In the Lab: Don’t Let the Work Get Lost in Translation

Scientists are all unique, but we do have commonalities that help us communicate better together

Recently, I started a customer service training course. I always want to interact better with my local and international colleagues in my field and create molecular biology-driven testing for characterizing life-saving medicines. I appreciated the training sections about “knowing your customers” internally and externally because each person is unique and wants to be heard, feel empowered, and make a difference.

The training covered four communication styles: Personal, Intuitive, Analytical, and Functional. This made me think of a book I read recently, “The Culture Map: Decoding What People Think,” and it taught me something, just like every personality test or management study I have ever taken. The “Culture Map,” which I loaded up with dozens of color flags as highlight markers, offered insights on persuasion, confrontation, and the differences between high-context messages (reading between the lines) and low-context messages (precise and taken at face value). All these nuances are embedded in the interpretation of different languages and cultures. 

In a nutshell, we are all unique, but we have commonalities that help us communicate better. Scientists like me want and need to communicate better to advance in our respective fields.

Personally, I find it interesting studying our cultural language and mannerisms. As an American, Generation X, highly-educated woman from the Northeast, with a sharing and perceiving personality, almost Pollyanna-like, I like to be optimistic and focus on the joy of interaction. I want to understand what “makes people tick” and how they think. No wonder the Myers-Briggs personality assessment classified me as a “Campaigner” (Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Prospecting) among 16 personality types. Yes, I am the ENFP Personality through and through. Hippocrates, Greek physician and philosopher from 400 BC, would say that I am Sanguine, an open book with words to jump off the page. Life experiences certainly affect these attributes, but we are born with personalities. We adapt to our surroundings too, grow culturally while expressing who we are.

A Melting Pot of Scientific Styles

Of course, in an international setting like Ithaca, where I grew up in the backyard of Cornell University, and later attended graduate school for my Ph.D., I can recall my own life experiences with fellow scientists from all over the world. In the postdoctoral labs, the “Danger! High Voltage” sign for a particular equipment piece was written in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Given how much the international culture of science has grown, I would imagine that there are probably many more languages translating that simple phrase these days. Safety and science are connected with communication! 

Here is a cultural-observation memory from my graduate lab days. There was a new postdoctoral worker, originally from Germany, who was so meticulous that she pre-ran each of her elaborate experiments with mock samples before using the precious, limited supply of material. In contrast to our (my) Americanized “let’s just give it a try” partially worked-out exploration experiments, she was methodical in every potential step. She checked every parameter before executing work with precious samples. The “Culture Map” description of these styles states that reasoning is culturally shaped, as Germans and most Europeans may have a theoretical approach to work in contrast to American culture, where we might be more practical than theoretical. 

This got me thinking about a unique understanding of these differences, not in the lab but in the kitchen. This same postdoc invited my family for her amazing German dish of sauerbraten. It was tender and delicious because she had slow-cooked the marinated meat for hours. The preparation was meticulous, and the process was long, but the result was very good!!! I, on the other hand, brought chocolate pudding. I had made this recipe maybe once before, and thought, “Why not give it a try?” Happily, everyone loved it! Different approaches but complementary methods and dishes. It all worked out.

The culture (and I don’t just mean the growth of microbiology media) of science, scientists, and anyone in business means we need to factor in our upbringings and personalities, motivational drive, and the person’s resources, as well as understand business and personal timelines. It takes time, but it still has to be delivered to the kitchen table or in the lab on time. We have to understand both expectations and our reality of timing. We still need to get it done.

How Scientific Failures Can Be Validating 

One last memory to share is appropriate to the culture map of people and personalities that I mentioned earlier. During my second summer as an undergraduate researcher in Andre Jagendorf’s lab, I was tasked with repeating an experiment to determine the effects of UV radiation on chloroplasts and their “health” or robustness in taking on photosynthesis reactions. The results from the first experiments were called into question. No one likes to be doubted, but a central aspect of scientific discovery is repeatability – can your work be repeated in another’s hands with the same or equivalent materials? How robust is this assay? Is the premise of the question flawed? Is there an unknown bias? Does an unknown factor skew the result? 

Fresh from my spring semester, I jumped into my summer lab experience, which began in late spring. May is still chilly because of the prolonged cold Ithaca climate. When I began my experiments isolating the chloroplasts from the green leaves of pea plants (which I grew myself) or from “chummy bunny” baby spinach leaves picked up from the grocery store, I jumped right into the experiment, setting up the experiments as precisely as possible, as the protocol suggested. Voila, I got the data result that my boss expected. Yet within that first month, the experiments started “failing,” which is not the correct term because data is data. Still, the phenomenon of UV treatment to the chloroplasts did not give the same response that it had just weeks earlier. What??? Did I change the buffers? No! Did I change materials? No! Did anyone notice the summers in Ithaca were hot and humid? I certainly did, especially as I was an Ithaca local, a “townie”. Did this particular laboratory lack air conditioning? YES! Aha, the conditions were not consistent. While we could control the temperature by incubating in an ice bath, we could not alter the humidity in the old vintage lab space. 

So, while the data from my experiments did not match the initial ones, ironically, the “failed” findings were the best news, not to the boss, but to the scientific researcher who started these experiments the previous year (in spring). It informed repeatability of her theory of how weather affects the results, a hypothesis that could not be validated until the work was repeated in another’s hands. I was never so happy to have failed experiments consistently. Was this communicated differently to me versus the other researchers? Well, yes, I was learning after all. So I was not upset being questioned about protocol or practice. I had no reason not to do this work step by step; they even watched me on occasion. Data is data, after all, and we need to know the context of how we got it, even if the data doesn’t deliver a result we like. 

So, here’s to working with our colleagues: try, teach, and connect colleagues in our science, for our science, and by our science, even when the results aren’t what we hoped. It’s what scientists are called to do: try, teach, connect, and repeat—in science AND ALWAYS in communication.