Welcome back! I come bearing the words of yet another stellar science communicator! If this is your first read, I’ve been interviewing TikTokers to learn more about how the platform is revolutionizing science communication and science education, from the power of livestreaming to the virality of eco-rap music videos. You can read the previous interviews in this series here and here.
Ella Hubber, aka @big_science_energy on TikTok, is a PhD student at Kings College London in the Department of Diabetes and the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine. Her PhD research focuses on optimizing islet transplantation as a regenerative therapy for Diabetes. Outside of her PhD work, Ella communicates science to all ages. Of note, she designed an interactive transplantation exhibit along with two students at Goldsmiths University to teach high schoolers engineering thinking. Her popular TikTok account has earned her 70,000 followers, and her videos reveal what it’s really like to be a working research scientist. Ella joined me to reflect on her experiences livestreaming her experiments, her use of comedy as a teaching tool, and her thoughts on how objective science is inherently human. In her words, “Anyone can be a scientist.
**This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity**
M: You’re actually [live]streaming some of your experiments?
E: Yeah. I stream my whole experiment sometimes. The first few I did did really really well. I mostly stream on TikTok because random people can drop in. But then, if I’m doing a really long livestream--the setup I currently have is I’ll do an hour on TikTok whilst also on Twitch. It’s great. Streaming the actual science, I think, when you’re scrolling through the TikTok feed and you see an interesting live pop up--wondering what someone’s doing--that really draws them in. So having me pipetting in a lab coat, people are immediately like, “What is this?” Which is great.
I’ll stream qPCR, which is so boring, just doing the pipetting. But people watch it, and they still ask questions about it. I streamed--I was making cDNA. I did an RNA extraction and made cDNA and did the whole PCR, and I basically just crowdsourced my protocol. I gave people my protocol and told them to give it back to me as I was going so I wouldn’t have to look at my protocol and to keep people involved. So I was like, “Okay, what’s the next step guys?” And someone would tell me. And I’d just do that. That was really fun. I’d love to do that with a whole long protocol. It’s just hard. Obviously, when you’re actually in the lab, it can be a hard setup. I would never do it with something that’s really vital. But when I’m just doing lots and lots of pipetting, it’s a really good time to do it. So I’ve done it with a few different things now, and it’s always been really good.
M: What are some of the best questions that you can remember from some of your streams?
E: Because you get lots of random people dropping in, it’s a lot of repetition. I repeat myself a lot. “What am I doing? What A levels did I do? What did I do for undergrad?” There’s a lot of answering those again and again. They don’t even bother me, answering them again and again because then I know that’s a young person who’s considering doing this.
The best things are when someone’s like, “I got this grade at A level or at university. Can I still do science?” Or, “I’m too stupid for science. I’m not good enough.”--NO! I love that someone wants to put that out there, so that I can then be the person who’s like, “No, you can do it. I know people who were terrible in school. That’s not what this is anymore. This is completely different. This is a job. It’s not an exam, and you don’t have to be a straight-A student to be a scientist.”
So I like getting those questions because then I like being able to let people know they are capable of being scientists. Anyone can be a scientist. We shouldn’t close the door to those people.
“So I like getting those questions because then I like being able to let people know they are capable of being scientists. Anyone can be a scientist.”
M: Totally. I definitely agree. It’s just a matter of learning how to do specific things and how to think critically in a specific way, but anyone can learn that.
E: Yeah.
M: I think on social media and in the news and people who are generally not involved in science but tend to be very liberal, there’s this phrase to just trust in science. “Oh, I trust in science. Don’t you trust in science?” I always feel like that’s a weird thing to say because science isn’t an idea. It’s a process. It’s a community. Do you have any thoughts about people who are trying to push a “trust in science” kind of mindset?
E: There was this podcast series that Nature did recently called “Stick to the Science,” where they were covering this idea of science and politics. When people read Nature and Nature talks about politics, they leave angry comments like, “Oh, you should just stick to the science. Why is a scientific journal getting political?” And that whole podcast was covering this idea that yes, science has always been political. Science is part of politics. Because it’s subject to policy, and we are humans with our own politics.
For that reason, you can’t just say “trust in the science.” We know as scientists that papers are retracted everyday. False data is put out there. As a whole, I think we’ll always land on the side of truth, if that’s what you want to call it. Because, as a community, that’s what we’re interested in, but that’s not [always true] to say, especially with breaking news stories and things like covid--which has moved so quickly, quicker than science can keep up with it. You can’t just trust one voice or another voice because right now people are butting heads over things. There should be a level of trust. It boils down to trust in the consensus. Not in this one person, this one scientist. The trust should come from science as a whole, I guess.
