Caltech Letters

We Do Our Homework: Caltech Graduate Students and Postdocs Should Form a Union

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Courtesy of C/GPU

Viewpoint articles are a vehicle for members of the Caltech community to express their opinions on issues surrounding the interface of science and society. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of Caltech or the editorial board of Caltech Letters. Please see our disclaimer.

Science is a labor of love—love of discovery, and love of pushing the limits of current human knowledge and ability. As graduate student and postdoctoral workers at Caltech, we nourish our cell culture lines on weekends, stay up all night observing through telescopes, spend hours welding devices, and travel long distances to study our world. We care deeply about our science, and we want the best environment in which to do that science.

Some aspects of our environment support our ability to do strong science, such as access to cutting-edge technologies, brilliant colleagues, and compelling classes and seminars. Other factors hinder or harm that ability, particularly for colleagues disadvantaged by our current system: for example, wages that fall short of the cost-of-living year-after-year, unexpected changes or cuts to our health insurance, unsafe laboratory environments, and a history of institutional failures to address mistreatment by faculty. To address these issues and create the best environment in which to do our science, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars across the Institute are in support of forming a union (known as Caltech Graduate Researchers and Postdocs United, or C/GPU). Unionization will allow us to collectively bargain for better working conditions and codify them in an enforceable contract.

Unfortunately, administrators leading Caltech are actively opposed to graduate students and postdoctoral scholars forming a union. In an email to graduate students in May 2023, Dean of Graduate Studies David Chan bluntly wrote, “As Institute leadership, we believe that unionizing is not in the best interest of our students or community”. Provost David Tirrell expressed a similar sentiment, writing in March that unionization would alter the “direct” and “collaborative” relationship between administrators and students.

Why is Caltech against us unionizing? A union will better position us to negotiate for the best conditions to do our science by challenging the current power dynamic where Caltech administrators unilaterally control all aspects of our working conditions. Case-in-point: year after year, the Graduate Student Council has presented Caltech with data-driven, explicit, well-formulated requests for stipend increases that meet the rising costs of living. Each time, Caltech has given marginal increases. Then, after the public debut of Caltech Grads and Postdocs United in December 2022, Caltech announced a sudden $5,000 increase in the graduate student stipend. In a message to faculty, Provost Tirrell explained that this stipend increase would be funded without impacting research budgets. Despite years of pleading from the Graduate Student Council, it took the specter of a union and a possible shift in power to finally persuade Caltech to increase stipends, and prove that they could do so without burdening lab funds. It is no wonder that on May 10th, 2023 the Caltech Graduate Student Council released a statement of support for C/GPU!

Caltech administrators have repeatedly sent graduate students and postdoctoral scholars a link to a website which provides supposedly unbiased “facts about, and resources for, current discussions about the potential Caltech graduate student and postdoctoral scholar unionization.” We were dismayed that much of the information in Caltech’s “Know the Facts” page lacks evidence, and worse, some of the “facts” are blatantly misleading. For example, they provide an example where “if only 100 out of 500 eligible people vote, 51 voters would determine the outcome for all 500 people in the bargaining unit, as well as future graduate students and postdocs”, which would suggest that graduate student and postdoctoral scholar union elections often have low (20%) participation. Twenty percent participation is far lower than any graduate student worker and postdoctoral scholar union election in recent history. Examples include USC, Johns Hopkins, and Yale, where union elections saw participation by 60%, 67%, and 63% of the voting body, respectively, with over 90% voting in favor in all three elections.

In fact, much of the language on Caltech’s webpage is similar to anti-union webpages at other universities. Several of these institutions have hired top-dollar law firms to prevent graduate students from unionizing; Duke University famously funded a legal campaign to challenge the law that graduate students are workers with the right to unionize. Curiously, large sections of the Caltech administration’s webpage are identical to a page about graduate student unionization published by Duke. Caltech graduate students and postdocs have taken the time to research, fact-check, and write critical clarifications to Caltech’s “Know the Facts” webpage.

A side-by-side comparison of the language from the respective anti-union pages from Duke (left) and Caltech (right). Exact language matches are highlighted.

Courtesy of C/GPU

Graduate student and postdoctoral workers drive the research and discovery happening at Caltech. We put all of our intellect (and most of our waking hours) into the generation, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of critical scientific advances. We do this work because we love science and discovery, but at the same time many of us struggle to pay for rent, healthcare, childcare, and international scholar visa and legal fees. Some of us deal with unsupportive or abusive advisors, and work in research settings with very real health hazards. Unionization can address these challenges and enhance our ability to do the scientific work that we love.

The undersigned graduate student workers and postdoctoral scholars have collectively contributed over a century of research and teaching years at Caltech. We have seen the serious hardships many fellow researchers have faced while trying to do their science at Caltech. We came here to work with and learn from Caltech’s world-class faculty, and we believe that a union will allow us to achieve more together. Many faculty, having once been junior researchers themselves, have expressed support for graduate students and postdocs unionizing at Caltech. We advocate not only for ourselves, but for all of our colleagues, especially those in more vulnerable positions. With a union, we will have the ability to bargain for long-overdue improvements and protections, such as:

Formal grievance procedures and third-party arbitration that puts students and survivors first, similar to mechanisms that the graduate student union at MIT is fighting for and the unions at UC have won
Protections and rights for international students and scholars
Written, contractual stipend increases that reflect cost of living every year for graduate students and postdocs
Guaranteed funding to transition away from toxic lab environments, conditions that Columbia academic workers recently won in their contract
Affordable health insurance and child care

We have done our homework and made the decision that forming a union is necessary to ensure that we and future scholars at Caltech are best positioned to make discoveries that can positively change our world.

In support of Caltech Grads and Postdocs United (C/GPU):

Alexander Viloria Winnett, BBE, 5 years
Ranjani Murali, BBE/GPS, 6 years
Tom Naragon, CCE, 6 years
William Denman, CCE/GPS, 6 years
Ryan Rubenzahl, PMA, 5 years
Varun Wadia, BBE, 6 years
Mike Greklek-McKeon, GPS, 4 years
Ashay Naren Patel, PMA, 5 years
James Williams, EAS, 3 years
Lambda Moses, BBE, 6 years
Richard Horak, BBE, 3 years
Sasha Alabugin, CCE, 3 years
Sam Ponnada, PMA, 3 years
Tessa Rusch, HSS, 3 years
Rahma Elsiesy, BBE, 2 years
Natasha Reich, CCE, 2 years
Simona Miller, PMA, 2 years
Nadia Suryawinata, BBE, 2 years
Elina Sendonaris, EAS, 2 years
Jasmine Emtage, BBE, 2 years
Ruby Byrne, PMA, 2 years
Quinn Morgan, EAS, 2 years
Matt Ratanapanichkich, CCE, 2 years
Talya Klinger, PMA, 1 year
Elisabetta Benazzi, CCE, 1 year
Daniel Utter, GPS, 2 years
Jessics Spake, GPS, 3 years
Abdullah Farooq, BBE, 6 years
Joel Chacko, EAS, 2 years
Emma Cosner, CCE, 1 year
Korbinian Thalhammer, GPS, 3 years
Ethan Klein, EAS, 2 years
John Chapman, CCE, 3 years
Nikolaus Prusinski, PMA, 3 years
Evie Harel, CCE, 2 years
Ruth Moorman, GPS, 3 years
David Abramovitch, EAS, 2 years
Himanshu Chaudhary, PMA, 4 years

Dungeons & Dragons & Batteries: Rethinking our approach to science outreach

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Jennah Colborn for Caltech Letters

Every Friday, I run a Dungeons & Dragons adventure at my local game shop. It’s one of my favorite ways to meet people outside of Caltech. Armed with bags of dice in every color imaginable, I guide players through zany high-fantasy tales and lay out puzzles for our team of intrepid heroes to solve.

But tonight’s D&D session isn’t your standard lair-crawling, monster-slashing module. Tonight, I’m running an adventure that doubles as science outreach. I still have plenty of classic D&D hijinks planned, but as a battery chemist, I’ve put my own spin on the story. I’ve written different types of real-world batteries into the game mechanics, and I’ve plotted a tale that will show my players how those batteries work as they use a battery-powered device to defeat this week’s villain. As people start to join my table, introducing themselves or chatting about their characters, I’m excited to see how they’ll approach the science-themed adventure I’ve laid out.

The author's “Dungeons, Dragons, and Batteries” game setup, complete with multicolored dice.

Skyler Ware

My battery-based D&D module was developed with the assistance of the STEM Ambassador Program (STEMAP), an outreach training program that helps scientists design their own community engagement activities. I had a little experience leading community outreach, though mainly through programs developed by someone else. STEMAP taught me to design my own outreach program, and their approach surprised me in its difference from the work I’d done previously.

STEMAP prioritizes building trust between scientists and the community, instead of a strict focus on teaching science. Rather than reaching out to conventional places of learning like schools, libraries, or museums, STEMAP encouraged us to look for places where science outreach doesn’t usually happen, like game stores or tattoo parlors, among others. Looking beyond the obvious venues allowed us to reach people who don’t, or can’t, engage with science in those spaces. And instead of showing up with a demonstration already planned out or with activity kits already in hand, we spent time talking to leaders and representatives of the focal group—the group we wanted to work with—about the best way to present scientific material before we even began planning our program.

STEMAP's approach encourages science outreach in less conventional places, like tattoo parlors or breweries.

Illustration by Jennah Colborn for Caltech Letters

This relationship-centered model seems simple, but it fosters an empathic approach to outreach that seems to be lacking in the modern scientific community. Too often, scientists fall into the trap of the “deficit model”: the belief or assumption that skepticism of science stems from a lack of scientific understanding, and that we do outreach to teach science to people who lack scientific knowledge. But that approach devalues the sociocultural factors that influence attitudes toward science, ignores what people might already know about the topic from their own lived experiences, and erases the group’s agency in deciding how and why they want to learn more. The deficit model alienates people whose science knowledge draws from experiences outside of formal education, who have historically been undervalued by scientific institutions, or whose attitudes toward science stem from deeply held values and beliefs that are challenged by scientific advances. In contrast, a more empathic, value sharing approach increases public interest in science and improves scientists’ connections to their communities.

The deficit model sees scientific outreach as a didactic practice, providing scientific knowledge where it was previously lacking. The relationship-centered model recognizes and draws on the lived experiences and existing knowledge of community members.

So how can we, as scientists, build authentic and trustworthy relationships with the communities we want to reach? Below are a few considerations that we can implement at any stage of the engagement process.

Get to know your audience. When communicating our science, trainees are encouraged to “consider your audience,” usually to get us to think about our audience’s education level. Dig deeper. Consider your audience’s interests, the tools and resources they have (or need), and the knowledge or skills they might already have acquired outside the school system. Use those interests, tools, and knowledge to build common ground.

Talk to community leaders. Build your outreach and engagement programs in collaboration with people who already know your audience. Ask what the group wants to learn. Listen to, and learn from, how they already engage with science. Spend time in the space you’ll be occupying. Resist the urge to guess (or to assume you already know) what your audience cares about or how they want to engage with the material.

Be your full self. Engage with your own community, whether that community is built around shared identities, interests, or values. That shared connection can be as deep or as frivolous as you want it to be, but bonding over something important to both you and your focal group builds trust and invites the public to see you as more than just your lab coat. Building that trust is just as worthy and important of a goal as sharing the science, and it will open doors to more effective and long-lasting relationships with our communities.

I encountered a powerful example of these principles in action at a conference in the summer of 2022. I met a researcher from South Africa who was working with rural and tribal groups to find more climate-friendly alternatives to coal mining. Her efforts weren’t focused on educating those groups on climate change though; as she explained, they already knew a lot about the effects of climate change on agriculture from their own lived experiences. They understood the science of climate change through a different lens, and they knew that closing coal mines would help fight both climate change and mining-related illness. But closing the mines would destroy the economies of their mining towns. Rather than hammering home the negative impacts of coal mining on the environment, her work focused on building trust and open conversations with the residents of those towns to ensure that alternatives to the coal mines would meet their economic and public health needs.

These principles can be applied just as easily in less politically charged situations, like classroom outreach or my battery D&D adventure. Though the stakes are much lower, there are clear parallels in how our focal groups respond when given the freedom and agency to direct their own engagement with a topic. When we approach outreach with empathy and openness, we build stronger, more trustworthy relationships with the communities we want to reach.

As our party of heroes defeats their last imaginary foe, I look out across the table at the smiling faces of a team that were strangers to each other, and to me, not three hours before. Even if they don’t remember a single thing about batteries, I’ve taken the first steps towards building an outreach relationship based on trust and mutual interest. I’ve shown that I’m more than just a scientist, and that I see them as more than just people who don’t know about batteries. Building trust through shared values might not be a typical focus during outreach, but I’m hopeful that by prioritizing those relationships, we can grow lasting, authentic, and impactful educational partnerships.

Study, Eat, Burnout, Repeat

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Jennah Colborn for Caltech Letters

As an incoming freshman in 2016, I received my first orange, Caltech-branded T-shirt during orientation. In cheerful comic sans, it proclaimed “Study, Eat, Coffee, All-Nighter, Repeat.” The facilitators waxed poetic about how we would bond spending long nights studying under the bright fluorescent lights of the library, running problem sets over to their drop boxes at 3 a.m. together, and enjoying the beautiful sunrises before finally going to sleep. The next four years were a whirlwind as I desperately tried to stay on top of my assignments, and it was only in the year after I graduated that I realized the extent to which I was burnt out by my time at Caltech. I realized the habits of overwork I developed as a student were working to my detriment outside of college. As it turns out, I wasn’t alone.

The "Study, Eat, Coffee, All-Nighter, Repeat" T-shirt the author received during freshman orientation.

Jadzia Livingston

In preparing for this article, I interviewed several recent alumni from various majors, houses, and extracurricular groups at Caltech. They all described experiencing burnout, an occupational condition characterized by exhaustion, lack of passion, and reduced productivity due to chronic workplace stress. Everyone felt it; we all agreed that overworking students makes them dislike what they are doing and makes them less effective at doing it. Each interview underscored an unfortunate truth: the Caltech undergraduate experience is structured in a way that puts students at a high risk of burnout and encourages bad work habits that will serve them poorly as they enter the workforce.

Every graduate I talked to remembered struggling to find time for everything. If their life was in perfect order, if every moment was scheduled, showers and meals were carefully timed, and leisure activities were used as a chance to do some of the easier work, only then was it possible to get all of the coursework done. There wasn’t a margin for error. There was never a moment to take for yourself, to think about what you were learning and what it all meant. There was always another set to do, another experiment to run, another recitation to go to. If something went wrong, if you got sick or injured, your whole life tumbled out of control.

The appearance of undergraduate success often masks unhealthy habits and feelings of stress and burnout.

Illustration by Jennah Colborn for Caltech Letters

I thought I flourished in that environment, having deadlines that pressured me to succeed in a short time. If every moment was carefully structured, then my productivity must have been maximized. If I spent every spare moment learning, then I must have learned a lot. To an outside observer, I was successful — I led two clubs, did publishable research, and kept a high GPA — but under the surface I was always exhausted, never slept enough, and felt like things were about to fall apart.

Many alumni I spoke to expressed concern that the students at Caltech were chronically sleep deprived. Some alumni worried that students aren’t aware of the negative effects of poor sleep habits, including reduced attention span, difficulties with memory formation and critical thinking, and increased depressive symptoms. Others worried that students—unaware of the consequences of poor sleep—were not putting in effort to fix their sleep schedules. Even though I knew the cost of sleep deprivation during my time at Caltech, I was still unable to maintain a healthy sleep schedule while also fulfilling my academic duties. The students I spoke to who did manage to cut enough time out of their work schedule to sleep often had to give up research, networking, teaching, or extracurriculars and deal with unbearable stress to make up the time “lost” to sleep. They didn’t feel they had the opportunities afforded to students who gave up sleep to get everything done.

Many students seem to take a perverse pride in — or at least have a grim acceptance of — this toxic culture. Students and professors alike look with awe at those students who are able to excel without appearing to struggle. This attitude plays into widespread impostor syndrome (the feeling of being academically out-of-place) among the student body (as described in the 2022 Co-Curricular Group Report). Students feel that they “don’t belong here” if they don’t force themselves to maximize their accomplishments at the expense of their physical and mental health. As a result, poor sleep habits and poor work-life balance are marks of pride, representing the sacrifices we make to succeed. They demonstrate how much harder we are working than everyone else and “prove” that we aren’t impostors. A selfless devotion to the pursuit of knowledge at the cost of physical and mental health is the hallmark of the mythical (and perhaps unduly venerated) “Caltech Genius.”

The mythical "Caltech genius."

Illustration by Jennah Colborn for Caltech Letters

Proper sleep hygiene is made even more challenging by work expectations that force students to prioritize completing their work over healthy sleep habits. At Caltech, most problem sets are expected to be done collaboratively. They are intentionally made more difficult than what one person can do on their own so that they are suitable for a group, which incentivizes students to work together and penalizes students for working alone. This system, paired with undergraduate work culture, promotes work habits that make healthy sleep patterns impossible. Groups are generally only available at night due to daytime classes and extracurriculars, so most work gets done between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m. In addition, many sets incorporate information taught up to the due date, so it often isn’t possible to work ahead of time. Classes at Caltech are also chronically “under-unitted,” meaning that the actual hours spent by students on the class far exceed the hours listed in the course catalog. While intending to create a collaborative environment, the assignment structure at Caltech inadvertently causes students to spend more time struggling through homework than thinking critically about what they have learned.

The time pressure undergraduates experience at Caltech forces students to choose between central aspects of the traditional college experience. A lot of undergrads at Caltech don’t go to lectures, and many that do are late or exhausted. I always found this puzzling — here we are with some of the most accomplished scientists in the world teaching us the secrets of the universe, and yet we can’t bother to get out of bed for class. But when every moment has to be strictly scheduled, and lectures aren’t essential to learn the material, it often becomes a choice between going to lecture or getting the work done. An hour of lecture could be used to edit a paper, work on a problem set, or even just catch up on the sleep missed because of a paper or problem set for a different class.

The culture of burnout at Caltech isn’t the fault of any one person or group. It’s systemic, and the students and faculty are complicit. The bad habits that students internalize and often glorify are both encouraged and taken advantage of by the way classes are structured. There is a general assumption that students will sacrifice sleep and career opportunities to get their coursework done, which in turn allows professors to assign more work. This environment of chronic stress and poor sleep makes learning that much harder, which makes assignments take longer, which creates more stress and worse sleep; the result is a cycle of unhealthy conditions.

The culture of burnout at Caltech leads students to question their value and sense of belonging within the establishment.

Illustration by Jennah Colborn for Caltech Letters

These habits don’t magically disappear with an easier workload or a different institution. I still find myself working at strange hours, struggling to get up in the morning, and taking on more than my share, even when my supervisors encourage me to put my mental health first. Without ingrained healthy work habits, I often find myself ignoring signs of fatigue and illness to get more work done. Having now worked at other institutions, I’ve seen how environments that intentionally prioritize the health and wellbeing of students and staff actually increase productivity and quality of work. I’m still unlearning the work and sleep habits I developed at Caltech, but I’m lucky to be surrounded by coworkers and supervisors who not only encourage me to take care of myself but model healthy work habits themselves. I’m grateful to have the experience I gained from Caltech, but it came at the cost of my health.

One night at freshman orientation, in 2016, an admissions officer got up in front of the assembled class of 2020 and told us that all of us belonged here, even though we might not feel that way. This school would be better served if the students and faculty believed this. That means structuring classes with the goal of most effectively teaching the information, rather than trying to weed out students who “don’t have what it takes.” That means both students and faculty recognizing unhealthy work habits as detrimental and encouraging and modeling healthy work habits. That means reevaluating class curricula to ensure that students are not expected to spend more than their unit load worth of hours doing work for classes. That means mindfully structuring classes such that students can easily understand the concepts rather than being mired down in busywork. Caltech is one of the most selective universities in the country, and everyone here has earned their place. Students deserve an environment where they are free to learn without sacrificing their health.

