Journal club.
(aired more or less in this form on All Things Considered January 21, 2004--not a transcript)

 

A few years ago, I started a new job. It wasn't a science job, which was a good thing, because I wasn't a science person. I think I could have done my new job without knowing much science; but I thought that to do my new job well, I should know at least some immunology. But I'd never taken an immunology course. I'd never really taken serious science classes at all.

Then someone suggested I go to the Immune-Based Therapy Breakfast Club, an AIDS activist group's journal club that met on Saturday mornings over bagels and coffee.

Each week we read through a published research article on our chosen topic, and then argued over the merits of the paper and the ideas it suggested. An immunology graduate student helped explain the technical aspects of the papers, but he wasn't in charge. We went over each week's article in Talmudic detail, puzzling over it together. As far as I know, none of us had formal science training other than the immunology textbook we each read on our own. But as we worked through them together, papers that had seemed like forbidding walls of jargon gave way to broad vistas of ideas and possibilities. Science became a warm conversation over a meal. It became ours.

I didn't actually go that many times, but I realized later that it was a turning point in my life. In journal club, science wasn't like in high school, where it seemed like the kids who were good at science were the people who liked memorizing things and following instructions. In real science, it's at least as important to think about what isn't known, to question and argue.

That was the start of a long process that later took me back to school for basic college science classes, then to work in an immunology lab, and then to medical school. While I was preparing for medical school, my favorite class was a seminar that was run like a journal club. And my favorite part of working at the lab was the journal club. Journal club was where ideas lived, where science became the world revealing itself.

At my medical school, we started a student group to take action against the AIDS epidemic. One of the first things we did was start an HIV journal club. At its worst, medical school can make me feel like science doesn't belong to me; that it belongs only to tests and lectures, memorizing and following instructions. But our HIV journal club is different. We do it only because we care about it. Because we believe in science as a thing to share around a table like stories, or a hot pot of coffee. It's super geeky, and that's what I love about it. This kind of geekiness is a form of sincerity, and we need more sincerity in this world.

After our first journal club meeting, which went swimmingly, I stood looking at the problems and questions we'd written up on the chalkboard. And I said to the guy who coordinates our journal club, "This is really beautiful." He grinned this big grin, and said, "Yeah." Finally, after more than a year of medical school, we had our own journal club. And science was mine again, at least for that hour.

copyright 2004 joe wright