Taken Seriously: Stories about wanting respect

While some people can fake it 'til they make it, others find that being taken seriously is a challenge, no matter what they do. In this week’s episode, both our storytellers share stories about trying to get the respect they deserve.

Part 1: Adam Ruben desperately wants to be seen as more than a junior scientist in his lab.

Adam Ruben is a writer, comedian, and molecular biologist. He has appeared on the Food Network, Netflix, the Travel Channel, the Weather Channel, and currently hosts "What on Earth?" and "Ancient Unexplained Files" on the Science Channel and "Inventions that Changed History" on Discovery Plus, as well as writing for the Emmy-nominated PBS Kids show "Elinor Wonders Why." Adam writes the monthly humor column "Experimental Error" in the AAAS journal Science Careers and is the author of two books: Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School (Random House, 2010) and Pinball Wizards: Jackpots, Drains, and the Cult of the Silver Ball (Chicago Review Press, 2017). Learn more at adamruben.net.

Part 2: When Larissa Zhou says she wants to make better food for outer space, no one takes her seriously.

Larissa Zhou is a PhD student at Harvard University, where she develops food technologies for low-resource environments. She loves to rock climb and cook. She's invested in building communities and transforming mentees into leaders, both in academia and on the mountain. Learn more at https://larissazhou.github.io/

Episode Transcript

Part 1

So I'm a scientist and we like to think of science as a meritocracy, but we know that it is not. It's very hierarchical. I think I learned this when I got my first job out of grad school. I was literally three days out of grad school when I got this job.

I was working at a small biotech company in Maryland making an experimental vaccine for malaria. It was my dream job. It was something that I was so enthusiastic about working on. But being three days out of grad school, I was clearly the lowest PhD on the food chain. But I worked and I advanced and I published and I got a promotion and a raise and, seven years later, in 2015, I was still the lowest PhD on the food chain.

It just kind of happened that way. It's a small company. There just weren’t people below me. And it wouldn’t have mattered except like I can always feel that they still looked at me as that 29‑year‑old who had joined them in the beginning.

So I remember one of my co‑workers was taking someone around the company and giving them a tour. They came to my desk and she said, “Oh, this is Adam. He's one our junior scientists.”

Adam Ruben shares his story outdoors at Smitty’s Bar in Washington, DC in July, 2022. Photo by Lisa Helfert.

A little embarrassing but like, yeah. Uh-huh. I know, but I’ve almost got my merit badge pipetting. At some point it was like, “Look, I'm 36. At what point am I going to be an actual scientist and not just a scientist in training?”

I really, really felt this every fall. We had this annual consortium, a big conference for all of our collaborators around the globe. We’d meet in a city and give each other presentations about what we were working on. It was a great opportunity to see results before they were published and talk to people and meet people.

And when the conference was in Baltimore, DC, I was allowed to go. But when it was some place like San Diego, New Orleans, any place that requires a flight, no. Mr. Junior scientist is not worth the plane ticket, so I don't get to go.

So when I don’t go to this consortium, I feel like I'm not a part of the company. I'm not a part of what we're working on. I'm not really helping in the way that I want to be helping.

Now, in 2015, for the first time the consortium was in Philadelphia. Borderline case. I'm not worth the plane ticket but maybe a train ticket. Maybe?

And so I don't know if they're going to send me or not. I'm kind of assuming they won’t. Then one day the CEO of the company comes up to me and says specifically, “Adam, if you go to Philadelphia, would you be able to stay the whole time?”

I'm like, “Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I could stay the whole time.”

He said, “Are you sure? “

I'm like, “Yeah. I will be there the entire consortium.”

And I'm thinking like, “Great. Finally, I'm being asked to go. My presence is wanted there.”

And he said, “That’s great. We need you there. You’re going to run the projector.”

I was like, “Ah, dammit.”

But what can I say to him? No? Because then, “Oh, Mr. Junior scientist is getting a little too big for his lab coat.”

So I'm like, “Fine, I’ll go run the damn projector.” It doesn’t matter. I'm still going to be there. I'm going to watch the presentations. I'm going to talk to collaborators. I'm going to get the free nice dinner. It's all going to be a good experience.

So I send out an email to everybody that’s presenting at the consortium saying, “Hey, I'm going to be running the projector. This consortium starts very early Thursday morning. Everyone send me your talks, please, no later than Wednesday.” You know where this is going.

And I got to tell you, the way they set this thing up, this is the consortium from hell. This is 200 talks over a period of two days. And I'm not talking about multiple rooms. I mean 200 talks into one microphone for one audience. There are three‑minute talks, four‑minute talks, no time between them. It is awful. People were speaking like at seven different points over the two days, a single person.

So when I send out this email, I'm expecting to receive about 200 talks. How many do you think people actually sent me by the requested deadline? I see someone putting up ten fingers. Five fingers. Fucking three! Three!

