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Lab lit revealed

09 Jul 2015 Robert P Crease
Taken from the July 2015 issue of Physics World

Robert P Crease talks to the founder of LabLit.com – a website devoted to literature about laboratories

Lab culture

In my column last December, I surveyed some novels that are set – or have key scenes – at physics labs. I found that some stories exploit the fact that a laboratory is a distinctive place, while others use labs simply as props. I also asked readers for other examples of lab-based novels that I might have overlooked.

Several respondents alerted me to LabLit.com, a website “devoted to the culture of science in fiction and fact”, which describes itself as “dedicated to real laboratory culture and to the portrayal and perceptions of that culture – science, scientists and labs – in fiction, the media and across popular culture”. The site includes a periodically revised list of novels, films, plays and TV shows that are “in the lab lit fiction genre”.

LabLit.com, it turns out, is 10 years old this year and was founded by Jennifer Rohn, a cell biologist at University College London. Rohn is also a blogger, journalist and author of two novels: Experimental Heart, a romantic thriller that turns on gene therapy research, and The Honest Look, a research thriller set in a corporate biotech lab.

I contacted Rohn to ask why she had started the site.

Untrampled ground

LabLit.com stemmed in large part from frustration,” Rohn wrote back. “I wanted to read about my world – scientific research – in novels, but there were so few books featuring it that it was bordering on the ridiculous.” Rohn added that she needn’t have been surprised. “The lack of scientist protagonists in realistic fiction mirrors a deeper problem, namely the near-invisibility of real scientists in popular culture.” By setting up the website, Rohn hoped to highlight the few lab lit novels and films that did exist and, perhaps more importantly, to inspire writers to use more science and scientists in their fiction by shedding light on what she calls “this invisible – but infinitely fascinating – world”.

But what makes a laboratory an infinitely fascinating place to set a novel? According to Rohn, any scientific setting – be it a lab, telescope or field station – is essentially “untrampled ground”. There are millions of novels set in homes, offices, hospitals, police stations, but by her reckoning barely 200 mainstream novels ever published with scientific settings. The lab is, to her, a rich and untapped environment where things happen that don’t happen anywhere else in the world.

“Sure, the human story will be universal – but when it happens in an unfamiliar territory, it offers scope for a fresh angle on a familiar trope,” she says. “Love, or lust, or jealously, or ambition, or demoralization, is going to feel different when it’s happening in a lab, because the situations are not as you’d find them in other settings.”

I pointed out to Rohn that much lab lit is concerned with instances of fraud or malpractice, including both of her novels. Older examples include C P Snow’s classic 1960 book The Affair, which her website had somehow overlooked. Set in the close and highly regulated community of the University of Cambridge, the novel involves an accusation of fraud and the slow, agonizing process by which this unjust accusation is reconsidered. The literary value of the accusation, it seemed to me, was that it served as a perturbation that reveals much about the research life: its resistance to the outside, reliance on trust, and respect for equality and integrity.

I suggested to Rohn the idea that perturbation was in fact a reigning motif in lab lit, whereby some disturbing force upsets the intense, highly regulated environment of the laboratory and thereby exposes its norms – and that the principal perturbing force in lab lit was fraud and malpractice. She agreed with my first point, pointing out that such misdemeanours even crop up at the end of The Hard Problem, Tom Stoppard’s latest play at the National Theatre in London. But Rohn noted that fraud and malpractice are far from the sole sources of perturbation.

“You can’t have a good story without a plot complication,” she says. “In literature, the complications are invariably something bad or negative that the protagonist must overcome. Nobody wants to read a story about a guy who goes to work every day and good things happen to him, The End.” But what can happen in a lab that’s noteworthy and negative? “For better or worse, fraud and misconduct are obviously choices,” she says. “But you see many others in lab-lit fiction, including unhealthy competition, rivalry, mistaken theories, ethical dilemmas, clashes with activists and of course, that ancient trope – Everything Going Horribly Wrong When You Meddle With Things You Weren’t Meant To Know.”

The critical point

I reminded Rohn of Eudora Welty’s famous 1955 essay “Place in fiction”, in which the US author remarked that great novels and short stories require a strong sense of location. Such fiction, Welty wrote, is “bound up in the local, the ‘real,’ the present, the ordinary day-to-day of human experience”. As Welty went on to say, “Fiction depends for its life on place.” Every great story would be not only different but “unrecognizable as art” if moved elsewhere. Welty writes, “Imagine Swann’s Way laid in London, The Magic Mountain in Spain, or Green Mansions in the Black Forest.”

Rohn agreed that Welty’s point holds equally true of lab lit. “A rivalry would be entirely different in an office setting instead of a lab.” She’s encouraged that lab lit has increased since she started the site – something she quantified a few years ago in Nature (465 552). Lab lit’s still rare, she says, but books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour show that quality examples of the genre are “reaching a comfortable level of popular acceptance”.

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