SoapboxScience

Maria Kahlert is an Associate Professor in biology with specialisation in ecology. Her research focuses on freshwater benthic algae; their biodiversity, how they are regulated by environmental factors, and how they can be used as biomonitors in lakes and streams. Maria Kahlert will take part in the Soapbox Science event in Uppsala on 25 May. She will talk about “Diatoms – microscopic small algae showing water quality and more”.

SS: How did you get to your current position?

I was called up and offered my current position by a colleague who met me in a joint project, where I probably did a good job.

SS: What, or who, inspired you to get a career in science?

Mainly, nature inspired me first: especially all water fauna. Raising frogs was an annual task. Then, Bernhard Grzimek, his books and documentaries and presence in TV was a great inspiration, especially actually his “Grzimeks Tierleben. Enzyklopädie des Tierreichs”.

SS: What is the most fascinating aspect of your research/work?

There is always something new to learn and understand. And it is not ending. And it is quite free: You can choose (more or less) what you want to focus on!

SS: What attracted you to Soapbox Science in the first place?

I think we scientists communicate too little with the people who actually pay our work. They have a right to ask questions, and to understand, but have very seldom a low-threshold possibility for it.

SS: Sum up in one word your expectations for the day

Communication.

SS: If you could change one thing about the scientific culture right now, what would it be?

The “third task”, i.e. communication of science to the public, should receive more funding and more impact when a researcher’s work is judged, and when grants and money are distributed. Right now, all focus is on scientific publications, excellence and high impact factors, but usually the “excellent” researchers have no time for the details, like both scientific details in the everyday work, and details about direct communication with the public. There is a need for us “everyday researchers”, but it is not easy to get paid for this.

SS: What would be your top recommendation to a woman studying for a PhD and considering pursuing a career in academia?

1. Get a mentor, or similar, who is a kind, established, excellent male senior scientist with a large network and communicative skills who wants the best for you, and get help from him.
2. Cherish your contacts, you never know where people end up. A large network is important and in particular my more informal contacts have often helped me see new possibilities and to take part in the research. Alone is weak. Large research groups are good for learning and “being included” but you must also establish your own ideas and this is easier in smaller groups, and after changing to a new group.

Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez is a Spanish particle physicist that works at Uppsala University in Sweden where she teaches physics in the Department of Engineering Sciences. Now a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since 2018, she started her career in the CMS Collaboration (2006-2018). A Higgs boson and top quark expert, today she keeps trying to find answers to long standing questions in the field searching for new phenomena at the LHC. At the Soapbox Science event in Uppsala on 25 May you can follow her on a guided tour to the subatomic world, visit the Higgs boson and the rest of the elementary particles, and plan a trip to the dark side.

By Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez

I am a particle physicist and my research involves investigating what comes out of high-energy proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. We do this to learn more about elementary particles, those you cannot break down into smaller pieces. I have been lucky to be a part of the group of people who discovered the Higgs boson in 2012 (and I have a PhD thesis to show for it) and I have studied, among other things, the heaviest particle that we know of, the top quark.

Since last autumn, my research is funded by the Swedish Research Council, and I teach physics at Uppsala University, but before coming to Sweden, I spent ten years based at CERN, the biggest particle physics laboratory in the world. CERN is located in the French-Swiss border, very close to the city of Geneva, where I used to live.

I am a woman in science and I come from an underprivileged background. I did have a lot of privilege anyway compared to most people (and luck!), and I’m aware of it, but I still could see first-hand how opportunities do not come in the same way for everybody, and that hard work can only get you so far. So, because I want to make science more inclusive, and I know that representation matters, I take outreach very seriously. And I like outreach most of all because it can be quite fun and sometimes you get to do very cool experiments with the excuse of introducing science to the people that actually pay for it.

I have done a few things in the last years, and I have had a lot of fun. Sometimes I stressed about organization before and during the events, but it usually turned out fine, and worth the effort at the end.

This is about the one time when it was not. In September 2015, I participated for the second time in an event for the “night of the researchers” in Geneva. The goal for this event was to bring science to the regular lives of people by setting scientists free inside a mall, a shopping mall. The premise of the plan was good, I think it cannot be bad to get some science thrown at you, and this is also why I signed up for Soapbox Science. The execution of the plan however could have been better.

