When I Was a Scientist: Stories about an earlier life

This week we present two stories from people who used to be scientists.

Part 1: Despite loving science, Ivan Decker's first exposure to field work doesn't go as planned.

Originally from Vancouver, Ivan Decker is a stand-up comedian that now makes his home in Los Angeles California. He has been featured on CBC, CTV, TBS and many other media outlets as part of shows such as: The Debaters, Just for Laughs, CONAN and he has a half hour special on NETFLIX. In 2018, Ivan was also the first Canadian to win a JUNO award for comedy album of the year since the award was given to Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas for the soundtrack to the movie strange brew in 1984.

Part 2: Nathan Min tries to pursue a 'respectable' scientific career, but finds himself relating to the mice he studies.

Nathan Min is a TV writer, actor, and stand-up based in New York City. He recently wrote for Adult Swim’s “Joe Pera Talks with You.” Previously, “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” He started performing stand up comedy as a freshman at Johns Hopkins University and went on to win the DC Improv’s Funniest College Stand Up competition at the end of his senior year. After college, he began studying at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York where he has since written for several house sketch teams. In 2014, he was selected as a finalist for the Andy Kaufman Award.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Ivan Decker

You can probably tell by my face and haircut that when I was a child I was very interested in dinosaurs. Not just dinosaurs, all types of science. I loved it. Every adult in my life was convinced that I was going to be a scientist. I even have a drawing from kindergarten when they asked us to draw what we wanted to be when we grew up. All the other kids drew hockey players and army men. One kid drew a horse. I think he later went into politics. But I drew a scientist, the typical white lab coat with the Erlenmeyer flask full of the color green.

Ivan Decker shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Fox Cabaret in Vancouver, BC in November 2019. Photo by Rob Schaer.

You got to hand it to Emil Erlenmeyer, by the way, to have a flask named after you. I mean most scientists have a theorem or something, but that… I mean he did other stuff. He was a chemist. But that flask is really the godfather. It’s what we all know. It is the most scientific vessel out there, most easily recognizable, so much so that I, as a 5-year-old, had it in my drawing full of green with some pencil swirly smoke coming out of the top.

I was not an artist. My parents, however, were. In the early 1990s long before the 2010 Olympics came and “rejuvenated” the area, they had a studio, a very cheap, rundown warehouse district on the edge of the brackish waters of Falls Creek.

Also perched on the edge of Falls Creek was a building that was very important to me at this time, which is Science World. The reason why it was so important was because my parents had a membership. And when we came to the studio, they would take us to Science World to hang around. Sometimes they would even leave my brother and I there and go back to the studio to continue working, a practice which I later found out was not allowed at all.

But I had fun and the building was unbelievable. Everything that went on in there was so inspiring and amazing. All of these people that worked there seemed to have the best job in the world. Balls of fire, giant bubbles, lightning coming out of a machine conjured seemingly by will, all done by chipper employees in a golf shirt and minimal eye protection.

And this obsession of mine continued throughout elementary school, but it was difficult because I grew up in a small farming town about an hour outside of Vancouver. So the closest thing we had to science was, once a year, a farmer would come to the school with a really big pumpkin.

And you could line up and touch the pumpkin and if he liked you he would let you slap the pumpkin as hard as you wanted and he would say stuff like, “Yep, she's a beaut.”

But I was good, I was good at science in elementary school. I loved it. I was not very good at any of the other subjects but science made sense to me. I remember watering a bean with food coloring to try to make the bean change color. It didn’t work, but it still grew, unlike every other kid in my class whose bean died because they had chosen to water them with Pepsi. I felt bad for my teacher because she didn’t even have time to explain to me that the reason why the bean was green was because of photosynthesis. She was too busy trying to get all the other kids not to just drink their Pepsi.

And I loved this science. My love affair with it continued throughout my elementary school and even on into high school. I loved the wonder of it, of wanting to know things and then finding them out. And this was before Google so if you wanted to find things out, you had to find a peer-reviewed book or talk to an adult. You couldn’t just watch an 18-minute YouTube video and then go, “The earth is flat. I did my research. I can prove it.”

But then, once I got to high school, though, something terrible happened. Because in high school, this is a time of social change. People start to make new friends. It turns out that science, my friend, my curious pal had made a new friend, Math. A subject which I did not care for.

