Going Public: Professor Stephen Curry on blogging as an academic

Structural biologist Stephen Curry reveals how plugging himself into the public domain has added new perspectives to his research and teaching.

Many people outside academia don’t seem to know what to make of professors. This was driven home to me a few years ago in a conversation with one of our undergraduate students. Though no stranger to professors, having been taught by several during his degree course at Imperial, he was incredulous when I informed him that Professor Curry regularly took the 52 bus from Victoria train station on his way to work. Somehow he saw professors as a class apart – not like ordinary mortals.

The revelation gave me pause for thought: professorships are much more numerous than they used to be – the days of one prof per department are long gone – but clearly they retain some mystique. I wouldn’t wish to diminish the position, but sense that a reality check is in order.

When I was promoted to professor back in 2007 my parents asked me how my job would change as a result. I was surprised at the question; as anyone familiar with academia will know, apart perhaps from an increase in committee work, I expected my primary duties of research and teaching to remain largely the same.

But something did change. When called upon to deliver my inaugural lecture, I had the chance to reflect on the journey that led to promotion, which was mainly devoted to the structural analysis of virus proteins and protein-drug interactions; but more importantly, I started to consider what I might do with the position. As I did so I felt able to relax a little and began to enjoy the sense of arrival.

There was no let-up from the pressure of maintaining the funding and momentum of my research group – the projects, the papers, the grant applications – or from the demands of undergraduate teaching, which is often a pleasure to deliver but a struggle to prepare: there never seems to be enough time to get everything done. You might think that 20 years in the business would have taught me how to balance this tension with professorial poise but you would be wrong.

Nevertheless, amidst this ongoing mêlée, the freedom that came with being a professor offered me an opportunity to enlarge my scientific activities. In 2008, as I was finalising yet another grant application, I found myself stalled in front of my computer trying to concoct 400 words on my plans for how I might engage broader audiences with my research. This part of the form had always troubled me. I had no problem with the implied duty to reach out to the public to give a good account of how I was planning to spend taxpayers’ money, but had few ideas, beyond visiting my children’s school, of how to go about it. But around that time, I had become dimly aware of the scientific blogosphere and began to think that a blog might be an easy way both to fulfill my duty to the citizenry and to demystify the idea of professor.

It was a risky move because even now people look quizzically at you if you confess to blogging. “Graffiti with punctuation” is how the gruff scientist in the movie Contagion dismisses blogging. That view still has many real world proponents, who tend to see it as an insular, narcissistic activity. Within the scientific community blogging is still sometimes seen as a distraction from the real business of research.

So, despite enjoying the new-found sense of academic freedom that came with elevation to the rank of professor, I dithered. Fear of losing scientific respectability wasn’t the only impediment. Starting a blog may be technically straightforward — all you need to do is log on and begin typing — but for a scientist who has only previously published research papers, the immediacy of blog writing feels strange, even dangerous. There is not the protection of peer review by

colleagues who will catch your more egregious errors before publication. So I hesitated on the edge of the blogosphere, that great ocean of free expression, testing the waters at first with my toe by leaving comments on other people’s blogs. Finding that these weren’t beaten back by an adversely critical reaction, that in fact some people took what I wrote seriously, I eventually took the plunge and started my own blog: Reciprocal Space.

Since then, I have never looked back. I found that once you start, it’s difficult to shut up. The great thing about writing a blog is that you get instant feedback from your readers, or at least those who take the trouble to leave a comment. And although the blogosphere is commonly supposed to be populated by trolls and hecklers, this simply isn’t the case. Among those interested in science, there is a growing community with a keen appetite for direct interaction with scientists. I had a positive initial reaction to my scrawlings on science and life in the research lab and soon developed a degree of self-confidence – I hesitate to call it courage – about sharing my views online.

I was surprised to discover that sitting down at my keyboard to write took me out into the world in ways that I never imagined and helped to redefine how I see my role as a scientist and professor. At first I didn’t recognise myself.

Before long I found myself banging on the door of The Guardian newspaper demanding – and getting – the right of reply to columnist Simon Jenkins who, riffing off the non-appearance of a bird flu epidemic, had castigated scientists as a self-appointed clerisy that considered itself above criticism. I wrote to remind him that the rigours of peer review of our papers and grant applications regularly serve to keep scientists grounded in reality and, occasionally, painful humility. In May 2010 I went to a meeting for those angered by a High Court ruling that science writer Simon Singh (Physics 1987) had a libel case to answer when he wrote that the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) had “not a jot of evidence” to support its claims that spinal manipulation was an effective treatment for childhood asthma.