How the universe made us

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered where the particles we are made of come from? In the words of the late, great Carl Sagan, ‘We are made of star stuff.’ The hydrogen and oxygen in water, the carbon in every life form, the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our bones and teeth, the iron in our blood, and the gold we wear were all made in exotic places in the Universe. To understand how this came to be, we need to zoom out of your room, city, and even Earth and take a journey to the edge of the Universe.

Before starting this journey, we will detour to some basic science. What makes carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and all other elements different? To answer this question, we have to take a look inside the structure of the elements. The constituent particles of an element are called atoms, which are the smallest building blocks of all matter. Atoms are made of positively charged protons and chargeless neutrons packed tightly into a highly compact nucleus that is orbited by negatively charged electrons. The number of protons in the nucleus determines the elemental identity of the atom. For example, eight protons combine with eight neutrons and eight electrons to create oxygen, twenty of each combine to form calcium, and so on. From a pool of a little over one hundred different elements comes your body and everything we know on Earth. But where and how did these elements, the basis for our entire existence, originate?

Schematic of an atom showing the general arrangement of protons, neutrons, and electrons

Key Stage Wiki

Let us start with the simplest element, hydrogen, which is made of one proton in the nucleus and one orbiting electron. Hydrogen is present in the water we drink, the food we eat, and the fuels we put in our cars. To see where hydrogen first formed, we need to travel back to the start of time, to the birth of the Universe itself. Astronomers have theorized that the Universe began with the Big Bang—an explosion with extremely high energy. Immediately after the Big Bang, bits and pieces of matter and energy rapidly expanded into the Universe. In these early moments, however, the environment was far too hot, dense, and chaotic for larger structures—like atoms and molecules—to form. Hydrogen didn’t appear until the Universe had spread out and subsequently cooled down—enough for the first protons, neutrons, and simple atoms to form. Electrons were formed within the first microsecond (one-millionth of a second) after the Big Bang. Protons and neutrons began forming shortly after, within a single second. About three minutes after the Big Bang, conditions had cooled enough for these protons and neutrons to form a hydrogen nucleus. This is called the era of nucleosynthesis (i.e., the synthesis of atomic nuclei). As the Universe cooled down further, these hydrogen atoms came together under the influence of gravity to form the first stars of the Universe. Continuing our journey to understand the basis of our existence, we now turn to these twinkling stars.

Humanity has looked at the stars and wondered about our place under them for hundreds of years. In the bellies of these stars—seemingly serene dots in the sky—a high-pressure inferno begins to squeeze together atoms of lighter elements and combine them into heavier ones. Because all protons are positively charged, they tend to repel each other. However, the extreme conditions of stellar interiors make them one of the few places in the Universe where protons can be forced to fuse into a heavier nucleus. Let’s examine this fusion process more closely. When two protons and two neutrons are squeezed together, they form the nucleus of helium. This nuclear fusion process releases enough energy to power the Sun. Then, three helium nuclei can combine in a multi-step process to form the nucleus of carbon, a 6-proton element. The fusion of carbon and helium nuclei leads to an oxygen nucleus containing 8 protons. The process continues. Through successive fusion reactions, the nuclei of most elements lighter than iron (26 protons) can be formed. The atomic factories inside stars continuously churn day in and out, generating all the carbon and oxygen atoms in the Universe. In fact, all the organic elements inside plants, animals, and even humans once came from the bellies of stars.

The extremely high pressures and temperatures in the interiors of stars provide ideal conditions for the generation of atoms of elements like carbon and oxygen.

Illustration by Sarah Zeichner for Caltech Letters

While lighter elements are created in living stars, heavier elements originate in magnificent, explosive stellar deaths. When a star dies, it explodes in a phenomenon known as a supernova, an explosion so bright that it may even look like a second sun in the sky. In the few seconds of a supernova, more energy is released than during a star’s billion-year lifetime. In 1054 AD, Chinese astronomers discovered such a second ‘sun’ visible in the daylight for nearly twenty days. This energy provides ideal conditions for heavy atomic nuclei to bind together and form even heavier elements, such as calcium and iron. My own research involves scanning the night sky to discover new supernovae. We then study how they evolve over time with the hope of understanding the physics driving the explosion itself, and the processes involved in making these heavy elements.

An artistic rendering of a supernova

Illustration by Sarah Zeichner for Caltech Letters

There are much heavier elements of course, like gold, that even supernovae can’t create. So where do these elements form? You might understand the game by now: we need to travel to places in the Universe that are even more exotic. After a supernova explosion, what’s left is an extremely high-density object called a neutron star. It’s so dense that a spoonful of a neutron star weighs more than the Himalayas! These highly compact objects provide a gigantic reservoir of neutrons essential for the synthesis of heavier elements. But to access this neutron reservoir, we need a way to tear it open. In this pursuit, we now turn to binary neutron stars. While we started our journey in a single star, like our Sun, most stars are actually binary (double): two stars orbiting each other. After both stars in a binary system explode, the two dense neutron stars left behind eventually spiral into each other and collide, releasing neutrons heated to billions of degrees. Heavy elements form in under a second. In 2017, observations made by Caltech scientists and others helped astronomers discover such a merger for the first time. The color and brightness of the merger provided direct evidence for the presence of gold and platinum—it was like observing alchemy in action!

Two neutron stars spiral in moments before merging, resulting in a highly energetic explosion that created the first gold and platinum atoms.

Illustration by Sarah Zeichner for Caltech Letters

How did these elements, formed billions of years ago, finally make their way to us? As stars die and explode as supernovae, they release all the elements they made into space. Similarly, mergers of stellar corpses also produce explosions that expel all synthesized elements, forming a cloud of gas and dust. This stardust later forms new stars, like our Sun, and new planets, like Earth. Astronomers believe that our solar system formed from one such cloud of stardust called the Solar Nebula around 5 billion years ago.

The origin story of the atoms that make up our muscles, bones and blood, the jewelry we wear, and the smartphones we use, a story that predates us by billions of years, is identical for each and every one of us. It is a story independent of one’s caste, race, religion, or country. Times are uncertain. No matter what you are going through, remember that we all are connected by this incredible, better-than-science-fiction story. You are made of stardust; every bit of you is glorious star stuff. Go out there and shine!

The science of fear and decision-making

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“What is its name? Can I pet it?”

“That wasn’t the right response,” I thought to myself, my hands sweating inside my blue nitrile safety gloves. But instead of saying anything, I just smiled back at the volunteer, who by this point was far too enamored with the test animal to pay attention to instructions from me.

And the animal in question?

A palm-sized, three-ounce adult tarantula.

Surprised? Well I was, too. This was meant to be an experiment on fear and anxiety, and my eight-legged lab partners were supposed to help us understand how those emotions work by eliciting them from volunteers.

Of course, as I learned that day, nothing in an experiment ever goes exactly according to plan…

Still, it was strange that I was getting this many volunteers who seemed unafraid of my test animals. The fear of spiders is called arachnophobia, and it is the most common fear among humans. Around 5% of the human population have this phobia, and in a study run by Graham Davey at City University London, 75% of the people interviewed were at least somewhat afraid of spiders.

So what exactly was I trying to test with this experiment? Long story short, I was trying to see how fears could affect how humans make decisions, and perhaps use the findings to come up with practical ways to use our emotions to guide our own decision-making.

Let’s say that someone is afraid of spiders: Could money incentivize them to kiss their fears goodbye and touch a spider? Or, in the reverse sense, could the presence of a spider impede them from collecting money? We were interested in investigating how fear could control a person’s decision-making.

In the Mobbs Lab, we constructed large black boxes with holes that allowed people to stick their entire arms into them. We then placed Easter eggs that represented different amounts of award money within those boxes. During each trial, the subject would reach their arm into a box and try to collect as many of the four Easter eggs as they could. The caveat? There was a 25% chance the box had a tarantula in it, acting as a stimulus to induce fear and stopping people from collecting all the eggs.

The “black boxes” constructed by the Mobbs lab.

Illustration by Julie Inglis for Caltech Letters

When I first toured the lab, the members showed me the tarantulas, which were alive, awake, and ready to scare their next subject. As a proud member of the 75% that feel mildly uncomfortable with spiders, I shivered as I saw them stretch their legs out and zip around in their cages. Lab members showed me how to handle them: they noted that wearing lab gloves was important, and they even fed the tarantulas live crickets. They told me about not only the spider experiments, but also other experiments, including one where the fear stimulus was in the form of a haunted house with actual electric chairs, cockroaches, and rooms designed for suffocating visitors.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on these experiments. I knew that I wanted to be a part of cool experiments where I could handle tarantulas and use them to scare subjects, and see how their fear could affect how they act. Usually, labs performing psychology and neuroscience experiments on human subjects have resorted to using fake stimuli for convenience. For example, in past experiments looking at arachnophobia, subjects were simply shown images of spiders on a flat computer screen.

Later, I learned that the lab wasn’t working with real stimuli just because it sounded cooler than using fake stimuli. Looking at an image of a spider simply does not engage the same brain areas and fear pathways in the brain as actually interacting with a moving, real-life spider. Two behavioral scientists at Caltech, Professor Colin Camerer and Professor Dean Mobbs, contended in a 2017 paper that using real stimuli is important for obtaining meaningful experimental results when studying fear.

Real versus fake stimuli.

Illustration by Julie Inglis for Caltech Letters

In addition to using realistic stimuli, we designed mini questionnaires that we gave the subjects before each “spider box” trial, in which we asked how many eggs they were planning on collecting and how anxious they felt, since anxiety is the feeling that you experience before a fear-inducing event. After each trial, we would ask the subject to rate the fear they had felt while collecting eggs. Along with those questionnaires, we planned to take an automated, constant stream of objective biological measurements of the subjects during each trial. One measurement was a subject’s sweat level, taken using a Fitbit-like gadget at the subject’s fingertips. Another measurement was the blood flow in a subject’s face, computed using computer vision techniques on video recordings taken throughout the experiment.

I worked with the team to advertise the research study and recruited an initial fourteen volunteers to come into our lab to undergo the experiment.

To thoroughly assess our volunteers’ fear of spiders, I gave them thick packets of questionnaires to fill out, including the Spider Fear Questionnaire (SPQ) and Fear of Spiders Questionnaire (FSQ) when they first entered the lab. After that, I led the volunteers into the experiment room for them to undergo the experiment. It was at this point when some volunteers would make comments that revealed how eager they were about meeting the spiders! It was clear that they would be willing to stick their hands into the boxes just for the opportunity to pet the spiders, even if the boxes didn’t contain any money.

In a final survey after the volunteers underwent the experiment, we asked them what their strategies were for grabbing the Easter eggs from the box. I had naively prepared myself to read about strategies to dodge the tarantula. Instead, I ended up reading about the strategies that they used to help protect the spider from their hands, such as by curling their fingers to stop themselves from poking the spider.

Naturally, every subject managed to pick up all the Easter eggs and thus the maximum amount of money from each box. And what I found when I took a close look at the results of the spider fear questionnaires was that none of our volunteers were actually arachnophobic, confirming my suspicions.

Although none of my study participants were fearful enough of spiders to be classified as arachnophobic, some subjects did show signs of mild fear. One person jumped up when they felt their hand had rubbed against the spider when their arm was in the box.

Even though there was some variation among the fear scores, we couldn’t find a relationship between the amount of money people collected and the spider fear scores; the subjects who had the lowest fear scores and the subjects who had the highest fear scores collected the same number of Easter eggs – all of them. And although we had also eagerly collected reams of physiological data, like sweat levels and blood flow, we couldn’t correlate the number of eggs collected with any of it either.

This was a great example of self-selection bias, where those who volunteer to participate in an experiment don’t reflect the general population and lead to skewed results. In my case, those who were less prone to be fearful of spiders were more likely to sign up for the experiment. Not having any arachnophobic people in our volunteer pool became a huge obstacle to eliciting findings from our study.

But we weren’t done just yet.

Remember those mini questionnaires we painstakingly issued before and after each trial? It turns out there were patterns within them!

By simply looking at the survey data we had collected both before and after each trial, we could see if the levels of anxiety and fear that each subject experienced had changed over time, over all the trials.

First, we looked at anxiety, which was the fear that subjects felt before reaching their hand into the box. We found that it decreased the more trials the subject participated in, which could mean that if you repeat a scary action over and over again, you could feel less anxious about performing the action the more you’ve done it before.

Meanwhile, our surveys also revealed that fear during egg collection stayed the same over all the trials. This meant that the actual feeling of fear did not change with the amount of egg-collecting experience a subject had.

Our findings show that although we failed to answer our question of how fear could affect decision-making because of selection bias, we could still find meaningful patterns of anxiety and fear even among people who do not have very high levels of fear.

A similar analysis on the physiological measurements that we took could teach us something about how the levels of blood flow or sweat changes between trials as well. The next step we have planned is to take a look at our biological measurement data and find out!

What are some practical applications of understanding how anxiety and fear work in humans? It turns out that there are quite a few! For instance, if we understood better how strong emotions influence how we make decisions, we might be able to create tools that trigger specific emotions within us and help us perform better decision-making.

In the spider experiment, I wanted to see how fear could deter people from collecting monetary rewards. This didn’t work out perfectly since all of our volunteers were undeterred, but we still found out about how repeated exposures to fear-inducing stimuli could affect fear and anxiety.

This finding could be extended to people with higher baseline levels of fear, and this fact could help us with coming up with tools that help people with decision-making.

Since doing this experiment, I have tried to apply my learnings to help with my own decision-making. To reduce the time I spent on my phone on entertainment such as social media and YouTube, one day I decided to change my phone background to a picture of holes. Since I have mild trypophobia, the fear of holes, every time I wanted to turn on my phone that day, I was too scared to do so. Unfortunately, it made me scared of using my phone even when I really had to for non-entertainment purposes, so I changed the phone background back to what it was originally by the end of that day.

Clearly, we still have a long way to go before the lessons learned from this study can be used for practical applications! But I am confident that continued research into the complex nature of fear could one day yield deep insights into human behavior, allowing us to better understand and control our decision-making in the real world.

In Defense of Basic Science

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Cecilia Sanders for Caltech Letters

If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood, and don’t assign them tasks and work. Instead, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

_{^{—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Wisdom of the Sands”}}

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…

_{^{—Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”}}

For a short time when I was six years old, I was really into rocks. Armed with a notepad, ruler, and magnifying glass, I’d march to the neighborhood park to catalog its geology in as much detail as possible. I still remember the rush of excitement that came each time I “discovered” a new stone, like no one had ever set eyes on it before. It was the first time I ever felt like a scientist.

That kind of wondrous, wide-eyed exploration is the reason I decided to pursue research in the first place, albeit more recently as a biology student (my passion for pebbles has since subsided). This is the realm of what we call “basic” science, which is termed for its focus on curiosity-driven discovery rather than any inherent simplicity. Yet the closer I get to becoming a card-carrying academic, the more I’m forced to ask myself whether my motivations should be more pragmatic. We urgently need to solve real-world problems, from global pandemics to climate change. Why bother developing abstract theories when we could spend that effort creating new medicines? Even if those theories later prove to be prerequisites that yield practical dividends, getting there by curiosity alone seems slower, riskier, more circuitous, and harder to control.

This debate is as old as science itself—and yet I can’t help but feel suspicious of those who deride basic research as foolishly romantic. I’m reminded of the apocryphal story about Michael Faraday who, when challenged by an audience member to justify the value of some discovery, retorted: “Madam, what is the use of a newborn child?” Clearly, it would be ridiculous to judge a person’s future potential based solely on their defenselessness as an infant. Similarly, when science aggressively optimizes for immediate utility above all else, it risks missing a wealth of mysteries we have yet to understand or even conceive. How much is a fact really worth? What’s the going rate for a flash of insight, a new model in biophysics, or an entire branch of mathematics? Why did Newton invent calculus, Darwin follow finches, and Einstein ponder gravity? The most impactful advances in human history were born of curiosity alone. And while their initial value is difficult to formulate in dollars and cents, their ensuing practical ramifications have revolutionized our lives. “People cannot foresee the future well enough to predict what’s going to develop from basic research,” says George Smoot, a 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physics. “If we only did applied research, we would still be making better spears.”

On its own, applied research is a fundamentally myopic endeavor. We cannot see the future, and we will never know the answers to our questions unless we ask them first. We’ll never know which new discoveries will be made—or how, or when—until we find them, lurking at the edges of our perception, and yank them into the light. This is the reality of our existence, as inescapable as death, or entropy, or taxes. It’s the reason science must always be a defender of curiosity-driven inquiry.

Nonetheless, today’s academia leaves less room for basic science than ever before. Only 17% of total U.S. R&D expenditure is devoted to basic research—and while universities performed 58% of it in 2007, that proportion has since dropped to just 48% in 2017. Even federal support for basic research has stagnated over the past decade (in absolute dollars), as reviewers and funding agencies become increasingly risk-averse. Taxpayers and policymakers bristle at the idea of underwriting esoteric research without obvious practical impact. Scientists, forced to devote a growing portion of their time to chasing vital grants, are incentivized to pursue the kinds of projects that are more likely to be funded: low-risk proposals with clear, short-term results. Together, these forces leave curiosity-driven science in a quiet crisis. Society demands progress, but in the words of Lewis Thomas, “we’d like to pay less for it and get our money’s worth on some more orderly, businesslike schedule.”

A breakdown of federal R&D funding from 2000-2017. While the U.S. government remains the single largest backer of science, it no longer bankrolls the majority of basic research. Since this graphic was published, federal support for applied research has surpassed that of basic science (in absolute dollars).

The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2020 (NCSES report).

The resulting trickle-down effects are pernicious. In a country where just 3.6% of total R&D funding reaches universities, competition for those research dollars is intense. Tacitly or overtly, trainees are encouraged to frame, upsell, and twist their research into the most “fundable” version possible. In the life sciences—which account for more than half of all academic research expenditure—it is a common practice to contort grant proposals until they offer some tenuous translational relevance, so that they might be considered by the monolithic National Institutes of Health. Even if a basic project is funded to completion, it can be an entirely different battle to publish the findings. Peer review at the most prestigious journals—Cell, Nature, and Science—emphasizes groundbreaking results with broad applicability, which naturally incentivizes authors to play up the importance of their work. Those who publish successfully in “high impact” journals bring in more grant money, boosting their academic careers. Researchers unlucky enough to be interested in unfashionable questions have little recourse; when they fail to publish “well” or to obtain further funding, they are promptly ejected from the scientific establishment.

The system now favors those who can guarantee results rather than those with potentially path-breaking ideas that, by definition, cannot promise success… Many surprising discoveries, powerful research tools, and important medical benefits have arisen from efforts to decipher complex biological phenomena in model organisms. In a climate that discourages such work by emphasizing short-term goals, scientific progress will inevitably be slowed, and revolutionary findings will be deferred.

_{^{—Alberts et al., Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws}}

Despite these monumental pressures, pockets of resistance still exist. New communities are emerging with the goal of establishing alternative ecosystems outside of academia, where basic science can flourish. Alternative publishing platforms could help address the limitations and misaligned incentives of modern peer review. A growing number of private and philanthropic organizations are starting to invest in riskier, exploratory projects, which might help to pick up the slack as federal funding slows. These are all welcome efforts, but we also need fundamental reform—which is where trainees are uniquely equipped to fight back.

