What’s Going On in the Basement?: Inside the World of Indie-Sci
It’s three in the morning and I’m standing lookout next to a dumpster outside of a Princeton University biochemistry building. From inside the dumpster comes a rustling noise like a large animal scavenging for food and a geyser of debris kicks up from the open hatch every thirty seconds or so. After I spend what seems like an eternity scanning the surrounding area for the intrusion of a campus cop or a drunk coed, my companion finally pulls himself out of the trash heap, a bulging red biohazard bag by his side. “Let’s go,” says Reid Dravecky, indie scientist.
We rush to Dravecky’s small hatchback, which, he explains to me later, has been engineered to run on a petroleum/corn-oil mixture of his own design. Dravecky crams the red bag into the back seat, and 50mL tubes and pipette tips splatter out onto the car floor and rattle around as he shifts into gear and accelerates away. “Don’t worry about those, they’re all getting cleaned anyway,” he reminds me, eyes fixed on the road ahead.
After a twenty minute drive, we screech to a halt behind a three-story apartment building in what real-estate agents might charitably call an up-and-coming part of Trenton. Dravecky and his CPA girlfriend live here on the first floor, with their cat Blaise Enrico Gregor Gottfried IV. Shutting off the car and reaching in the back for the bag, Dravecky leads me through a worn-down door into a dark basement storage area, warning me not to move until he hits the lights. As he tosses down the bag and heads around the corner, I attempt to make out shapes in the blanket of dark, trying to localize the source of a strange bubbling sound and a disquietingly persistent hiss. “Here, got ‘em,” Reid whispers, and the room fills with a dim light from the double strip of Christmas lights that line the basement’s low rafters, revealing a junkyard of cast-off scientific equipment: beakers with dangerous-looking cracks, a centrifuge wrapped in duct tape, a large, three-legged…
“…is that a scintillation counter?” I ask, suddenly wishing I’d worn a radioactivity badge on my jacket.
“Sure is,” Dravecky replies as he crawls on the floor switching on power strips and untangling power cords. “You’ll never believe what you can find at a Bethesda garage sale.”
After giving a swift kick to a boxy object and sending it shuttering into operation, Dravecky grabs our night’s bounty and unties the top. “Time to do our autoclaving,” he winks, and pours the bag’s contents into what I realize is a simple dorm-room refrigerator laid on it’s back, with the hose of an industrial steam-vac stuffed into a makeshift hole drilled into its side. The waterfall of tubes, tips, and trays falls into the fridge’s open door, which Dravecky then locks shut.
“The consumerist worldview of mainstream science would have you believe that all this equipment is ‘disposable,’ only fit for one-time-use,” Dravecky yells to me over the unbelievable din of the homemade sterilization device as he winds a kitchen timer to two hours and absentmindedly sets it on top. “That’s just one of the philosophical shackles I broke free from when I took my lab underground.”
It would be easy to dismiss Dravecky as a crank or a pathetic loner – a victim of one too many poor reviews who fell through the cracks of academia’s ivory tower – but that would be a mistake. Dravecky’s own assessment is far more accurate: he sees himself as part of an underground movement with ranks that are continually swelling, a member of a loose consortium of scientists who have “turned off, tuned in, and dropped out” – out of the cut-throat world of grant writing and department politics, out of the daily grind of teaching and mentorship, and into the murky realm of independent science: “indie-sci.” These are no high-school dropouts looking for another chance at the science fair; several of them were seasoned veterans in their fields before their fall from propriety. Many are bright young upstarts like Dravecky, who two years ago turned down an offer for a tenure-track position at SUNY and instead started accumulating the basement full of pilfered equipment and expired reagents that surrounds us now.
“No guarantees,” Dravecky reminds me, “in life or in science.” It’s something he’s fond of saying again and again: “No guarantees. Science isn’t about mastering unpredictability, it’s about being comfortable with it.”
As I watch him load a gel with drops of liquid suctioned from the bottom of an old Gatorade bottle, I ask him about his decision to say sionara to the mainstream of science.
“People just need to get their priorities straight,” he says. “Back in the old days, you couldn’t just open a catalog and get a gleaming piece of equipment delivered to your lab the next day. You couldn’t send your sample away in the mail to be analyzed and get the results emailed to you. You had to be resourceful, you had to use what you had to answer what questions you could. And believe me, the things you can discover that way are often a hell of a lot more meaningful than the predictable findings you see every week published in Science and Nature.”
