tl;dr

I am starting this blog for three main reasons:

1. I don’t get very many opportunities to write about academic research in the way that I was expected to at school. Rather than wait around until grad school to ease my toes back into science writing, why not create that opportunity for myself now?

2. There are not enough low-stakes ways to nurture academic writing or scientific literature comprehension beyond a “journal club” or similar department-contained, low-key, biweekly meeting. Outside of academic institutions, there aren’t many opportunities like this available in general!

3. I have more free time than I will probably have during the next decade. Rather than doomscrolling, why not make the most of my time by dedicating it to a more autodidactic pursuit? There’s a lot (a lot!) of things I don’t know—especially in chemistry. Some areas I don’t really feel the need to know too thoroughly, but there are others that I find myself wishing I wasn’t so clueless in. Reading (and learning) takes time, and time is what I have right now.

This is a big question I consider frequently. In the past few years, I have seen the reemergence of the personal blog through various platforms like Twitter, Substack, and fancy Squarespace websites. Though these blogs tend to be slim and beautiful, more and more of them ended up being poetic, confessional, very public diaries. The other type of blog was a well-curated and thought-out installment of biweekly posts about the author’s favorite things. The former could be interesting (especially reading those of friends or even mild acquaintances) but the latter is much more intellectually appealing because I frequently learn about topics that I am either already deeply invested in (experimental music, the internet, art museums) or know very, very little about (San Francisco, paint colors, Nietzsche).

A lot of the writers of these blogs are not “experts” in the topics they discuss. Often, these deep-dives are pursued with an autodidact’s spirit, and so, are presented out of pure enjoyment. I love this! But the more blogs I read, the more it became clear that research into the humanities and arts was a much more approachable and blog-able exercise than the hard sciences.

This is where I have to acknowledge the exceptions. The only true exception to this trend was Twitter, where conversations, outreach, and general communities around physical science were increasingly growing. A lot of young graduate students were becoming famous “paper posters” by simply tweeting about new literature in their field. Another exception to this trend is ML research, in which scientific journals are not the primary avenue for publishing research, but rather extremely large conferences. Because of this, other than posting papers on arXiv and attending these large conferences, blogging and/or tweeting about the field became a surefire way to display that you knew your sh*t. That is to say, blogging about ML is much, much more common among researchers (both in academia and industry alike).

Alas, I am a chemist and not a machine learning guru. Somehow it feels stranger to write casually about scientific research through a blog, especially since I am both early-career and a very young researcher. There is a big expectation that if you are going to be writing about chemistry at all, you should be an expert. And being an expert meant specializing in a small field by getting a big degree. But a lot of the blogs I read don’t have authors with PhDs. A lot of the authors are actually my friends. I also have a lot of friends who are scientists, and unlike our humanities-inclined peers, we did not post on Twitter or keep a Substack. We all wrote scientific papers, read scientific papers, talked about scientific papers, but blogging was not something we (people my age, early 20s, probably in grad school) were doing. Or maybe they were? Let me know if that is/was you!

Writing and talking about scientific research can be very difficult. I took a lot of courses in college (especially at the graduate level) that involved some aspect of presenting scientific ideas through writing or oral presentations. However, I was keenly aware that I was finding paper-reading to be laborious (the answer was easy here: I was simply not interested in what I was reading). And, at times, it was difficult to approach things like “new advances in inorganic chemistry” when I had very little practical knowledge in inorganic chemistry to begin with, and so trying to digest these academic papers felt unnatural.

This changed in my senior year when I joined a physical chemistry lab. The change was caused by a number of reasons. The first was that I was working with people who were extremely well-read and very clever. When you work with people who are very well-read (and if you, yourself, are not) you begin to feel a sort of shame and inferiority that is…healthy for your academic soul. The next (which seems very obvious but still somehow came as a shock to me) was that doing research in a field of your choosing will mean that you acquire the necessary background and said practical knowledge about that field. This meant that papers that seemed esoteric before were suddenly wholly applicable! Exciting! Thought-provoking! Even amusing! Not only that, but having a secure understanding of the research I was doing and my function within a lab allowed me to stop stressing about whether or not I sounded stupid or like a fraud, and allowed me to (finally!) talk casually about science. But what about writing casually? One of my mentors during my time there (who was one of these previously mentioned well-read people) introduced me to a lot of fun scientific ideas and papers, but one of my favorite things he showed me was Derek Lowe’s blog, In the Pipeline.  

In the Pipeline was one of the first examples of truly “casual” writing about science that I had encountered. I am always impressed by the diverse range of topics that Lowe covers (although not too surprising considering the increasing scope of pharmaceutical companies and biotech startups). I also frequently find myself going down deep click-holes with his citations as ground zero. I especially enjoy reading about topics that are slightly beyond my knowledge-base (which as an undergrad chemist, often meant anything to do with cell biology), or issues regarding research science as a field (his most recent post is a fun one, on the ethics of citation-maxxing).

However, to write like this (concisely, thoughtfully, using lay-person’s language) and to do it successfully and near-daily can be owed to Lowe’s long involvement with pharmaceutical science: he possesses a huge range of insight that one can only amass through time and rigor. And although I feel like everyone and their moms is reading In the Pipeline, I still feel that it is not exactly what I am looking for. Where are my non-experts?

Long story long, this brings me to my intentions for my own posting. On the question of why write about research science if you’re not an expert scientist, I think there’s a few arguments to be made:

The first is that writing about science helps you understand science. But not enough people do this—in fear that they will be exposed as some sort of frauds for talking about something they know nothing about. The fear of being wrong is pretty universal, especially for younger researchers. It’s even more prominent for people of color, women, queer folk, and first-generation students in science (a number of which I happen to fall into). Currently, while I’m working in a non-academic setting, I don’t get very many opportunities to write about academic research in the way that I was expected to at school. Rather than wait around until grad school to ease my toes back into science writing, why not create that opportunity for myself now?

The second is that the likelihood that someone reads my posts isn’t very high. And so, I think that a small, insignificant blog is the perfect way to both showcase that I can read and think critically about scientific research, as well as allow myself to set aside time to indulge in papers that I keep bookmarking to my “To Read” folder. There are not enough low-stakes ways to nurture academic writing or scientific literature comprehension beyond a “journal club” or similar department-contained, low-key, biweekly meeting. Outside of academic institutions, there aren’t many opportunities like this available in general!

The third is that I should take advantage of the time I have now to explore different fields before the inevitable pigeon-holing that occurs downstream in my career. I am already doing this at work, where I’ve been lucky to have been hired as part of a two-year rotational research program in pharmaceutical R&D, but I can also emphasize this in the literature I am reading. I am keenly aware that I am at a crossroads where I have more free time than I will probably have during the next decade. Rather than doomscrolling, why not make the most of my time by dedicating it to a more autodidactic pursuit? There’s a lot (a lot!) of things I don’t know—especially in chemistry. Some areas I don’t really feel the need to know too thoroughly, but there are others that I find myself wishing I wasn’t so clueless in. Reading (and learning) takes time, and time is what I have right now.

Hopefully, this site can act as a platform to enable my casual science-writing in a more-or-less public manner. At no point am I trying to write as an authority on anything; rather, I want to be able to read freely and be able to present crystallized thoughts on topics I have been exploring. That being said, please do email me if I am horrendously wrong about something, or if you have a paper that you think I should read as a follow-up. And lastly, if you are an early-career researcher who is also blogging or posting about science, please reach out! I would love to support you and your writing in turn.

AS 7/14/24