This was extremely upsetting to me. It was me and science running through the fields, drawing pictures of spiders, learning about water. What is Math doing here? You are not invited, Math. You've already got your own class. Stay in your lane, Math.

They even divided science up into three different sciences. We had Physics which was just math. We had Chemistry which was a new language of math. And then we had Biology. Oh, there's no math here. It’s just living things. But what are living things made of? Chemistry and Physics combined. Ha-ha, it was math the whole time.

Nevertheless, I persisted. I stayed on with science. And, over time, in high school, I started to understand how important science was. How it was then and is now under attack a lot of the time and it’s very important to maintain and it’s at the forefront of all successful society. It’s what we really need.

I was so enraptured with the idea of doing something big, making a change, so that when my teacher told us that there was an opportunity for us to go into something called Science Career Preparation, I jumped at the opportunity.

Part of high school is you have to complete a quota of volunteer hours in order to graduate. So I volunteered for even more hours because they were promised to be in the field of science. I was very excited. Maybe I would find a place for me where science would fit into my life.

There were only two of us in the program. I thought we’d be following scientists around going to labs, learning about stuff, but that was big-city science. Our first placement was at a local bog helping with the conservation effort.

Now, I was excited still. When heard ‘bog’ I thought we were going to be walking around, we’re going to be collecting samples. We’re going to do stuff, specimens. But that’s not what a bog is about. I was thinking of a marsh. Marshes are much better. bogs Exist to make us appreciate a good marsh. If there was a Tinder for wetland, we would all be swiping left on bogs.

The ranking of wetlands is as follows. From top to bottom: marsh, swamp, fen, bog. It’s mostly just peat and water and the occasional tree. But it was very important to conserve and we were going to do that by building a boardwalk through it.

So we arrived, me and my friend Michael. The two of us got there on the first day and our job consisted of taking very scientific two-by-fours, putting them on a cart and hauling them down the boardwalk and using very scientific hammer and nails to attach them to the already present joist and piles that someone with wherewithal had put in there before us. Not exactly something two, thin-armed mitochondria enthusiasts were expecting.

This was grunt work. I was very skinny in high school. Like if you dropped a roll of ChapStick and it managed to spin under a fridge and go all the way to the back, I could still reach it. Michael was the same except with glasses. A real player-two situation.

Now, on the second day of our carpentry career preparation program, we arrived to find that someone had loaded one of the carts for us, presumably an adult that wore at least a medium t-shirt, because it was quite full. Now, Michael volunteered to haul that one ahead and I loaded up my own smaller cart and followed behind.

When I got to the third corner, I heard this horrible crash. All of a sudden I heard Michael yelling, “Ivan, help.”

I ran around the corner to find that the cart and Michael had tipped into the bog and he was lying on his back covered in two-by-fours with just his bespectacled face pocking above the surface of the water saying, “Help me. The boards are heavy.”

Without thinking, I jumped into the bog to save him. But then, I realized that I was also stuck. The two of us were trapped, being claimed by this bog that was so desperate to get back the lumber that had been stolen from Mother Nature years and years ago.

We were both struggling under its weight. I managed to wrench him free and we built a boardwalk out of the lumber and climbed back up onto the other boardwalk and had to walk back to the office covered in mud and peat moss and whatever microscopic organisms we were there to conserve, and call our parents to come and pick us up.

Even though it was a harrowing experience and I almost died, I was so thrilled because throughout the entire day we didn’t do any math.

Now, I don't know if it’s still called being fired when it’s a volunteer position, but we got whatever that is, so we had to leave. And to get the credit, we just had to write an essay on the importance of bogs, which I made Michael do for me in exchange for saving his life.

Three years later, I made one of the best decisions of my life. I turned 19 and I called a comedy club. They asked me to come down and do their Amateur Night. It went okay and I started going week after week. I was working in a grocery store at the time and I would wander around the store and write stupid jokes like, “Oh, there's 8-minute cream of wheat and 3-minute cream of wheat, who’s getting the 8?”

I wasn’t good but I started to get better. And I kept doing comedy for a number of years until I met a guy randomly who said, “Hey, I've made the big time. I’m going to move to Toronto. I’m going to quit my job here in Vancouver. If you want to interview for it, you can. It’s at Science World.”

And I freaked out. I was like I can’t believe I’m getting an opportunity to work there.

