Science in the Pub

Citizen Science: what makes an expert?

by Kate Viscardi

For March’s Science in the Pub (PubSci), Gail Austen, a PhD student at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, discussed Citizen Science, asking “what makes an expert?” 

Although “Citizen Science” is a new term, the practice goes back a long way. Amateur, novice, non-professional and similar terms sound pejorative, but Gail argued that practitioners can actually be very knowledgeable and the important thing is that everyone is involved. There are lots of different levels, from the wealthy amateurs of the 19^th century, like Darwin, to indigenous groups who have intimate knowledge of the biodiversity of their localities. She showed a photo of a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe holding a smartphone – yes, it certainly looked anachronistic but the purpose was deadly serious – they use the phones to monitor poachers’ movements.

Gail argued that right back to the Industrial Revolution, education has concentrated on producing people who met the needs of industry and commerce and that ethos is still alive today, but what we need is fresh perspectives. Gail gave Zooniverse as an example where a volunteer, Hanny van Arkel, pointed out a galactic feature that no-one knew what it was and so opened up a new area for research. Over 100 years ago Beatrix Potter was knowledgeable about algae, to the extent that she had a paper read to the Linnean Society – by her uncle, her being a woman. Websites such as iSpot, Ask a Biologist and iNaturalist, include contributors who are not necessarily professionals but are knowledgeable in their chosen field.

There are benefits and issues for both professional scientists and enthusiasts. Academics have access to publications and tools that the public doesn’t, whereas amateurs are free to pursue their own interests without worrying about grant applications and suchlike. Observation records can be very useful too. The National Biodiversity Network has data going back to the 1600s, which can’t be used commercially but is a massive, free source of information. However, some academics still query the robustness of the data. There are now publications available to guide professionals in how to harness the strengths of citizen science. 

Gail herself came through the route of being an accountant volunteering with the Natural History Museum, to chairing a local conservation group (Kent Greater Crested Newts), to doing a PhD in citizen science. Her research uses face recognition studies to examine how good people are at recognition and the types of errors people make. How good are experts compared with novices? How do training methods impact on accurate identification? Do we see what we expect to see? Thoreau said: “it’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see” – for example, it’s only religious people who see Jesus on a piece of toast. Gail has found that people who know very little are much more confident of their knowledge than people who have more experience – an example of the Dunning-Kroeger effect.  (Author’s aside: This is something that explains an awful lot of what goes on in social media – people who lack the skills or abilities for something are also more likely to lack awareness of their lack of ability.)

This matters for species identification.  In Kent there are malaria-carrying mosquitoes and it’s vital to spot the right species. But if we do not know what species exist, and how they interact, we cannot be accurate – but there aren’t nearly enough professionals to cope with the information that’s there, not even what’s being found in museum collections. The process of identifying a new species is not straightforward, either. There are also observation effects – there are lots more reports of rare species than common ones because people know they’re rare.

Whatever information is gathered it will be of interest to someone, somewhere. Non-structured observations can provide new information and there are plenty of data, that could be used to predict changes and inform policy, but it’s all over the place. Gail feels that what we need now is a massive database to bring it all together but there isn’t the money to fund it.

PubSci is held on the first Wednesday of every month, at 7pm, upstairs at the Old Kings Head, King's Head Yard, 45–49 Borough High Street, London SE1 1NA. Arrive early to take advantage of the pub's Happy Hour.

Science in the Pub -- November 2015

Antibiotic Apocalypse? Antibiotic Resistance: Occurrence and Challenges

By Kate Viscardi

November’s PubSci was timely, coming as it did in World Antibiotic Awareness Week. Dr Michael Byford, who is a Biochemist lecturing at London South Bank University, outlined the dangers that arise from the development of resistance to antibiotics and discussed a different approach taken in the Soviet Union.

Bacteria are all around us and generally do us no harm; indeed we have symbiotic relationships with some, inside and outside our bodies. However, when the wrong bacteria get in the wrong place they can, and do, kill. Until the discovery of penicillin, infections in wounds were very bad news indeed and made surgery a risky business, while tuberculosis patients were isolated in remote sanatoria for long periods.

Today we take antibiotics for granted – too much for granted. Bacteria reproduce simply by splitting in half, so one bacterium can become a million in just a few hours. The more “copies” there are, the more chance there is of one of them having a mutation: and that mutation could be something that enables that bacterium to survive the attack by the antibiotic that is killing its neighbours. The mutated bacterium then divides and passes on its newly-acquired resistance to its offspring. The chances of resistant bacteria developing are increased when a course of antibiotics is not completed – antibiotics take time to kill all the bacteria, if the course of treatment stops too soon there will be bacteria still around that have been weakened but not killed, and they will develop their defences. And if antibiotics are used when there is no infection it results in bacteria in balance in the body being exposed needlessly to the pressure to evolve resistance.

