To be a scientist is to ask the right questions and receive answers from Nature, whatever they may be. Every day we get answers that contradict our hypotheses - this is painful, necessary, and we learn this every day on our own. But to ask questions, you need to think more broadly - to get out of the box. But locked in a laboratory cage, we seldom find time to expand our boundaries and gain other impressions and experience. When I received a letter inviting everyone to the Locarno Film Festival, I did not doubt for a second that I needed this experience. On the one hand, I myself had the opportunity to meet new people from a new environment and be inspired by them, on the other hand, I and other scientists brought diversity to the “homogeneous” group of artists - they, like us, need diversity in order to keep their minds open.
And very soon, five PhD students went to one of the largest European film festivals. Having reached BaseCamp, we immediately realized that all the conditions were created here so that people would get to know each other and spend time together, exchange impressions and share experiences. Spending half a day at the festival itself, we gained enough emotions and new ideas to meet with the artists in the evening and communicate on topics that are close to them. But when the artists asked us what we were doing and found out that we were scientists, two things happened: 1) “Why are you here?” 2) “Is it true that...?”
We were pleasantly surprised that people from art are interested in what is happening in the world on the side of science. Basecampers were interested in eternal problems - cancer, human cloning, substances for changing consciousness and other transhumanistic issues. But what was even more pleasant, some of them use science and references to it in their work. This desire for a combination of disciplines inspires us, scientists. We need to know how to convey our research to society, not only with the help of words on paper, but also in a more vivid and expressive form. A good lesson for us was the exhibition of contemporary art, held as part of BaseCamp.
This exhibition showed us that the boundaries of art are much wider than we used to think. In science, we sometimes subconsciously and without reason limit ourselves, which harms research. But other boundaries — ethical — need to be explored and reasonable compromises made. The presence of these rules determines not only the attitude of the scientist to the object of study, but also the attitude of society to science as an institution. And Basecampers helped us learn more about this relationship.
Definitely, BaseCamp is a great and necessary platform for sharing knowledge for people from various fields of activity. The artistic environment only contributes to this, because we all love art, are ready to argue about it, and most importantly - are able to see it in everything - even in the most ordinary things.
Boris Lozhkin: PhD Student in Thomas Ward's group at UniBasel with a focus on the development of new drug delivery methods for cancer therapy. One of the problems of modern methods of therapy is the low selectivity - drugs are toxic for healthy tissues - therefore, we are developing super-precise delivery methods based on the synthesis of antitumor drugs directly in the tumor.
As a PhD student in chemistry at the University of Basel, I have never really paid attention to how I was mainly surrounded by other PhDs in scientific fields, Postdocs and Professors. This academic environment has naturally become a norm for me. Usually, all work-related meetings and conferences are exclusively attended by a scientific audience and scientist speakers. In such events, everybody is expecting to meet scientists and discuss about advanced research and science. Obviously, the total opposite happened when the five of us arrived at the Locarno Film Festival and BaseCamp. There, at BaseCamp, we were cohabiting for five days with principally artistic people (film directors, photographers, designers, musicians, actors, curators). Nobody was really expecting scientists to be there. At the beginning, other BaseCampers did not believe that we were “real” scientists or were thinking that our goal was to study them. These situations surprisingly lead to very interesting and unique discussions. For example, we learned that these young artists are all very interested in science and that they are also very confident in scientists’ work. Their only regret is that science is not accessible enough for non-scientific people, which makes it difficult to connect with. It was a great experience to expose our research and exchange with very open-minded people coming from totally other fields. These discussions also pushed us to learn how to explain our work in a more simple and straightforward manner to make it understandable for non-scientists. This really enabled us to see our research and working environment with new perspectives. Even though our work environment and field of study strongly differ from theirs, we were easily able to find common points, especially when it is about creation and developing new concepts. We are still in touch with some artists to concretise new projects, and we are currently planning to invite them to Basel for an Art of Molecule event. Stay tuned.
Claire Elsa Meyer: PhD student in the research group of Prof Cornelia Palivan at UniBasel working on smart nano vesicles made of polymers and biomolecules for biomedical applications like imaging.
As scientists we are trained and constrained to follow protocols in order to achieve excellence in our research. however, most of the time this well-established formula results in isolation of our scientific community and loses dialogue with the other branches of the society. Being aware of this situation, we, 5 PhD students from different fields of life sciences, decided to join the BaseCamp to ‘research’ this problem and to define the communication need of our community’s outreach.
Even though we felt unprepared and misfit to the atmosphere of the BaseCamp, soon after our arrival we realized our scientific identities were found to be interesting and enigmatic to our new housemates. With the help of our scientific attraction and the common language of our generation, we were able to start fruitful discussions and adjust ourselves to the rhythm of the BaseCamp life easily.
