Science Meets Fiction

Telling stories at the cutting edge of science.

7 min readDec 23, 2018

Scientists spend a lot of time exploring the details of a specific problem. We rarely step back and see how that problem fits into the story of science and the story of our lives.

Taking the opportunity to do this can offer a better perspective on what we do, why we do it, and what got us there in the first place.

In November 2018, eight screenwriters met with researchers at the Sanger Institute to talk about what we do and find inspiration for future projects. The event formed part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival Ideas Lab. I jumped at the chance to sign up. It was an opportunity to chat about things we care about with people who think in interesting ways.

While I’d expected to come in and talk only about my research, the conversation was wide-reaching. There were questions about my work and it’s implications, questions about me, and questions about life in general.

Why would anyone watch a movie about our work?

At the outset of the event, we each introduced ourselves and what we do. At short notice, I found it challenging to describe what I do to a room of people and pick out things that could inspire a film (that was worth watching).

I study bacteria and how they evolve to cause disease. Specifically, it’s my job to look at thousands of deadly bacteria and pick out the specific differences in their DNA that cause them to be particularly dangerous. I then publish this information to make it available to the world.

A question I’ve been asked before is how much of that knowledge could then be used to build the perfect infectious agent. Turns out its not only academics who wonder this, one of the screenwriters had the same question. This isn’t an easy question to give a straight answer to. We don’t try to do this in the lab so we haven’t got a good idea of how achievable it would be. It is a concern though, and it’s one that’s been pointed out in pretty clear terms by Bill Gates in the past. It’s also been highlighted as an Unprecedented Technological Risk by the Global Priorities Project, and was the subject of a great recent Medium post:

Could a Madman Use Synbio to Wipe Out Humanity?

New breakthroughs in gene editing will lead to incredible rewards — and risks we can barely contemplate

medium.com

It’s not fun to think about, particularly as someone whose job it is to publish lists of ways in which bacteria may become more dangerous. But, another aspect of my job is to wire these lists into surveillance software. This allows us to flag these same mechanisms when they show up somewhere in the world. Infrastructure for surveillance is improving both locally and globally. Strengthening links between our knowledge of what makes a bad bug to our ability to detect them will grow dramatically as a result. This will leave us better prepared for disease outbreaks, whether natural or engineered. The former Director General of the WHO, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, addressed these concerns in a 2003 speech. A key point in this speech for me was that during conflict, infectious disease often increases. The techniques we need to address this predictable increase are the same we’d need in the case of a bioterror attack. While bioterrorism is a real threat, better surveillance and preparedness can help us manage this threat as we would any other disease outbreak.

An example of the tools we use to flag dangerous strains of bacteria

What kind of person grows up to be a scientist?

Something I hadn’t counted on was questions about myself and how I came to be a scientist. There was a lot of curiosity around how early I knew that I was going to be a scientist and if I had thought about other professions. I would have loved to hear the answers from the other scientists in the room — it’s rare for us to talk about what life events led us to one of the most well-known research institutes in the world. As someone who used to do logic puzzles, read encyclopaedias and make PowerPoint presentations in her free time as a child, it’s really no surprise that I became a scientist. But, growing up with one side of my family focussed on specific professions (doctor, nurse, pharmacist…), and the other side being strict religious fundamentalists, this wasn’t the plan my family had for me.

I aspired to be a vet, a forensic pathologist (thanks to Patricia Cornwell), then a nutritionist. It wasn’t until part-way through university that my fascination with microbiology took over, and it wasn’t until my PhD that I was properly introduced to coding. In university, I was first introduced to a world of remarkably adaptable creatures, that exist right under our noses. I learned they can have massive effects on our environment, our wellbeing, our culture, but are usually invisible to us. Finding out I could download a huge amount of data to my computer for free and use it to answer all kinds of questions about where these things came from and how they do what they do completely sold me. I owe a lot of gratitude to my university, which allowed us to study a range of subjects spanning many disciplines and didn’t focus us into specific professions.

Common ground

Over the course of the session, we discovered similarities in our professions:

We have to convince someone to fund us to go after an idea before we’ve really explored it yet. Many of us found this challenging and frustrating.
Our working styles were often similar. I have a habit of starting too many projects at once and not finishing them, as did some of the writers.
We’re interested in exploring how the world works and contributing our own unique ideas and perspectives.
Both careers involve a lot of creativity and independent work. Sometimes you have little to show for all your time until your project finally comes together.

Exploring the bigger questions

What was really enjoyable was in stepping outside of my area of expertise and discussing some broader questions about life and the world.

One discussion was around the nature of consciousness. We talked about whether animals’ consciousness is like our own. We questioned how we’d even go about measuring this in the first place. As we get better at growing human brain organoids, people are beginning to wonder whether these organoids could become conscious and whether we’d know if they did. It’s possible these organoids will develop the ability to feel pain. If so, in the absence of consciousness is it ethical to cause pain?

Another dilemma is around the growth of these organoids. The cells need a brain-like environment to form an organoid and start firing. Currently, we implant them into mouse brains to achieve this. Cognitive tests of these human-mouse chimaeras have found that they outperform other mice, suggesting they’re more intelligent. What, then, do we make of these animals and how do we classify them relative to humans and other animals? There are so many questions around consciousness that are moving from the philosophical realm to the scientific, as we explore new techniques for studying the human brain.

In discussing what might happen to us after death, I mentioned that we’ve recently discovered that the brain keeps firing for some time after we die. I still find this a pretty horrifying concept. It’s unclear how this firing relates to consciousness and awareness. But, this raises the question of whether we’d hear ourselves being declared dead and experience being unable to move or breathe. Pays not to think about it too much…

I found I was able to comment much more on topics outside of my immediate field than I thought. I listen to science podcasts, and that knowledge of what’s going on in other areas can feed into interesting discussions. For those who are a bit light on science podcasts and would like to broaden their horizons, here are some of my favourites:

It’s nice to take a step away from the often hectic pace of research to reflect on some broader questions, that have no clear answers. You forget that it’s often these larger questions that brought people to science in the first place.