I got three talks and I didn’t get 197 talks. Why? Because the hierarchy, right? Everyone is way too important to be the one who sends their talks in advance. No, no, no. They're all the special ones.

So I get to the consortium with nothing prepared and people are just throwing flash drives at me. They go, “Hi, I didn’t send it to you, but I’ve got it on this flash drive.”

“Mine is on five flash drives.”

“Mine is in the cloud. Can you find it? “

“I can’t connect to the hotel Wi-Fi. What can you do about that?”

“Mine is on a Mac. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Can I change my 37th slide that I sent to you 98 minutes ago?”

And it's horrible. I can’t get anything straight. I don't get to meet anybody. I don't even get to go over and have coffee. I'm just sitting there like taking this, taking this and people, “I emailed you my talk yesterday.”

And so I'm just putting everything into play so that when the consortium begins, I can run it smoothly.

And I'm not participating. I'm not even paying attention to the talks. I'm spending every moment worrying about the next session. The lowest person on the food chain in this giant room is still me. I am Projector Boy.

The highest person on the food chain, incidentally is our special guest, the Minister of Health of Equatorial Guinea. He is there in the front row looking very regal. He has a translator sitting next to him, whispering in his ear the whole time.

One of my jobs as projector boy ends up being getting water for the Minister of Health of Equatorial Guinea’s translator. So I am the translator’s water bearer. And, let me tell you, that is one thirsty‑ass translator.

So all day it's just craziness and not enjoyable. I'm wishing I was anywhere than in Philadelphia, waiting to just be back on the damn train and leave again.

We're about halfway through the second day when one of our collaborators gets up to speak. He's this older German doctor, shaved head, sharp nose, never blinks. Late 60s.

He gets up, I put up his slides and he looks at it and he says, “Zat is not ze right slide. Put up ze right slide.”

I don't have any more information than that. I'm remembering like, “Okay, what did he send me? I don't know. Everyone’s given me everything at once.”

I think, if I remember it correctly, he's on the schedule three times, but he only gave me two talks and neither one had a title that matched anything on the schedule. So I don't know what the other talk is so I just kind of blanked for a minute and then he says, “Ya, well, I suppose we will soldier on.”

Okay. Great. Go ahead. Do your thing. So he clicks and every slide that comes up, he's prefacing it like, “Well, zis is obviously not vat the slide is showing but…”

I'm like, “Okay, I get it. Fine.” He's hoping to still talk through his presentation but, instead, he gets a couple minutes into it, through a few slides and then he stops again, pinches the bridge of his nose. He says, “Yeah, well, I suppose this should be a lesson to me. If you’re going to do something, you should do it right.”

And he looks right at me and he says, “Put up the right slides,” as though I’ve had any opportunity in the past few minutes to fix whatever. You’re looking at my computer screen. You’re all seeing it. It's projected. What do you think I was able to do in that time?

So then he throws out this like little crumb. He says, “It's number two. It's number two.”

Like who would say that unless they think they’re the only person in the room. But now, the whole consortium has ground to a halt. No one is doing anything. They're all just stopping and watching me and watching my computer screen as I'm digging through folders. I don't know. Did he email? Did he send it? Did he flash drive it? Did he cloud it?

So I'm going through things. Then, finally, I open this one folder and it has two files in it. They're named Philadelphia 1, Philadelphia 2. As soon as I open it he goes, “Ya, it's number two.”

Like you named your files Philadelphia 1 and Philadelphia 2. Why not just call it like My PowerPoint of Science?

So like fine. I open number two. He gives his presentation. He's done. People applaud. And after the applause dies down and it's quiet, he waits until it's quiet, he's walking back to his seat. He stops and looks at me where I'm sitting with the projector and he goes, “Zat was not good.”

What is it with my people and the Germans? It never worked out for us.

So now, I'm not only Projector Boy, I am Bad Projector Boy. And I don't want to be there anymore. I don't want to be in front of our collaborators. I'm not benefiting in any way. I just want to leave. We get to the very end of the consortium. I'm like, “Finally, we can go.” But, no. Everyone’s got to give their little thank‑you speeches. People give their thank‑you speeches, “I want to thank everybody…” And the German doctor gets up to give a speech.

He's got this little smile on his face and he starts his speech and he says, he turns right to the Minister of Health of Equatorial Guinea and he says, “Bonjour, Ministre. Merci beaucoup pour attendre aujourd’hui.” It's this little speech in French that he's very clearly practiced and he's very proud of. Heavily‑accented German French, but still French, and the room is quiet. Like completely quiet. Even the translator has stopped speaking for the first time in two days.

And as he's going through his speech, I think I understand why people are getting quiet. I'm looking around, I'm seeing other people are seeing it too. I realized something that I think most of us realized that he doesn’t realize.

