CHECKING

The encounter with Miriam and her possible faint grey lines is not the only time I have observed people checking up on results with colleagues.

One of the juniors at Gyro Gearloose sits solemnly in front of her screen. She is going through numerous power point slides. On them are colour diagrams that shift from ice blue to orange and deep red. The blue colours indicate that the test shows a healthy person, the orange and red ones that there is a risk of contamination with valley fever¹⁹. ‘I’m going through the presentation for tomorrow’, she tells me. ‘I’m presenting for the group in order to make sure that my results are correct.’ The next day, at the presentation, they go through the details of her experiments and her results. All aspects seem to get turned inside out: ‘Why use milk as buffer?’²⁰ asks one of the attendants at some point – he is not trained in lab work but in advanced statistics, however, all questions seem welcome.

This is business as usual. In both labs, people present their work and their progress internally; sometimes to their closest colleagues, sometimes to the entire laboratory.

They do this not just because others might find it interesting or that it could spur new collaborations with colleagues, although these are important aspects as well, but also

19 Valley fever is an infectious disease caused by a fungus endemic in the Southwestern part of USA and Northern Mexico.

20 ‘Buffer’ is a dissolution used in chemical experiments, in which it is important to keep the pH-value constant.

to check that all the results are ‘correct’ and that the experiments have been conducted as they should. Some of these meetings are quite informal. They are agreed upon by a specific group of colleagues. Perhaps the presentation forms part of a meeting, where other items are also discussed, perhaps it is part of doctoral supervision, if it involves assessing students’ results. At other times, the presentations are more formal. Both labs have a weekly seminar (at Gyro Gearloose even several) where the scientists take turns presenting their results. At Curious George, the juniors talk a lot about these presentations, which are called ‘CRAMS’. When it is their turn to do a CRAMS, they talk about how well people have done at the last CRAMS, or they gossip about those who have made a bad impression with their research – be it juniors or seniors. The way the juniors talk about this seminar made me think about a rite of passage. It is something testing and significant that they all have to go through.

There are risks of both shame and failure, but also of glory and fame. And the juniors all seem equally unsure about how their own presentation will go beforehand. Of course, the glory and fame – which is perhaps not as great as it sometimes sounds – does not only come from having correct results. I suppose they should also present some interesting and original results to obtain that. Furthermore, they probably also have to do it in an arresting way. Shame, on the other hand, originates from sloppy work and thus incorrect results. It is quite evident that the juniors fear that their work will be looked upon that way. The seniors never talk about CRAMS in that way.

They are supposedly quite used to being scrutinised in this manner and therefore do not fear any shame. It is my impression that the presentations also work as a way to teach newcomers (juniors and other newly-employed people) about both the quality standards at the lab and how checking should be done. The seminars at Gyro Gearloose and Curious George therefore work as important places to learn about proper conduct in the mode of Vocation. As a sort of side effect, they also distribute (at least temporarily) local glory or shame to those who present, at least at the junior

level. Shame, as I will also show in some of the coming sections, is inherent to the mode as a way of regulating individual behaviour.

The exposure to criticism and collegial scrutinising of results and methods starts early on. I attended the final seminar for a bachelor student, who had done part of her lab training at Gyro Gearloose. She had brought homemade cake, she squirmed and smiled more than the students I have seen and there were fewer people in the audience than at the normal seminars (only her two supervisors, her two friends and me), but otherwise the scene was the same. She made a PowerPoint presentation of her experiments and analysis. The supervisors went through her experiments and results and asked about all the methods, how it was done and how she got the results.

Afterwards, we ate her homemade cake and chatted. When the scientists are further along in their careers, there may be more audience members and the cake is replaced with champagne (or just black coffee if it is an ordinary seminar), but the ritual is basically the same from bachelor level onwards. These seminars are one of the ways that the scientists check up on each other. But there is a lot of informal ‘every-day’

checking going on as well. The first story with Miriam and the faint grey lines illustrates this point well.

I’m sitting in one of the wet labs, where Jack is working. He has just complained that he has made a mistake and has to redo some of his work again. His supervisor comes in and looks at the progression. He examines the three Petri dishes on the table closely. ‘This is not what it’s supposed to be,’ he says and opens one of them and sniffs. ‘Here, you can smell it.’ He hands over the Petri dish to Jack. ‘Can you detect that sour thing? That’s mucus. It’s contaminated.’ They laugh, but Jack still looks annoyed as his supervisor leaves. He turns to me: ‘Do you know what mucus is?,’ I shake my head. ‘It’s snot,’ he states, flatly. ‘I’ve sneezed into the goddamn Petri dishes. Now I have to redo even more work…’

I often encountered this supervisor/student relationship. Good supervisors come around and check up on their students’ work. They have more experience with experimental work; they can distinguish snot from E. coli simply by the smell.