For many researchers, publishing something in a journal like Science can be a career-defining event. But indie scientists like Dravecky sniff at impact factors and eschew traditional forms of scientific communication as “oppressive” and “formulaic.” The pioneers of the movement published their work in freely-distributed pamphlets duplicated illicitly on Xerox machines at their day jobs; now the internet blog is the medium of choice.
“The corporate journals are just now cozying up to open-source publication like they invented it out of thin air,” says Tim Stout, webmaster of leading indie-sci blog The Journal of Underground Research (or JundRes, for short).
“They suckled the idea [of open access publishing] from the teat of indie science just like they consume everything else that comes up the indie-to-mainstream pipeline: no props, no citations; one day you pick up Cell and some shitwig has jacked your methodology and slapped their name on your results.” Stout’s voice lowers to a whisper: “You remember all the hubbub in the glossies about neutrinoless double-beta decay a few years back? Well, before it was in Physical Review Letters it was right here on JundRes – guy goes by ‘Quasar’ proved that that shit happens with a dilution fridge he set up in his garage. Could have saved those Europeans a whole shitload of trouble and money.”
Unlike conventional scientific media, discussions on JundRes aren’t constrained within the narrow limits of traditional scientific discourse. Melissa Karnats’ review of how all biological studies using animal research are flawed (due to the exclusive use of “patriarchal” species like rats and canines) garnered over 1000 comments in the article’s standard discussion thread. A snapshot of the indie-sci discourse in progress, the participants nit-picked Karnats’ methods and conclusions (often using mysterious acronyms like CDNS and ROFLDNA), promoted their own blog-post research, got off on a digression about Battlestar Galactica, and ended with a flurry of photoshopped images of various animal species superimposed upon Gloria Steinem.
“The proliferation of off-topic conversation in these threads is regrettable,” Stout admits, “but we feel to censor these unpredictable avenues is to yield to the oppressive rules of mainstream scientific communication, with its antiseptic demeanor and hypocritical faux-objectivity. If the occasional flame war is the price of honest, frank, productive discussion, then we’ll take it.”
A similar disregard is exhibited by the denizens of the indie science world for those other hoary icons of scientific exchange: the visiting lecture and the convention. With no universities or institutes to organize official visits from outside speakers, indie scientists coordinate tours of the country, packing whatever homemade gear they can safely transport into dilapidated vans and hitting the road for several weeks. “Salons” are held at local bars in cities that have developed prominent indie-sci scenes, usually to miniscule but passionate audiences.
A few weeks after my run-in with Dravecky, I attended one such salon at a grimy coffee shop in a pre-gentrification area of Washington DC. Arriving early, I ask the participants whether they will be using Powerpoint presentations, drawing dismissive chortles from the unshaven and ripe-smelling scientists.
“Powerpoint is a tool to distort and neuter the truth, man,” says molecular biologist “Hyena” Wilkinson (“I study everything but cancer, ‘cause that shit is played the fuck out.”). “In indie-sci, if you can’t show me your cell line replicating and phosphorescing right in front of my fucking eyes, man, why should I dig your shit? I don’t dig your shit.” Rather than the usual coffee-and-chit-chat before a data presentation, Wilkinson prefers to drink a bottle of Southern Comfort and has been known to draw graphs and mechanism schematics in his own blood and vomit.
Although all indie scientists have their own reasons for taking the low road, most of them share a few things in common: a distrust of traditional funding institutions, a contempt for the rigid formalities of academia and industry, and above all a fierce independence. But amidst these core values, there are a number of dazzling contradictions. It’s common to hear an indie researcher in the same breath speaking of pure science like a jealous lover – “virology used to be worthwhile until HIV research came along with its fat wallet and bought it out” – and cursing the lack of government funding for basic research. As Wilkinson’s longtime collaborator Sheila “She-Wolf” Jennings puts it: “The only whitecoats still making Benjamins are the ones studying anthrax and killer lasers.” More than one person I interviewed admitted that their decision to drop off the institutional grid was partially a result of the cutthroat competition for grant dollars in the current era of NIH and NSF cutbacks. And despite their qualms about taking sullied money to support their research, some indie scientists see no problem in living the good life: “I make five times what I would have made as an assistant professor,” said one ecologist-cum-daytrader that I spoke with, “and I don’t have to write grants or haggle with the fucking Seychellian government about field permits. I fly in, drop some money with the local officials, and bam! – I’m out watching lemurs or collecting leeches or whatever else I fancy.”
