33 Epiphanies

Cross-training for Biophysics

Although some people may view research as a 9-to-5 job, I see it as my lifestyle. In the mornings I run, during the day I do biophysics, and in the evenings I cook. However, I value the first and third as vital activities for the second. Going back to the running analogy, my time away from lab is "cross-training" for my biochemistry experiments.

Running provides a great opportunity for amateur research since it's both easy to quantify (distance and time), but filled with confounding variables (e.g. rain storms and late night partying), since I'm not willing to live the type of monotonous lifestyle needed for a truly scientific experiment. As I train for the Lion CIty Marathon in late June, I talk to other runners, read articles, and experiment with different training strategies to find the best way to prepare. Wei Keong has done considerable research as part of his triathlon training, so he has discovered a good mixture of long runs, track intervals, recovery drinks, and daily nutritional supplements. On a related note, my friends John and Sukhjeet took a whole course about sports nutrition from Clyde Wilson at Stanford, which leads into the enxt topic: cooking.

Cooking is the other obvious example of this type of extra-laboratory investigation. Singapore is one of the best places in the world for exploring global cuisine: Chinese, Indian, Malay, Peranakan (a mixture of the previous three), Japanese, and even French, Lebanese, and New Mexican. Initially the Makansutra was my guide to finding the best tasting food, but I became increasingly curious about the history behind the various cuisines. I recently purchased "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee, one of the most amazing books that I have read. Instead of recipes, the book is filled with the evolutionary history and science behind the foods of the world. I now view cooking as the collected wisdom of hundreds of generations of people solving problems: using animals (milk, eggs, meat, etc.) to derive nutrition from otherwise inedible plants, applying salt, heat, or microbes to kill harmful bacteria and preserve food, and so on.

Of course, there is more to life than running and cooking, so I am always on the lookout for recommendations for things to do in Singapore: places to visit, festivals to attend, hawker centers to try, books to read, movies to watch, music to hear, and on and on. Louis Pasteur wrote that "chance favor the prepared mind," so I view my philosophy of being as open-minded as possible as preparing myself for some serendipitous discovery in lab.

Unstuck

As I mentioned in the last post, I have felt stuck with one particular step in my experiments. I am trying to use a pair of optical tweezers to stretch out a piece of DNA. However, the DNA is too small to manipulate directly, so i need to attach each end to a micron-sized polystyrene sphere, which I can move around with the lasers of the optical tweezers. The tricky part of this process is finding pairs of beads that are actually connected by DNA. I am still not sure whether I have actually made such pairs, although I have seen tantalizing hints that remind me of Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot sightings.

To get unstuck, I tried a meta-experiment: I posted each step of the process on my Picasa website. This forced me to understand each step of the procedure and unleashed a flood of questions: did I clean the Plexiglas and coverslip thoroughly enough? Are the solutions of microspheres that I am using still good? What about the DNA? How long do I need to incubate with BSA? What if I coat the whole surface of a glass coverslip with anti-dig? Will anyone reading this blog know what I'm talking about? And so on.

Talking with my friends in the neighboring labs was also vital to getting unstuck. They asked great questions from an outsider's perspective that forced me to re-evaluate things that I took for granted (why do I need to flow liquid through the flow cell? etc.). It also gave me chance to see what they do with their experiments. While I use a refrigerator/freezer to store my DNA and microsphere solutions, they use an oven to make their nanotube samples. However, their vacuum chamber (for studying field emission) and X-Ray Diffraction machine have no kitchen equivalents. In addition, I got to see photos of Zhi Han's recent honeymoon to Spain and Morocco (I'm tempted to buy a ticket right now) and to discuss the body, acidity, and aroma of some freshly-prepared gourmet coffee with Wei Keong.

Running and Research

Besides cooking and GTD, I love to run. I can get into the flow of the activity, as my mind becomes focused and the time passes smoothly. On good days, my time in lab feels the same way. Moreover, research, like running, is at many times a solitary endeavor. This can be the hours spent on a long run or the days (or weeks) spent aligning the lasers of an optical tweezer or trouble-shooting a biochemical protocol. Endurance is essential in the face a 16-week long training plan or day after day of unsuccessful experiments.

Based on a thoroughly unscientific study, I have noticed a strong correlation between my progress with distance running and my advances in my research project. Last semester I discovered the limits of my perseverance with both of these activities. My training for the Standard Chartered Marathon was going great until I was attacked by a lowly virus, resulting in a month-long epic battle with the common cold. For the first week, I refused to accept that I was sick, so I continued running and going to lab, which only accelerated my decline. For the rest of the semester, I could not run more than 10k. At the same time, I was stuck at the same step in my experimental procedure (linking two different types of microspheres with a single strand of DNA).

Now I must return to lab to face the same problem that resulted in physical and mental burnout last year. My marathon training now has a small, fairly stable start, but I am still seeking strategies to achieve the same type of feeling with my research. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cooking Club

At the risk of seeming like an Anthony Bourdain fan site, I'll start this post with an excerpt from his essay Name Dropping Down Under, from the collection The Nasty Bits. The piece explores possible reasons for the sudden rise in popularity of celebrity chefs in countries like Australia and the US:

As you sit in your lonely apartment, you feel a yearning, a longing for a sense of family, or belonging. Disconnected as you are from roots you still feel ambivalent about, those big family meals in movies are looking strangely good. A vestigial "nesting" impulse takes hold and you find yourself watching Rick or Nigella, thinking "Gee, I wish he were my older brother, or dad, and he was cooking for me." Or "I wish Nigella were my sister, or mom, cooking me that slow-roasted ham..."

