New Orleans Ubers and Communication

I recently got back from a conference for scientists who study alcohol addiction. Every year, we meet up for 5 days of talks and presentations where we share our latest research and catch up with each other’s science lives and personal events. This year, the Research Society on Alcohol (RSA) met in New Orleans, Louisiana. Ironic, because one of the things New Orleans boasts is a robust tourist economy based on drinking and debauchery. Appropriate, because New Orleans is a city of contrasts. Saints and sinners, Ursuline nuns and swashbuckling pirates, and apparently RSA conference meetings and also Tales of the Cocktail, an annual international conference for the drinking industry.

I learned about Tails of the Cocktail from an Uber driver while trying to cheat the heat of NOLA in the summer. The driver was much more excited for that conference than ours and, to be honest, I could see why. Their website has cheerful people in the pictures, their society name is pretty clever, and also, they do pop-up booths in the streets of the city where they showcase the latest in their craft. Apparently, this year, wine-based cocktails are making a splash. I also assume they tip their Uber drivers well, as fellow tip-based-industry professionals.

I bet they also have really fun answers when someone at a party asks, “So what do you do for a living?”

As a scientist who studies the long-term consequences of alcohol exposure during critical developmental windows, my answer to that question is usually a bit more of a bummer. I’ve learned to disarm my conversational partner by couching it with humor – “We study what adolescent alcohol use does to your brain later on in adulthood – a little challenging to talk about at parties, ha ha!” (as they slowly lower their beer). I then like to end on a positive note – “…and that’s how we can figure out ways to help people with their alcohol use and their health!” But it’s still a hard topic. Maybe this is why I don’t get invited to a lot of parties. Maybe I need to change my approach.

I think talking about our jobs to non-scientists is hard and also really important. “We get rats drunk” seems like “silly science” to most people at first, and it’s good to practice a simple and elegant way to get to the point: how does this help humans? We are alcohol science ambassadors to the world – to the taxpayers, to the children and adolescents, to their parents and doctors.

On a scientific level, this thought rolled around in my brain a lot during an RSA session I attended called the “Linda P. Spear Memorial Workshop: Celebrating a Legacy in Adolescent Neurodevelopmental Alcohol Research and Translational Research Careers.”

Dr. Linda Spear was a larger-than-life figure in the field as well as in our University/department. I was not in her lab but I had the honor of benefiting from her wisdom (and humor!) She was on all of my committees during graduate school and I have my own pencil-marked copies of documents to treasure.

Dr. Spear’s protégés put together a great symposium. Dr. Marisa M. Silveri discussed her lab at Harvard where she was able to take her preclinical training and expand her own research to human adolescents. She uses cutting-edge techniques like noninvasive brain imaging with magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to study teenage development and the vulnerability of the changing adolescent brain to drugs of abuse. Some of the latest work from her lab and other colleagues has ventured into interesting areas in developmental research such as examining whether forgiveness was associated with the volume of a brain region called the middle frontal gyrus (spoiler alert – it was! And forgiveness also mediated the relationship between this brain structure and clinical symptoms such as depression).

Dr. Melissa Morales told us about her journey from preclinical addiction work with Dr. Spear all the way to founding her own lab in Binghamton that is focused on neuromuscular and autoimmune/inflammatory diseases. Dr. Rachel Anderson, a Senior Policy Advisor at the NIH Office of Aids Research, told us about her journey beyond the academy into her current position where she is able to affect change and scientific progress using the skills she learned from Dr. Spear’s mentorship. Dr. Tamara Fitzwater, UX Researcher and Data Analytics professional at Cisco, was actually one of my own first mentors in the alcohol research world. Dr. Fitzwater told us about how her professional path led her first to tenure at Ithaca College and then into a completely different research environment at a tech company where she continues to use her science skills to help people perform at their peak. The common thread that ran through their talks is that there are many ways to be a successful scientist and to use our training to be a positive force in the world.

I got a lot out of this session. Personally, it was wonderful to see such a wide range of success that all stemmed from talented women finding the right mentorship and making bold and clever (as they would maybe say, Beautimus!) career choices. On a practical level, I was intrigued by the resources mentioned in the talks. I am definitely planning to check out and then disseminate ACER’s yellow pages. RSA’s flagship Alcohol Clinical & Experimental Research journal uses this space to publish articles of public interest about alcohol that are not paywalled – what a great resource! Having read Dr. Spear’s academic work, I am also now curious to read The Behavioral Neuroscience of Adolescence, the book she wrote that is aimed at the more general public.

On a professional level, the main thing I took away from this talk is that we all need to be outspoken and articulate about our science, whatever it is. All of Dr. Spear’s former students emphasized her willingness and ability to engage with different audiences about the importance of understanding adolescence as a unique time period and the danger of alcohol during this critical juncture. As reported in this oft-cited Dawson et. al 2008 paper, the age of first alcohol drink is a crucial predictor of an individual’s future relationship to alcohol. In other words, the longer a teenager can hold off having that first drink, the more optimistic we can be about their future interactions with alcohol – each year of waiting imparts protection from a potential Alcohol Use Disorder diagnosis in adulthood.

Some of us do preclinical work with rodents where we are able to directly manipulate variables and test which parts of the brain are vulnerable to addiction in ways that we can’t do in human adolescents due to ethical considerations. Some of us do clinical work where we examine real-life patient populations, learn about their neurobiology, and offer treatment options. None of it is “silly science,” all of it is valuable and important, and I think we can and should tell people why it matters. The implications of our research are so far-reaching – from forming personal decisions about how to teach our children about drinking (“You are your children’s frontal lobe!” as Dr. Silveri put it in her talk) to helping our legal system understand that an adolescent is fundamentally different from an adult (see Miller vs. Alabama).

And then again, sometimes it’s best not to talk about the science much at all. In another Uber interaction, a driver asked me what I did and I decided this was a great time to practice my communication skills. I told her about my alcohol research, and at the end of my spiel she asked me why people drink – is it because of grief?

Something I’ve learned over the years is that when people hear I do alcohol research, their next question is almost never about me – it is usually about them. I gave a careful answer but after that I mostly just listened. Her daughter died in a car accident a few years ago and her husband’s drinking problem escalated after that. I am honestly not sure what the best scientist response in that situation would have been. I chose to talk about how complex addiction is and how there are many factors that contribute to its development. I mentioned personal anecdotes as well as the research. I also mentioned that there are lots of resources out there that can help in recovery when a person is ready to take those steps. I think our interaction was very personal and genuine and I hope I left her with a good resource and a positive impression of us scientists out there who do alcohol research.

Thank you to Heather Dorn at Binghamton University’s Writing Initiative for her insightful suggestions in finalizing this piece.