I was assigned to a big chain store shop that sells a bit of everything: electronics, books, and gadgets of all sorts. And in particular, my activity was to happen in the area of the TVs. This was 2015 and curved TVs were omnipresent. We have brought to the TV section a very cool feature: a colleague of mine was to go down 100 meters underground to one of the experimental caverns with a camera to give us a virtual visit, assisted by two more colleagues in the control room, and I was going to host from the shop. The visit was to be broadcasted in one of the huge curved TVs on sale. This was to be done in slots of 15 minutes at certain times agreed with the experiment beforehand. In between visits we had a little quiz with simple questions to keep the audience entertained.

This kind of virtual visit is a fantastic opportunity for people that cannot travel physically to CERN to go underground and see what kind of experiments we do with some detail. These visits take place at moments in which the LHC has stopped operation, even for a few days, and sometimes no other kind of visits are allowed. The guides can get very close to the big detectors and show not only their very large size, but also can focus on details that are not easy to show in regular visits. These visits are really quite something, I have done a few myself, mostly for high schools, and I can only recommend them.

The author, guiding a virtual visit to the CMS experiment in 2016

However, the TV area was in a deep corner of the shop, an area full of TVs well outside any natural flow of people. Somehow nobody was outside advertising our virtual visit, and nobody announced it using the speaker system of the shop, so in fact, nobody really knew we were there. We were two people in person in the shop to discuss science and my colleagues on-site.

After setting up our things, we quickly realized there was not a lot of people coming. We had to wait a few minutes before the first clients passed by there and when they did, there were usually 1, maximum 2 people at a time, and they clearly mistrusted out intentions. They were not aware that there was a science outreach event going on and they were perceiving us with high levels of suspicion. We tried to make contact with them and it was very hard, they did not want to be bothered and most of them ended up chased away from the TV section of the shop.

It took a while before the first shopper came to us, and to our astonishment, we got asked about curved TVs, comparison of TV performances, and prices. Eventually, we managed to attract one person or two to our stand and the first visit had some audience. I think the idea was good, and the connection worked very well. The people in the experimental site were not to be blamed by the lack of success, they did the best possible with the situation. But we had fixed time-slots for those visits to the cavern, and they were never advertised. In the middle of the visits, the shop would chant loudly its offers by megaphone, the visits were never announced.

We had t-shirts to give away but people would just hear from other people we were giving free t-shirts inside, so they would come in, get a t-shirt, get out. The only thing that worked to keep engagement was other people: I had two friends visiting me, and when they came, they attracted shoppers. A colleague also passed by and was of course interested, and that made 3 more people curious. Seeing other people coming to us made people come as well. Much like a restaurant that is empty scares away new customers.

So this was a story of failed outreach, but it was still ok, because we did discuss science with some interested customers, and we learned something. Not only about TVs, but also about what works and does not for engaging the public.

Emelie Pettersson is a veterinarian and a PhD student at the National Veterinary Institute and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. After graduating with a veterinary degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2008 she spent almost nine years working in mainly small animal emergency and critical care medicine, both in Australia and in Sweden. With a desire to eventually work in the field of veterinary public health, Emelie did a Master of Science degree in International Animal Health through the University of Edinburgh, parallel to her clinical work, and graduated in 2014. In 2017, she started a PhD in veterinary parasitology and the career path took a new turn, from the emergency room with dogs and cats to pig farms and the laboratory, investigating the parasites of pigs.

Emelie Pettersson will take part in the Soapbox Science event in Uppsala on 25 May. She will talk about “Must improved pig welfare lead to more parasites?”

By Emelie Pettersson

My topic for Soapbox Science 2019

My topic will be the parasites of pigs. I will first give the audience a little brief introduction to the life of the pig parasites and talk about how advanced some of them are in the way they live of their hosts. Secondly, I will talk about the way we keep Swedish pigs and how that may influence their parasites. Sweden has stringent animal welfare laws and aim to allow pigs to live in as natural housing conditions as possible, especially when compared to many other countries. Unfortunately, parasites may also thrive in these more natural housing environments and what I am looking at in my PhD project is if better animal welfare also results in more parasites?

What is there to know about pig parasites?

Lots of course! Pigs are hosts to several parasites and some of the most common ones are the pig roundworm, the nodular worm and the whipworm. Some of these parasites have quite fascinating life cycles. For example, the pig roundworm called Ascaris suum. It is a large, whitish worm that resemble thick spaghetti. The adult female worm can be as long as 40 cm and it lives in the small intestine of the pig. Pigs become infected when they ingest parasite eggs, excreted in the faeces by other infected pigs, from the environment. Pigs being coprophagic (i.e. the eat faeces) run a large risk of ingesting parasite eggs if these are present in the environment. Once the eggs are ingested, they hatch in the large intestine of the pig and the little larvae that have developed inside the eggs, escape. The larvae now start to migrate through the body of the pig. Initially they penetrate through the intestinal wall to reach the bloodstream. Here they just follow the blood flow and after a day or two they end up in the liver. While trooping through the liver these larvae obviously do some damage and they will cause inflammation and small bleeds. This is damage that the body will heal, and just as with other healing wounds, small white scars will form. The scars are called “white spots” or “milk spots”, as that is what they look like. The scars do not affect the liver or the pig itself but if they are found at slaughter, the liver is considered unfit for consumption and is condemned.