“You can’t just trust one voice or another voice because right now people are butting heads over things. There should be a level of trust. It boils down to trust in the consensus. Not in this one person, this one scientist.”
M: Scitimewithtracy and I were talking about the idea of having a skeptical trust. Taking the information at face value, but she really emphasizes the importance of understanding the mechanisms behind like, “If someone says that we should be wearing masks, why? Why is it important?” And getting behind the mechanism.
She is a former college professor, and so she’s really frustrated that people aren’t being taught information finding skills or critical thinking skills to weed out uncredible information. It kind of turned into, “TikTok is so great. TikTok is disseminating information.” However, there’s this really pervasive problem about information finding that people are just not skilled at combing through the internet.
E: That’s a really good point. Hank Green put a video up a couple of days ago saying, “I like that you guys ask me questions, but there are all these other scientists. You can ask them as well.” I did a stitch saying, “Yeah, you can ask me questions about biology specifically.” I get people who ask me questions about physics sometimes and I’m like, “I really can not do that. I fully cannot help you.” I’ll try my best because I have been taught, as a researcher, how to research things well, so I can look for sources for you. When I have time, I’m happy to do that for interesting questions, but some of the questions I got were not necessarily basic. It’s not something everyone would know, but it’s something that a basic ability to search the internet properly would do. And look for correct sources. They’re not things that are hard like you have to read a primary paper, for example. Yeah, it’s kind of sad.
M: I loved your caterpillar cake reviews and specifically the bar graphs you did and the statistical discussion. That can be a really complicated thing to talk about, and you did that really well. How did you get the idea to do that? How long did it take you to figure out how you were going to approach that subject?
E: Obviously in the UK around that time there was this whole huge debate about what the best caterpillar cake was. I kept seeing a bunch of news articles of people saying, “We’ve ranked them, and this is the best.” And immediately, just immediately, my brain went, “Well, you didn’t do it properly though.” I thought, “that would be quite fun to do.”
It took so long to make this video because I had to source all of these cakes, and I was trying to do this science as properly as I could. I got different participants. I blinded it. I made a scoring questionnaire and everything. As you say, I did the bar graphs and the stats afterwards, which actually was so much fun but took up way too much of my week. I could have tried to make it funny. I could have tried to do the bar graphs, or the stats, in a way that was a game. I just wanted to present it very basically. I don’t want to talk down to people.
There’s this idea that you have to be really really well and highly educated to understand this basic scientific research, but you don’t. I just presented this data as if I was talking to anyone, even a friend who was a scientist. Just very casually, and that I found really easy to do. That was great, but the whole point of doing that video, I realized, was really because I wanted to show people how proper scientific study design works in a funny way. I thought that was a really good way to approach it.
M: I agree. I think it was really effective because as soon as people saw the caterpillar cakes I’m sure they went, “Yeah, I want to know which one’s the best.” That made me think of: What’s the goal with these videos? Everytime you make one, what pops into your head as what you want people to take from your account?
E: I still am finding my footing there.
M: I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
E: I don’t even know if I’ll ever go down really specifically to one line or another. This isn’t my career, ultimately. I’m just having fun with science communication. Mostly what I want is for people to take a general interest in science. From my perspective as a researcher to take an interest in being a research scientist and doing research, maybe think about doing that as a career, or at least understanding what it is better. It’s really about looking into the research part of science. That’s why when I do the videos where I just sit down and discuss an interesting area of research, I’m still trying to bring up the papers I might have looked at and talk about how they did this kind of research, for example. There are some really great TikTok accounts, like @lab_shenanigans or @sciencemaven. They teach science in funny or interesting ways. I’m not really doing that. I’m not trying to break down simple science for people, although I think that is a totally great thing to be doing. I’m trying to bring it up to making the research side of science accessible.
“I’m not trying to break down simple science for people, although I think that is a totally great thing to be doing. I’m trying to bring it up to making the research side of science accessible.”
M: That makes a lot of sense now that you’ve made that distinction. I’ve been talking to a few different people, and they all occupy different niches. There’s a lot of different niches when you talk about scicomm. There are people that make simplified science for educational content. There’s a rap duo I talked to yesterday that makes ecological music, and while they use educational content, the themes about either personal freedom or environmental justice are much more important and ring through than the actual details. And then people like you, who are showing what it’s like being in the lab, and humanizing science and making it personal.
E: That’s a great way to put it. Humanizing science.
You can hear more from Ella by following her @big_science_energy on TikTok!
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