Wit can convey important truths about critical thinking and the scientific method, especially when group leaders poke fun at themselves in the process

Say what? The principal investigators who pass down wisdom through humour

Wit can convey important truths about critical thinking and the scientific method, especially when group leaders poke fun at themselves in the process

The unofficial rules of Derek Pociask’s immunology laboratory, scrawled across a glass cabinet above one of the benches, can elicit odd looks from passers-by:

“Be a badass.”

“Figures or it didn’t happen!”

And the very specific: “All cytokines/chemokines + anything important is to be aliquoted and LABELED with date/concentration.”

Despite not being a “rules guy”, Pociask says, the tenets have been on display for years (see go.nature.com/3omjvcy) in his lab at the University of Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana. The idea is to prompt critical thinking by his students and staff, and to help structure and guide experiments. Some rules advocate bold ideas and encourage students to rise above limitations; others deal in the practicalities of benchwork and writing up results. “No one is forced to read them, but at some point, we end up going to them because ultimately, [a mistake] happens,” he says. “They’re a little funny, but if they stick in the mind, we have to visit them less often.”

Such adages, enshrined on lab T-shirts or even trending as Twitter hashtags, can be silly, but they can convey serious truths about what it means to think critically and succeed in academia. Indeed, these sometimes-trite sayings often stem from years of hard-earned wisdom amassed by principal investigators (PIs), who hope to spare their students the pain of lessons learnt the difficult way. Sharing advice through humour, it seems, can keep it fresh in the minds of students long after they’ve embarked on careers of their own.

For Michelle Galeas-Peña, a former PhD student in Pociask’s lab, one mistake was enough to induce a career’s worth of remembering. Just weeks after beginning in the lab in 2015, she bungled a sensitive and expensive assay she’d been left to run unsupervised. By not reading the protocol, she’d missed an important step and accidentally washed her samples down the drain. Pociask laughs about it now, but originally, when she told him, his face turned red and he buried his head in his hands. Later, he pointed her towards the rules, including the fourth (“Make new mistakes.”) and seventh (“Protocols are NOT suggestions!”). “I spent three or four years afterwards in that lab seeing those rules every day and thinking about them when I was working on something,” she says.

Now a postdoc in another lab at Tulane, Galeas-Peña still uses a photo of the rules in her presentations and imparts them to students she works with. It’s interesting, Pociask says, to see what resonates with people, and also “nice to see a pay-off for one of the things I actually do care about, which is mentoring students. It’s a little bit of validation in a system that does a poor job of giving validation.”

Word gets around

Word of mouth is perhaps the most common way for ‘PI-isms’ to make their way around the world, passing from lab to lab as students progress in their careers, eventually launching research groups of their own. But scientists’ wise sayings are sometimes shared in other ways, too, such as on lab freebies — wristbands, hats or coffee mugs handed out to members.

Sunil Hingorani, an oncologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, has so many maxims that his staff made a bingo card for lab meetings (although no one has yet clinched five ‘Sunilisms’ in a row; see go.nature.com/3modowy). One of his mottos, ‘Stop doing stupid stuff’, eventually made its way onto a rubber wristband that was handed out during a fundraising walk for pancreatic cancer in 2021. Shelley Thorsen, Hingorani’s programme manager when he worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington, says the expression stems from the group’s mission to rigorously develop new treatments for cancer. Hingorani was bothered when researchers failed to test treatments in animal models that fully recapitulate the disease, for example. He felt that “we needed to really get moving on this disease”, says Thorsen, who still works at the cancer centre. “I brought the wristband to my new office, and it’s on my desk as a good reminder to stay focused.”

Social media is another channel where advice can spread far beyond the confines of individual labs. Jesse Lee, a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, often finds himself laughing at the things his adviser, pancreatic oncologist Gregory Beatty, says during lab meetings. “He’ll have a really grand idea, and then he’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s relatively straightforward’,” Lee says. “That phrase generally follows some of his wildest ideas that no one can actually put into effect.” For instance, Beatty once asked him to devise a way to keep slices of cancerous mouse liver alive in a Petri dish to study the effects of drug combinations. The idea is one that was casually tossed out, yet Lee then spent a few years developing a system that kept the livers alive for two weeks.

