Circling the Black Hole — The supermassive problem to networking in the Life Sciences.
By: Guy Rohkin
Tags: Biotechnology, Networking, Social Network, Communication, Science

I am the co-founder of scifind.net, the Life Sciences collaboration network. I am a scientist with a background in molecular biology and genetics. I used to work primarily in genomics, with a focus on mtDNA and immunorepertoire sequencing. I went through the second cohort of IndieBio with the startup Girihlet Inc as their first employee. Through my experience, I saw lots of startups emerge from the ground up and witnessed their evolution at both IndieBio and later, the Oakland Genomics Center.

I had spoken before in my previous article about all the complexities of communicating in the Life Sciences industry. This time I wanted to go in-depth on a glaring shift in the industry of engagement with incoming generations of scientists.

The question that’s on everybody’s lips is always “who do I talk to?” People want to know who to talk to for that internship, their next career move, questions about their work, fraternization, research. Who should they talk to? The first step in gauging that is in profiling people. In order for them to answer that question, they have to have an in-depth understanding of their work. If you’re trying to grow your network, you definitely want quality over quantity but the difficulty can come in even breaking the ice.



An interesting way to flip this is by using ingrained systems of mentorship that pre-date digital mediums in the scientific world. Individuals are accustomed to having PIs, or thought leaders. By creating small communities lead by mentors and allowing fledgling scientists to enter and communicate freely with them, you can break the proverbial ice. Let me present a scenario and go into some current approaches on the periphery of this problem.



The Scientific Scene

It’s very easy to get absorbed in your own lab cohort, in your company, in your tribe. The strength of growing a network is in stepping out of your comfort zone, a situation that is prevented by the communication structures that permeate Life Sciences. If it’s predicated on word-of-mouth, on insular lab groups, on prestigious or expensive conferences, it makes it quite hard to gain initial exposure. This is a level of exposure to information that newer generations of scientists crave and gravitate towards.

You’re an upstart scientist doing their M.Sc in Molecular Genetics. Your days are spent in lecture halls or working on research in a lab. Since your time is pretty sequestered, the main contact points in your industry are your PI and your lab mates. Once a year you may get to go to a conference, where you have to do a poster presentation, otherwise, you are listening to other presentations. Your PI is busy fraternizing and doesn’t introduce you to their colleagues from other institutions (they also see that you’re busy and doesn’t want to intrude). Just like that, you’ve missed out on networking because the foundation is predicated on physical presence and reinforced by word-of-mouth.

The Standard is the Conference.

It’s important to note that the de-facto standard of networking are conferences (and word-of-mouth by extension). Conferences are effective in that they give powerful stages to expose research, discuss with peers across their industry, and hopefully meet other individuals. The difficulty in conferences is the lack of true democratization. It inherently creates a hierarchy–who is presenting? Who is manning the booths? Who is the listener and who is the lecturer? They are guarded by expensive entry points, are temporally prohibitive, and on top of that make it difficult to feel comfortable to connect. It isn’t necessarily that in-person forms of communication are daunting, they just don’t make for good icebreakers in an industry where pertinence is paramount. You would have to know if someone is relevant before approaching them, so how are you supposed to establish pertinence without any qualifying information?

In-person networking is not without its benefits. You’ve probably experienced this with COVID-19 and lots of video conferencing the importance of physicality. There are immeasurable cues such as micro-expressions, inflections, or body language that are lost in the grainy footage. By being put on the spot constantly, simply the act of video performance can be difficult and lead to fatigue. Physical presence adds a dimension of trust and personality that is immeasurable. The problem lies in the uncertainty that precedes it.

Anonymity — to hide or to thrive?

There are much more expedient, comfortable, and cheaper channels that we have seen utilized in other industries. For an emerging generation of scientists, digital forms of social networking can be effortless to traverse and are more often than not the primary conduit of new relationships in other industries, especially in professional scenarios. In the Life Sciences, an industry ruled by word-of-mouth, only by allowing open channels of communication can you circumvent the heavily relationship-dependent mediums of networking. Without these physical constraints, you can imagine the ease of discovering one another between scientists. There are exceedingly efficient ways to network that might not rely so heavily on happenstance.