A few days after passing through the liver, the migrating larvae come to the lungs where they cause similar damage – bleedings and emphysema. This can obviously affect the pig’s ability to breath and the animals may develop laboured breathing and a cough. The damage caused may also predispose to other infections by bacteria or viruses that can take advantage of an already damaged lung. The larvae will eventually continue their journey into the windpipe of the pig where they get coughed up and swallowed, and suddenly they are back in the gastrointestinal tract again. Once back in the small intestine of the pig they either will be expelled and hence cleared from the host or they will stay on and develop into adult worms. New adult worms can reproduce and produce thousands of eggs that are excreted with the pig faeces into the environment. If the conditions in the environment are right and its warm and humid enough, these eggs will embryonate, which means they become infective and are then ready to infect new pigs that accidently eat them. A very elaborate life cycle for a simple parasite! Once in the small intestine these large adult worms may impact the pig’s ability to utilise their feed, to grow and to thrive. Parasite infections may hence influence both the welfare of the pig as well as productivity for the pig farmer. Many of the other gastrointestinal parasites of pigs may also influence their growth but in general pigs do not develop severe clinical illness from these parasites.

Parasite eggs that are shed from infected pigs survive well in the environment if the conditions are right. Eggs from the pig roundworm can survive for more than 15 years in the environment! The eggs are thick walled and resistant to most cleaning agents and disinfectants. This is also true for other parasite eggs from pigs and it is hence difficult to get rid of parasites from a stable.

What is different with Swedish housing conditions for pigs?

Sweden is thankfully a country with stringent animal welfare laws that were implemented in the 1980’s. For example, pigs are always to be kept loose. In many other countries, even in some of our Nordic neighbours, sows are fixated during large parts of their lives. Loose housing increases the likelihood of faecal contact which in turn could increase the chance of becoming infected with parasites. In Sweden a maximum of 30 % of the pen floor can be slatted, and farmers must provide some sort of bedding material for the pigs. Since parasite eggs survive well when it is warm (but not too warm) and humid, solid floors and bedding material can provide a much better environment for egg survival compared to bare slatted floors. It has been hypothesized that these examples of more natural housing conditions may increase the parasite load in a pig stable. The national parasite status of pigs in Sweden has not been investigated since the more stringent animal welfare laws were implemented and one thing I am investigating in my PhD project is if good animal welfare also means more parasites? Do Swedish pigs have more parasites now compared to when sows were fixated or when larger parts (if not all) of the floor was slatted?

What about drugs used to kill parasites?

Since the parasites are difficult to get rid of by cleaning and they usually do not cause severe disease in pigs, the aim is not to eradicate them from a pig herd. Instead the aim is to keep them at a low level where they do not really do any harm to the pigs and where productivity is not affected. Good hygiene is essential to achieve this. Also, the use of anthelmintic drugs or “de-wormers” are used frequently. De-worming drugs are often used routinely without farmers knowing if they need to use them or not, since the parasite status of a herd very rarely is known. Overuse of drugs, that may not be necessary in the first place, may favour the development of drug resistance. Parasites of other species such as horses and sheep have developed resistance to anthelmintic drugs, and it is known that pig parasites in other countries have done the same. So, another thing I am investigating in this project is if Swedish pig parasites also are becoming resistant to antiparasitic drugs.

As a little side note:

The pig roundworm, Ascaris suum, is very closely related (there is even discussion that it may even be the same parasite) to the roundworm that infect humans (Ascaris lumbricoides). The human roundworm is included in the so-called soil-transmitted helminthiasis. This is a group of four different gastrointestinal worms that infect up to 1.4 billion people around the globe and is considered a neglected tropical disease, causing large suffering mainly in children.

See you all on the 25^th of May in Uppsala!

I am very grateful I have been selected to speak at the soapbox science in Uppsala this year. I think the idea of promoting and highlighting women in science is fantastic and I hope that the audience in Uppsala will find my talk interesting on the 25^th of May.