To my fellow graduate students: resist the deforming gaze of today’s academia, which compels the commodification of your innate curiosity. You have the freedom to direct your research; this is a unique privilege. Do work that fascinates you, even if you can’t justify its immediate utility. Share your passion with the world, instead of letting the world beat it out of you. Tell old friends and first dates about your work. Blog about it. Present it at conferences. You will feel pressure to defend your interests in terms of technological advancement or practical impact, but remember that your curiosity is always worth your time. Following it isn’t some recreational or ivory-towered pursuit; it’s the beating heart of what science is all about.

After all, basic science is the original science. Since our earliest sapient ancestors first gazed up at the stars in wonder, we have been fighting to make sense of the universe. In the same way, our childhood fixations—whether rocks, space, dinosaurs, or something else entirely—reveal that there is something universal about our desire to understand. This search for meaning has been the engine of progress for our species throughout history. Curiosity is humanity’s most valuable compass—we must protect it in order to protect our future.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Skyler Ware for many rounds of thoughtful edits (and remarkable patience while I struggled to meet my deadlines); Cecilia Sanders for an incredible illustration that’s way out of my writing’s league; Niko McCarty, Alexey Guzey, Divesh Soni, and countless other friends for reading and critiquing my drafts; and the entire Caltech Letters team for helping bring this little piece to life.

Caltech Letters Year in Review: Our 5 Favorite Articles of 2021-22

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Here at Caltech Letters, we’ve wrapped up another fantastic year of bringing science out of the lab and into context.

With campus commotion returning to pre-pandemic levels, we’ve continued to grow and expand our site. In the 2021-2022 academic year, we celebrated our fifth year since launch, the third year of our Viewpoints section, and the publication of our 60th feature-length article.

Here are a few of our favorite articles from 2021-2022:

A Sneak Peek at the Quantum Revolution

Illustration by Jennah Colborn for Caltech Letters

You might be familiar with the idea of quantum mechanics—maybe from a physics class or your favorite superhero movie. At small scales, the everyday physics we’re accustomed to starts to break down, and light and matter take on strange properties.

What if we could tap into those properties and harness them for our own purposes? That’s the idea behind quantum information, which could dramatically increase the power of our computers and networks in the coming years.

According to graduate student Piero Chiappina, quantum technologies are poised to revolutionize the way we store and share data, in applications ranging from chemical modeling to information security.

In this far-reaching explainer, Piero gives a crash course in the physics behind quantum information and offers a peek at the exciting opportunities these tools might offer in the coming years.

Read the article

Feeling wine: The science behind our perception of tannins

Illustration by Siobhán MacArdle for Caltech Letters

If you’ve ever had a glass of cabernet sauvignon or a cup of oversteeped tea, you’ll likely be familiar with the dry feeling they leave in your mouth. That dryness comes from tannins, a type of molecule found in the leaves and fruits of many plants.

But how do tannins cause that drying sensation? Where do tannins come from, anyway? And what does that mean for your next trip to the wine aisle?

Siobhan MacArdle (PhD ’22) explains how tannins interact with our mouths, why some wines have more tannins than others, and how to choose a wine that gives you the perfect mouthfeel.

Read the article

Femininity, Foreignness, and Flowers: How culture shapes scientific discovery

Illustration by Sarah Zeichner for Caltech Letters

Science is often viewed as objective, impartial, and absolute. But humans are inherently subjective, and the ways we perform and interpret science can change with contemporary social climates and attitudes.

What does the influence of sociocultural factors mean for the scientific method? What happens when cultural and scientific views clash? Can scientific understanding ever be separated from the social environment in which that understanding arises?

Graduate student Fayth Tan grapples with these questions and examines the role of cultural context in scientific discovery through the lens of orchids, femininity, and colonialism in Victorian England.

Read the article

No More Dirty Money for Green Science

Illustration by Isabel Swafford for Caltech Letters

There are many ways we can reduce our carbon footprints. Small lifestyle changes like carpooling, taking public transit to work, or ditching single-use plastics can all add up over time. But some changes, like switching from natural gas to electric appliances, can have even farther-reaching impacts.

In Los Angeles, building energy use makes up a staggering 40% of carbon emissions, most of which comes from natural gas appliances. Transitioning away from natural gas in buildings in favor of universal electrification, according to recent graduate Cora Went (PhD ’22), is the only practical way to eliminate this source of greenhouse gas.

Cora notes, however, that natural gas providers in California have been broadly opposed to electrification initiatives—all the while advertising their support for renewable energy research at universities like Caltech.

In this incisive commentary, Cora details her experiences fighting for local building electrification and urges scientists to critically examine the implications of accepting funding tied to fossil fuel companies.

Read the article

Non-Utilitarian Scientific Ethics

llustration by Isabel Swafford for Caltech Letters over "Braun Laboratories at Caltech", captured by Lev Tsypin

In 2019, Stewart and Lynda Resnick—billionaire owners of agriculture conglomerate The Wonderful Company — pledged a record $750 million to Caltech to support energy and sustainability research, including a brand-new 80,000 square-foot research building.

This eye-popping figure—the second-largest private donation ever made to a US university—spurred a range of commentary, from excitement over future breakthroughs enabled by the Resnicks’ largesse to newfound scrutiny and criticism over the environmental practices of the Resnicks’ own companies.

In a world of scarce research funding, how should researchers grapple with the dilemma of accepting donations from controversial sources? Should scientists accept support from organizations whose practices don’t align with their values?

In this thought-provoking Viewpoint, graduate student Lev Tsypin examines these challenges at the heart of scientific funding and proposes new ethical approaches to tackling them.

Read the article

Caltech Letters is currently recruiting. If you’re part of the Caltech community and are interested in joining our team, please contact letters@caltech.edu.

Non-Utilitarian Scientific Ethics

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Isabel Swafford for Caltech Letters over 'Braun Laboratories at Caltech', captured by the author.

Caltech recently received the second-largest gift ever donated to a US university, a whopping $750 million from the Resnick family, meant to support research into sustainable technologies and means of combating climate change. This money will be used to erect a new building, bolster Caltech’s endowment, and fund environmentally-oriented research. Researchers who receive these funds will retain full self-determination over their work. It is tempting to unquestioningly celebrate this gift and the freedom to use it, but I believe that it is not ethical to pursue research using these funds without critically examining our relationship with the Resnicks. As scientists, we mold our work, our speech, and our way of interpreting the world in pursuit of objectivity. However, we often end up deluding ourselves and each other into believing that we actually are objective beings. Such beliefs are dangerous when we encounter ethical dilemmas: a person who believes themself to be objective can always justify their actions as “right.” As we consider how the Resnick gift should be employed, we need to be clear about how we judge the ethics of its use.

When we think of moral dilemmas, we usually think of dramatic scenarios: for example, the trolley problem or, in the case of scientific research, how long artificial embryos should be allowed to develop. But the vast majority of ethical choices scientists face are mundane. These choices are typically not even related to experiments, but rather to funding: from whom to procure it and how to compete for it. In the US, scientists usually turn to a combination of government agencies and private organizations. The government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), usually have a very broad scope and support many diverse scientific ventures. The private foundations typically have very concrete missions, such as developing treatments for a particular disease. Despite the differences in breadth of focus between public and private sponsors, US scientists typically justify their applications for funding by claiming that their research will contribute to the “Greater Good”. These contributions are codified in grant and proposal guidelines and are sometimes termed the “broader impacts” of the work. For example, the Center for Advancing Research Impact in Society (ARIS) developed a guiding document to advise grant reviewers and program managers on how to evaluate NSF grant applications, underscoring the importance of the quality of their proposed broader impacts. This document states that a key factor in evaluating a given proposal is its potential “to benefit society or advance desired societal outcomes.” In other words, while scientific research directions are typically driven by myriad human motivations like aspiration, ego, and curiosity, they have to be recontextualized and sold as socially beneficial.

Relying on the strength of the broader impacts of their research, scientists make a utilitarian claim. Maximizing utility, broadly defined as achieving the most good for the most people, is an important motivation and should be at the foundation of public policy. But I contend that it can never be an objective goal. There is no universal definition of “Good,” and, for most definitions, this Good cannot be evaluated within our lifetimes. Utilitarianism usually cannot be a moral basis for a scientist to pursue their work ethically because the work’s utility cannot be guaranteed. In applications for funding, utility often emerges as either an afterthought or an assertion provided solely to procure funding. Unless a different, non-utilitarian moral ground underlies the work, the scientist’s ethical obligations as a human being cannot be satisfied by their proposed research alone.

To give a concrete, admittedly dramatic, example of the tension between utilitarianism, funding, and social values, I present the case of Martin Couney:

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the burgeoning eugenics movement held “Better Babies” contests (e.g., which blue-eyed white baby is “scientifically best?”), and most doctors advocated that premature infants be left to die, Martin Couney developed incubators that saved thousands of these children, including his own daughter¹. Couney did this as a showman who continually lied about his credentials: In 1898, he began traveling to expositions and fairgrounds in the US, with infants on display in his incubators as sideshows, all the while claiming to have a European medical license and training under Dr. Pierre Budin, a founder of modern neonatal care, neither of which was true². In 1903 and 1904, respectively, Couney established permanent expositions on Coney Island and in Atlantic City that both ran for nearly forty years³. By charging the peeping public for admission, Couney was able to fully cover the cost of the medical care, sanitation, and nurses’ wages at no cost to the desperate parents who brought him their newborns. When the infants matured, they were returned to their families. Couney saved roughly 85% of the premature babies in his shows, in contrast to the roughly 25% that were surviving standard care. Gradually, Couney garnered enough respect to win over the medical establishment. His influence went beyond saving the preemies to proving that they could grow up to be indistinguishable from those who had been born at full-term. As one example, possibly due to the simple fact that oxygen was too expensive to provide in excess in Couney’s sideshows, infants under his care avoided developing retrolental fibroplasia, blindness that plagued children who were given too much oxygen in hospital incubators⁴. The approximately 6,500 people saved by Couney’s enterprise grew up to have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of their own; there are likely tens of thousands of people alive today because of him. Couney’s work made him a kind of anti-eugenicist, aligning him against the utilitarianism of his time: the reason why the medical establishment did not bother trying to develop means of saving premature infants was that those children were deemed to not be worth the effort. Preemies were considered weaklings who would be inferior to the “better babies.”

This story underscores the capricious nature of utilitarianism. Back then, as it would now, the way that Couney funded his work delegitimized his efforts⁵. However, the fact that there was no social ethic, no “legitimate” establishment that would support saving premature infants, created the possibility for Couney’s success. Couney wanted to save those children, to spread “preemie propaganda”⁶, and found an unorthodox way to do it, while also accruing significant wealth. Today, after the fact, it is tempting to explain why what Couney did was right by making a utilitarian argument, that the ends clearly justified the means, but this retroactive argument is misleading. We now think that the ends have justified the means because our social values have changed (for the better), and we, as a society, agree that the lives of premature infants are worth saving. This change in values is not due to us having followed a utilitarian ethic. It is due to the non-utilitarian work of people like Couney.

This example may seem incomparable to a gift of $750 million from one established group (the Resnicks) to another (Caltech), but Couney’s revenue was actually millions of dollars in today’s value⁷. The connection that I want to draw between the two cases rests on their shared dissonance between utility, funding, and social values. To paraphrase one of Lily E. Kay’s opening arguments in The Molecular Vision of Life⁸, by participating in the given funding system, the scientist also participates in forming a consensus of values and priorities with the funder⁹. This happens even when the scientist’s motivations—such as general curiosity, desire for social progress, or self-interest—have nothing to do with their relationship with the sponsor. This consensus of values and priorities, which constitute the social program of the funder, is more beneficial to the funder than the scientist. While a funding agency provides an individual scientist a sort of legitimacy (evidence that the scientist was able to convince someone to give them money), the fact that the agency unified a whole field of research solidifies that agency’s influence on society. Thus, uncritically using money from a given group strengthens it, regardless of what the funds are used toward. Neither a utilitarian claim nor a successful procurement of funding can serve as evidence of ethical work.

So, in order to use the Resnick gift ethically, we must critically consider their values and priorities, as evidenced by their practices. The Resnicks made their fortune through questionable business practices, such as shipping drinking water from Fiji to the US and taking control of a previously California-owned waterbank. Accepting their donation raises questions about where the line between reputation laundering and reparation is drawn. For example, by conducting research with their money, are we justifying the way in which they accrued their wealth? Have the Resnicks given enough money directly to Fiji (via taxes, donations, investments, or reparations) to qualify as having made a restitution? Such questions are not restricted to the Resnick gift and apply generally to issues of accepting money for research from harmful enterprises, such as from fossil fuel companies. However, the Resnick gift is unique in its size and intention, being the first of its magnitude to directly aim for environmental improvement. It will cause reverberations in donations to other universities, and so it behooves us to establish a system of ethics for using it from the outset.

We already know part of how Caltech will use the gift: $400 million will go into Caltech’s endowment, $100 million will go towards a new building, and $250 million will be applied toward research via the Resnick Sustainability Institute (RSI). The RSI has four interconnected initiatives: “Sunlight to Everything”, which aims to use solar energy to combat pollution and greenhouse gasses; “Climate Science”, which aims to mitigate the effects of global warming; “Water Resources”, which aims to improve the availability of drinking water; and “Ecology and Biosphere Engineering”, which aims to understand and mitigate negative human impacts on ecosystems. This mass project is uniquely poised to involve every branch of science found at Caltech. There is no doubt in my mind that research funded through the RSI will lead to applicable, beneficial, and interesting outcomes. But this research is unlikely to undo the direct harm done to the environment by the Resnicks’ companies, despite all the freedom that a private donation allows. Undoing this harm would require Caltech to start an explicit program to assess and address environmental damage done to Fiji, the Pacific Ocean, and California’s freshwater reserves by Caltech’s biggest donor.

'Baxter Hall at Caltech', captured by the author.

Lev Tsypin

The question stands before every scientist at Caltech who is, or wants to be, funded through the RSI: Do you support the Resnicks’ practices? If you use their money and do not actually resist their business ethic, then it does not matter what your reflexive answer is; you are participating in the formation of the consensus that these practices are okay. As a member of society, you should feel free and welcome to follow your curiosity, invent new solutions to social problems, and pursue the work that you believe in. But you should also remember who is allowing you to do so. Scientists stand to gain from clarity about how funding shapes research and about how to formulate an ethical system in a changing world, and demonstrating this clarity will serve to increase public trust in science. There are several key questions that each scientist should engage with:

What is the social program of the group funding me or the research I’m invested in?
Are the funders using researchers as props to justify their social programs?
By lending credibility to the funders, is my research supporting something that I stand against?
If yes, does the funding provide an excuse to keep doing what I have been doing, or is it an opportunity to subvert the practices or social program I oppose?

It is almost always easier to keep doing what you have been doing, and it is sometimes right to do so. Ultimately, different people will have different tolerances for how much cognitive dissonance they can bear when their work supports a social program that they stand against. When I ask myself the above questions, I find myself where I believe most scientists are: the opaque moral gray. I find my own work interesting and worthwhile, insofar as all fundamental, creative pursuits are important human practices. But I do not believe that, during my PhD, I will be able to pursue research that compensates for the social programs of some of my funders (e.g., the Army Research Office). I have to live with this fact, and how I do so is the ethical choice before me. The way I see it, sticking to my research and doing nothing outside of it to improve my environment would be wrong.

In the case of the Resnick gift, my non-utilitarian stance is that money should be used to pursue sustainability research and combat climate change, as the gift was intended to be used, but that this cannot be done innocently. Guided by a non-utilitarian ethic, our use of the money ought to be paired with action that is separate from the exchange that the Resnicks and Caltech have made. This action should serve to subvert the aspects of the Resnick companies’ social programs that we disagree with and move us beyond a zero-sum moral accounting.

If you find yourself in a similar position to mine, the call to action is three-fold: improve the immediate social space around us, improve the institution(s) we are a part of, and improve the society we find ourselves in. It is not possible for an individual to address or work on all scales at once, but there are a lot of issues that can be addressed on an approximately local scale through collective advocacy. In the case of Caltech, an obvious small-scale example is to combat food waste (it is absurd that we received $750 million for sustainability research without any infrastructure for composting on campus). More generally in academia, we should move to involve trainees in decision-making (e.g., admission, hiring, tenure, and curricula, which would foster increased trust and understanding between faculty and their mentees). Graduate students, postdocs, and staff should collectively advocate for more equitable working conditions, grievance procedures, and compensation. Labs, be they in academia, non-profit organizations, or industry, should have explicit conversations about their values and how they align or conflict with those of their funding sources. These are opportunities to supplement research in a way that centers actual, subjective values and thus sculpts the norms of scientific conduct. These are opportunities to do something good.

Acknowledgements

This piece has been in the works for a year, and has been shaped by many people. I want to thank Audrey Massman for introducing me to Martin Couney’s story during a tabletop role playing game. I’ve had many conversations about the ethics of scientific funding, including with members of the Newman Lab antiracism discussion subgroup, with whom I read Lily E. Kay’s Molecular Vision of Life, and I want to particularly thank Elise Tookmanian and Georgia Squyres as co-leaders of that group. I’ve had long discussions about how to improve Caltech with many of my friends and colleagues, which influenced the tone and direction of this piece, and I want to thank Fayth Tan, Krystal Vasquez, Aditi Narayanan, and Hannah Weller for helping me crystalize my perspective on the systems of power that are at play within academia. I’m hugely grateful to my adviser, Dianne Newman, who has been nothing but supportive of me when I have come into conflict with Caltech, who finds the humor within our personal disagreements, and who has ensured my success as a PhD student even as I have gotten increasingly active on campus outside the lab. Thank you to the editors, Melba Nuzen, Nicole Wallack, Skyler Ware, and Heidi Klumpe for their careful and constructive criticism of this piece. Most of all, I’m grateful for my fiancée, Yana Zlochistaya, who has read, thought about, and discussed this piece with me since its inception.

Footnotes

1: Prentice, C., 2016. Miracle at Coney Island: How a sideshow doctor saved thousands of babies and transformed American medicine. p. 32

2: Ibid. pp. 51-55

3: Ibid. p. 23, p. 29, and p. 70

4: Ibid. p. 67

5: Ibid. p. 27

6: Ibid. p. 65

7: Ibid. see, for example, p. 29

8: Kay, LE. 1996. The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the rise of the new biology. Oxford University Press, USA

9: Ibid. p. 10

No More Dirty Money for Green Science

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Isabel Swafford for Caltech Letters

My favorite place on Earth is a secluded tributary to the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park, California. In the fall, the river becomes a trickle of water between emerald pools carved into the granite—the perfect swimming holes. I have gone backpacking there most years since high school. Yet for the past few autumns, raging wildfires, driven by climate change, have forced me to cancel the trip. With climate change, it has become hard to imagine a future in which I am able to return to this yearly tradition. If this future exists, it depends on a steep drawdown of carbon dioxide emissions driven by a combination of policy changes and technological innovations.

A picture of my favorite place on Earth, now threatened by climate change.

Cora Went

As a Caltech scientist, I have long struggled with how I can personally work to abate the climate crisis. The impacts of climate change fall hardest on the most disadvantaged communities, which places a responsibility on me to act. For now, I have landed on a combination of technology research and organizing. In the lab, I research new materials for capturing solar energy. Outside of the lab, I organize with the Los Angeles chapter of the Sunrise Movement Los Angeles (Sunrise LA), a group of young people fighting to stop climate change through direct action, electing Green New Deal champions into office, and working on local policy.

I represent Sunrise LA on the SoCal Building Electrification Coalition, which aims to pass building codes that transition both existing and new buildings to all-electric appliances. We don’t hear much about buildings in the context of climate change, but, in California, they comprise a full quarter of our carbon emissions. In Los Angeles, that number exceeds 40%. Much of this comes from natural gas appliances—mainly gas hot water heaters, gas stoves, and gas furnaces. On top of emitting carbon dioxide, natural gas appliances also come with significant health risks: growing up in a home with a gas stove increases asthma risk for children by as much as 40%.

