It was a hot July evening about four years ago, and my friend the research librarian was giving me advice about higher education. I was an impressionable 21 and just starting my research career on the Klamath River in Northern California, a region where people are fierce advocates for the place they live. Scientists come in and out of the region to study it, often using the data to advocate for this threatened system, but in the past, there have been instances of scientists just taking the data and leaving. River people, then, turn a wary eye to outsiders descending upon their communities with scientific demands.
Ade looked me right in the eye. “Before you consider graduate study, just remember one thing. Whatever you do, don’t become a biostitute.” She frowned into her G & T, her voice dripping with scorn.
A “biostitute”? I inquired, a little breathless. What did she mean? It sounded bad.
“A biostitute is a big-name, big-time famous scientist who spends the majority of their time squirreled away in their ivory tower somewhere, writing abstract papers about ecological theory that have very little to do with what is actually happening on the ground, in the places they presume to be ‘studying.’ Their famous name and ability to garner funds makes them desirable among agencies, institutions, community resource groups, and tribal governments who want their scientific advice. So they spend their time flying around the country, or the world, on other peoples’ dimes, dispensing ‘wisdom’ from above on subjects and places they were just introduced to yesterday. The people they’re giving the scientific advice to are far more qualified to study their own problems, because they can actually observe their own ecosystems and places up close. The biostitute, instead of becoming familiar with one or a handful of places and focusing on practical study of those places, prostitutes himself or herself out for brief biological missions in places s/he’s never been before and knows nothing about. The result is shoddy, superficial science based on mathematical models that don’t work anything like real life, instead of long-term observations made by locals. The biostitute is focused on his or her academic career and the number of papers published, the number of fancy models created, not on real change, citizen empowerment or effective management of resources.”
Whoa. This was quite the fiery outpouring. I nodded and gulped and took it pretty seriously. My friend Ade is brilliant and usually pragmatic and realistic, not exactly what I’d call an ideologue, so I tend to take what she says to heart, and this, one of her rare diatribes, was no exception. At the time, with little experience of science or scientists, I had nothing to weigh her words against.
The word biostitute stuck in my mind (and my throat) like a thorn, or a fish bone, for years afterward, jabbing painfully and awkwardly at times when I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing next with my life. When I left the Klamath to explore other options and other places, I left with a massive sense of guilt. I’d poured my soul into this landscape, its slopes, streams and springs, and these people, who had in turn invested heavily in me, and now I was uprooting for…..for what? Unemployment. Then short-term employment in one place after another as I tried to convince myself I needed to experience different ecosystems, working with different animals, trying different fields of study and different places. I disliked all of them. Instead of the sense of connection and community I had tapped into on the river, instead of the sense of purpose and cause and love for my work, I encountered only a sense that I was drifting, planktonic and helpless, in a great sea of disconnect and detachment. Was this, I wondered, the first step on the road to biostitution, just selling oneself as a seasonal tech wherever the work happened to be, rather than sticking to one’s guns in a loved place of one’s choosing? This life, it seemed to me, was science without the soul, and that, it seemed, was the foundation upon which one could build a future as a biostitute.
Eventually, when I had had enough, I decided very tentatively it was time to consider graduate study. With a master’s degree or a PhD, I figured, it would be possible for me to earn enough money and have enough ownership over a project or two to be able to afford to stay in, and pay proper attention to, one place, one landscape, and its attendant biological and human communities. As I pored over program websites, emailed dozens of professors and labored worriedly over my application essays, Ade’s advice occasionally popped up and bounced around in my brain. Biostitute. Would 3 or more years spent chest-deep in mathematical analysis of numbers, graphs, charts and models suck the soul out of my science, remove the context (human and landscape) and make me forget why I became interested in fisheries in the first place? Overwhelmed by my options, I drew some lines in the sand. I avoided programs and professors who focused too much on modeling and not enough on fieldwork. I chose only programs located geographically within the historic range of anadromous species of Onchorynchus, and only major professors within those programs who focused on freshwater ecology of some sort, with some relevance to conservation and human dimensions.
About a year later, here I am, the rookie graduate student of a big-name, big-time famous scientist, one of the people on the very cutting edge of aquatic ecology, who often works with mathematical models and has more than a few dozen published papers to his name. Is he a biostitute, and, as his student, am I on my way to becoming one? That’s an easy answer. No, and no. Daniel, although he is a different sort of scientist and a different sort of person than my friends on the river, is no biostitute. He is committed to his work on the Wood River System in Alaska, where he lives for 4 months of the year. Daniel uses computer models to simulate and predict ecological patterns accurately and to great effect, but, born of 15 years of close observation of the lakes and streams he works in, he is also adept at actually seeing patterns in real-time on the landscape. Without the close observations of what’s actually happening out there, he would be unable to write models that work. Without modeling and statistics to help interpret the overwhelming amount of actual field data that is collected, he would be lost in a vast sea of meaningless numbers, out of which one human brain cannot necessarily extract existing patterns. Modeling and real fieldwork go hand-in-hand to achieve a richer, more complex analysis of the subtle changes in the fish populations, zooplankton communities, water temperature and climate that he studies. When modelers lose sight of what it is they’re actually studying, they fall back into a two-dimensional world where the parameters of reality become too simplified and perhaps have little to do with actual fact. When field technicians are unable to interpret the endless counting and measuring they do day after day after day, they can become somewhat disconnected from the sense of story and narrative that mathematical analyses lend to data. Qualitative observations of the landscape are not somehow less valuable than quantitative ones, and vice versa. They are complimentary.
Was my librarian friend correct in her assumptions and warnings about academic scientists, or was she stating things too much in terms of black and white? In the four years since that gin and tonic, I’ve decided that there are many grains of truth in what she said, but that it is a little too stark. The bright line (as she draws it) between the big-name, mathy, modeling University Scientist and the earthy, grassroots Citizen Scientist is a false dichotomy. One needs the other, and they can exist, simultaneously, in the same individual. I can use models, publish many papers, work at an academic university, have a lot of funding, and travel and work in many places and still have integrity in the science that I produce. What I take away from the stern lecture against biostitution is not that I should fear turning into some ivory-tower monster, but rather that it is not enough to simply do the science (especially to puff oneself up), fly around the country talking about yourself, and letting the data sit there. Conservation science, ecology, and related disciplines ought to be performed with a purpose. I don't mean bogus science with foregone conclusions and pre-meditated or falsified results. I mean an ethic, a direction, a whole other layer than the scientific method.
To explain what I mean, let me unfurl another anecdote. Another dear friend of mine, who also happens to be a budding scientist, once said something to me that turned on a whole bunch of lightbulbs over my head at once. We were at a conference and we had just sat through one of the more boring, inaccessible, incomprehensible and generally bad research presentations I’ve ever heard in my life, given (alarmingly) by a seasoned professor and fisheries scientist. Despite his age and experience, the man appeared to have no idea of how to clearly convey research goals, methods, results and overall concepts to an audience. After the presentation, my friend and I were expressing our surprise that such a man, with an important role in research and resource management, would have no communication skills.
“It just makes me think,” said my friend, “that as a scientist, it isn’t enough to do research. We also have responsibilities to be educators about and advocates for the places and organisms we study.”
Now this is more like it. Rather than pursue a scientific career path cowering in fear and loathing of doing the “wrong thing” (or even becoming a biostitute, a creature I’m beginning to believe may be largely mythical), I’d rather try to live in inspiration, attempting to live up to the triple bottom line of good science, good education about that science, and well-founded advocacy. This is how, for me, you avoid becoming a biostitute and start to put the soul back into science.
More about this line of thought very soon.
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