Anyone who is Facebook friends with a scientist has probably witnessed the collective online squeal of nerds chancing upon the latest science-themed YouTube sensation. For the last few days, hundreds of grad student status updates have linked to Bad Project, the fantastically written, choreographed and costumed Lady Gaga parody video from the Zheng Lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
Decked out in biohazard shoulder pads and a (sterile!) serological pipette bodice, Lady Science recounts the plight of a grad student left to parse through her predecessor’s messy lab notebook, protocols written in Thai, and mysterious samples (“What, what, what is in this box?!”). The video perfectly captures the occasional trials and tribulations of lab life (no bands on your blot, crazy mice, anxiety about publication) while simultaneously showcasing the creativity, cleverness and goofy camaraderie of its scientist cast.
One of the earliest predecessors of the modern Funny Science YouTube Video is the 1971 classic, “Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level.” Paul Berg, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, explains in the preamble that the film will depict “symbolically, yet in a dynamic and joyful way, one of nature’s fundamental processes” by “using the dance idiom.” The film then cuts to jangly psychedelic music permeating a sunny field of students rolling, skipping and holding hands to demonstrate the translation of mRNA to protein.
Looking beyond the bongo drums and tight pants, the contrast between the straight-faced scientist Berg and the revelry of the dancers served to show the young general public that serious research had revealed the “grooviness” of the molecular world. The film’s sponsor, Dr. Kent Wilson, was committed to innovating science education and spent much of his career creating “visualization technologies to make science more accessible to students of all ages.”
With the advent of YouTube, clever, comical and informative science videos of all stripes are increasingly populating the Internet: students showing off what they’ve learned in class about embryonic development and apoptosis, lab supply companies getting silly while advertising their machines and enzymes, professors “breaking down” the importance of their research, and grad students parodying popular culture with their pipettes.
What these videos all have in common is that they render the world of science personable. That so many have turned science into song demonstrates the abundance of glee, passion, wit and whimsy in the field—qualities rarely associated with scientists. Importantly, social media has made these videos accessible to a larger general audience. Even if a viewer can’t understand every term or identify any equipment, it may be his or her first glimpse inside a real lab, which looks significantly different from those depicted in Hollywood movies—a bit more cluttered, a bit more silly, and a lot more human.
> The bad project video perfectly captures the occasional trials and tribulations of lab life
> (no bands on your blot, crazy mice, anxiety about publication) while simultaneously
> showcasing the creativity, cleverness and goofy camaraderie of its scientist cast.
I don’t see “Bad Project” that way. I see it as a commentary on at least three major issues convincing young students not to pursue science, stereotypes, difficulty, and return on an investment of time.
We celebrate athletes, movie stars and business leaders more than scientists, and when children are asked to pick what they want to be when they grow up, scientists and engineers are often at the bottom of the list.
The video also points out numerous technical hurdles to overcome in pursuing a science career, only a few of which the future scientist has much control over, including unknown experimental outcomes, coworkers with questionable ethical and communication skills, and mercurial reviewers, among others. Lady science complains about colleagues before her who did shoddy work and broke professional commitments. Students compare this to the bar for entry to other professions earning a similar income and rationally decide on something else.
The subject is caught in a bad project that presumably lingers unresolved for years. Unfortunately, this is common for Ph.D.’s in science. I have one of those science Ph.D.s and I saw my share of fellow scientists push back their thesis defense years. I know some who took 9 years to finish their Ph.D.. “Why oh why do I waste my time?” is a reasonable question. The answer is often abuse of the system by some professor with tenure.
The video’s great and I applaud the students who made it and expressed authentic frustrations with the scientific process and community. It’s really funny. It’s funny because it’s true. And that’s sad.
You definitely have a point–”Bad Project” captures the awfulness of a project gone entirely wrong– flaky predecessors with impossible to read lab notebooks, noxious unlabeled reagents, and failing experiments.
I also agree that in addition to the witty costumes and pop culture reference, part of the reason it was a hit with all of us was because we have all experienced some of that frustration and failure at some point.
However, the fact that the commentary comes as self-examining humor is noteworthy because (1) scientists are not stereotypically known for their self-examining humor and (2) the cast of this video uses this humor to simultaneously acknowledge that science is a Harsh Mistress and that we still love it. People have been known to make similar paradoxical statements about things like New York City (without bringing down New York City’s recruitment rates).