Fortunately, there are alternatives: electric heat pumps can provide both heating and cooling to a home and are at least three times as efficient as traditional furnaces. For new buildings, they are less expensive over their lifetime than traditional furnaces and air conditioners. Crucially, electric heat pumps emit less carbon dioxide, and the benefits will only compound as we add more renewable energy sources to the electric grid.

Across all sectors, experts are coming to a consensus on the cheapest and most equitable path to a zero-carbon future. This consensus can be summed up in two words: electrify everything. We already know how to make cheap, abundant renewable electricity, and whatever runs on electricity is as clean as the grid. Not only will our buildings be all-electric, but so will our cars, our trucks, and our public transit. A wide range of energy models have demonstrated that to achieve net zero by 2050, we will use at least twice the amount of electricity we currently do, while our total energy use (electricity plus other sources of energy, like liquid fuels) will decrease.

This graph shows how much we can decrease US CO2 emissions with various changes. Decarbonizing our power generation alone only reduces emitted CO2 by 30%. When combined with electrification, 71% CO2 reductions are possible.

Cora Went, data from the Rocky Mountain Institute

These same energy models show that the market alone won’t get us there quickly enough. We need to use all of the policy tools at our disposal to accelerate electrification, from investing in electric public transit and electric vehicle charging infrastructure to subsidizing heat pumps and ensuring new buildings are all-electric.

Electrifying everything also means that, for our survival, the fossil fuel industry must shrink dramatically.

Many have said that the fossil fuel giants—Chevron, Exxon, BP, Shell—will simply become energy companies, providing the wind, solar, and other renewables that we need in a zero-carbon future. This is misguided: they missed their chance to make that transformation decades ago. Instead, they dug in their heels, becoming the purveyors of climate denial and the opposers of climate legislation. Today, they are still extracting huge quantities of fossil fuels.

The “Victory Memo,” written in 1998 by a group of fossil fuel industry representatives (including Exxon, Chevron, and the American Petroleum Institute), showed clear intent to promote climate change denial in the general population.

Climate Files

In the past five years, fossil fuel companies and utilities have taken a more subtle approach, trying to convince politicians and the public that they are part of the solution to climate change rather than denying its existence. The fossil fuel industry now argues that we need more innovation, so we should wait to eliminate fossil fuels. This is misleading—energy modeling shows that we already have most of the technology we need to stop climate change. It is also a false dichotomy, suggesting that we cannot innovate at the same time as we work to eliminate fossil fuels. Not only can we, but we must.

On the local level, our SoCal Building Electrification Coalition is coming up against these same tactics and talking points. Our natural gas utility in Los Angeles, SoCalGas, is threatened by the electrification ordinances that we are advancing, since 80% of their revenue comes from selling natural gas to residential customers. Following the fossil fuel industry’s playbook, they are trying to position themselves as the solution while delaying the phase-out of natural gas to maximize their own profits.

In public, SoCalGas has pledged to achieve net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2045. They heavily advertise their research on renewable natural gas and hydrogen. In private, they’re fighting tooth and nail against the climate progress we need to make immediately to solve this crisis, which is electrification and shrinking their industry.

SoCalGas sued the California Energy Commission when the commission tried to reduce gas use in the state. They got in trouble with California regulators last year for misusing customer money to lobby against energy efficiency standards. Recently, Santa Barbara residents received a mass text from SoCalGas encouraging them to call and oppose a building electrification ordinance. The utility has responded to these ordinances by pushing localities to adopt “balanced energy resolutions” across the state.

Perhaps most egregiously, SoCalGas was found to have launched and funded a front group, Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions (C4BES), to advocate for continued natural gas use in the state. This organization poses as a group of natural gas consumers, with pictures of families cooking on gas stoves and messaging about “energy choice” and the “right to use natural gas” on their website. The principles on the C4BES website even match those on the SoCalGas website nearly word-for-word. This is a classic example of “astroturfing,” where a corporation creates a front group which poses as a grassroots organization in order to boost their political voice.

Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions recently took down their website. However, their Facebook page still contains frequent references to SoCalGas as well as calls for residents to oppose building electrification ordinances (above).

Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions, via Facebook

Just last week, the California Public Utilities Commission levied a $10 million fine against SoCalGas for continuing to use ratepayer money to lobby against stronger rules for buildings and appliances. This lobbying included efforts to weaken 2022 updates to the state building code, which moves California towards all-electric new construction. Despite multiple sanctions and negative press coverage, SoCalGas, a company that derives its power from being a state-sanctioned monopoly, continues to use that power to keep us hooked to an energy supply that is damaging our health and the planet.

In light of this, the public pledges that SoCalGas has made to achieve net zero by 2045 ring hollow. Further, their plan to rely on energy sources like hydrogen and renewable natural gas to achieve their goals is unrealistic. These sources have an important role to play in a zero-carbon future, particularly in hard-to-electrify sectors such as aviation, parts of industry, and long-duration energy storage (storing energy for days to years). However, neither is poised to take the place of natural gas in buildings. Renewable natural gas is not abundant enough, hydrogen is inefficient, and both are expensive. Electrification remains by far the cheapest and the safest way to decarbonize buildings. The talk of hydrogen-powered homes is a classic example of greenwashing, or misleading the public to think that a company is more climate-friendly than it is.

Given their history of underhanded tactics around Southern California, and their nefarious reputation in the building electrification world, I was surprised to learn that SoCalGas funds research on renewable natural gas, carbon capture, and hydrogen at Caltech. They recently partnered with Caltech on a hydrogen demonstration project. At first glance, this could seem like a good thing: the profits gained from polluting our environment are being reinvested into necessary research and development.

But this funding should not be welcomed, and we can look to the parallels with the tobacco industry to see why. Cigarette companies have long funded cancer research, using the profits from their deadly products to create a public relations smokescreen. They claim to be solving the problems they have caused, while pursuing covert legal and political tactics to keep the sales coming in. Many cancer researchers now eschew funding from tobacco companies, understanding that this money merely perpetuates the cycle of harm done by the industry.

Armed with the reputational benefits of their collaborations with Caltech researchers, SoCalGas has the credibility today to make false claims to government officials and the public that we should not pass all-electric building ordinances, because they are funding research on technical solutions like hydrogen that are just around the corner. They can pump the brakes on the affordable and realistic solutions that are already here.

Both tobacco and fossil fuel companies could take substantive steps towards solving the problems they claim to care about by supporting efforts to regulate their industry. Of course, under capitalism, a private company will never have internal incentives to support regulation that hurts their bottom line. But we, as energy researchers, can follow the example of cancer scientists and stop feeding into the industry’s cycle of harm.

It’s time for scientists at Caltech, and other research institutions, to reject funding from SoCalGas. This would decrease SoCalGas’s credibility and political power, which would get us closer to passing the building electrification ordinances that we need in Southern California.

I know this isn’t simple. Government funding can be hard to come by, and we need to drastically increase federal support for climate-related research—the $45 billion over 10 years of science funding included in the initial draft of the Build Back Better plan would be a good start. Additionally, many academic funding sources are dubiously ethical, and perhaps that money would just go to another institution if not Caltech. But the benefits gained from that research funding are outweighed by the costs of enabling SoCalGas as they slow political action on the climate crisis.

I dream of one day being able to journey back to the emerald pools in Yosemite without fear of wildfires. But for me, this is a privilege. The climate crisis threatens the entire lives and livelihoods of Black, brown, and working-class people on the frontlines of climate change. At Caltech, our mission—to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education—has embedded within it a commitment to improving people’s lives through our research. If we are serious about this mission, we need to take a holistic view of our research, from funding sources to new technologies. For Caltech researchers working on climate solutions, upholding our mission means rejecting funding from the fossil fuel industry. The stakes could not be higher.

Feeling wine: The science behind our perception of tannins

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Siobhán MacArdle

If you’ve ever drunk wine with a wine aficionado (don’t call them snobs!) you’ve probably heard them describe what they smell—maybe dark fruits, baking spices, freshly cut grass—and also note whether or not the wine has tannins and how much. To understand what people mean when they talk about tannins in wine, we can start with an experience that has nothing to do with wine: drinking oversteeped tea. When you finally take a sip of the tea you forgot about 20 minutes ago, your soothing afternoon ritual is now stripping the inside of your mouth of all its moisture, causing you to recoil and shiver. You are feeling astringency, like your mouth is being dried out. This astringent experience is caused by molecules called tannins—chemicals found in many foods such as tea, dried fruit, and chocolate, but perhaps most famous for their presence in wine. In a good wine, tannins cause a more subtle drying sensation than in your forgotten oolong, providing complexity and structure, which adds another dimension to the tastes and smells we get from these chemical solutions.

The astringent sensation caused by tannins makes your mouth feel dry. However, tannins aren’t actually drying out your mouth–this is just how our brains perceive the interaction between tannins and our saliva. The chemical structure of tannins makes them particularly good at sticking to things and clumping them up. Think of tannins like those burrs that get stuck to your clothes when you go for a walk in nature. Just like burrs, the interactions that tannins make are nonspecific; they will stick to many different types of molecules (whatever they happen to bump into). In our mouths, they bump into saliva proteins. The saliva in our mouths is full of proteins that keep our digestive tracts lubricated, but after taking a sip of wine or that neglected tea, the tannins in these beverages will bind to our saliva proteins and clump them up. All clumped up, these proteins are no longer dissolvable in our saliva and they become more like tiny pieces of sand—not big enough to see, but big enough to feel. We experience the friction of these tiny bits of sand-like protein-tannin clumps as astringency, or dryness, in our mouths.

So, what is it about tannins that makes them so prone to clumping? Tannins are a subcategory of a broader class of molecules called polyphenols. Phenols are carbon rings decorated with oxygen atoms and polyphenols are many of these phenols joined into one big molecule. Phenols have many double bonds, which carry lots of negatively-charged electrons that aren’t married to any particular atom. The oxygens on the phenols are electronegative, which means they pull electrons toward themselves. This combination of lots of double bonds and lots of oxygen atoms creates many areas of polarization in the molecule, which means certain parts carry slight negative charges and other parts carry positive charges. This polarization makes the tannins more likely to form attractive interactions with things that they bump into than if they were neutral molecules.

For example, when a negatively-charged part of the tannin comes into contact with another molecule, the negative charge will repel the electrons of that molecule, causing that part of the other molecule to be slightly positively charged. Now you have a slight negative charge in the tannin and a slight positive charge in the other molecule, which causes attraction! These attractions are called van der Waals forces and they are relatively weak, way weaker than the bonds that bind atoms in molecules: if bonds between atoms in a molecule are superglue, van der Waals forces are maple syrup. Long story short, tannins are sticky¹. They are likely to glom on to chemicals that they find, and when we’re talking about tannins in wine, the largest class of chemicals that they find are the proteins in our saliva.

Our saliva proteins are well equipped to interact with tannins as well. All proteins are made up of a combination of 21 different amino acids stuck together in a long chain and folded into a unique structure. The proteins in our mouths contain a lot of a particular amino acid called proline. Proline is special because it forces a kink in the protein structure. So lots of prolines means lots of kinks and bends in the protein, which makes for a disordered squiggly mess. This open and unstructured shape of the proteins in our saliva provides many spots for tannins to bind. Although there are no specific bonds that happen between tannins and saliva proteins, both are perfectly suited for many non-specific interactions, thus resulting in clumping.²

The interaction between tannins and saliva proteins.

Illustration by Siobhán MacArdle

But why did our saliva evolve to have all these squiggly proteins? Let’s imagine that we didn’t have these proteins in our saliva—the tannins would have nothing to clump to in our mouths and would make it to our stomachs and intestines all on their own. There, they would find the important digestive enzymes—chemicals that we need to get nutrients from our food. If free tannins made their way to these enzymes, they would bind and clump them up, taking them out of commission and disrupting our digestion. You might have experienced this if you stubbornly drank that over-steeped cup of tea anyway and gave yourself a stomach ache. We probably evolved to have these squiggly proteins in our saliva as sacrificial tannin sponges to protect our digestive enzymes from the tannins in our diet.

There is immense range in the levels of tannins in wine, and wines are commonly described as having low, medium, or high tannins. If you start paying attention to the level of astringency you experience from certain wines, you might develop a preference for wines with a particular level of tannins. And then you might actually have an answer at the wine store when they put you on the spot with, “are you looking for anything in particular?”

Most of the tannins in wine come from the skins of the grapes used to make wine³. These skins and the winemaker’s choice of what to do with them are how we end up with wines of such varying tannin levels. If the winemaker chooses to include the skins during fermentation, the tannins dissolve into the grape juice and the resulting wine will have tannins. The extent of tannic character depends on the length of time the winemaker chooses to keep the skins around. Just like a tea bag, the longer the skins are “steeped,” the more intense the astringent experience caused by tannins will be. In addition to time with the skins, the other variable affecting tannin levels is the type of grape. Certain grapes are thicker-skinned than others, so they will impart more tannins to the wine than wines made from grapes with thin skins. Pinot Noir, for example, is notoriously thin-skinned, so these wines will always be low in tannins. Nebbiolo grapes, on the other hand, contain a lot of tannins in their thick skins, so wines made from these grapes will have an intense tannic character.

Even within a grape variety, there can be variation in the levels of tannins depending on the conditions used to grow the grape. Tannin molecules may serve as a sort of “sunscreen” for the grapes, absorbing UV rays from the sun that could be damaging to the grape cells (all those double bonds in tannins that were mentioned earlier are also great for absorbing UV radiation!). Thus, grapes that are grown at higher altitude and in more direct sunlight, where they are more prone to harmful levels of UV radiation, will produce more tannins to protect themselves than grapes grown in the shade and at lower elevation.

You might have noticed that red wines tend to have more tannins than white wines. This is because traditionally, red wine is made from red grapes and the skins are included in the fermentation, while white wine is made from white grapes and the skins are separated out before fermentation. With no skins around during fermentation of white wine, there are no tannins to be had. Rosé is made from red grapes, but the skins are separated before fermentation, as they are for white wines, which is why rosés are lighter in color and tannins than red wines⁴. A fun tasting experiment is to try to find a red wine and a rosé from the same producer of the same grape (something to ask about the next time you’re at the wine store!). Tasting these wines side by side will give you a sense of what flavors and sensation come from the grape juice vs. the grape skins.

There is a fourth variety of wine growing in popularity in the US called “orange wine” or “skin contact white wine.” Just like how rosés are made from red grapes in the style of white wines, orange wines are made from white grapes in the style of red wines. That is, orange wines are made by fermenting white grapes without separating out the skins. Therefore, these wines have some of the color and tannic complexity of red wines, with the brightness and acidity of white wines. They come in varying shades from light yellow to deep amber depending on how long the skins were kept mixed into the juice during fermentation. You can ask at your local wine store how much skin contact a particular orange wine has. If they say 6 months, you’re getting a more tannic and dark orange wine, whereas if they say 24 hours, you’ll be drinking something more akin to a traditional white wine.

You don’t need to know any of this to consume and enjoy the complexity that tannins bring to wine, but it is fun to think about how much more our mouths can do than just taste. Because the drying sensation we get from tannins happens in our mouths, we often talk about tasting them; however, the sense we use to detect tannins is actually touch. By feeling the clumping of saliva proteins in your mouth you’re getting a glimpse into the story of the wine, starting from the conditions of the grape growing in the vineyard, through the fermentation of the grape juice, and finally, into the bottle. And understanding the mechanism behind our perception can help us bring awareness to the tannins and other features of great wine. You might get so focused that you start to notice differences in the astringency feeling you get from some wines versus others. In fact, people might describe different types of tannins in wine as soft, fine or even velvety.

Finding tannins in food, even beyond wine, can be an effective mindfulness practice. The next time you eat or drink, try to distinguish between what your mouth is feeling versus what you are tasting, and you’ll likely discover many more tannins in food!

Footnotes

1: Polyphenol molecules are also what gives peated whiskey its smoky taste, which is another example of how sticky these molecules are. In this case, the polyphenols come from the peat that is burned to dry the barley before fermentation. They stick to the barley throughout fermentation, distillation, and decades of aging, allowing us to taste that peat smoke many many years later.

2: This is called “aggregation” in chemistry-speak.

3: There are some tannins that come from the seeds and stems of the wine, but they are often less prominent than the skin tannins. If a wine is described as “whole cluster”, that means it was fermented with the stems and therefore will have stem tannins. Barrel-aging is another source of tannins—if a wine is aged in barrels, especially new barrels, it will extract tannins from the wood.

4: The compounds that give wine most of their color, anthocyanins, are also found in the skins of grapes.

Femininity, Foreignness, and Flowers: How culture shapes scientific discovery

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Sarah Zeichner for Caltech Letters

There are such queer things about orchids. Such possibilities of surprises.

_{^{—“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” H.G. Wells, 1894}}

In 1862, three years after The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects. Using the mechanics of orchid pollination, Darwin sought to provide empirical evidence for his new theory of evolution. Specifically, since orchids attract pollinating insects with nectar, traits of orchids and insects should have evolved together. When Darwin was sent an orchid from Madagascar with a nectar tube almost a foot in length, he surmised that there must exist an insect with a proboscis—an elongated tubular mouthpart—long enough to reach the nectar. The insect in question was discovered 21 years after Darwin’s death. The moth Xanthopan morganii praedicta (translating to “predicted moth”) has a proboscis up to 14 inches long and exclusively pollinates the Madagascar orchid. Darwin’s accurate prediction that the orchid’s floral morphology was adapted to extremely specific pollinators vindicated natural selection as not just metaphysical speculation, but a principle able to generate hypotheses and guide experimentation.

Xanthopan morganii praedicta

Esculapio, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

In his studies, however, one genus of orchid baffled Darwin. Orchids of the genus Ophrys rarely produced nectar but were clearly adapted to insect pollination. Most curiously, they resembled insects enough to be given common names such as bee orchid or fly orchid. Why these orchids had adopted insectiform mimicry, however, remained unclear. Only sixty years later, in the early 20th century, would naturalists Maurice Pouyanne, Edith Coleman, and Masters John Godfery separately answer this question. All of them observed that Ophrys orchids are indeed pollinated by insects, despite not producing nectar to attract them. Rather, the central petal at the base of the bee orchid specifically resembles the abdomen of a female bee, both in texture and in coloration. Males of the species mistake the orchid for a female bee, land on the petal, and attempt to mate with the flower. As the bee does so, its movements dislodge the orchid’s dense packets of pollen onto the bee, which will fertilize the next Ophrys flower the unwitting insect attempts to mate with. Unlike other orchids that leverage insects’ hunger for nectar, the Ophrys orchids leverage their hunger for sex.

Ophrys apifera labellum, the bee orchid

Hüseyin Cahid Doğan, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Intriguingly, interactions between insects and these orchids were documented by Darwin himself. There are accounts of Ophrys being “attacked” by bees in his 1862 book, though his records read, “The meaning of these attacks, I cannot conjecture.” Though Darwin was making the same observations as the naturalists who would make the discovery sixty years later, he was unable to interpret their significance.

Darwin's original 1862 illustration of Ophrys.

Public domain

Darwin’s struggle to understand Ophrys orchid was likely colored by the “orchidelirium” seizing broader Victorian society at that time. These rare flowers were a luxury commodity accessible only to the very wealthy, with desirable varieties selling for over $20,000 in today’s money. Demand produced a new professional class of orchid hunters, explorers commissioned by rich patrons to go on expeditions into the tropics. While “delirium” implies fevered psychological compulsion, the Victorian appetite for orchids can also be understood as an exercise in wealth, power, and control. Orchid ownership not only signified riches, but connections, education, and taste—a material avenue through which the hierarchies of Victorian England could be expressed.