He gets to the end of his speech. He says, “Et j'espère que nous pourrons travailler ensemble”

And then the CEO of my company, who’s standing right next to him, turns to the German doctor and he says one word. It's the same word I was thinking. He says, “Spanish.”

Because the language of Equatorial Guinea is not French. It's Spanish. It's the only Spanish‑speaking country in all of Africa. I know this. I’ve been getting water for the translator for two days.

Because of the hierarchy, I couldn’t do anything at that moment. It was so nice to see him taken down a peg. What I wanted to do so badly was to stand up out of my projector chair, point at the German doctor and just say, “Zat was not good.”

Danke.

Part 2

In 1998, the movie Armageddon came out. And I watched Bruce Willis and Steve Buscemi and Ben Affleck train to be astronauts and save the world from an asteroid collision. And I said, “I want to do that.”

I was ten years old and I imagine myself going out during the day to save humanity, to explore new worlds and at night, as an astronaut, I would come back to my spaceship and I would get to read all I wanted without my mom yelling at me to practice piano.

So to pursue that dream, I went to college to study physics. It was really hard. I came to hate the word ‘intuitive’, because my professors would say, “So you’ve got this system and intuitively you already know x about it. Now, let’s talk about the other stuff.”

And I will be like, “What? None of it was intuitive to me.” And so I thought, “Am I too stupid to be a physicist?”

I dabbled in the astronomy and the earth and planetary sciences department and I always felt out of my depth.

By this time in college, I had become an American citizen so I was allowed to work at aerospace companies in the US. I interned one summer at a company that made satellites. All that summer, I got to do absolutely nothing substantive or never get to touch the hardware even though I begged my manager.

Larissa Zhou shares her story at Turtle Swamp Brewing in Boston, MA in July, 2002. Photo by Kate Flock.

So I looked at those dreams of space flight and I thought, “Well, that was naïve.” Every kid wants to be an astronaut when they're little. I was no different. But it's time to grow up and let go of those dreams.

So what would I do instead? I was obsessed with food too. I loved to cook. In high school I would come home and my hands would just be itchy from wanting to make something. And in college, every chance I got I tried to turn our final project into something food related. So I thought maybe I can make my way and have a career in the food world, but I didn’t know anybody who did that.

One day, I went to a lecture by somebody who was a giant in the field and I went up to him after the lecture and I said, “Do you have some career advice for me?”

And he said, “I got nothing for you.” He said he had walked a very winding path into this career in food and it worked for him but he couldn’t recommend it to me.

And I thought, “Wow, you’re a really crappy mentor.”

But, over time, I realized that was really liberating advice because I had permission to bushwhack my own path into the food world. And my intuition for how to do it would be as good as anybody else’s. And so that’s what I did.

I explored science and cooking in my own way. I became a food scientist. And I worked for about seven years, most of this time I worked with a team where were wrote these big, beautiful, gorgeous cookbooks on the science of cooking.

During this time, my free time I was getting really into rock climbing and backpacking. I was eating a lot of crappy, freeze‑dried meals. It turns out, freeze‑dried foods are the basis of space food and this technology really hasn’t changed for many decades.

At that time, I was starting to hear these plans by NASA and by SpaceX that they were going to send people for longer durations and to go deeper into space. I thought, “Do they expect people to eat freeze‑dried meals for five years straight? And if not, what other new technologies can we invent that makes food tastier but still fits within the extreme requirements of space flight?”

I really wanted to work on this question and I thought, well, I’ll apply to a PhD program.

So I went to food science departments and they said they don’t have the aerospace engineering skills. I went to aerospace engineering departments and they said they don’t have the food skills. And then there was a professor who had a lot of experience at NASA and he said, anyways, it was way too early to work on this and I would never get funding.

I got funding from NASA a year later.

And then there were my mentors from the days of studying physics, and they said this. They said, “This is fun, but it's not fundamental. This is engineering. It's just engineering. It's not physics.”

They called me a dilettante. They said, “Be careful doing work that’s merely cute.”

So all this feedback made me feel crazy. It was so obvious to me the need for solutions to a problem that was becoming urgent, my perfect fit in terms of experience using science to make food more delicious, and my interest in getting into the space world, but I guess other people didn’t believe it.

Eventually, I ended up in a mechanical engineering program where the professor was supportive in a sense that he mostly left me alone. I worked on food‑related questions at first, but I didn’t work on space food because I wanted to be taken seriously.

One year into my program, I was at happy hour for space enthusiasts and a guy asked me, “What is your dream?”

I said, “My dream is to develop cooking technologies for space where we can really cook, not just rehydrate and reheat.”

And he said, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense. How can I help?”

And I was like, “What? I didn’t have to convince you? You just got my logic right away?” And that meant the whole world to me.