Picking up on that issue in my blog and joining in with the noisy campaign to challenge the BCA, I found myself in the High Court listening to Singh’s barrister debate the finer points of what constitutes scientific evidence with three of the most senior judges in the land. It was almost surreal to witness science dissected in a courtroom but a salutary reminder that it reaches well beyond the confines of the laboratory.

As support for Singh, who eventually won his case, transformed into the Campaign for Libel Reform I found myself in parliamentary committee rooms absorbing the testimony of a wide range of interest groups, several of them scientists, science writers and journal editors. They each recounted examples of the pernicious effects of the archaic defamation law of England and Wales, under which a threat of libel can be issued with little or no evidence of damage and throws the burden of proof on the defendant. Because they are so expensive to defend, even if you win, libel writs are often used to stifle legitimate scientific debate. Science as a discipline depends critically on the cut and thrust of argument but where that clashes with powerful commercial interests, such as in the treatment regimes of chiropractors or the management of drug trials of pharmaceutical companies, wealthy organisations can silence critics with the mere threat of a libel action.

There is little doubt that the scientific dimension to the campaign helped to propel it up the political agenda and, astonishingly, the UK’s coalition government is now shepherding a new Defamation Act through parliament that offers much stronger libel protection for science (and many other areas of public life). I cannot claim to have played a major part in the campaign but have given steady written and personal support; seeing it from close quarters has been an education in legal and political processes.

Like I said, once you get a taste for these things it is difficult to stop. When, in September 2010, Vince Cable, the new Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, sought to justify a warning that scientists would have to take their share of impending budget cuts by declaring “something in the order of 45%” of publicly funded research to be “not of excellent standard”, I did not hesitate. Former MP Dr Evan Harris and I wrote a stern rebuttal of Cable’s claim in The Guardian and immediately joined a small band of like-minded scientists, led by cell biologist Dr Jenny Rohn, to found the Science is Vital campaign. It is a testament to the power of blogging – and Facebook and Twitter – that within 42 frantic days we had amassed a petition of over 35,000 signatures, lobbied parliament and rallied with over 2,000 supporters right outside the doors of the Treasury to protest the threatened cuts to the science budget. Harnessing grassroots support was an important fillip to behind the scenes efforts by more august bodies such as the Royal Society to lobby the government. It led to direct talks with Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts and – it still seems incredible – to significant protection of UK spending on science spend.

The science budget for 2010–14 was fixed in cash terms and so is being eroded by inflation. There is no doubt that pressure on funding is much more intense than in recent years – many working scientists seem gripped by a grim determination to weather the recession. But I was immensely heartened by our ability, through Science is Vital, to mobilise support, not just from scientists, who were only about half the signatories on the petition, but from large swathes of the UK population.

As with the libel reform campaign, the experience of leaping from the keyboard into the public domain has brought home to me how standing up for something can make a real difference. Something I thought would be difficult turned out to be quite straightforward. I hope my efforts might also have made blogging more respectable within science, by showing something of its potential to energise dialogue, both amongst scientists and with the wider public. With increasing frequency I bump into colleagues who tell me they have read my blog, something that is always satisfying to hear because although I might now be less shy of offering an opinion in public, part of me feels little different from the diffident undergraduate I was 30 years ago. The openness of the form, I tell them, gives blogging a scholarly edge: writing in public disciplines your thinking and challenges it by exposing you fully to the counter-views of your commenter critics. a real difference.”

Of late, the focus of my writing has looped back into academia. A post I wrote last year to assert the importance of mathematics in the training of life scientists sparked an enormous response that is now helping me, in my role as Director of Undergraduate Studies, to organise a rethink of our curriculum.

Most recently I have been exploring the issue of ‘open access’, a revolutionary approach to publishing research papers that makes the scientific literature freely available to readers. It is an obvious innovation in a web-connected world that enables the taxpayer to access the research that they have paid for. With luck, open access should enrich the technological dimension of political discourse as our society turns to face serious problems, such as climate change, energy generation, food supply and the medical demands of an ageing population.

Open access is backed by the government, but it is a complex policy that is inflaming cultural and budgetary conflicts among scientists, who feel tethered to an established journal system that is increasingly unaffordable. The innovation is by no means a done deal, so I have been writing extensively about open access this year, trying to unpick its Gordian knot of issues for myself and anyone who cares to read.

Having plugged my professorial self into the public domain, I am increasingly called on for comment in the press and on the radio. How things have changed. A few months ago I found myself in a booth at the BBC studio in Westminster, staring down at the microphone in front of me, waiting for the ‘voice of Radio 4’, Eddie Mair, to cue me in as the professorial expert to another discussion on open access and wondering: “How did I get here?”

Illustrations by SHOTOPOP

This article first appeared in Imperial Magazine, Issue 38. You can view and download a whole copy of the magazine, from www.imperial.ac.uk/imperialmagazine.