This quote resonates with me for several reasons:
1) I am sitting in my lonely apartment.
2) I do feel a longing for a sense of family, or belonging.
3) After my trip to India, I finally started living in my apartment, although I had been sleeping there for over four months. With my parents' help (they accompanied me on my epiphany-inducing journey), I rearranged the furniture, so that a rack of drying laundry no longer blocks the incredible ocean view and a place to sit is available in front of the widescreen TV. I also gave the kitchen a thorough cleaning, so that the stove no longer serves as an appetite suppressant.

The point of this post isn't to whine about sitting alone in my apartment. Instead, I want to announce my goal of starting some type of cooking club on the island. I am not a foodie in the purely hedonistic sense, but rather since I see food as a window into other cultures. In America, I observed how food was often driven by a desire by corporations to maximize profits and a public obsession with minimizing the time, effort, and money required to prepare a meal. In India, I saw the entire cycle of a meal as I rode past farms on the train, accompanied my uncle to the local market, and watched my aunt prepare six-course meals, starting with grinding whole spices into pastes for the curries. In Singapore, I've obtained numerous glimpses into other cultures, such as:
+ eating a home-cooked Chinese meal from one of my coworkers and his apartment-mates (every single Chinese grad student complains about the Singaporean version of their cuisine)
+ going on an "organic tour" of Singapore to visit local farms and eco-friendly eateries (in Mandarin, unfortunately for me)
+ conversing with food bloggers about the local cuisine (which helped inspire me to start this blog)
+ enjoying an exquisite Japanese meal with the head waiter at the nearby Shin Kushiya.
During my last summer at Stanford, a group of six friends and I would cook dinner together every weeknight and I would love to do what I can to start to revive that tradition here in Singapore.

GTD@NUS

I've complained a lot about being trapped in windowless basement laboratories, spending hours by myself battling legacy Visual Basic code, making miniscule adjustments to align a set of mirrors, or other tasks that would never make exciting reality TV viewing. However, armed with another India-induced epiphany, I am ready for Round 2 in the lab. While lying semi-conscious in bed due to some stomach ailment, I realized how my true passion was the communication-related aspects of science, rather than the solitary hours at the bench. In high school, I loved explaining my science projects to the judges and public at the science fairs and even now I enjoy talking about the mechanical properties of DNA with everyone ranging from grad school friends and co-workers to taxi drivers and gelato machine salesmen.

"Results-oriented" is one of the first phrases that comes to mind when I think of Singaporean culture. Throughout their lives, Singaporeans are tested to determine their path through the education system and government bureaucracy or corporate world. Wei Keong, one of the students in a neighboring lab, explained the rationale for this: Singapore is a small island with human capital as its only natural resource. If a substantial fraction of the population decided to become poets or pastry chefs, the economy would face rather dire consequences. This can lead to a short-sighted, competitive atmosphere. Wei Keong observed this in junior college and another friend at Biopolis mentioned that some scientists go so far as to give only partial protocols to researchers in other labs, to avoid giving them an advantage.

Lying on the bed in India, with a conveniently-placed bucket on the floor next to me, I realized that I had incorporated many of the negative aspects of this philosophy and focused too much on a few short-term goals instead of seeing the big picture. My true goal in Singapore is to learn as much as I can about the local culture (and biophysics) and tell all my friends and family about my latest discoveries. Moreover, communication is a central feature of science as well, whether it is an interdisciplinary collaboration with another research group or a presentation to a funding agency. I am doing my own meta-experiment to see if David Allen's GTD system (see photo) will help me be more productive in the windowless basement lab, but I will always keep communication as my central focus. It's the reason that I started this blog in the first place.

No Reservations

Anthony Bourdain convinced me to end my three-year experiment with vegetarianism, which was the first in what I plan to be a series of epiphanies. The open-mindedness and candidness that he portrays in his books has been an inspiration for me during my time in Singapore. Although I spend many of the daylight hours in a basement laboratory, attempting to use lasers to move around strands of DNA, I explore as much of the island as I can during my free time. I have gone to movie festivals, wine festivals, cooking classes, a 10k race, and a half-marathon, among other things.

I initially became a vegetarian as a sophomore in college for environmental and ethical reasons. After I arrived in Singapore, I naturally gravitated towards the vegetarian food stalls and vegetarian Indian restaurants. As time went on, I met vegans, raw foodists, and even a fruitarian, although I became increasingly skeptical about their attitudes towards food.

A turning point in my life occurred soon before my recent trip to visit my family in India. Their traditional Bengali diet includes eggs, dairy, fish, and a little meat and I had to decide whether to request special meals from them. They would happily accommodate my dietary requests, but I was acutely aware of the inconvenience that this would cause. Moreover, I realize how food and cooking is such a central part of any culture, so rejecting their cuisine would be inherently closed-minded. As if that weren't enough, I didn't know if my pro-vegetarian arguments about factory farming, over-fishing, etc. would make any sense in their entirely different environment.

By some odd coincidence, I saw my landlord for about the fourth or fifth time in my life, even though he lives in my apartment. He was cooking dinner with one of his friends and her daughter, and invited me to join them. Their Chinese meal included meat in practically every dish. I was stuck in the middle of an imaginary debate between Anthony Bourdain, Nina Planck, and Michael Pollan on one side and Peter Singer, Jim Mason, and my vegetarian friends in Singapore on the other. The voice that finally won out was Anthony Bourdain's rant against vegetarians in his essay "Woody Harrelson: Culinary Muse."

That decision led to a far more enjoyable and thought-provoking experience in India, which i will elaborate in future posts. However, I am glad that I went through the experience of being a vegetarian, since I am now more deeply aware of the global effects of meat production. Although I will eat meat occasionally from now on, I will continue to do whatever I can to make a positive impact on the issues that made me a vegetarian in the first place.