Over the course of my studies so far, I have worked with all sorts of different biological materials. I analysed the DNA in ear and tail tissue from mice, genetically engineered the thale-cress Arabidopsis thaliana, studied the impact of certain proteins on plant, hamster and human cells and also juggled around pure DNA (only metaphorically speaking, as far as I can remember). Clearly, all of these different biological samples come with their own characteristics and challenges but they also have a few things in common. For example, that none of them are very talkative.
Let me paint you a picture: I really enjoy being in the lab early in the morning. Well. That is, if I can persuade my body that it enjoys getting up at 6 am. Anyways, mornings in a molecular biology lab are quiet. I can start my day by getting a cup of tea in between feeding my cells, watering my plants, extracting some DNA… all without saying a word. The thing is that if it was not for colleagues trickling in over the course of the morning, then I could continue working until the end of the day without saying even one syllable. The materials I work with simply do not ask for much of a personal relationship with me (although some of my former colleagues would insist that their experiments work better if they greet their plants every day).
And it is not even that I just don’t really bond with my samples – I even did horrible things to them! I would chemically dissolve mouse cells to collect their DNA, obliterate whole plant batches using chlorine gas and when my experiments on live cells were finished, I would kill them at 200 °C and 100x atmospheric pressure. In general, you could say that my discipline does not require of me to be particularly empathetic towards my material (the ethics behind animal studies are clearly a whole different topic).
Until lately this was part of my understanding of the natural sciences. Then, however, I was enabled to check out the field of neuroengineering and got to work together with a group of biomedical engineers on understanding the human brain and improving rehabilitation devices. This, crucially, entails work with human subjects… you know, those things with feelings, rights and the ability to punch you if you hurt them. Being so, of course, the scientists require a completely different, complementary skillset; namely that of the social sort.
“Hi, thank you so much for taking part in this study!”, “So here’s what we’re going to do…”, “Is this comfortable for you?”, “Could you just hold this with your left hand…”, “Is it okay if I…”, “How are you feeling?”, “Would you like to take a break?”
As a biomedical engineer, you depend on your participants, so you must go out of your way to make sure they are comfortable. After all, a subject could just get up and leave at any point if they wanted to. So, you need to introduce the subject into everything that is going to happen and how it will be done, because the unknown and unseen can understandably make them anxious. Long silences while you set up the experiment can also feel awkward to the subject, hence it is beneficial if you continuously converse with them, to keep them engaged. Depending on the type and length of the experiment, the attention of the subject might also wander off, wherefore you must give them regular breaks. The list goes on.
In short, biomedical engineers learn to be deeply empathetic, fluent in smalltalk and just generally social geniuses. It was amazing, working together with some of them and learning, essentially, how to handle humans. They are able to read human behaviour and react in a way, which they know will keep their audience feeling safe and involved. This is part of their training, be that conscious or not, because if they were no good at it, then the quality of their results would also suffer. The bottom line is that I now know to whom to go, if I need someone taken care of. Coming from a less human-centered branch of biology, I was really impressed by that skillset and hope to have taken some of it with me, as my future work with synthetic cells will not necessarily teach me those skills as much either…