During our discussions with some of the BaseCamp residents, we were able to learn about our image in their society and how they comprehend our work from their perspectives. We also mentioned shared tools and concepts between our fields and appreciated our well-established coupling that goes back a long way. Especially our conversations on the ethics of the science on the society were intense and thought-provoking for both sides where everyone reshaped or modified their opinion with new information from each other.
The BaseCamp was a unique and influential experience in our PhD lifetime where we had to use our scientific competence in a completely different manner and came across with confounding similarities between our fields in an experimental surrounding. I believe that the dialogue we started and the ideas we sparked at the BaseCamp together will evolve into fundamental contributions in science and art collaborative space and encourage us to apply and involve more from each other’s world in our work.
Selen Manioglu: PhD student in Prof. Daniel Müller's research group at ETH Zürich's measuring the interactions between membrane proteins of human cells and their ligands. The information we gain from these measurements will help us to design better drugs for these membrane proteins.
Focusing on a specific area of research and becoming an expert on said topic are essential to being a PhD student. In order to become one of those experts you spend most of your time at the lab doing research. Automatically spending more time with your colleagues, who do similar projects as you are. Then you go to conferences, again, with the same people, discussing the same topics. Short: you discuss the same science with the same people. So how could we break this repetitive cycle?
Hearing about the BaseCamp at the Film Festival in Locarno seemed like the right opportunity to break that cycle. Five of us PhD students were found to visit the BaseCamp. We were excited, we were ready and most importantly we were soon sitting in a train to Locarno. But there was one main question that remained unanswered: We will be surrounded by artists, directors, actors and numerous creative minds. But what exactly was OUR purpose there?
After reaching the BaseCamp and talking to the first people, all our doubts vanished. We quickly found common grounds: be it how they made use of biology or chemistry to create art, general ethical questions or merely what the best beer at BaseCamp was. There was always something to talk about. Through these conversations we realized more and more that our generation was having similar thoughts, but was using different means to communicate our respective philosophies and concerns.
The most interesting talks we had were about the big leaps in genetic engineering and its consequences resulting in ethical challenges. It was very encouraging to see that most of the people were highly interested in what we are doing and very faithful in research nowadays. They were sure that new technologies will help eradicate certain diseases in the near future.
But what effect does this have on us as a society? Will it bring people closer together? How does it affect the gap between the powerful and the poor? All these smaller questions were summed up into one general question: how could new technologies transform the way we live in the future and how is everyone capable of making this process easier?
In my opinion, the BaseCamp offered a great platform to meet and engage with people from different backgrounds and find new inspiration. It was eye-opening in a way that it made me take a look at my research from a different angle, as well as appreciate the work we’re doing in the lab.
Because being a scientist means of course being an expert, but it’s more than that: a scientist needs also to be curious to ask questions nobody has asked yet and be courageous to find answers nobody has found yet.
Jaicy Vallapurackal: PhD Student in Thomas Ward's group at UniBasel working on high throughput screening methods to directed evolution on living bacteria.
“Are you guys doing experiments on us?”. In the eclectic crowd of critics, directors, designer and actors, the presence of five scientists at Locarno’s Basecamp raises questions.
After putting down our bags on the first day of this large experiment organized in parallel of the annual film festival, we undertook to meet the residents through filmed interviews to ask them about their relationship with science and cinema. After the initial questioning on our presence, we were welcomed with enthusiasm and curiosity. In many ways we were not in foreign territory: some artists already use biology in their work ; fungi growing on different media to form unique shapes and networks for example, while others explore questions surprisingly similar to the ones faced by scientists. Paul - a student in media interaction design at ECAL - showed us his installation depicting a "synthetic forest" through large pictures of trees aligned under stroboscopic light and accompanied by repetitive ambient sounds. The parallel between his idea to isolate fundamental pieces of a forest and replicate them to create a “perfect” (yet very unnatural) one and synthetic biology was easy to draw.
On a personal level, having to explain a research project to a lay audience is never an easy task and doing so at Basecamp was a great opportunity to take a step back. During our discussions, I was surprised to meet very few concerns about genetic engineering, a field which is still controversial for many. On the contrary, many Basecampers were excited about the possibilities brought by such technologies. On these questions, scientists and artists seem to have similar questions about the future: if we can modify our genome, how does that question our identity ? What does access to consumer genetic modification means for society ? In many ways, we spoke the same language and shared the same concerns and hopes.
I was glad to be part of this first edition, I think Basecamp is a great platform for everyone curious and willing to engage in an open discussion and I hope to collaborate more in the future with the amazing people we met there.
Olivier Belli: PhD student in Randall Platt’s group at ETH Zurich working on the development of new genetic engineering tools to study how proteins are produced and modified in cells. These tools will then be used to study how the brain works on the molecular level and to better understand diseases like autism.