One place where this can be seen is Reddit. On Reddit, you can create extremely niche subject forums or broad ones. Anything ranging from politics to Dungeons & Dragons. There, individuals can be shrouded by a cloak of digital anonymity which allows them to communicate freely without fear of judgment or association. Anonymity is powerful in that perspective, but it’s a double-edged sword. As a consequence, people might find it difficult to take the relationships to real-life or evolve them into pragmatic, action-based networking–a feature essential for collaboration in the Life Sciences. People can become notorious within these online communities simply through their voice. The act of creating a digital persona allows them to choose their characteristics based on their contributions.



There are ways to circumvent anonymity but they involve extended world-building and essentially recreating the avatar. If you play an MMORPG, you literally re-create your persona in another fashion. Your avatar also has to participate in specific goals and craft their identity in this world in more ways than just a textual one. You adorn them with unique armor and equipment, or acquire achievements to showcase your skills. At first glance, it might seem like it is all anonymous but building an avatar is anything but. Players create an abstract form of identity that they mold to represent themselves. These features differentiate you from other players, but also allow people to qualify you ahead of time. You might find yourself sitting around and a player whispers you complimenting your armor, or in looking for a group to kill a dragon, you may be questioned as to whether you have an achievement to indicate that you know what you’re doing.

With pure anonymity, it can be hard to build these networks in Life Sciences. Additionally, there isn’t much need to go and create an entire universe for it like in the MMORPG example. The “universe” already exists, and it’s filled with publications, work, prestige, and character. By creating a medium for identity formation in life sciences, the need for high-touch high-communication networking opportunities can be met. Scientists eager to grow their network would be excited for an infrastructure that would permit this across the industry.

On the flip-side, there is LinkedIn–a platform that obliterates the idea of anonymity. There, your identity is formed around your professional growth and achievements. People do create groups and communities, but due to professional optics, and under-utilized real-time features, it causes an asynchronous form of correspondence which can lend itself to seeming dissociative.



On LinkedIn, complete transparency is the way people hide in plain sight. In a lot of ways, some people hide their opinions, their quirks, their true know-how, their personality, everything to adhere to a form of business neutrality that permits chameleonic shifts. How can something catered towards that business impartiality, begin to permit the ways in which scientists might want to express themselves, but cannot due to the decorum of a mindset? What is genuine or authentic participation for them?



In the scientific world, you have experts talking to other experts all around the same jargon and levels of literacy. By creating a vernacular push to talk to the lay-man, it can stifle the way in which experts want to speak to their peers. The discourse can be extremely difficult depending on the target audience as scientific jargon is dense and takes years to familiarize yourself with (not to mention subject-specific vocabulary). Now, more than ever, creating channels of dialogue between scientists will empower them to communicate more with one another, and by extension, allow them to create a communication bulwark when interacting with the public. If discourse between scientists is hard to generate, It’s even more difficult to generate that discourse between scientists and the public.



Communication throughout the platforms



The ways in which users communicate on the platforms are fundamentally different and lend themselves to different purposes.



For example, LinkedIn Messenger isn’t necessarily used for communications between networking individuals, and more for responding to specific sales or advertising inquiries. LinkedIn is an amazing newsfeed of content that can reach across a variety of industries. People can comment on posts, and emanate an aura of business engagement. It’s the Rolodex of the digital age.



In Reddit’s case, the forum-based approach allows people to breach a consortium of topics. They can engage in asynchronous communications there, or even use a direct messaging functionality for talking to specific people or groups. Bringing those relationships to actionable points is contextual and depends entirely on the nature of the forum. For example, a group about politics might not lend itself to a real-life meeting as it’s highly charged, whereas more relaxed topics could lead to ease of communication between members.



In an MMORPG, when there is an in-game deficit of interactivity (necessity for high levels of discourse for a specific encounter) many gamers take their communication to a platform called Discord (a messaging and voice chat platform). That abstract identity that they create in-game can now intertwine with their real-life personhood. Furthermore, people coalesce around similar interests and then communicate freely. There, they are able to communicate more easily than in-game and may exchange names, numbers, or real-life information. As a gamer myself, I’ve had a lot of experience with that, even becoming IRL (In-real-life) friends and building more comprehensive relationships.