Critics of indie-sci describe the movement as a bedraggled group of misfits that are so far out on the fringes of scientific research that they must promote their pseudoscientific theories and report on the results of their cobbled-together experiments through MySpace pages and YouTube videos. “I went to one of their ‘salons’ a while back,” said one prominent University of Michigan immunologist, “and I asked some woman what kind of proteases she used in her protocol. She grabbed my drink out of my hand and spat in it – ‘That kind!’ she said.” A developmental biologist I spoke to had a similar disconcerting run-in when he tried to contact a blogger about results they had described on JundRes: “It was really interesting work, really novel stuff. I asked the guy a question, whether he thought over-expressing Pax19 in the spinal cord of these mice would lead to incomplete neural tube closure, and a few weeks later I got an envelope with two dead mouse pups stapled to an index card with one word – ‘YES.’ I checked them out and sure enough he was right – but how the hell am I supposed to replicate that!?”
Indie scientists seem to appreciate and even cultivate their bad-boy and bad-girl personas, and there’s some truth to the image. Indie researcher’s careers are often cut short by bouts of depression, chronic substance abuse, or the loss, for whatever reason, of the tremendous willpower required to push their research forward without the support network that most mainstream scientists take for granted. These struggles are all part of the indie-sci aesthetic, and the few indie researchers who have garnered positions at mainstream scientific institutions are looked upon with scorn by their underground colleagues. Consider the case of Todd Clynes, one of the few researchers to break through the “basement ceiling” from the world of indie science to the mainstream. Clynes published several groundbreaking results – both in hand-printed pamphlets and on his blog, PixelPop – based on research conducted using DIY imaging technology he constructed from a Lite Brite, a bike helmet, and several undisclosed components. After attaining some degree of popularity amongst the close-knit indie science world, Clynes received an unprecedented offer from the Scripps Research Institute: a six-figure salary, his own lab space, and full use of their state-of-the-art MRI machines. All the same, Clynes thought long and hard about sacrificing the independence of his own garage laboratory before making the difficult decision to go legit.
“Being forced to invent my own scientific tools and work within severe financial and technological limitations made me the scientist I am today,” Clynes told me. “Yet, the ultimate aim of any researcher is to share his findings with the world, to improve the quality of life for those around him or her. Scripps offered me the opportunity to take the skills I had honed while tangled in wires in my garage and use them in an environment where you don’t receive dangerous electric shocks on a regular basis. I guess I was somewhat naïve; I thought I could bring my work to a wider audience while changing the system from the inside.”
Clynes’ noble goals fell on deaf ears amongst his former colleagues. Within days of his announcement at PixelPop, he was branded a “sell-out,” a “traitor,” and the ultimate in indie-sci slurs, a “Piltdown.” Clynes’ blog was vandalized and hacked, his research was disparaged at every turn, and his “farewell tour” of the salon circuit was marred by picketing, heckling, and the occasional assault. The stream of abuse continues to this day; Clyne says that even at Scripps he still receives a handful of what he calls “Judas” e-mails every week, and there is a website dedicated solely to the defamation of his current research.
While it’s easy to complain about selling out to “The Man,” the more experienced indie scientists that I spoke with seemed to realize that stories like Clynes’ are just a symptom of a more general phenomenon, and that if indie science is to continue to mature as a movement, it will need to find a way to come to terms with its own success. Whether or not indie science was once no more than just a couple of kids playing around with chemistry sets in their bedrooms, there’s no doubt that these days it’s much more than that – it’s quickly becoming a full-blown international movement. And as it becomes more and more common for indie scientists to make major advances in their fields, to be cited by their mainstream counterparts, and even to be recruited into the world of mainstream science itself, it’s going to be more and more difficult for them to fly the flags of street-cred and independence.
The indie science world that I was able to observe for several weeks was a scene at a crossroads: either cling to the DIY aesthetics that have defined the field or allow the border between the underground and the mainstream to be further eroded. For every researcher like Clynes who saw the benefit of leaving his basement and midnight dumpster dives behind in order to reach a wider audience, there’s a zealot like “Hyena” who refuses to compromise any aspect of his modus operandi, even if it means laboring in obscurity for his entire career. The passion of such indie scientists, misguided as it may or may not be, fuels an engine of scientific discovery that lacks the chrome trappings and precision-crafted parts of its institutional counterpart, but that moves the rickshaw of knowledge forward nonetheless. You in your gleaming white coats at your sterile lab benches, listen closely – you can hear the hum.