Supervisors often just show up, see what their students are up to and then lead them in the right direction in very tangible ways. Those supervisors who are considered

‘good supervisors’ check up in a calm and respectful way. When I followed the seniors, who often sit in their offices, juniors would constantly come in and ask questions about everything from sentence constructions in papers to the status on chemical supplies. As one of the seniors, Sandra, at Gyro Gearloose explains to me:

‘I learned a lot from one of the seniors in the lab, where I was a graduate student.

That’s why I really try to support and advise her [a bachelor student, ed.] – and also help you.²¹ How else should you guys learn your way around?’

However, this is not a relation reserved exclusively for the supervisors and students.

It is a way of going about your work that I encountered at all levels. At Curious George, many of the scientists share an office, often two to a room. As I sat there, I saw how the scientists constantly ask each other for advice, make each other check numbers or formulations in their papers. At times, checking up is extended beyond the members of the lab as when the members are at conferences or external discussants are invited to present or assess PhD students, associate professor applications, etc. One of the scientists at Curious George told me that she at times writes to the authors of published papers and inquires about their methods – and that she has kept all her own notes from her lab work in the eventuality that somebody may write to her. Something she both hopes for and dreads, because on the one hand

21 I often got the impression that the seniors considered me as yet another young pup, whose ‘up-bringing’ as a valuable member of academia was their responsibility as well.

it would be an honour if somebody were that interested, but on the other she is afraid that her notes are too sloppy.

Those ways aside, the most common way of checking is the self-monitoring, which the scientists constantly exercise.

Today I’m following Catherine around. We are in the basement of the building where the plants for her next experiment are kept in a cool, dark room. She is going to infect half of the plants with mildew fungus and half of them will remain untouched. She explains the process –partly to herself, partly to me – during the process of infecting the plants. ‘Infected plants to the right, healthy plants to the left.’ She repeats this phrase many times. ‘I really have to remember,’ she explains to me, ‘it’s so important that they are not put together. They look the same with and without infection at this stage, and they have to be in the same climate chamber after infection to ensure the same light regimen.’ She continues the work. ‘They are to the right,’ she reassures herself, as she puts another potted and infected plant on a rack. She writes it down in her lab notes so she can remember for later. Then she counts the plants on the two racks. It is as it should be: Half of them to the right, half of them to the left. She still looks a little concerned as we leave the room and she casts glances back at the two filled racks.

Much of the checking is actually mostly directed at the scientists themselves. They are very careful in everything they do and constantly just look again. In that way, it takes immense concentration to do fairly mundane tasks such as filling ten flasks with liquid or measuring the amount of buffer correctly.

Annie is sitting in front of her screen as I approach. She shows me some graphs that she is currently working on. According to her, they do not look as they should. She is

going to go through all the numbers to check up – or otherwise do the statistics all over again, because something seems wrong. She wants to check whether it is the samples or the techniques that are causing the problems.

The scientists, first and foremost, check up on their own procedures and results to see whether they seem reasonable. They go through their papers many times before they show them to others. They check the statistics, the measurements, the way they have positioned their samples, the timer on the fridge, the oven or a third device, and they write the measurements down, so they can return and check on their former selves. This constant checking up on their own behaviour seems to take a lot of intense work:

I have chosen to assemble a range of observations under the heading of ‘checking’.

One could also interpret some of the examples as ‘helping each other’. The good supervisors help their students in the lab; scientists are given the opportunities to practice presentations at internal seminars; good colleagues help each other write papers and handle the complex and stubborn machines. I consider both interpretations quite valid. It depends on the angle of research. Davies and Horst(In review) point out that the notion of ‘care’ in scientific work has been neglected. They suggest that the feminine connotations to such notions as ‘care’ have made it difficult to focus on such interpretations in a world dominated by (traditionally masculine) discourses about ‘objectivity’ and formal rules. Their paper shows, in contrast, how research management is also very much about ‘caring’ for the research group and ‘caring’ for the juniors (Davies and Horst In review). Agreeing with Davies and Horst, I do not suggest that the ‘checking’ should be understood in a way that excludes friendships, wishes to help a colleague or care for inexperienced PhD students. Rather, I suggest that ‘care’ and governance in the form of checking up are not mutually exclusive.

They can, in fact, be two sides of the same coin.

The reason that I have chosen to focus on the more disciplining aspects of the examples is that the examples resonate with the descriptions of responsible conducts as I encountered them during my work mapping social responsibility in science, as shown in chapter 5. Many of the texts²², which I categorised as ‘Demarcation Rationality’, state that internal control with methods and results are vital. As described, the scientists consider it paramount that science is autonomous, but governed by strong, internal ideals so as to ensure integrity. Here, they often name the daily, mundane processes such as peer review, supervision, presentations and collegial supervision of work as ways of enforcing these ideals. Seen in this light, the many encounters that I have described, (also) become instances of checking up on fraud and laxity.