Project Biotales

What does the world of biological sciences research feel like?

What does the everyday life of an early career biologist look like?

What are the joys, anxieties and hopes of early career biologists?

What messages do they have for young people curious about biological sciences research?

These were some of the questions explored in project Biotales, an outreach project that unravels personal journeys of early career biologists through creative writing and art. In this article, I discuss the concept and process behind the project. I focus on aspects such as why the project is centred around the standpoints of early career biologists, what is unique about the material produced, and what are the kinds of themes explored by some of the narratives. 

The importance of early career biologists voices in articulating the ​“strangeness”of research spaces

As a student pursuing a Masters in Biotechnology almost two decades ago, I interned in some of the première research institutions in the country. There, I encountered biological sciences research mainly through close interactions with PhD scholars (who were often tasked with demonstrating techniques to me and so on). In these spaces, I realised that research laboratories functioned very differently from the undergraduate and postgraduate laboratories that I had been a part of. 

Beyond the thrill of experiencing ​“cutting-edge scientific research”—

which most undergraduate and postgraduate students who study in Indian colleges and universities without PhD programmes miss out on—

I began to realise that there are various aspects related to the nature and culture of biological sciences research that one gets a first hand experience of, only while doing research. 

Sociologists often talk about how an important aspect of understanding the world is about ​“making the familiar strange”. Biological laboratories are social spaces where human beings interact and produce knowledge of the living world. Understanding the dynamics of knowledge production within these spaces, as a human endeavour as well as making it explicit to the public is, therefore, necessary. 

PhD students are uniquely placed in this regard – as people who can uniquely articulate the ​‘strangeness’ of laboratory spaces, simultaneously as insiders and outsiders, as they acculturate into these spaces. As a young student, insights from interacting with them were valuable.

Some insights include the curious nature of how scientists generate a hypothesis- how far have their questions travelled, and mutated (often a research question being pursued in a laboratory in India would have its genesis in the postdoctoral research of the PI in a laboratory in the USA), why are certain questions considered ​“hot”? What kinds are deserving of grants and so on. 

I also began being acutely conscious of the culture and the organisation of the laboratory, its constitutive hierarchies (the chain of command that runs from the Principal Investigators of the project, to the sanitation worker who cleans the laboratory), gender dynamics, laboratory protocols that require constant attention to precision, avoiding contamination, waste, and frustrations associated with repeated failures of experiments and so on.

For these reasons, project Biotales takes as its focus the narratives of early career biologists’ experiences of their research, through the lens of strangeness. These narratives offer a raw and honest picture of how research spaces function.

Please read the second part of this piece (soon to be published) for a peek into what some of the materials look like and how the materials were co-created.