implies that the toughest poster sessions to give are on the last day, wherein the energy of audience and presenter alike almost fully peter out near the end of that day’s final session.
As it happens, my poster on immune mechanical outputs fell on such a time slot. Thankfully, the Princes of Serendip, not unlike Erwin Schrödinger, describe a flow of probabilities rather than the fifty-fifty of coin flips. And so, against the odds, on that final hour of that final slot of that final day, the encounters I had were incredibly fulfilling. I never thought I would have engaged so animatedly with anybody outside of lab about Zernike polynomials, of all things – it was enough to make this seventh year feel like a second year all over again! (But let’s not take that claim too far.) Only time will tell if the collisions of 2023 will unfold into the findings of tomorrow. But in my experience, the Society has figured out as good a formula as any for engineering serendipity.