Nineteenth-century English society was highly stratified along lines of gender and culture, and the principles underlying Darwin’s own work were extrapolated to justify its social hierarchies. The philosophy of Social Darwinism suggested, rather conveniently, that the current social hierarchy was simply the “natural” outcome of applying natural selection and evolution to human society. The philosopher Herbert Spencer, coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” used the metaphor of the body to describe the Victorian hierarchy of gender and class. Upper or middle-class men were the Head, the seat of reason, and thus suited to rule and govern. Women were the Heart, keepers of emotion and spirituality. Notably, botany, particularly the study of flowers, was a culturally sanctioned science for women, intended to socialize them into rationality and industriousness, and away from feminine frivolity. Cultural hierarchies were also used to justify British colonialism as a “civilizing mission” necessary to “assist” colonies to develop sufficiently sophisticated governments and societies. Therefore, orchids, from yet-unexplored regions beyond the empire’s reach, were seen as passive objects to be acquired and cultivated to English tastes.

The process of acquiring orchids only reinforced their place in Victorian hierarchies as exotic objects. The expeditions were dangerous, and orchid hunting was a hypermasculine arena, far from the feminine associations of botany. Orchid hunters ventured to far-flung locales, lured by the promise of fortune and repute, but often met grisly ends. Moreover, the journey of the intrepid orchid hunter into the tropics was not only a physical danger, but a moral one as well. Explorers were entering a space unregulated by English societal norms and morality, with only their own self-control preventing them from being corrupted away from Victorian gentility. While lurid stories of murder and betrayal among orchid hunters resulted from financial competition rather than any tropical corruption, the idea of the tropics as an inherently transgressive space captured the public imagination. Surviving an orchid hunt acted out a cultural narrative of the triumph of civilization over chaos, of English propriety over deviant morality. In return, victors were rewarded with their own personal part of the tropics, a personal stake in the colonial machine. As the empire expanded with growing networks of colonists, missionaries, and traders, exploring and exploiting the tropics became easier. Maps were drawn, dangers were cataloged, and routes were constructed, enabling increased varieties and numbers of orchids to be shipped to England. The once-unattainable orchid was now safely contained in English greenhouses, stripped of its perilous origins, a tamed and civilized ornament.

This view of the orchid, submissive to male impulses and receptive to “civilizing” forces, could certainly present an obstacle to understanding its actively deceptive and manipulative pollination strategies. In fact, the gradual understanding of its actual biology coincided with and may have benefited from a shift in Victorian society. As the reach of the British empire expanded rapidly through the 19th century, so too did cultural anxiety. The Victorian social hierarchy was being challenged both at home and abroad. The word “feminist” entered English usage in the 1890s, with women campaigning for the rights to their own bodily autonomy, such as sexual consent within marriage and the ability to use contraception. Organized anticolonial movements escalated in the latter half of the century, including years-long armed resistance throughout the African continent and mass political mobilization in South Asia. The assured status of the patriarchal empire no longer seemed so certain, and the exoticizing fascination in cultural narratives took on a distinct element of fear.

These growing fears around gender and loss of empire were conflated in a common literary archetype in tropical journey narratives of the 19th century: the “native woman.” She was Other in both race and sex, uncannily seductive, dangerously sensuous, and irrevocably foreign. Previously exotic and passive through the lens of white male protagonists, the “native woman” evolves into something more ominous by the end of the century, often with the help of the orchid. In the pulp magazine story, “The Orchid Horror”, the protagonist is seduced by an unnamed native woman called the Goddess of the Orchids, who sends him to collect an orchid she does not yet have. Upon finding it, he realizes the orchid’s scent is a powerful narcotic, entrapping those who inhale it to the Goddess’s will. Other stories describe secretly carnivorous orchids worn around the necks of native women, or in more literal presentations, monstrous hybrid orchid-women endemic to the tropics. The orchid took on the recurring image of the provocative Other, capable of undermining and subverting hierarchy and social order—the flower as exotic seductress, as femme fatale. The ending of the 1894 short story, “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid,” by science fiction author H.G. Wells lays these anxieties bare: the unsuspecting protagonist is overwhelmed by the orchid’s sickly-sweet scent and is seized by its bloodsucking roots. The orchid he had assumed was a harmless beauty turns out to be a vampiric predator, and he is only saved by his housekeeper, who was suspicious of the overtly foreign bloom. The creeping unease is obvious: what if the subjugated are no longer truly within our control? In this space, so far from the assumptions of Darwin’s Victorian England, an orchid pollinated by providing false sexual promises is no longer far-fetched.

Interior illustration, Amazing Stories, March 1928 by Frank R. Paul

Public domain

The slow discovery of Ophrys pollination illustrates the dialectic of scientific discovery: social context continuously influences the way we do and understand science. Ophrys pollination had to be observed, but it also had to be interpreted. Exactly how it was interpreted was dependent on the social and cultural narratives surrounding it. As science historian Jim Endersby concisely puts it in his book Orchid: A Cultural History, “There is no stable boundary between the natural and the cultural.” For Ophrys pollination to be understood as an act of sexual deception, three intertwined cultural ideas—femininity, foreignness, and flowers—had to be simultaneously reimagined as active subjects instead of passive objects. The destabilization of Victorian society was a powerful catalyst for this reimagination: the greater emancipation of English women and the emergence of organized anticolonial movements challenged what were once thought of as “natural” hierarchies, inspiring reactionary consternation and manifesting as sublimated fears in popular culture like “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”

Femininity, seduction, and deception remain entwined with Ophrys pollination even today, and the orchid continues to report on changing, though not necessarily improved, cultural hierarchies: tellingly, some botanists still refer to the bee orchid by another common name: the prostitute flower. While we may prefer to believe that the empirical process of science is completely separated from our sociocultural beliefs, the parallel shifts in the cultural and scientific understanding of orchids tell another story. Like an insect enticed by Ophrys, we labor under a compelling belief, but ultimately an illusory one.

A Sneak Peek at the Quantum Revolution

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Jennah Colborn for Caltech Letters

Some of the greatest technological advancements in history have come from exploiting the laws of physics. With further mastery of each set of laws came a new chapter in the history of mankind. Newton’s laws unlocked the secrets of motion. We have used his discoveries to build bridges and skyscrapers, and send rockets to the moon. The laws of thermodynamics brought about the engines that make our cars run, the refrigerators that preserve our food, and the machinery of the industrial revolution. The laws of electricity and magnetism taught us how to power our cities, to build the electronics in our cellphones and laptops, and to communicate with people halfway across the globe. But there is a set of laws in physics that we have not yet learned to fully exploit, and these are the laws of quantum mechanics. These laws describe very small things like atoms and molecules, and very cold things, hundreds of degrees below freezing. At these extremes, the physics of everyday life completely breaks down, and light and matter behave in very bizarre ways.

To understand this behavior, let’s take a crash course on quantum physics.

You’re probably familiar with the idea of a state. Traffic lights can be in one of three states: green, yellow, or red. Coins have two states: heads or tails. In the quantum world, objects exist in states with very specific physical properties. Atoms, for example, have energy states, where their energies take on specific values—we say the energies are quantized, hence the term ‘quantum mechanics’. In each energy state, electrons move around the atom with different speeds and spatial patterns. This is like if you were driving a car, but instead of gradually speeding up when you step on the gas, you jump spontaneously to different speeds: 10mph to 20mph to 50mph.

But it’s more complicated than that: quantum objects behave wildly differently when we’re not looking at them. Before we look at a quantum object, it has no well-defined physical properties like energy, position, or speed. Instead, a quantum object exists in a combination of all of its possible states simultaneously, until someone looks at it. At that moment, the object pops into existence in a single state (there are other interpretations of this effect involving multiple universes, but we’ll leave that for another day). The very act of looking at a quantum object changes its state.

That’s like a car approaching a fork in the road, but instead of going down one path or the other, it exists in two different locations at once and travels down both paths. But the moment someone clocks the car’s speed, it pops into existence at a single place. It sounds ridiculous, but this is the reality of the quantum world. When we’re not looking, the tiniest objects like electrons can be in multiple places or move in different directions at once (though in reality it’s a bit more subtle). We call this behavior superposition.

A car traveling down a path that splits. If the car obeyed quantum physics, then it does not go down one path or the other; it partially goes down both paths at once while no one is looking. As soon as someone looks, the car randomly appears on one of the two paths and the version of the car traveling down the opposite path disappears.

Jennah Colborn

Perhaps weirdest of all is that multiple quantum objects can behave in a coordinated way, where the state of one object seems to affect the state of another, no matter where they are in the universe. Imagine having a pair of coins that always land on the same face when you flip them. If one coin lands on heads, the other coin will land on heads, even if they are on opposite sides of the galaxy. It sounds like wizardry, but this is the essence of a real phenomenon called entanglement, one of the most powerful resources of the quantum world. We observe entanglement in how electrons spin, how light propagates, how atoms move, and much more.

Two coins that were brought to opposite sides of the galaxy. If the coins are entangled, then no matter when or where the coins get flipped, they will land on the same face.

Jennah Colborn

What if we could tap into these strange properties? What could we do with them? This question is the foundation of quantum information, an emerging frontier of science. After a few decades of research, quantum information is poised to have a dramatic impact on science and technology.

To understand how, let’s look at the simple idea that kickstarted today’s information revolution: all of the information in our computers is stored as a string of 1’s and 0’s. The text you just sent? Your recent bank transaction? The color of the pixels on your screen? All have a special code in your computer made of a specific combination of 1’s and 0’s. Each digit of this code is called a bit, and they are the fundamental building blocks of today’s information.

Of course, 1 and 0 are just mathematical abstractions, so these bits are encoded in real life through the voltage in tiny electrical switches. ‘0’ corresponds to the switch being OFF, and ‘1’ corresponds to the switch being ON. Each computer chip contains billions of these switches, flipping on and off in a desired way to store and process information. The essence of solving a problem on a computer is flipping these switches into a final configuration that represents the answer to the problem.

Crucially, the way information behaves depends on the physical object that carries the information. In today’s computers, our information carriers can only do one of two things: turn on and turn off. What if we could store information inside something else, something that behaves fundamentally differently? That’s where quantum information comes in.

Instead of electrical switches, the 1’s and 0’s in quantum information are stored in the quantum states of light and matter. This could be, for example, the energy states of an atom. ‘0’ corresponds to one energy state, and ‘1’ corresponds to a different energy state. Because of this, information behaves in a much richer way than before: information can exist in superposition and be entangled. The bits in quantum information, called qubits, can be 1, 0, or a superposition of 1 and 0 simultaneously.

Add more qubits, and the complexity increases. Two bits can have four states: ‘00’, ‘01’, ‘10’, or ‘11’. A superposition of two qubits allows them to be in all four states simultaneously. A three-qubit superposition has eight states, four have sixteen, and so on. Just 60 qubits in superposition have over one quintillion possible states, more than the world’s biggest supercomputers. A quantum computer made of 60 qubits could store and manipulate all of that information simultaneously.

The caveat is that we can’t access all of that information. Just like the car approaching the fork in the road, as soon as we look at the qubits, the superposition is destroyed and only a single state out of the one quintillion is revealed to us. This is bad for computation: how do we know that the one state revealed to us contains the right answer? It boils down to the mathematics, but scientists have found clever ways to control qubits in some algorithms to get around this problem. The result is that these quantum computers have the potential to solve certain problems that are far beyond the capabilities of conventional computers.

One example is quantum simulation, where we program a computer to replicate the behavior of the atoms, electrons, and nuclei in a chemical or material. Quantum simulation helps us understand how atoms and electrons interact to give chemicals their properties. This could pave the way for developing life-saving drugs, new energy sources, and a better understanding of the universe itself. Today’s computers are surprisingly bad at quantum simulation, because it requires keeping track of all possible quantum states of a complex arrangement of atoms. A typical drug like penicillin has more quantum states than the number of atoms in the universe. We couldn’t simulate its full quantum structure on a conventional computer within our lifetime. Quantum computers are uniquely poised for this task, because qubits obey quantum physics exactly the same way the states of a molecule do. A quantum computer with roughly 100-1000 qubits could simulate molecules like penicillin within a few days. Quantum computers aren’t all-powerful, though. This type of magnificent speedup is only possible for a few problems, but these problems have enormous implications for a wide range of industries.

We can also use qubits to send information more securely through a quantum internet. We’re constantly sharing important information online: credit cards, social security numbers, and more. Ensuring information is secure online is a crucial aspect of the internet. As computers get smarter and faster, it becomes easier for hackers to access your important information without you knowing. In fact, an alarming problem that a large (thousands of qubits) quantum computer would be very good at is breaking RSA encryption - the method that protects most of your information on the internet.

Quantum information is much trickier to hack. It hinges on the idea that looking at a qubit changes its state. Imagine you want to share information stored in qubits. If a hacker tries to read the message, the qubits containing the message will change their state, revealing random gibberish. Scientists have developed quantum encryption protocols based on this idea. It’s a guaranteed way to know if a hacker is tampering with sensitive information. For this reason, a quantum internet has the attention of banks, governments, and schools.

But perhaps the most exciting answer to what quantum information will be useful for is this: no one really knows. 50 years ago, we could never have predicted the enormous impact computers and the internet would have on our daily lives. The explosion of the Information Age came about through decades of experimentation. It’s likely we’ll see the same with quantum information: the most exciting applications may only reveal themselves once the technology starts maturing.

So where are we in this grand vision? We have quantum devices with 50-100 qubits, but we can’t control them accurately enough to really do anything useful with them yet. This is because quantum states are incredibly sensitive to their environment. Remember that looking at a quantum object changes its state, but it’s not just us humans that do the looking. Everything in the environment can “look” at a qubit by interacting with it, from static charge to vibrations in the ground to molecules in the air. Even the tiniest disturbance can alter the state of a qubit, which leads to corrupted information. It’s like trying to balance a pencil on its tip: even the slightest push can topple the pencil. It’s why scientists are building intricate protective machinery to isolate qubits from the outside world. Even then, it’s not enough.

Fortunately, scientists have spent years developing protocols for detecting and correcting these errors. These protocols are known as quantum error correction codes, and they are the reason we believe quantum technology is feasible even in the presence of errors. In a quantum error correction code, the 1’s and 0’s aren’t the qubits themselves, but how the qubits are entangled. Let’s go back to the pair of entangled quantum coins. There are two possible ways they can be entangled. In one way, the coins always land on the same face. In the other way, the coins always land on opposite faces. We can call ‘0’ the state where the coins land the same, and ‘1’ the state where the coins land opposite. The stored information is protected because even if one of the coins is disturbed, the information about how the coins are entangled remains hidden to the environment unless both of the coins are disturbed.

This protection comes at a cost: you need two qubits to encode one ‘protected’ qubit. Practical error correction protocols are more extravagant and require tens, hundreds, even thousands of entangled qubits per protected qubit. This means that quantum technology of any practical use requires control of thousands, even millions of qubits, far off from the number we have today. No need to worry about quantum computers breaking the internet any time soon.

But we’re making progress: over the last 20 years we’ve gone from pen and paper ideas to functional intermediately-sized quantum machines. We’re playing with atoms, light, and ultra-cold electronics in the lab, learning to harness their properties. We’re beginning to demonstrate the first quantum error correction protocol, sending qubits over hundreds of miles, and doing calculations on quantum computers that surpass the capabilities of our traditional computers. That said, large-scale quantum technology with practical relevance to our lives will likely only arrive once we figure out how to implement quantum error correction. How long will that take? No one really knows for sure: it could be 5 years, 5 decades, or more, but the work we do now will pave the way for that long-term vision.

Taking Science Education Virtual

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Karena Cai for Caltech Letters

When I signed up to tutor underserved high school students at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had tutored before, but never through a computer screen, and I was anticipating challenges. However, when teaching a high school biology module on population genetics, I discovered a koi pond simulation¹. The student and I watched as the fish in our virtual pond changed from orange to white over simulated generations, with young fish appearing and old fish disappearing. With just a few buttons, the student could adjust the parameters that affect the rates of evolutionary change in the koi population, like the number of fish and rate of genetic mutation, and rerun the simulation. As the koi changed from orange to white faster or slower, I saw the principles of evolution and genetics begin to click into place for the student. While this koi pond simulation may not have the aesthetics and user experience of today’s most popular video games, I was still impressed. The use of interactive virtual games was certainly not a widely available learning tool when I was a high school student, but over the past year of tutoring, I repeatedly discovered that virtual games are an effective way to teach.

I might not have found the koi pond simulation if the COVID-19 pandemic had not forced me to meet with my student remotely. During the pandemic, many teachers turned to new virtual tools out of necessity, but even as many students return to the classroom, interactive and engaging virtual worlds could continue to be a valuable resource for teaching.

The video game industry and the rise of virtual reality (VR) have laid the groundwork to make science education virtual. People who play video games spend an average of 7 hours a week in the virtual world². In America, 60% of 18-29 year olds are gamers³. Not only do more young people play video games, but they also spend the most time, averaging 8 hours per week with a preference for strategy and puzzle games^{2, 3}. Young gamers demonstrate incredible focus, persistence, attention to detail, patience, and creativity as they conquer each challenge and improve towards mastery. These are some of the same traits that are key to excelling in a different arena: science^4,5. By adopting techniques successfully used in gaming, science education could more effectively captivate the interest of young people in primary and secondary school to improve scientific literacy and preparation for careers in science.

Immersive design is a key element that keeps people playing. Gamers are engrossed by well-developed characters and stories that require constant interaction^{6, 7}. But it’s not just the story that keeps people hooked—background music⁸ and interactive, aesthetic graphics⁹ engage people in the virtual world. Elements of achievement and competition, such as the use of progress bars, level advancement, fake currency, prizes, and increased challenge as the user advances, help to keep gamers motivated and provide feedback^{6, 7}.

While the use of virtual interactive environments is starting to trickle into classrooms, the immersive design of technologies like video games and VR could purposefully be applied towards making science education more engaging. Scientific objectives could be part of a story where the student is a key character that actively participates by advancing through the material. Through engaging music and graphics⁹, the virtual format could bring abstract ideas to life or create more authentic and inspiring visualizations of cells or ecosystems.

Unlike a large classroom, the video game experience can be very individualized. The gaming interface makes it possible for learners to receive instantaneous, personalized feedback on their progress toward mastering scientific concepts through repetition. Students come from varying backgrounds and skill levels, and with the customized options of a video game, students can complete side quests for supplementary material to reward curiosity, spend more or less time on topics catered to their unique strengths and weaknesses, and progress towards mastery in a way not possible in a traditional classroom. The video game format could make education more immersive, individualized, and therefore, effective⁹.

The design and mechanisms used in popular games can serve as inspiration to guide the gamification of scientific concepts. Take Tetris, a tile-matching game in which the user manipulates tiles to fill gaps under increasing time pressure as the user advances. A similar setup could be used to teach DNA transcription to RNA, as the user matches complementary base pairs of DNA and RNA nucleotides. Alternatively, inspired by Mario Kart, blood cells could race through the circulatory system, refueling with oxygen at the lungs and even delivering medications to treat obstacles like clots. For a more creative or survival themed game, the user could ward off viral or bacterial infections by producing an antibody response or applying therapeutics while learning how they work.

Illustration by Karena Cai for Caltech Letters

Video games demonstrate a long-established ability to engage the public in everything from education to exercise. Wii Sports and Pokémon Go got users moving, off the couch and into the neighborhood respectively, gaining attention not only for their interactive formats, but also for their fitness benefits^10,11. On the education front, Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego? incorporates history, geography, and culture as players follow the titular character on her global crime-solving missions¹². The Oregon Trail similarly educates players on the harsh trials of the U.S. westward migration in the 19th century¹³. Both of these games have persisted in public consciousness years after they were first used in schools. The science-based television shows Bill Nye the Science Guy and The Magic School Bus and disease-combating board game Pandemic have also achieved mainstream popularity^14,15. These successes show it is possible for broad science education to be engaging—perhaps now through a video game format.