I interviewed. And even though I had no training, except for some limited bog experience, they let me have the job. I worked there and it was everything that I had experienced as a kid but now in reverse. I got to see the young children being inspired. It was the greatest job in the world. I was so happy making tornadoes of fire, freezing stuff with liquid nitrogen. The only difference between then and now was we had new shirts and more eye protection.

And even though I’m not on the cutting edge of science, there's not going to be any Decker Flask, I feel like even though I’m not there, I can still appreciate science. Like the way that you can appreciate music when you can’t play an instrument. Or the way people dance when they can’t dance. I still love science and, hopefully, I have inspired someone to do something great. And even still, I’m happy to be a long way from the small-town, pumpkin-slapping science of my past. Thank you.

Part 2: Nathan Min

My name is Nathan Min. I’m a comedian, a writer and an occasional actor of limited range. For most of my adult life, I had a hard time introducing myself that way because I was pursuing a career that I thought was more respectable, more impressive even though I didn’t have the passion for it, scientific research.

In 2011, I started working as a student volunteer in a neuroscience lab where, over the course of nine months, I killed over 600 mice. That’s not an exaggeration. I’m not that good of an actor.

Nathan Min shares his story with the Story Collider audience at (le) Poisson Rouge in NYC in March 2020. Photo by Zhen Qin.

I saw some crazy things in that lab because mice are weird. I saw a mouse suck itself, and then stroke itself with its two fore paws. This other time I saw a male mouse mount its own brother. The brother was not into it. The weirdest thing I saw was a mouse defecating and it was like mid-poop, another mouse runs up and pulls the poop out and starts eating it. I don't know. I guess there's only so much to do when you're stuck in a cage.

But anyway, besides running simple experiments, one of my main responsibilities was mouse husbandry. And as a loving and devoted husband to dozens of mice, I was responsible for feeding them, for giving them fresh water, for changing out their cages and for breeding.

I should explain these were special mice. They were transgenic mice, genetically engineered to express light sensitivity in certain cell types in their brain. So the idea is you can insert an optical fiber into a part of their brain and, through that fiber, stimulate that area of the brain with a certain wavelength of light and then observe the mouse’s behavior to see if there's an association between excitation of those cells and their behavior, behaviors like feeding or attacking or grooming.

Grooming is an interesting mouse behavior, I think, because the normal human reaction whenever we see a mouse is like, “Oh, that’s disgusting. That is so gross.” Meanwhile, the mouse they're just trying to look good. I don't think that’s fair to the mouse.

Anyway, so I would breed these mice and they would have pups. When the pups were of age, I would test them to see if they had this special gene. If they did, they could be used in the lab for studies. If they didn’t then I would have to, soon after, sacrifice them. If you guys are uncomfortable, you can cover your ears.

Basically what that entails is putting them in a cage and carting them down to a room where I put them in a plastic bin. I put a metal lid on top. The lid is attached to a hose that’s attached to a gas canister of carbon dioxide. I turn it on, wait for them to go to sleep, wait for them to stop breathing, wait for them to die. And then turn the gas off, take the lid off, take them out one by one and dislocate their skull from their spine by pulling on their tail. I think, when performed correctly, it’s a painless process for the mouse. But it’s initially a very shocking and stressful process for me.

So I would do this maybe once a week, once every other week, dozens of mice at a time for nine months. I think, eventually, one day a postdoc in the lab noticed I was feeling down. Just imagine me now but with like low energy. We got to talking and she asked me the question of why are you here. I didn’t have a good answer for that.

I think maybe I just had created my own cage for myself. I kind of identified with the mice in that way. Destined to be in a scientific research career track and then die at the end. Actually, it’s interesting. I looked up the definition of the word ‘mousy’ recently and the definition was timid, nervous, lacking presence or charisma. And I thought somebody posted my biography online. I’m just kidding.

Anyway, I came to realize that, like the mice, I was in a cage of my own. It was a cage of fear. Fear of what my parents would think if I switched career tracks. Fear of what my friends would think. Fear of what other comedians would think. What if I wasn’t that good? What if I failed? But the difference between me and the mice is that I could step out.

So about a month after, I left the lab, got a boring day job and started doing comedy at night. Then, a few months after that, all those mice died in Hurricane Sandy. So, thank you.