This Is How NOT To Do It.

Even though this has been blogged about by other people already, I wanted to add my voice to the cacophony, because it arrived with perfect timing.

First, a video. Keep your barf bags handy. Bags. Plural.

This is an ad run by the European Union meant to encourage young women (teenage and younger) to be scientists. While a noble goal, (and the rest of the campaign looks absolutely great) I was very disappointed; apparently, I've been doing it wrong!

I spent yesterday in lab in deep shit. Literally. I was moving a batch of sea urchins from one tank to another so I could clean the old tank out and get it ready for a load of urchins being moved out of the lab proper so that another batch could be brought up from the tank room and housed in the lab. (A sort of echinoderm musical chairs.) There were a lot of urchins. Sea urchins eat a lot, and, accordingly, excrete a lot. I don't think I need say more.

In my mind, I was doing them a huge favor by moving them into a new tank with more kelp and more space and less shit. Of course, the urchins thought that some big evil thing was coming to take them to urchin hell and decided to go down fighting. An urchin can stick to damn near anything; the tank walls, the kelp, the strange slimy object in the middle of the tank, the spatula you're using to pry them off of everything else, you...and it takes significant persuasion to get them to let go. Even worse, you can't just grab them and yank unless you really get them by surprise; an urchin is in form and function the illegitimate purple lovechild of a tribble and a porcupine,  and can give you world-class splinters. 

So there I am, in my nice white labcoat, prying urchins off of the tank walls with my hands and a barbecue spatula, getting slimed up to my armpits, and hoping I'm not freaking them out. Freaked out urchins start to spawn. As soon as someone spawns, everyone's doing it (like a college party), and suddenly the tank's a huge mess of gametes and then there goes all the data from the urchins, because the gametes are the bit everyone wants to study and that can't be done in a tank full of urchin doings.

Accordingly, between prying angry urchins off everything and realizing that this poor labcoat is really going to need a wash, and trying to make sure the worst of the shit is out of the tank, I'm checking to make sure that no one is being publicly indecent in the next tank over and yanking out the urchins that are (hopefully before any of the others notice) and putting them in some other lab's unused tank so they don't crawl off and get stepped on. And that was before I even started to seriously clean the old tank, which was even more exciting. I did this all before lunch. Lunch happened at three. Then I came home and saw this video and laughed my ass off.

I love science, even when things are mucky and hectic (like yesterday). I get to tell stories about it afterward and enjoy the absurdity of the situation. (Two older women, obviously visitors, came by in time to see me rushing across the room, white labcoat covered in urchin shit to the armpits, holding a large barbecue spatula with an even larger urchin on it, kelp in the other hand, saying "Okay okay, I have a new tank for you I have food for you oh GOD DON'T SPAWN." I like to think I bolstered their faith in the humanity of the scientific community...) And I get to do important, useful things, uncovering things that we didn't even know that we didn't know. I love that things don't work out neatly, that there's so much to do and that there's uncertainty in everything. I love it because it's real, because it's something I can go and do things about. And besides, it's hilarious. Just look up the debate on Komodo Dragon prey capture methods.

Science isn't high heels  and lipstick and confidently scribbled equations. It's not a fashion shoot. It's not really all that glamourous. I'm pretty sure that the audience this is aimed at knows that; they must at least have done some sort of science class by now, and seen the textbook depictions of scientists. In the end, the ad just winds up being condescending and absurd. It's like the producers sat down and went, "Hey, what do girls like?" "Fashion!" "Sweet, let's put lots of fashion in and just make it science themed." "Brilliant!" and no one called them on it. Their other videos are spectacular, showing female scientists at work and talking about why they love their work. I'm just sorry that they led the campaign off with this absurdity.


(Also sorry for weird formatting--Blogger is being PURE EVIL today and keeps ruining everything!)