Promising efforts to use virtual worlds to enhance science research and education are already underway. In the video game InCell VR¹⁶, the player races to save a human cell from destruction by a virus while learning biology concepts along the way. Use of VR technology in InCell VR and other games shows promise for making science education even more interactive and collaborative^17,18. Use of VR for training in science-related professions is also expanding: neurosurgeons can now practice operating on a virtual brain¹⁹, and scientists at Purdue University are developing VR courses for training in cryo-electron microscopy²⁰, the topic of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Such applications demonstrate the value of immersive virtual learning environments for technical education.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers have had to adapt to a new age of “Zoom learning”. However, this isn’t the only way to approach remote learning. Since 2018, Caltech has also been developing a software prototype for a VR teaching space to provide a virtual environment for college-level education. In this virtual classroom, students have streamlined options to interact with the instructor, other students, and 3D scientific models, all with the click of a button²¹. Science teachers can use this technology to instantaneously assess understanding of the materials and rapidly customize activities to each student’s needs, creating a more personalized and immersive educational experience. Likewise, students can instantly and privately indicate confusion and get extra practice on difficult material, promoting inclusivity. Development of these new educational tools could not only facilitate more effective remote teaching during the current pandemic, but also expand the capabilities of future classrooms to tackle persistent challenges.

Illustration by Karena Cai for Caltech Letters

Despite the potential benefits of incorporating this immersive technology into schools, this objective faces the same major hurdle as most educational endeavors: money. Video gaming is a massive industry that generated $120 billion in revenue in 2019²², but production costs can range in the millions for games with advanced graphics and modern software-development tools^23,24. It is not clear if the government, schools, individuals, or some combination would contribute most to profits that drive production. Nevertheless, The Oregon Trail generated around ten million dollars in revenue annually by 1995, demonstrating the potential profitability of educational games²⁵. The rising U.S. learning-based game market is also promising: valued at $2.4 billion in 2018, the value is projected to exceed $4 billion by 2024²⁶. Heavy collaboration between educators and game developers seems critical to create games that are both educational and engaging (and therefore profitable)²⁷. However, the impact of even a great science game will only extend as far as the number of people it reaches. While games like The Oregon Trail show us that popularity and revenue are possible for educational games, disparities in technology access and public school funding remain a hurdle for video games to be a truly equalizing force in science education.

Combining immersive and entertaining virtual worlds with instructional design that meets learning objectives is key for this educational strategy to be successful. Using the interactive format of video games and VR in the classroom could not only increase engagement but also make science education more personalized, inclusive, and therefore, effective. Gamification of education to reach a diverse audience of young people may lead to a more informed world, increased appreciation for science, and preparation for a career in STEM. It is time VR headsets and game controllers made their way into the classroom, giving education an overdue technological upgrade to immerse students in science.

References

1:PopGen Fishbowl - Virtual Biology Lab.

2: The State of Online Gaming – 2019. Limelight Networks (2019).

3: [Brown, A. Who plays video games? Younger men, but many others too. Pew Research Center (2017)](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/11/younger-men-play-video-games-but-so-do-a-diverse-group-of-other-americans/ (2017){:target=”_blank”}.

4: Burke, K. What Makes a Good Scientist? American Scientist (2017).

5: Jensen, D. G. & 2018. The core traits of career success. Science (2018).

6: Huotari, K. & Hamari, J. Defining gamification: a service marketing perspective. in Proceeding of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference 17–22 (Association for Computing Machinery, 2012). doi:10.1145/2393132.2393137.

7:Hamari, J. & Eranti, V. Framework for Designing and Evaluating Game Achievements. in DiGRA Conference (2011).

8:Mehta, R., Zhu, R. (Juliet) & Cheema, A. Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition. Journal of Consumer Research 39, 784–799 (2012).

9:Becker, K. & Parker, J. An overview of game design techniques. in Learning, Education and Games 179–198 (ETC Press, 2014).

10:Althoff, T., White, R. W. & Horvitz, E. Influence of Pokémon Go on Physical Activity: Study and Implications. J Med Internet Res 18, (2016).

11:Anders, M. As Good as the Real Thing? ACE Fitness Matters (2008).

12: Riviere, L. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? In the Classroom! Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2019).

13: Farber, M. Oregon Trail as an Anchor for Interdisciplinary Learning. KQED (2017).

14:Council, N. R. Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits. (2009). doi:10.17226/12190.

15:Jolin, D. The board games turning science into playtime. The Observer (2019).

16: Luden.io. InCell VR.

17: Zimmerman, E. K–12 Teachers Use Augmented and Virtual Reality Platforms to Teach Biology. Technology Solutions That Drive Education (2019).

18:Thompson, M. M., Wang, A., Roy, D. & Klopfer, E. Authenticity, Interactivity, and Collaboration in VR Learning Games. Front. Robot. AI 5, (2018).

19: Erickson, M. Virtual reality system helps surgeons, reassures patients. Stanford Medicine News Center (2017).

20: Gonzalez, B. et al. CryoVR: virtual reality training and outreach tools for cryo-EM. Acta Crystallographica Section A: Foundations and Advances vol. 75 a66–a66 (2019).

21: Lombeyda, S. ERT: an Enhanced Reality for Teaching. Open Virtual Reality for Art and Sciences at Caltech.

22: 2019 Year In Review. SuperData, a Nielsen Company (2020).

23:C, T. Why video games are so expensive to develop. The Economist (2014).

24: Koster, R. The cost of games. VentureBeat (2018).

25:LaFrenz, D. E. Oral history interview with Dale Eugene LaFrenz. (1995).

26:ltd, R. and M. Game-Based Learning Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2019-2024. Research and Markets (2019).

27:Buday, R., Baranowski, T. & Thompson, D. Fun and Games and Boredom. Games Health J 1, 257–261 (2012).

Caltech Letters Year in Review: Our 5 Favorite Articles of 2020-2021

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This past year has been a remarkable one for Caltech Letters. As the pandemic slowed and the campus gradually sputtered back to life, we celebrated the publication of our 40th feature-length science article and the second year of our viewpoints section. In the four years since our launch, we’ve published work by over 70 Caltech scientists and exponentially grown our audience to hundreds of thousands.

Here are a few of our favorite reads from 2020-2021’s lineup:

Decoding the Language of Genomes

Illustration by Sarah Zeichner for Caltech Letters

Genomes are the “blueprints” of life. Their building blocks are billions of tiny nucleotides—denoted by the letters A, C, T, G—which form instructions for cells to grow, die, or behave in certain ways. This story, of course, is well-known to folks who remember high school biology.

But how do cells actually read and interpret the contents of a genome? Given an almost endless list of instructions, when do cells know which ones to follow, and in what order? Enter the realm of gene regulation. Although they may seem like a static jumble of letters, genomes in fact operate dynamically and—like a novel—are richly infused with their own grammar, punctuation, and plot.

Graduate students Suzy Beeler (PhD ‘21) and Nicholas McCarty explain how today’s biologists and physicists decode the beautiful, chaotic language through which genes express themselves.

Read the article

Geologists and the Earth: Building a Better Symbiosis

Illustration by Sarah Zeichner for Caltech Letters

Objectivity is frequently viewed as a core tenet of the scientific method. But what does it mean to be objective in science? And what happens when the process of conducting research clashes with the surrounding environment and community?

Unlike science, art makes no pretenses of independence, but also naturally incorporates the complex cultural, political, and social contexts in which it lives. Can researchers produce better science by accounting for subjectivity and the oft-entangled relationships their work has with the broader world?

Graduate student Sarah Zeichner examines these questions as she studies landscapes from her perspectives as both a geochemist and an artist.

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Pills and Mathematical Paradigms: Tracking Opioid Abuse in the US

Illustration by Casey Yamamoto for Caltech Letters

For over two decades, the opioid epidemic has silently burned through the US, leaving only a mounting death toll and devastated communities in its wake. But until recently, detailed, distributor-level data on sales of opioids has been kept behind closed doors, posing challenges to researchers who have sought to reconstruct the epidemic’s path. Armed with data recently made public by a federal lawsuit, graduate student Shiyu Zhang and a classmate track how misuse of name-brand oxycodone fell after a major manufacturer was pressured by regulators to make its pills harder to abuse.

Read the article

Drop Millikan: Repudiating the Racism in Caltech’s Foundation

Illustration by Usha Lingappa for Caltech Letters

Robert A. Millikan is a venerated man.

A physicist and Nobel laureate, Millikan is known for his namesake 1913 oil drop experiment and—during a 26-year tenure as Caltech’s first president—his role in transforming the Institute from a small vocational school into a top-flight research center.

Nearly a century later, however, that legacy has come under fire, both on campus and across Southern California.

In an emphatic viewpoint, Sophia Charan (PhD ‘21) challenges readers to re-examine Millikan and several of Caltech’s key benefactors in light of their staunch promotion of eugenics, segregation, and racial redlining throughout the early 20th century. Amid a national reckoning over racial injustice, Charan explores how we can reconcile this sordid history with visions for a more just, inclusive future at Caltech.

Read the article

Larger than Lyfe

Illustration by Cecilia Sanders for Caltech Letters

“What is life?”

It’s a deceptively simple question, but attempting to answer it can lead to long-winded, inconsistent, and maybe even downright paradoxical definitions. For centuries, philosophers and scientists have struggled to come up with a set of universal, easy-to-understand criteria for this fundamental phenomenon.

Clearly, bacteria and insects are alive, and an inanimate rock is not. But what about self-replicating machines or viral ideas, like Internet memes? Could those be “alive?”

How about creatures—if they are to be found—on other planets? Will they satisfy any known definition of “life” that we have here on earth?

As planetary scientist and astrobiologist Mike Wong (PhD ‘18) explains, truly understanding life and its origins might require a new framework that moves beyond familiar precepts of earth-bound biology.

Read the article

Caltech Letters is currently recruiting. If you’re part of the Caltech community and are interested in joining our team, please contact letters@caltech.edu.

In Memory of Cassidy Yang, Class of 2016

Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I first met Cassidy in the fall of 2014. I was a freshman and she was a junior, and we were the only two women majoring in physics in Avery House. My first impression of Cassidy was that she was a little awkward, but nice. I remember being a little surprised when I got her email about participating in an Avery House Secret Santa: I hadn’t expected her to be involved in house-wide activities. As I got to know Cassidy better, she became like the older sister that I never had. I may not have been her closest friend, but she always offered help when I was struggling with problem sets, needed a ride to a play when I felt too anxious to ask anyone, or working on my graduate school applications. To remember who Cassidy was to me, I reflect back on the days I spent with her at Princeton in late March of 2018.

Cassidy Yang (Caltech class of 2016) and her sister Angel passed away in a car accident in December 2020.

Cassidy was my host when I made an unofficial visit as a potential graduate student in her program. When I arrived at her apartment on the night of March 26, Cassidy told me that she was going to sleep on the couch and that I should take her bed. I asked if she was sure—I was only there to meet people, while she had to go to the lab early the next morning—but she insisted. That was so typical of Cassidy as a friend, always worrying about others first. She was even concerned that she would wake me up while getting ready in the morning.

Cassidy was in the second year of her PhD and my visit was only a day after she had flown back from a conference in Los Angeles. While I was visiting her place in Princeton, she told me about her research on the collective behavior of social bacteria called Myxococcus and showed me her slides and some cool movies she had taken of the bacteria. I was amazed by Cassidy’s research on these droplets full of thousands of cool, little bugs.

Cassidy presenting her research on Myxococcus at a conference.

I remember asking Cassidy what she liked to do outside of research, and she told me she enjoyed inviting people over for dinner and making food for them. At a Princeton memorial on December 8th, 2020, several of Cassidy’s friends talked about her love of hosting, describing Friendsgiving gatherings and dumpling-making events at her apartment.

Cassidy also told me what it was like to be a graduate student at Princeton, and not all of her comments were positive. She told me how frustrating it was when the WiFi was broken in a graduate residence hall, and how it took a ridiculous amount of time to get it fixed. She complained about not getting enough mentorship in the department. But what I admire most about Cassidy is that she didn’t just complain about things. She understood what needed to be changed, and she never stopped taking actions to make those changes happen—often behind the scenes.

She reached out to the administrators of her department to work on making the Quantitative and Computational Biology (QCB) program better and more inclusive. Whenever there was a new member in her lab, she was the one who made sure they got to know everyone and made them feel comfortable in a new environment. She shared ideas with her colleagues, gave helpful feedback, and practiced talks with people. She was also in charge of the QCB happy hours and mentored undergraduate women in physics throughout her PhD. Cassidy knew that people needed a better support network, especially in graduate school, and she helped create one. When I told Cassidy I’d accepted a position at Harvard, she wished me the best for my PhD career. Even though I went to a different school, we knew we would keep seeing each other, since we were in the same field.

Cassidy (front row, center) was heavily involved in Avery House activities while at Caltech, including this group trip to the Getty Center. Jiseon is on the right of the front row.

Cassidy changed me as well. At the end of my first year in the Harvard Molecules, Cells, and Organisms program, I had my own recruit. He had to visit on his own, since he missed the official recruitment week. When my program director told me about this, my first thought was that I should organize a dinner with my recruit and invite all my classmates, just like Cassidy had done for me. When I had visited Princeton, I had been worried because I had missed the department’s official recruitment events. But after Cassidy had invited more than 10 grad students to a dinner for just a single recruit—me—I had felt welcomed, and I hadn’t felt awkward anymore. Normally, I would have been too overwhelmed to organize an event like a big group dinner, but Cassidy made me step out of my comfort zone because her kindness and consideration had meant so much to me.

The last time I met Cassidy in person was at the American Physical Society’s (APS) March meeting in Boston in 2019. I missed her talk because I had a class that day, but she came to mine. I regret so much that I missed her presentation. We were supposed to meet again at last year’s March meeting in Denver, but the conference was cancelled at the last minute due to concerns over COVID-19. I wanted to make it to her talk this time, ask her about a new exciting paper on Myxococcus that her group had published, and hang out with all of the Avery physics folks. I had no doubt that when she defended her thesis next year, we would all get together and celebrate all the great things she achieved during her PhD and what an amazing friend she was to everyone.

It has been really difficult to cope with losing Cassidy and her sister Angel so suddenly, and I can’t imagine how heartbreaking it has been for the people who spent more time with her. Yet I am truly grateful that I had Cassidy in my life. She inspired me in so many ways, and even now I am discovering more and more incredible things that she gave us by reconnecting with all the amazing people who knew her.

Cassidy and some of her friends from Princeton after successfully completing an escape room in Boston while at the March 2019 APS meeting.

I want to close by sharing a story about a beautiful Sunday I spent with Cassidy and two of our Avery housemates, Joseph and Yubo, during the APS meeting in March 2019 in Boston. In the morning, we were going to have brunch at Cafe Luna, but it was too crowded. Instead, we went to a cafe called Juliet. During the Lyft ride to the cafe, Yubo left his phone in the car. The driver was kind enough to drive back to return his phone. Cassidy offered to pay for the lost item fee, although Yubo wouldn’t let her. After brunch, we hung out at Joseph’s place, playing board games and hanging out with Joseph’s roommate’s cat, Marbles. Cassidy brought a cute board game called Root, Yubo and I brought some desserts from a bake sale at Harvard, and Joseph baked a cake for us. We were already full from all the desserts before heading to Spring Shabu Shabu, one of the best restaurants in the city. We wanted to have an early dinner because Cassidy had signed up for an escape room that night with her Princeton friends. The restaurant was jam-packed as always, so we walked through the Petco next door while we waited. I still have a video of a guinea pig sleeping with its mouth open, which I found hilarious. We ate so much (including the ice cream for dessert) and Cassidy left early to have fun with her other group of friends. During that week, we had a big snow storm after a very warm winter. Nobody could stop complaining about the weather, but it was the most beautiful week I have ever had in Boston. And Cassidy was there.

Not My Thesis, Chapter 4

Fri, 07 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In Chapter 4 of Not My Thesis, Jane Panangaden explains the abstract world of pure math and the delights of exploring it, as well as her work advocating for tenants’ rights in Pasadena. While dividing her time between writing proofs and legislation, Jane grapples with how we apply our skills, technical or otherwise, to bring a different world into existence. She asks us to consider: why do math?

You can find out more about the Pasadena Tenants Union, including the ordinance they wrote here. Read about what the Socialists of Caltech are up to here.

To learn more about the history of eugenics at Caltech, check out this Caltech Letters viewpoint article. In recognition of this history, Caltech recently decided to remove the names of some of the eugenicists from campus buildings. Hear Jane and others in conversation with the Caltech Archives in this video.

Find us on Caltech Letters, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. The transcript is available here. You can contact us by emailing notmythesis@gmail.com. Music for this episode was provided by Blue Dot Sessions, and our artwork is by Usha Lingappa.

Meritocracy and Me

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Emma Sosa, Graduate Student in GPS, for Caltech Letters

At Caltech, there are many opportunities to hear people talk about their science, but we seldom learn about speakers’ career paths beyond the thirty-second introductions listing awards and alma maters. One of the rare chances to hear someone’s full career trajectory is at a series of events hosted by Caltech’s Women in Chemistry group. These wonderfully low-key breakfast events take place in the historic Gates Chemistry Library. I’ve heard many different women share their stories over the space of an hour, yet even these conversations never seem to fully explore their paths. The career paths described sometimes seemed incredibly straightforward: I have loved science since I was five years old, I went to graduate school, and finally, I got my dream job as a professor. They might mention a departure from the typical trajectory or hardships encountered along the way, but these conversations, like the thirty second-introductions, are still a compressed version of the facts.

A photo in the Gates Library after a Women in Chemistry breakfast event with Professor Corrina Hess (seated, white shirt) in 2018. The author is seated on the far right.

Elise Tookmanian

Let me tell you my thirty-second introduction.

I grew up outside of Philadelphia and graduated from high school near the top of my class with a deep love of learning and science. I attended Franklin & Marshall College, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania with superb undergraduate research opportunities. After working hard in a lab there for three years, I published two first-author papers and received awards from the Chemistry department. I applied to several schools for graduate school but chose Caltech for its top-tier chemistry department. There, I joined Dianne Newman’s lab to do exciting interdisciplinary research in the field of geobiology. While at Caltech, I became an editor for Caltech Letters and plan to pursue a career in science communication after I graduate.

It sounds nice, right?

It’s all true, but it certainly isn’t the full story. This thirty-second introduction obscures my privileges, my struggles, and even my good luck. These details can easily become invisible because, especially in the United States and in academia, society constantly reinforces the idea that the world functions as a meritocracy. In a meritocracy, wealth, power, and opportunity are distributed to individuals based on talent and effort alone. It’s the tempting idea that race, class, or your family background don’t affect your future, that you can do well in life if you work hard. Meritocracy perpetuates the false beliefs that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that every kindergartener could be President one day, and that SAT or GRE scores are predictive of academic success. The data consistently show the opposite. Race and background play demonstrable roles in measures of success—especially in the context of STEM higher education. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen that even the economic fallout of the pandemic and the virus itself disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minority groups. Meritocracy would have us believe that any of these failures are due to character flaws—laziness or lack of intelligence. In reality, these statistics are the fallout of systemic discrimination that cannot be overcome by determination alone. Meritocracy preserves the status quo of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and class divisions by simply saying that they don’t exist. We’re all just blank slates with the same world of opportunities at our feet.

The story of my life that more accurately accounts for the factors outside my control goes something like this.