Lee started a Twitter account for the lab during the COVID-19 pandemic, and began using the hashtag #ShitGregorySays to document Beatty’s quirky statements alongside new work from the group and highlights from the field. Beatty, who doesn’t use social media much himself, was at first slightly alarmed by the teasing, he says, but has since become surprisingly tolerant of it. “It’s flattering that your students listen to you, and you get a chance to see what actually is resonating with them,” he says, adding that the account “certainly does create a certain level of attention for the lab”. Members of Hingorani’s group were among those to notice the posts, prompting the creation of their own hashtag, #StuffSunilSays.

Although this hasn’t yet led to an increase in students looking to join the Beatty lab, it does make the group a bit of a hit at conferences, with students approaching the group as fans of the Twitter account. And Beatty says that even greater visibility could be helpful in recruiting graduate students and postdocs. They might think, “Oh, the Beatty lab looks like a fun lab,” he says. “You could imagine that might be the case, and so I haven’t seen any downside to it.”

Laugh together, stay together

There are other, practical reasons for PIs to choose to embrace humour, although several noted the need to strike a balance between silliness and the serious nature of their work. In Hingorani’s lab, for example, they’re developing treatments for a deadly cancer and often work with patients. In those instances, lab members approach their interactions with intent, saving banter for lab mates.

So, when appropriate, what benefits does comedic relief bring?

For some, the answer is a degree of egalitarianism. Although academia is hierarchical, science increasingly progresses through teamwork. Some PIs use humour and wisdom-dropping to make themselves more approachable. Melissa Bates, a physiologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, oversees a tight-knit group that spends time together outside the lab, often going on bike rides and joking around. Bates once received a plaque from a graduating master’s student of some of her more memorable sayings, many of which came from weekend trips. Examples include, “Always under-promise and over-deliver,” and, when she’s asked about weird maladaptive physiology: “Why? I don’t know, I’m not the Lord.”

In the lab, this jovial dynamic plays out in what she calls star-shaped mentoring, in which students are empowered to solicit feedback from all members of the group. “We have a rule that I’m never the first person to see something,” she says, adding that this has led to a “culture where the feedback you get from an undergraduate is as valuable as the feedback you get from a faculty member”.

For others, it comes down to authenticity. André Isaacs, an organic chemist at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, has leveraged humour, fashion, cosplay and dancing to create hundreds of viral videos on the TikTok platform about chemistry and teaching. Isaacs, a self-described extrovert, first downloaded TikTok during lockdown. At the time, sharing videos was about maintaining a link to his community, but now, he says, it’s about cultivating a space for people to be themselves and think creatively about science.

He tells his students to “be strong and wrong” and to embrace vulnerability, which is often easier to do through humour. For example, if people feel supported by their peers, they could be more likely to try off-the-wall ideas that result in failure but teach important lessons about the scientific process. “I think silliness is critical to the success of any lab space,” he says. “The only way you’re going to do creative work is to bring your authentic self.”

And then, sometimes, a bizarre or funny analogy is the one that sticks. The science underlying humour and memory is fragmented, but neuroimaging studies have shown that information conveyed through humour activates more brain regions than does information shared without humour (J. C. Coronel et al. J. Commun. 71, 129–161; 2021). Beatty works in “off-the-wall” analogies that he tailors to each student. Recently, while explaining how the tumour microenvironment can influence the behaviour of cancer cells, Beatty referred to Lee’s dog Maggie, and how her behaviour might be different at his house than at a house party down the street. “It’s these types of analogies that I like to teach through, because they’re less about the nitty-gritties of the science,” he says. “You can relate to them in real life and think about the problem in a different way.”

At the end of the day, Beatty adds, science should be enjoyable, noting that he often works long hours by choice because of how much pleasure he derives from his work. “If you’re doing it as a job, then chances are you’re not really doing it for the right reasons,” he says. “It should feel like you’re advancing science and making a difference in the world because this is really what you want to do — this is fun. I want my students to feel that way as well, to enjoy that process.”

And if they poke a little fun at him while doing it? “I’m happy to help in any way that I potentially can.”

Nature 616, 849-850 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01373-7

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Heidt, Amanda