2.13: Academic Intersections with Liz Wayne & Xine Yao
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This week it’s a podcast two for one as we cross the STEM/humanities divide with cancer scientist Liz Wayne and literary critic Xine Yao. Together they host of PhDivas, a podcast about academia, culture, and social justice. In our conversation we discuss how people across the scholarly spectrum perceive one another, the locus and character of research in the humanities, and the necessity of being interdisciplinary. Also: Drake, headaches, scholarly privilege, friendship, and ruminations on the word “rumination”.
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Links and Show Notes:
The cover art for this week’s episode is taken from the “Colonies” series by artist Vik Munzi and synthetic biologist Tal Danino. Emerging from the creative combination of contemporary art and biotechnology known as bioart, this particular image was created using rat liver cells. Check out this blog post for a description of the artistic and scientific process underlying “Colonies” then maybe peruse this article for a scholarly review of the ethics of bioart.
Yes, neuroscientist Jack Gallant and colleagues really did ask people to listen to The Moth while in an MRI. The result is a study that tells us some neat things about what is happening in our brains as we listen to narratives.
The study comparing activity within the brains of mathematicians and mathematicians was recently described in this paper and this (significantly less jargony) article. Similar studies have also been conduced with opera singers, expert dancers, professional writers, expert board game players, trained artists, and many other groups.
After his death in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was removed and dissected by pathologist Thomas Harvey. From there, the story gets rather garish. Recent analyses of Harvey’s unpublished photographs can be found here and here.
Xine and Liz covered how they came to do the work they do now over on PhDivas.
For those somehow unaware, Drake is so Canadian that his entertainment career started with a role on Degrassi: The Next Generation. Yes, he is also from Toronto.
Hans Bethe was awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. Though perhaps best known for his involvement in the Manhattan Project and subsequent advocacy against nuclear weapons, he also made significant contributions to astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics during a scholarly career that lasted over 70 years.
Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit features a scene centered around “Letters to a Young Poet”, a collection of letters written by poet Rainer Rilke to Franz Kappus.
Xine and Liz’s discussion about graduate student labor in higher education can be heard here. Their episodes focused on mentorship and leaves of absence can be heard here and here.
The discussion about how many hours academics should work per week is as ubiquitous as it is contentious. The most recent catelyst of conversation is probably this blog post by bioinformatician Mick Watson.
Some neuroscientists actually do spend time slicing brains. The sectioning of the brain of Henry Molaison (aka Patient H.M.) was even streamed live online.
Oliver Smithies (along with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans) was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of homologous recombination- the the technique underlying gene targeting and knockout mice. Still working in the lab at the age of 90, Smithies is also well known for his work advancing gel electrophoresis.
Xine and Liz discuss what the research process looks on either side of the STEM/Humanities divide in this episode of PhDivas.
Remedies to treat headaches are found in the earliest known medical texts, though our current understanding is mostly informed by the (decidedly chauvinistic) medical tradition of early scientific era. This paper provides a nicely concise summary of the history of headaches.
Judith Butler is perhaps best known for her 1990 book “Gender Trouble”, in which she outlined her theory of gender perfomativity. Because her prose is notoriously difficult, here is Judith Butler explained with cats. Butler’s definition of rumination is described in this essay on criticism.
Speaking of difficulties with language, the word “bibliography” has two distinct meanings relevant to this podcast: 1. The organized listing of referenced books (a.k.a. enumerative bibliography) and 2. The systematic description of books as physical, historical or cultural objects (a.k.a. analytical bibliography).
Derived from the Latin rūminātio (“chewing the cud”), the word “ruminate” is most often defined as something akin to “deep, careful consideration”. In the context of clinical psychology, “rumination” refers specifically to a mode of responding to distress that involves repetitively and passively focusing on the symptoms of distress and on the possible causes and consequences of those symptoms. In general, research into this type of rumination has focused on its link with the symptomology of major depressive disorder and its possible link to a deficit in controlling the contents of short term memory.
“A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf’s exploration of women as writers of and characters in fiction, can be read in full via eBooks@Adelaide.
In episodes of PhDivas that directly address perceptions across the STEM/humanities divide head on, Xine and Liz describe their visits to a biomedical engineering and the Mütter Museum.
The most comprehensive statistics about the health of the humanities is given by the Humanities Indicators project undertaken by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Spoiler alert for the 2015 report (and a trend that’s been noted for decades), things could be better. Since this episode is all about interdisciplinary scholarship, it’s probably worth noting that, despite some recent increases in the U.S., trends in STEM funding worldwide are also not encouraging.
Among its many, many epistemological problems, the pseuedoscience of phrenology was both steeped in and used to justify all manner of institutional racism. Martin Delany was admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1850, but saw his admittance rescinded due to the objections of a group of white students.
It’s perhaps not most precise metric, but if you want to compare the value universities place on their academic departments compared to their sports programs, just take a look at this breakdown of average salaries. Data on graduate stipends across institutions and disciplines can be found here.
The current minimum stipends for graduate students and post-docs funded through NIH grants can be found here. If these salaries seem egregiously discordant with the levels of expertise required, keep in mind that people funded through other mechanisms are often paid significantly less.
Thomas Kuhn outlined the notion of paradigm shifts in scientific knowledge in his his hugely influential book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. In very broad terms, Kuhn’s thesis was that scientific theories do not emerge simply from falsification or the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a complex set of evolving intellectual circumstances and possibilities.
Maybe scientists forget that rhetoric is a thing because it literally preceded the modern conception of science by millennia? No seriously, Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” was published almost 2,000 years before Copernicus first described the heliocentric solar system in “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” and Thomas Hooke catalyzed cell biology with “Micrographia”.
Johannes Haushofer, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, recently published a CV listing his career failures to encourage others to keep trying in the face of disappointment. Reaction to the CV going viral was decidedly mixed. As noted by Haushofer himself, several other academics previously published similar documents.
The Week's Bold Signals Book Club selection in “Synners” by Pat Cadigan. Originally published in 1991, Synners is a classic cyberpunk novel. There are hackers battling mega-corporations, there is a dystopian urban landscape and a rich virtual, there are lots of big ideas about the intersection of humanity and technology. As with most cyberpunk, most of the superficial elements haven’t aged very well. This is a novel where the creation and distribution of music videos is a central plot point. But this is also a novel that has a lot prescient things to say about the reciprocal relationship between communication and culture in the digital landscape.
Most of Pat Cadigan’s work is currently out of print, but her “Mindplayers” trilogy is currently available in omnibus form. If you enjoy “Synners”, Melissa Scott’s “Trouble and Her Friends” has a similar milieu.
If you’d like to purchase any of the books discussed in the book club and support the podcast at the same time, take a gander at our Amazon store. The podcast also has an Amazon wishlist if you’d like to donate a book. The full list of book club books is here.
Music in this Episode
“Enterprise 1” by Languis "Cosa Preluda” by dmyra “Latin Electro #10″ by dmyra “Too Far Gone” by Ryan Lit “People in Colours” by Superpoze
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3323602