I grew up outside Philadelphia in a family of six. We were comfortably middle-class and never worried about necessities. Both of my parents graduated from college, so it was always assumed that we would have the opportunity to do the same. My mom didn’t have to work and chose to homeschool my siblings and me for a few years instead. She gave me a lot of specialized attention as I was learning to read and write, but also the freedom to explore whatever was interesting to me. These experiences fostered my love of learning, reading, and writing. My high school was well-funded and offered many AP classes. Taking these AP classes boosted my GPA and prepared me to take the same courses again in college. When I was accepted to different colleges and received the financial aid packages, I chose a school that was slightly more expensive because it was a good investment. I didn’t have to worry about going into debt. I had my family to fall back on, and I didn’t need to financially support them. Beyond that, I simply assumed that I would be able to get a good job and pay off my student loans without any problems. My background, growing up middle-class with two parents who graduated from college, normalized these assumptions.

As a white woman growing up in a majority white town, I never felt that I didn’t belong. I chose to attend Franklin & Marshall College and later Caltech without a single thought to my race. The note on Caltech’s application encouraging students from underrepresented groups to apply didn’t give me pause. I could choose these schools because I knew I would feel comfortable there. Their reputations as “elite” schools were positive features; I didn’t have to consider that the descriptor is often correlated with whiteness. Even choosing to continue in academia and attend graduate school was a comfortable decision. My whiteness allowed me to move through these white academic spaces easily, never doubting that I belonged there.

Beyond my privileges, I also had some good old-fashioned luck along the way. When I started doing research, I was given a project that turned out to be relatively straightforward. When other students spent weeks trying to get their proteins to crystallize, my protein happened to crystallize on my very first attempt. I published this project with my advisors, and I spent the next year expanding on this work to publish a second paper. I worked hard, but I was also very lucky to be given that specific project in that particular lab.

The author stands in front of her poster titled Development of a Vibrational Hydration Ruler at the 2015 Biophysical Society Meeting.

Elise Tookmanian

This second version of my story is longer. And it accounts for only some of the luck, circumstance, and privileges that got me to Caltech. It is difficult to reconsider my accomplishments in the broader context of my privilege—I can no longer take full credit for my success. However, this version doesn’t negate my hard work or talents or drive. This version simply recognizes that there was more at play in the opportunities that presented themselves and my decision-making along the way.

In the same way that meritocracy gives meaning to our success, it also gives meaning to our failure. When I got to graduate school, meritocracy flipped on its head. What had previously buoyed my belief in my belonging and success now became a source of deep insecurity and shame. My struggles became evidence that I didn’t belong at Caltech or even in graduate school, a reflection of my inadequacy. Within the framework of meritocracy, everything I did reflected my innate worth: my faults, my merits. When the problem is you, how do you escape it? Meritocracy puts all the weight on the individual: both success and failure. If you succeed, it’s because you are talented, but if you fail, it is because you are broken.

These harsh dichotomies are not a fair or truthful way to view ourselves or the world. Outside of meritocracy, there are more realistic ways to understand failure. I failed because science is a place where things should fail most of the time. I failed because I was learning. I failed because I beat myself up for failing, making it harder and harder to try again. I failed because I was struggling with anxiety, a condition that surfaced during grad school and takes a lot of effort to manage. I failed because maybe graduate school wasn’t exactly right for me. Not because I am not smart or talented, but because it wasn’t a good fit. I missed the concrete goals and the opportunities to try new things that I had during my liberal arts college experience, and I learned how much I enjoyed writing and having an impact in my community. No hard feelings. It’s not me, it’s just, well, graduate school.

I say “failed,” but my time in graduate school hasn’t been a failure. “Failed” may be the first word that comes to my mind because meritocracy is hardwired into my very neurons, but it (again) isn’t the truth. I may not have a thesis full of experimental data, but my contributions are still valuable. I’ve learned so much about myself and even discovered what I want to try next. The truth is graduate school was a really hard time for me, and that doesn’t define me as a person.

The author sits in front of her laboratory bench at Caltech in the fall of 2016.

Elise Tookmanian

I try to hold these truths together as a way to bring form to this invisible force in the world. I can be hardworking, benefit from white supremacy, and find it difficult to start working some mornings. This isn’t always an easy task. But, maybe it is getting easier. According to a Pew Center Research report in 2020, 65% of adults in the United States say that some people are rich because they have had more advantages in life, rather than due to hard work. This erosion of the myth of meritocracy gives me hope.

Now, when I listen to the thirty-second introductions before seminars, I try to remember that I’m listening to a story. Stories help us better understand ourselves and our world. Stories simplify and make sense of information. But they undoubtedly lose some complexity in the telling. They are only an approximation of reality. We don’t always have time to get into all the details. Our stories about ourselves or others rely on shorthand and tropes in the same way that a movie or book does. And just as we should critique and analyze the media we consume, I think it is time to critique the stories we tell about ourselves.

By taking into account our privileges and our roadblocks, we can take control of our personal narratives. This empowering act decouples our worth and our “success” or “failure” by reevaluating our efforts within the bigger, more complex landscape that surrounds us. As we take control of our personal narrative, we can fight off our imposter syndrome and extend empathy to those around us. We can change how we read other people’s stories. When hiring a new faculty member, admitting the next class of graduate students, or giving out awards, we can use this knowledge of our inequitable world to give someone a bit of good luck. In recognizing the myth of meritocracy, perhaps we can change the landscape to create the more just world we desire.

Pills and Mathematical Paradigms: Tracking Opioid Abuse in the US

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Casey Yamamoto, Graduate Student in GPS, for Caltech Letters

There is a saying in Chinese that translates to “every medicine is thirty percent poison.” I was brought up in a family that subscribed to this philosophy. When my doctor prescribed me a buffet of pain relievers after I got my wisdom teeth removed in the US, my parents urged me not to take them. They believed taking pain killers would burden my liver, and the temporary disappearance of pain would mask any symptoms of a potential complication. Their reasoning is rooted in the belief that medication is not needed for every discomfort—you do not need to take pain medication, unless the pain is life-threatening. Raised in this environment, I was shocked when I arrived in the US and saw the casual attitude people have toward pain relievers, as well as the prevalence of pain medication misuse among Americans.

I reflected upon the different attitudes the US and China have towards medicine as I began my most recent project characterizing opioid misuse in the United States. Opioids are a class of drugs widely abused in the United States and are typically prescribed to treat moderate to severe pain. Opioids cause a sense of euphoria, a “high” that not only dulls the pain of the body, but also has psychoactive side effects. Long-term use of opioids creates dependencies and can lead to addiction. The United States has more people with opioid use disorder than any other country in the world. In 2017, 1.7 million Americans suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioids and approximately 47,000 died as a result of an opioid overdose. The issue is more severe today than ever, as the pandemic and isolation exacerbates feelings of loneliness and despair, causing some people to turn to drugs as a coping mechanism.¹

Top: Overdose death rates in the United States involving opioids. Bottom: Countries consuming most opioids from 2013-2015.

Data from the CDC and the UN International Narcotics Control Board (see references 2 and 3)

There are many brands of prescription opioids that are manufactured and sold, but OxyContin is by far one of the most popular. OxyContin was launched in 1996 by Purdue Pharma (also known as “Purdue”), one of the major culprits behind the opioid crisis. OxyContin was a unique approach because it provided round-the-clock pain management from a single pill. One pill contained enough medication for several hours, but the innovative extended release formulation slowly delivered oxycodone, the active ingredient. Purdue spent a huge amount of money marketing OxyContin, and the company became a financial success in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2009, OxyContin accounted for 34.3% of all oxycodone pain relievers sold in the United States and 83.3% of all high-dosage pain relievers.⁴ While the drug was intended to optimize patient care, the large amount of oxycodone packed in a single pill made the drug one of the most popular opioid products to abuse. Users could crush and snort the OxyContin pills to get an instant high.

Trend in Oxycodone Sales: Sales of all prescription oxycodone increased substantially from 2000 to 2010, with per-person sales quadrupling in the 10 year period. The sales of oxycodone declined from 2010 to 2015 as a result of the OxyContin reformulation and aggressive measures taken by the states and the federal government to counter opioid addiction.

Shiyu Zhang and Daniel Guth (see reference 4)

In August 2010, under pressure from policymakers, Purdue reformulated OxyContin to make it “abuse-deterrent.” The reformulated OxyContin is almost impossible to crush and inject, so OxyContin lost its attraction among recreational users. However, it wasn’t clear if those recreational users were abusing opioids less as a result of the reformulation or turning to other opioids besides OxyContin (such as heroin) that was still easy to abuse. The reformulation provides a unique opportunity for social scientists like myself to study what policies are effective in reducing opioid misuse. My colleagues and I wanted to know if the OxyContin reformulation was successful in reducing the recreational use of OxyContin and opioid abuse and whether it led to any unintended consequences.

While the aim of our study was straightforward, the execution was more complicated. A lot of people have the misconception that social science research is qualitative in nature. In reality, gathering, processing, and making sense of data are all very important parts of our job. Real-world data is high-dimensional and complex, and we create mathematical models to mirror these complex, real-world scenarios. The process of finding the right framework to answer our research question reminds me of what my undergraduate econometrics teacher used to say about models. In his opinion, all models are wrong, but some are useful. All models, by definition, are simplifications of reality, but they allow us to focus on the most critical aspects of the data relevant to our research question. Simplifications that ignore the less important parts of the overall picture are useful for identifying the main factors that affect the world around us.

For the first few months of our study, my coauthor Daniel Guth, a fellow graduate student from Caltech’s Humanities and Social Sciences Department, and I sifted through over 500 million records of prescription opioid shipments, read books and papers chronicling the opioid epidemic, and built several mathematical models in an attempt to understand how opioid use disorder takes hold and evolves in a community. Much of the data we relied on for this study was only available because of a court case in 2019 that made half a billion records of opioid transactions from 2006 to 2014 publicly available. Before the publication of this data in the new ARCOS (Automated Reports and Consolidated Ordering System) database, researchers were unable to break down the sales of opioids by brand (OxyContin vs. non-OxyContin) or disaggregate the sales to specific locations beyond the state level. The new publicly available ARCOS data supplied a level of detail that enabled us to look at exactly where the OxyContin reformulation had the most impact with respect to misuse and overdose and compare use of the new abuse-deterrent OxyContin with other brands.

This detailed dataset showed that the sales of OxyContin went down after the reformulation, and the sales of alternative oxycodone went up. Upon seeing this pattern, it is tempting to conclude that the reformulation caused users to switch to a different brand of oxycodone. However, correlation is not causation. Just because two events happened at the same time does not prove that the first event caused the second event. Let me use a simple example to illustrate this point: if you look at the number of people who drowned after falling out of a fishing boat and the marriage rate in Kentucky from 2000 to 2010, you will realize that the two numbers move together over time. Despite what the data shows, it is hard to believe that an increase in marriage rate would cause an increase in drowning or vice versa. Similarly, just because the sales of OxyContin went down and the sales of oxycodone went up after the reformulation does not imply that the changes are caused by the reformulation. To make our claim stick, we need to investigate whether these two events are correlated purely by chance or whether one event causes the other.

An example of spurious correlation.

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlation

In order to go from correlation to causation in the case of OxyContin reformulation, my team used a common mathematical model in my field called the difference-in-difference (DID) framework. To use the DID framework, we categorize all US states into two bins: those with either a high or low percentage of people misusing OxyContin before the reformulation. If the reformulation truly impacted how people misuse opioids, then the high-percentage misuse group would experience a bigger change in OxyContin usage since there are more people affected by the reformulation. However, if the reformulation had no impact on opioid abuse, then the low-percentage misuse group should experience the same amount of change during this period as the high-percentage misuse group. Hence, by comparing changes in OxyContin usage in both groups we can better assess whether the reformulation was successful in reducing OxyContin use.

Using the difference-in-difference framework to analyze the ARCOS data revealed that our hypothesis was correct.⁴ The reformulation did indeed cause OxyContin sales to decrease. Additionally, the same model established that the sales of alternative prescription oxycodone went up to compensate. Specifically, in locations where OxyContin misuse was high pre-reform, OxyContin sales dropped a greater amount than where misuse was low, and alternative oxycodone sales went up a higher amount. Because the OxyContin reformulation was a national change uncorrelated with local conditions, this difference-in-difference model provides causal evidence that reformulation caused individuals to switch to a different brand of oxycodone.

Difference-in-difference Framework Example:
Scenario 1: Let us imagine that a state in the U.S., State A is exactly the same as State B except for its OxyContin misuse level in 2009. After the reformulation, State A experienced a higher drop in overdose death than State B. Since everything else between A and B are identical, the difference is likely caused by their initial OxyContin misuse level. Hence, the OxyContin reformulation likely played a part in reducing overdose.
Scenario 2: Let us imagine the same situation as above. After the reformulation, State A experienced the same amount of drop in overdose death as State B. Hence, whatever caused overdose death to drop is likely to be independent of the initial OxyContin misuse level. Therefore, the OxyContin reformulation did not play a part in reducing overdose in this hypothetical situation.

Shiyu Zhang

Although we are addressing very specific questions concerning the OxyContin reformulation, the findings from our study can be applied to develop more effective ways to control opioid abuse. Understanding how OxyContin users responded to the reformulation, a specific example of reducing the supply of an abused drug, can be incredibly informative for researchers and policy makers. These results can shed light on how recreational users of other drugs will respond to reductions in drug supply more generally, whether it is a raid on drug dealers or a change of formulation, as was done for OxyContin. Our study suggests that partial restriction on access to drugs is not effective in curbing use, and a strategy to combat addiction needs to be holistic. It needs to not only cut the supply of illicit drugs, but also connect addicted individuals with the right resources to fight addiction and withdrawal symptoms.⁶ Even the most well-intentioned interventions may be unsuccessful in curbing drug use, and teams of policy-makers, sociologists, and physicians must join forces to tackle this issue that continues to plague our country.

I would like to think that the research I do at Caltech is both retrospective and forward-looking. In contrast to the work many of my friends do in other departments at Caltech, my research involves building quantitative models to make inferences about social phenomena. While the data I work with and the questions I try to answer concern the past, the inferences I make concern the future. Doing this research for the past year has made me cognizant of the fact that cultural differences in how Chinese and Americans perceive pain medication is not the only driver of the opioid crisis in the US. Rather, the market for prescription painkillers in China is much smaller because it started with stronger regulations. America’s current landscape of opioid use stems from a combination of government policies, pharmaceutical companies, and market forces. In each country or state, the drivers of addiction are complex, and mathematical models can precisely identify those drivers and therefore distill meaningful lessons from our past. The sooner we learn those lessons, the more lives we can save.

References

1: “Overdose Deaths Accelerating During COVID-19.” CDC, December 18, 2020.

2: “Opioid Data Analysis and Resources.” CDC, January 25, 2021.

3: “The U.S. Opioid Epidemic.” Council on Foreign Relations, July 16, 2020.

4: Zhang, Shiyu and Daniel Guth. “The OxyContin Reformulation Revisited: New Evidence From Improved Definitions of Markets and Substitutes.” ARXIV, 2021.

5: “Spurious Correlations.”.

6: Sordo, Luis and et al. “Mortality Risk During and After Opioid Substitution Treatment: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Cohort Studies.” BMJ, vol. 357, issue no. 0959-8138, doi: 10.1136/bmj.j1550..

How the Model Minority Myth Harms Us All

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Illustration by Emma Sosa, Graduate Student in GPS, for Caltech Letters

When I was in elementary school, my mom volunteered to help with Math Olympiad. I already knew that I was good at art, so I was excited to show off my math skills for her. I would not be able to articulate why until much later in life, but for some reason I just thought that I should and would be good at math. But on Math Olympiad day, I couldn’t do any of the worksheets, and my humiliation grew until the hour was over. To this day, being asked to calculate something on the fly ties a knot in my stomach.

We’ve all heard the stereotype—Asians are good at math. This casual statement is a manifestation of the Model Minority Myth, the idea that certain non-white minorities can serve as a successful assimilation “model” for other non-white minorities. The myth may seem benign, even beneficial for Asians, but it stems specifically from anti-Black racism and contrasts the cherry-picked successes of certain East Asian Americans against stereotypes of Black, LatinX, and Native Americans as a justification for their continued marginalization. It centers Asian American and Pacific Islander narratives around East Asians, despite the rich history of many other Asian groups in the U.S. since the 1800s. It is also a direct product of the American myth of meritocracy, the idea that power and privilege are allocated by individual merit alone, blind to social and economic class¹. As a Caltech scientist, and as an Asian American^✝ who used to believe in the Model Minority Myth, I believe we must subject this stereotype to the same level of critical examination we demand in our research.

In order to dismantle this racist myth, we need to understand that “race” is a social construct with no scientific basis, based on perceived differences in physical appearance among human beings². In the American colonies, race was used to justify why certain people—enslaved Africans and colonized Indigenous Peoples of North America—were denied the rights and freedoms that European colonizers took for granted². Race was written into the legal system of the colonies, and later the United States, starting in the 17^th century in order to grant exclusive rights and freedoms only to those considered “white,” like Virginia slave owners and other European colonizers.³ In the United States, race was explicitly set up as a hierarchical system with white landowners at the top and enslaved Black people at the bottom. The social, political, and economic forces that protect and reinforce this hierarchy are “white supremacy.”

A racist cartoon from 1899 called The Yellow Terror in All His Glory. This cartoon encapsulates ‘Yellow Peril,’ the idea that Asia and its people represent an existential threat to the Western World. The cartoon depicts an anti-colonial Qing Dynasty Chinese man astride a fallen white woman, who represents the Western world.

Image from Ohio State University.

It is against this backdrop that Asian Americans were racialized. Asia has been consistently viewed as the West’s “other” throughout history, simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. Until after World War II, Asians living in the United States were primarily seen as “Forever Foreigners”—a homogeneous group primarily loyal to a monolithic “Asia” instead of the United States^4,5. Starting in the 1800s, thousands of Asian immigrants—primarily Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino — came to the United States to work in agriculture, construction, and other low-wage jobs^5,6. Despite the diversity of this group and their hard work, they were dismissed as backward, submissive, and inferior⁵. Their perceived lack of loyalty to the United States and their “otherness” were used as evidence to restrict Asian immigration and reject Asian immigrants. Regulations were put into place that barred them from becoming naturalized citizens, prohibited them from owning or leasing land, and crowded them into ethnic enclaves like Chinatowns that were considered “depraved colonies of prostitutes, gamblers and opium addicts.”⁷

U.S. Asian population over time with notable legislation affecting Asian immigrants or immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first immigration law to prevent an entire ethnic group from immigrating to the United States and becoming eligible for citizenship. Later, the Immigration Act of 1917 established an Asian Barred Zone of countries from which no immigrants were admitted, and the Immigration Act of 1924 supplanted that law to effectively ban all immigration from Asia. Finally, note the rise in population after the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

Data from the 2010 U.S. Census and the 2012 Pew Research Report "The Rise of Asian Americans."

Asian immigrants’ failure to thrive because of restrictive and racist laws began a feedback cycle that perpetuated their perceived inferiority and exclusion between the 1870s and World War II. This included passing increasingly prohibitive immigration policies to keep the Asian population low (<1%). The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first immigration law to prevent an entire ethnic group from immigrating to the United States and becoming eligible for citizenship.6 Citizenship was even taken away from certain subgroups, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1923 that Indians were not white and therefore ineligible for citizenship⁸. Later, most Asian immigration was barred with the passage of the 1917 Immigration Act. The stereotype of the “Forever Foreigner” continued through WWII with Japanese internment, a federal policy where people of Japanese descent were uprooted from their homes, forced into internment camps, and required to complete “loyalty” questionnaires⁹. California even ruled that only “1/16th” of Japanese heritage was enough to qualify¹⁰. Though the United States was also at war with Germany, sweeping demands for the internment of German Americans never materialized.