Like Discord, the best structure for communication are intimate sandbox groups, coalesced around topical goals, that permit free-flowing communications. Pure anonymity can be problematic, that is why creating a new digital form of identity can be powerful. As Oscar Wilde says, “Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth”. The mask is just another version of yourself. If you even think about yourself in different contexts you can clearly see that. There’s the “you” that is presented to your family, to friends, professionally, or in an online game. Finally, there’s the scientist in you that yearns to be represented. In this way, the interplay between subtle identity building, communication, and related goals can lead to an alignment that blossoms into friendship, networking, and real-life action.

Research Gate is another powerful tool for scientists. A platform to disseminate and publicize research as well as present your skills and research has also morphed into a scientific Rolodex. Its greatest strength lies in its Q&A capabilities, but, it lacks the networking aspect required to build powerful relationships. On websites like Research Gate (or a more agnostic Q&A platform, Quora), information becomes wholly transactional. In Quora, there is a greater focus on communities with people gravitating towards particular writers–with Research Gate information becomes a currency, and the desire to connect and collaborate with others becomes secondary. Its ability to disseminate know-how on a simplified Q&A basis is strong and has pushed science forward simply in the ability to be able to ask these targeted questions. The next level of that is to bring the parties together.



Those are all numerous examples that are great at solving particular aspects of socialization. It’s important to see their strengths and weaknesses when thinking about communication or networking. I like to call this method “circling the black hole”. Black holes are not actually visible. We can, however, determine the presence of a black hole by seeing how it interacts with matter in its periphery. In a similar fashion, by looking at the periphery of social networking, we can infer stronger communication solutions for the Life Sciences.



Where do we begin?



COVID hits, there are no more conferences. In regards to your lab, the once physical and daily interactions are now further disjointed. You look for guidance or community, where do you go?



Perhaps there’s a smidge of familiarity to this scenario, I know this feels eerily true in my case.

The thing is, by putting the utility into the individual’s hands this can be mitigated. One way of doing this is by creating communities that allow for mentorship across the sectors, but also networking on the same social tiers. That is to say, bridging the disjointedness between industry and academia. Due to insularity, scientists within the industry are not communicating with academic scientists, and vice versa, even though there is plenty of know-how that can be exchanged or rapport that can be built for professional development. Perhaps in the upper tiers, there are collaborations between industry and academia, but it is seldom the case for those below that position.



Secondly, building rapport between scientists of the same tier or adjacent ones. Creating interconnectivity between scientists in related sectors can build grassroots networks to strengthen the case. This can be seen in an embryonic form on scientific sub-Reddits where the majority of younger scientists communicate on topics of interest. The difficulty in taking casual rapport into a real connection is exacerbated by the anonymity and lack of qualifying information on the platform. Who knows what can happen when you bridge the gap for passionate emerging scientists?



Lastly, increasing levels of openness and transparency across sectors. There is a tendency to keep IP internal. This makes sense as it's their competitive advantage. But there’s more to science than just the IP itself. Know-how can exist and can greatly expedite processes in both academic and industrial sectors. By allowing the free flow of networking and collaboration, experimental research can be galvanized further. A great example of how this can change the world is clearly with the COVID vaccines that were created in record time. This was only possible because knowledge sharing was permitted by the most powerful entities. The moment they opened those floodgates, scientists were quickly able to synthesize this knowledge and work towards a solution. What kind of other life-altering breakthroughs are we missing out on because of opacity?



In an industry with such a heavy focus on personal relationships, the distribution of that ability to enable a bottom-up networking capability would increase efficiency and innovation. Relying on this traditional system cripples the inherent ingenuity of scientists. As important as the individual is to science, individuals are nothing without their peers to collaborate and interact with. Science itself is built upon numerous foundations of knowledge and in a world where the problems have gotten significantly more complex and granular, banding together will create the answers for a greater tomorrow. There was a time where discoveries could be spearheaded by an individual, but now it takes a village.