I love "Night Science" but wish we didn't need the term
Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher are doing a great service for biomedical science by pumping the idea of “Night Science” in editorials and an excellent podcast.
“Night Science” is Yanai’s term for the deeply creative, intuitive parts of science that aren’t part of the day job. Night science is the shower thoughts, the things that you daydream about, the conversations a few drinks deep at the conference that aren’t gossip, the stuff you find time to work on when you’re not doing what you feel like you’re supposed to do. Day Science is all the stuff you’re supposed to do. There is no science without Day Science, but there is much less transformative science without Night Science. Must less fun science without Night Science. Night Science is the stuff of why so many of us fell in love with science in the first place. Certaintly it is for me.
I recently complained mid-rant that we don’t have a place to share reasonable speculation that can help move mental models in a field forward. What the hell’s a blog for if not that? So let’s do it!
In hindsight, my first Night Science post went up in January, on two things we can learn about the biology of infection and immunity by looking closely at polio vaccines. This post was Night Science because it’s about mental models of mathematical models—about how one might think about connections between things that we can measure at the human scale that tell you something about the cellular and viral scales. But, I don’t prove anything to the standards of a journal paper. It would take a ton of time and a minionstudent or three to prove out any of this to the standards of biomedical publishing. As Yanai and Lercher make clear, Night Science has to turn into Day Science to bridge that chasm.
As someone employed to inform global health strategy, with a family that I love being around, and multiple sclerosis, I don’t have the resources to pursue ideas like those seriously, and I likely never will. But! The same approach to science that leads me to daydream about subdiffusive transport of antibodies as inferred from vaccine efficacy studies is how I do my day job. (Massive self-congratulations incoming.) It’s how I correctly estimated the COVID mortality rate in February 2020 from data gathered over social media and a modeling paper. It’s how thinking about everything good about bad about the global polio eradication program led me to help design and get funded the Seattle Flu Study in 2018, which anticipated every innovation in COVID-19 surveillance and modeling, including volutnary community-wide testing, at-home self-testing, test-to-treat, near-real time incidence mapping, integrated phylodynamics, and that social distancing was a proven, viable, and effective intervention in the US, as evinced by snowstorms. And how me and my colleagues continued to stay at the frontier of knowledge to help make Seattle arguably the biggest COVID-19 success story in the US.
Now that my back is very thoroughly patted, what was I trying to say? Oh yeah, my point is that I believe it is impossible to do the day-to-day work of biomedical science well without taking the Night Science seriously. Every system that we study is not-quite-weakly connected to everything else. We get fucked by hidden correlations everywhere we turn, over and over again, as I wrote about here. It is our responsibility as scientists to cultivate a fine eye for identifying connections that might matter and figuring out when they do or don’t for your day job. In biomedical science, through ignorance, arrogance, laziness, just doing what we were taught… we help kill people when we don’t care to understand system dynamics outside our narrow disciplines and don’t think carefully about the fundamentals of our fields.
So anyway, that’s why I wish we didn’t need the term. The distinction between Night and Day Science is artificial. They are so separated in practice in biomedical science that I’m adoring a podcast centering the Night Science, and I’m trumpeting it in this post because it feels so refreshing. But there is no distinction. That we, as a field, think there is, if we’re someone who can even see both in the first place, is a big part of why so little of what we do is any good. So, as I find my voice (hopefully less grouchy with time…), I hope to help by sharing my Night Science more freely.
To that end, I also intend to find a home for an edited and expanded version of this series in a Gates Foundation branded venue. The first few Night Science posts that’ll show up here are rooted deeply in my favorite piece of Day Science on polio immunity and transmission. I am writing this at 1pm on a Thursday. This is my job. I’m paid do it. And a personal blog doesn’t reflect that.
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Famulare (2024, Mar 7). I love "Night Science" but wish we didn't need the term. Retrieved from https://famulare.github.io/2024/03/07/I-love-night-science-but_wish-we-didnt-need-the-term.html.