An article from the December 22, 1941 issue of Life Magazine that was written during WWII in response to violence against people of Chinese descent, based on them being perceived as people of Japanese descent. This article encapsulates the “Forever Foreigner” stereotype—note that the article does not attempt to dissuade people from attacking those of Asian descent, but instead tries to help you do it more accurately. This article also illustrates debunked “race” science, masquerading as “physical anthropology,” used to distinguish the “friendly Chinese” from the “enemy alien Japs.”

After WWII, a split between “good” and “bad” Asian Americans emerged. A select subset of Asian Americans—mainly U.S.-born and -educated Chinese and Japanese Americans—were held up as Model Minorities. Economically and academically successful, these Model Minorities allegedly achieved success due to their adherence to “traditional American values”—respect for authority, nuclear families, and adherence to strict gender roles^5,11. As historian Ellen Wu has shown, the Model Minority Myth was so successful in the 1950s because it was used as anti-communist propaganda, arguing Chinese American success was due to American freedom and democracy that was not available to them in communist China⁷.

The Model Minority Myth then evolved in the 1960s in response to the ongoing Civil Rights movement. William Petersen, then a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, argued in an influential 1966 New York Times Magazine article titled “Success Story: Japanese American Style,” that Japanese Americans were the hard-working antithesis to what he termed “problem minorities, specifically the ‘American Negro.’”¹² Those same “traditional American values,” he argued, had allowed them to overcome discrimination after World War II and achieve some success in the U.S. This idea immediately caught on in popular culture and academic literature to apply to all Asian Americans, resulting in an infamous 1987 TIME Magazine cover that proclaimed, “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids.”¹³ When explicitly compared to Black Americans, Asian Americans were said to have achieved success “the old-fashioned way” through quiet hard work and perseverance—validating the myth of American meritocracy—instead of protesting in the streets as Black civil rights leaders were⁵. This myth held despite the history of activism within the Asian American community, from the 1800s to the present. After all, it was only after the concerted activism of East, South, and Southeast Asian American groups that all people of Asian descent fully secured the right to vote and become U.S. citizens in 1952^14,15. Even the term “Asian American” was only coined in the 1960s by a collective of college students and activists in order to unite disparate Asian identities in the fight for political and social change¹⁶.

Time Magazine cover from 1987 proclaiming "Those Asian-American Whiz Kids." Note how the students shown on the cover appear to be racially homogenous and of East Asian descent.

Asian Americans were held up as Model Minorities to justify the enduring divide between white and Black Americans, and to gloss over the consequences of slavery. A 1966 article in U.S. News & World Report noted, “At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese-Americans are getting ahead on their own, with no help from anyone else.”¹⁷ This statement is willingly blind to the fact that the wealth of this country comes from the subordination of Black people, an unrepented sin that can be traced all the way from slavery, through segregation, to mass incarceration and police violence today. It also uses the Model Minority Myth to prevent policies of restorative justice. Today, it is used to scale back another legacy of the Civil Rights movement: affirmative action in university admissions. One example is the 2014 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, which was filed not by an Asian American, but by an organization founded by a politically conservative legal strategist¹⁸. Asian Americans have consistently been used as an ideological tool to suggest that other minorities, particularly Black Americans, have only themselves to blame for their historical and structural marginalization^19,20.

Ironically, it was the Civil Rights movement, led by Black Americans, that shaped the Asian American population that we see today. The Civil Rights movement led to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished restrictive immigration policies that allowed the Asian American population to grow. The Asian America that we see today is largely the product of this post-1965 immigration, with 20 million Asian Americans tracing their roots to more than 20 countries in East and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent⁶. My parents are part of this post-1965 wave; they left China in the early 1980s to pursue PhDs at Columbia University, became naturalized U.S. citizens, and at this point have lived in the United States longer than they have lived in China. Today, Asian Americans represent 6% of the U.S. population and are the fastest growing racial group in America⁶. This group is majority immigrant, with 74% of all Asian American adults born abroad⁶. Although Asian Americans are traditionally thought of as East Asian due to Japanese and Chinese Americans being the dominant Asian subgroups prior to 1965, it is projected that the 2020 census will show Indian Americans as the largest subgroup²¹. Asian Americans are also multiracial and the most likely racial group to marry across racial lines⁶. One example is Vice President Kamala Harris, who has an Indian-born mother and a Jamaican-born father.

2010 Demographics of Asian Americans (in blue) and Pacific Islanders (in orange). Information on ‘Other Asian’ for Asian Americans is shown in bar graphs to the right of the pie chart. Asian Americans make up ~6% of the U.S. population, while Pacific Islanders make up ~0.5%.

Data from the 2010 U.S. Census and the 2012 Pew Research Report "The Rise of Asian Americans.""

However, as in the past, modern Asian immigration is highly restrictive. The 1965, and subsequent, Immigration Acts have all preferred family-based and high-skilled immigration, which has led to the phenomenon of “hyper-selectivity” in Asian immigrants where many are better educated than the general American public and their home country populations²². For example, 51% of Chinese immigrants have at least a bachelor’s degree while only 9% of Chinese citizens do^6,23. Given the design of these immigration laws, it is not surprising that Asian Americans, as a whole, have the highest annual household incomes and highest household wealth in the U.S.⁶ It seems today that U.S. immigration policies, not “traditional American values,” are responsible for the Model Minority Myth.

Top panel from left to right: a) Percentage (%) of Adults Foreign Born, b) Of those foreign born adults, percentage (%) that arrived in the past 10 years, c) Percentage (%) of people of Asian descent employed in Science and Engineering fields. Bottom panel, left from right: d) Median Household Income, and e) Percentage (%) of Adults (age 25 and older) with a college degree or higher, f) Percentage (%) of Adults living in poverty. Detailed information was only given for the six largest Asian subgroups.

Data from the 2010 U.S. Census and the 2012 Pew Research Report "The Rise of Asian Americans.""

And yet, that is not the full story either. The Model Minority Myth flattens the diverse Asian American population into a monolith. In reality, each Asian and Pacific Islander subgroup has a unique history and faces distinct challenges. Although some have arrived as highly skilled workers, many have also arrived as refugees, notably Vietnamese immigrants as a result of the U.S.-backed Vietnam War. Today, Asians are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. undocumented population²⁴. A growing number of Asian immigrants are also arriving with minimal education and job training, one factor that has led to Asian Americans displacing Black Americans as the most economically divided racial or ethnic subgroup in the U.S.^5,25 These immigrants include my aunts, who have worked in Chinese restaurants, as home aides, and as Amazon warehouse workers. Even academic success is not guaranteed: two-fifths of Chinese Americans (either born or raised in the U.S.) do not graduate from college, and in the first year of college, Asian American and Black students have the highest enrollment rates in remedial education courses^22,26. And despite the higher median income and education of Asian Americans as a group, they are underrepresented in leadership positions in government, corporate America, academia, and popular media²⁷.

Finally, the Model Minority Myth denies the historical and ongoing racism that Asian Americans face. In truth, the “Forever Foreigner” trope never died, but continually resurfaces in response to American geopolitics. This includes the alarming rise of hate crimes against South Asian Americans, notably Sikh and Muslim Americans, since the 2001 September 11 attacks³⁰, and assaults against a variety of Asian Americans in the age of the novel coronavirus^28,29. Asian Americans are also the least likely group to seek and receive treatment for mental illnesses or report domestic violence^30,31. The Model Minority Myth obscures the reality of who Asian Americans really are, the challenges they face in their daily lives, and encourages their silence about it².

The Model Minority Myth is a difficult thing to talk about among Asian Americans, perhaps because some feel that it benefits them, and because some have whole-heartedly embraced it. I thought I was a Model Minority for a long time, too—growing up in a wealthy suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area surrounded by successful Asian Americans, it was easy for me to assume that we had all gotten here by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. It was much more difficult for me to question those assumptions and educate myself about the tortured history of race and “success” in America. Clearly, the Model Minority Myth was never meant to be pro-Asian. Instead, it is used to justify white supremacy and minimize the continued effects of slavery on Black Americans. The racialization of Asian Americans is complex and nuanced, and needs to be viewed within the broader history of race in the U.S.—in fact, the constantly shifting perceptions of Asian Americans so clearly illustrate how race is a social construct, a blank screen onto which individuals with various political agendas project⁷. Buying into the Model Minority Myth only reinforces false narratives of race and success, and thwarts the efforts of all groups to finally make the U.S. equitable for all.

✝:Notes on the term “Asian American”

There have been many terms the community has used to try and label themselves, including (but not limited to): Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), Asian Pacific American (APA), and Asian Pacific Islander (API). These changing labels reflect the ongoing dialogues that these communities are having as they grapple with their identity, as well as the continually changing demographics of this community. For the purposes of this piece, I will use the term “Asian American” because: 1) The history of Pacific Islanders is heavily shaped by colonization, which cannot be explained in this short piece, and 2) Pew Research Center data on “Asian Americans” is referenced, which is defined as people who self-identify with one or more of the following Asian groups: Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Indian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Malaysian, Mongolian, Nepalese, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Thai, and Vietnamese.

References

1: Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2018. “The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?” The Guardian, October 19.

2: Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?: And other conversations about race. Basic Books, 2017.

3: DiAngelo, Robin. White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press, 2018.

4: “Yellow Terror in all His Glory”. Ohio State University. Retrieved 6 February 2021.

5: Lee, Erika. (2015). The Making of Asian America: A History. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

6: Social, Pew, and Demographic Trends. “The Rise of Asian Americans.” Pew Social & Demographic Trends (2012).

7: Ellen D. Wu, “Asian Americans and the ‘Model Minority’ Myth,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2014.

8: United States v. Thind, 261 U. S. 204 (1923).

9: Catherine Collins (2018). Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present: Fields of Action, Fields of Vision. Brill. p. 105. ISBN 9789004353244. Retrieved September 29, 2019.

10: “WWII Japanese Relocation Center and Internment Camp Newspapers.” California State University, San Bernandino.

11: William A. McIntyre, “Chinatown Offers Us a Lesson,” The New York Times Magazine, October 6, 1957.

12: William Petersen, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” The New York Times Magazine, January 9, 1966.

13: Time Magazine (1987). Those Asian American Whiz Kids. Aug, 31, 51.

14: Minnis, Terry Ao & Moua, Mee (2015). “50 Years of the Voting Rights Act: An Asian American Perspective.” Asian Americans Advancing Justice, August 4.

15: Cheng, Cindy (2014). Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War. NYU Press. p. 177.

16: Kambhampaty, Anna Purna (2020). “In 1968, These Activists Coined the Term ‘Asian American’ – And Helped Shape Decades of Advocacy.” Time Magazine, May 22.

17: “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S.,” U.S. News & World Report, December 26, 1966.

18: Hinger, Sarah (2018). “Meet Edward Blum, the Man Who Wants to Kill Affirmative Action in Higher Education.” American Civil Liberties Union, October 18.

19: Chen, G. A., & Buell, J. Y. (2018). Of models and myths: Asian (Americans) in STEM and the neoliberal racial project. Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(5), 607-625.

20: Chow, Kat. 2017. “’Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians and Blacks.” Code Switch, April 19. 21: Hsu, Hua. 2020. “Are Asian Americans The Last Undecided Voters?” The New Yorker, October 26.

22: Lee, Jennifer, and Min Zhou. The Asian American Achievement Paradox. Russell Sage Foundation, 2015.

23: Communique of the National Bureau of Statistics of People’s Republic of China on Major Figures of the 2010 Population Census[1] (No. 1), 2011-04-28; and Communique of the National Bureau of Statistics of People’s Republic of China on Major Figures of the 2010 Population Census[1] (No. 2), 2011-04-29.

24: Ramakrishnan, Karthick and Shah, Sono (2017). “One out of every 7 Asian immigrants is undocumented.” AAPI Data, September 8.

25: Kochhar, Rakesh and Cilluffo, Anthony (2018). “Income Inequality in the U.S. Is Rising Most Rapidly Among Asians.” Pew Research Center, July 12.

26: “Initiative on Asian American Pacific Islanders: Issues and Facts.” Obama White House Archives, 2016.

27: Johnson, Stefanie K. and Sy, Thomas (2016). “Why Aren’t There More Asian Americans in Leadership Positions?” Harvard Business Review, December 19.

28: “Our Campaigns: Hate Crime Tracking and Prevention.” The Sikh Coalition. 2021.

29: Escobar, Natalie (2020). “When Xenophobia Spreads Like a Virus.” Code Switch, National Public Radio, March 4.

30: Kam, Katherine (2020). “Why domestic violence calls are surging for Asian American women amid the pandemic.” NBC News, Oct. 1.

31: “Asian American/Pacific Islander Communities and Mental Health.” Mental Health America..

The Big One

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It’s 1:00 a.m. and my Uber is winding its way home along a twisting freeway through the heart of Los Angeles. My driver seems in a talkative mood.

“So, what do you do?” he says.

I shake my head to clear the fog after a long evening.

“I’m a seismologist,” I respond, “I study earthquakes.”

“Earthquakes?” he says. “So can you tell me when the Big One is coming?”

The Big One. He’s talking about the massive earthquake that California is “overdue” for. Whenever I tell people what I do, this is the one burning question they have. Knowing when the Big One is coming feels like it could give us some control over our lives—lives every Angeleno spends on the unpredictable and uncontrollable ground that lurks beneath our feet.

California lies on the boundary between two giant tectonic plates. These blocks of the Earth’s crust are on the move, sliding about the same speed as your fingernails grow. But, along the 800-mile long San Andreas Fault where they meet, friction causes the plates to get stuck. As they try to slide past each other, the stuck plates bend, storing up energy like a coiled spring. When the pressure becomes too great, the fault slips; the plates move rapidly, violently shaking the ground.

The San Andreas Fault runs from the Salton Sea in the south to well north of San Francisco. Each part of it produces big earthquakes, causing the ground to slip tens of feet, every one to two centuries on average. When the last Big One hit Northern California, in 1906, it reduced San Francisco to rubble. Meanwhile, the southern end of the fault hasn’t ruptured in roughly three hundred years.

The San Andreas Fault at the Carrizo Plain, central California.

Illustration by Usha Lingappa for Caltech Letters

I study earthquakes, using supercomputers to simulate an event like the Big One. From the safety of my desk, I create ruptures that break a digital version of the San Andreas Fault to explore how the earthquakes start and what makes them stop. But even when I try to tame earthquakes in my computer, they’re still unruly beasts: fascinating, terrifying, and full of surprises. Centuries of studying the Earth has taught us that earthquakes are as inevitable as they are unpredictable. We don’t know when, but we do know the next Big One is coming.

“I’m sorry to disappoint,” I say to my driver, “but they’re random. We can’t predict them. Although we know it’s not a question of if, but when.”

Perhaps it’s the thought of the next earthquake, or perhaps the winding of the freeway, but I start to feel nauseous. My fingers make for the window switch to let in some slightly fresher air. Despite the late hour, my driver wants to know more. “That sounds pretty scary! What’s going to happen?” he says.

My driver’s question pushes my mind’s eye high above the ground, giving me a view of the whole of Southern California. The San Andreas Fault is a slice through the landscape, separating the San Gabriel Mountains from the Mojave desert. Crossing this scar in the ground is a thin vein that carries the blue lifeblood of our desert city: the Los Angeles Aqueduct, bringing us water from the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This aqueduct, and others that also cross the fault, are the source of over 70% of the city’s water. One big slip of the San Andreas severs the city’s lifelines.

This map shows the three aqueducts that supply over 70% of LA’s water, all of which cross the San Andreas Fault. An earthquake on the San Andreas could sever these aqueducts.

C.A. Davis (2010)

I imagine the Big One starting, miles underground. The fault breaks, and once broken it starts to slip, one side sliding relative to the other at several feet per second. As it moves, the San Andreas sends out seismic waves in all directions, shaking the ground and everything on top of it. In a matter of seconds, the fault slides 20 feet.

The consequences are immediate. LA loses access to more than 70% of its water as seismic waves rupture gas mains and bring down power lines, sparking thousands of fires. Roads are broken, and cell towers overloaded. At the end of it all, the potential destruction to our city is immense: hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, families fleeing their ruined homes, and two thousand lives lost. The U.S. hasn’t seen an earthquake this bad in over 100 years.

Vital roads, pipelines and aqueducts cross the San Andreas Fault just north of Los Angeles.

Adapted for Caltech Letters by Usha Lingappa

Such a bleak future seems unreal to the human mind, when we can turn on our tap and have clean water, and I can hail a ride on my phone within minutes.

My car hits a bump, bringing me out of my head and crashing back into my seat. For a moment, I catch the driver’s concerned eyes in the rear-view mirror; he’s still waiting to hear what the Big One will do.

I hesitate for a second, trying to order my thoughts. Even though I study earthquakes, my scientific work has given me only a tiny piece of a puzzle that’s immeasurably complex, ranging from geophysics to infrastructure safety to disaster planning. We know where the big faults are, and the kinds of earthquakes they’ve caused before, but we don’t know how close to breaking they are now. We know how to make buildings safer, but we don’t know which buildings will suffer the strongest shaking. Here and now, all I can do is translate a tangled web of knowns and unknowns into the clearest possible answer. But we need an answer that’s not just a tale of destruction, leaving us powerless in the face of disaster. Instead, we need to tell the story of the progress that we’ve made and the steps we, as individuals and as a society, can still take to get ready for The Big One.

“There will be an earthquake, and it will hit us hard” I say, “but it’s what we do right now that determines just how bad that earthquake will be.” I recite the age-old words of earthquake safety: purchase supplies; have an emergency plan for meeting with loved ones; drop, cover, and hold on when the shaking starts. But I also tell him just how far we’ve come: a network of seismic sensors now watching the fault 24 hours a day, ready to send out precious seconds of warning when the Big One starts. The better mapping of dangerous faults, and the strengthening of buildings and pipelines.

Science won’t let us predict every random geological event, but it can teach us how to understand and prepare for those events. The catastrophe that I imagined is only one possible path; as a society, we can avert disaster. Preparation lets us tame the fear that uncertainty creates in our minds, and tame the threat that earthquakes pose to our lives. Generations of research mean that we’ve never been more prepared for earthquakes.

As our ride nears its end, I realize I’ve forgotten something, perhaps the most important thing we can do to get ready. Being prepared isn’t just a question of medical supplies and bottled water. “We need to get to know our neighbors.” I say. “Who lives nearby, who might need help after the quake. We can recover if we work together.”

I thank my driver as I step out into the cool night air.

A few weeks later, I find myself in a bar in Palm Springs. As I sit down, a woman next to me greets me and asks: “So, what do you do?”

If you’d like to find out more about how you can get ready for earthquakes, visit earthquakecountry.org

Note: This story was originally written before the 2020 pandemic. An earlier version was delivered at a live storytelling event at Caltech.

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The science of fear and decision-making

In Defense of Basic Science

Acknowledgements

Caltech Letters Year in Review: Our 5 Favorite Articles of 2021-22

Non-Utilitarian Scientific Ethics

Acknowledgements

Footnotes

No More Dirty Money for Green Science

Feeling wine: The science behind our perception of tannins

Footnotes

Femininity, Foreignness, and Flowers: How culture shapes scientific discovery

A Sneak Peek at the Quantum Revolution

Taking Science Education Virtual

References

Caltech Letters Year in Review: Our 5 Favorite Articles of 2020-2021

In Memory of Cassidy Yang, Class of 2016

Not My Thesis, Chapter 4

Meritocracy and Me

Pills and Mathematical Paradigms: Tracking Opioid Abuse in the US

References

How the Model Minority Myth Harms Us All

✝:Notes on the term “Asian American”

Suggested Additional Reading

References

The Big One