It takes time and costs money to identify the exact strain of bacteria that is causing an infection, so most antibiotics used are broad-spectrum – effective against a variety of bacterial strains. In fact, most antibiotics are only profitable for pharmaceutical companies if they are broad-spectrum because they can then be used for more conditions, so for more patients, so more sales volume. It is not, however, in the pharmaceutical companies’ interests for bacteria to develop resistance to their products. Developing new antibiotics is an expensive business and the speed at which resistance is now spreading makes it a risky undertaking.

Most antibiotics have at the base of their development some kind of fungus, natural or synthetic. Another approach, however, is the use of bacteriophages (phages). These are a specific kind of virus that attack bacterial cells. Their disadvantage is that they are very specific to individual strains of bacteria so banks of phages are needed in preparedness for different infections. It is said there are still buildings full of phages near Moscow and these could yet prove valuable.

Many of the audience were clearly very knowledgeable, able to follow the technical details, and the questions at the end revealed deep concern about the problem of antibiotic resistance when it affects gravely ill patients.

Will this prove to be the end of the Antibiotic Age, with the subsequent return of fear of disease and lengthy treatment regimens?  The speaker was hugely pleased when “measures to address antibiotic resistance” was chosen by public vote as the winner of the Latitude Prize 2014, but it would help now if people would trust expert knowledge. A cold is caused by a virus, not a bacterium, so there is no point in taking antibiotics, yet people express dissatisfaction with doctors who don’t prescribe them.

Pubsci is held on the third Wednesday of every month, upstairs at: The Old King’s Head, King's Head Yard, 45-49 Borough High Street, London SE1 1NA

Ada Lovelace Day at Science in the Pub

By Kate Viscardi

Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated on the second Tuesday of October every year, while Science in the Pub (PubSci) meets on the third Wednesday of every month. Starting in 2009, Ada Lovelace Day was originally a day of blogging about female role models in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), but quickly grew into events run around the country. PubSci sticks to its usual date but has an annual Ada Lovelace event each October. This year the speaker was Dr Charlie Lea who, a few years ago, used a PubSci audience as guinea pigs in her PhD research. Charlie is now a Psychology lecturer at the University of Brighton and returned to PubSci to take a different approach to commemorate Lady Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.

Despite her programmes for Babbage’s unrealised programmable computer, and Babbage’s own acknowledgement of his “Maths fairy”, Ada Lovelace was dismissed by many contemporaries in the early 19th Century and her efforts attributed to Babbage. Charlie took this as her starting point and discussed the way that women have been whitewashed out of the history of Psychology.

Educated women were regarded with horror in 19th Century society. G Stanley Hall said: “Educated women are functionally castrated”, but there were pioneers determined to succeed, and succeed they did. Nevertheless, they have still been largely written out. Charlie attributed this to the bias of misogynist historians and that women tended to work in under-valued areas, such as educational, social and occupational psychology. Much less famous than the “founding fathers” of the discipline, Charlie gave brief biographies of some amazing women.

Mary Whiton Calking founded the Psychology lab at Wellesley College and was already working on memory and synaesthesia at the start of the last century. William James taught her in his own home and described her as his best PhD student ever, but Harvard never awarded her PhD. No US university would let Christine Ladd Franklin into their Physics labs, so she switched to Logic and Mathematics and fulfilled the requirements for her PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 1882, but it was not awarded until 1926. She was introduced to Psychology in Germany and developed her own theory of colour vision.

Margaret Floy Washburn did ground-breaking work on the animal mind, including maze-learning rats. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, whose interests were in engineering and management theory (“time and motion”), left academia and together with her husband ran a consultancy company. Amongst other things she invented the pedal bin – and they also had 12 children.

Charlie summed up by saying that women invented important paradigms yet had difficulties even in being awarded their PhDs, getting lectureships or funding. They were influential teachers but the areas in which they worked were often devalued. They have also suffered from mis-attribution of their work, for instance by being described as “X’s student” instead of being given the dignity of their own names. And they continue to be whitewashed out. Finding little mention of women in histories of psychology, Charlie searched her university library for a book specifically about female psychologists and found just one, published in 1982 in the USA.

Science in the Pub meets at 7pm on the third Wednesday of every month, upstairs at the Old King’s Head, 47–49 Borough High Street, London SE1 1NA. Arrive early to take advantage of the pub's Happy Hour from 6–7pm. Our next speaker, on November 18th, will be Dr Michael Byford on Antibiotic Resistance.