So now when a class came along that would give us the chance to develop an idea for microgravity and experiment for microgravity and help us develop it into reality, and then give us the chance to fly on microgravity flight, I applied. And this friend I had made at that happy hour, he and I worked together.

We proposed that we would build a pot for cooking pasta in microgravity. Because lots of food need to be both heated and hydrated to become cooked. And the issue is that, in space, you don’t have gravity to keep the water in contact with the heating source. You can get very poor contact, inefficient heating and it can become dangerous. So our solution was to design a pot with a special shape that use surface tension and capillary forces to keep the water exactly where we want it to be. We applied for a spot and we got in.

During those subsequent months, there were occasional moments where I was like, “What? I'm doing this thing that I said I always want to do.” I was so excited.

And, occasionally, I would obsess over the perfect soldering joint, because I was getting trained up in the machine shop and brushing off my soldering skills from college. I was obsessing over the mechanical, the little nitty‑gritty details in the same way that I loved to obsess over how to assemble and ice a cake beautifully in the kitchen.

But most of the time, I was not in flow state because, most of the time, I was freaked out out of my mind. The time crunch was part of it. But more it was that I felt stupid all the time. I had never built hardware like this, never built for it to fly in microgravity. There were lots of people giving me advice about how I should do this, how I should do that. And every decision I made felt so important and so possibly wrong.

Another aspect was that microgravity flights are really rare and expensive. I thought I had just one chance to prove that I wasn’t crazy. The flight works like this.

It looks like a regular plane but, inside, all the seats are ripped out, except for a few rows at the back. We build our experiments inside these aluminum frame boxes that are bolted to the floor. And during the flight we lie next to them and sort of babysit the experiment.

The plane would take off and get to cruising altitude between 20,000 and 30,000 feet and then it would start on an ascent. This is very much like when you ride a roller coaster, climbing that hill and dropping off.

The parabola of a flight is the same thing, just magnified. And so it would ascend and then when it goes into freefall, everything inside the plane that’s not bolted down is also falling at the same rate, so it feels like we're floating even though what we're doing is we're all falling.

We had been told that so many things go wrong. Lots of flailing limbs. People just don’t know what to do with themselves, knocking over experiments, so we had been told to double check, triple check, de‑risk everything. I spent so much time just thinking through all the what‑ifs of how the experiment could go wrong.

And then I thought I need to keep thinking because what if there's one thing I didn’t think of and that’s the thing that happens during the flight. And then my experiment will have failed and I will have nothing to show for it and I’ll be a failure.

It didn’t help that a few months into this, I broke two ribs in a freak accident. And then a few weeks after that, the Atlanta shootings happened, during which a white man committed extreme violence against many Asian women. And I was reminded that pretending to fit in doesn’t work.

But I thought, “I don't have time for that identity crisis,” but I literally could not outrun my alienation because I had two fractured ribs and it hurt to even breathe.

So when it came to the day of the flight, I bolted my experiment in. We got to cruising altitude. I laid down next to it.

I remember looking up at the ceiling and I just thought, “You know what? It's okay. I just want to black out for the next 45 minutes and I just want all of this to be over with. And I will go back and tell people that it failed but that’s okay because it was just a side project and I’ll go back to my regular life and my “real” research. I just want all of this to be over with.”

Then at the top of the ascent, the flight attendant called out, “Nosing over.” And then it went into freefall and we floated up gently off the ground. I did a few pushups on my fingertips. The easiest pushups I will ever do on my life.

I had designed my experiment to run mostly autonomously, but I was so freaked out. I kept anxiously staying close to the box. Everybody else was somersaulting and I was just like, “Are there leaks? What’s going on?”

And parabola after parabola, nothing bad happened. Nothing leaked, nothing exploded. The temperature ramped up as it's supposed to. It shut off as I had programed it to. There was funky fluid behavior inside the pot that I hadn’t anticipated and that would be cool to analyze afterwards, and it kept on working.

But I was shutting down, because I was getting so nauseous that, by the 15th parabola, I was curled up in a ball and the flight attendants had to pick me up and dribble me like a basketball over everybody else and strap me down in the back, and I spent the last five parabolas dry heaving into a barf bag.

And there's footage of me during this entire flight and there's a look on my face. Friends have seen that look and they're like, “Wow, Larissa, you look super freaked out.”

When I see that, I think of two things. I think it was ridiculous. It was ridiculous because I was literally vomiting the vomit comet. It was ridiculous that I was a body that was no longer confined to gravity for the first time in a lifetime.

And the second thing was it was sublime. Because after all the hours in the machine shop and the hours at the soldering bench and all the people who said that I shouldn’t do it, that I couldn’t do it, that if they were me they would do it differently, I had done it. I had cooked rigatoni in microgravity.

Thank you.