Questions and answers with Jay Nadeau

Biophysicist and biomedical engineer Jay Nadeau grew up in Hawaii, just outside Volcanoes National Park. She completed her BS in biology and her PhD in physics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. After her postdoctoral work in experimental neuroscience at Caltech, she worked as a scientist in the Center for Life Detection at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Nadeau is now an associate professor at Montreal’s McGill University, where she’s been since 2004.

Nadeau is a member of the editorial board of the online-only, open-access journal Frontiers in Neuroscience and regularly serves on the organizing board of the Colloidal Quantum Dots for Biomedical Applications session at the annual SPIE Photonics West conference. Her research interests include nanoparticle photophysics, nanotoxicology, fluorescence imaging, and nanotherapeutics.

Earlier this year, she founded Bitingduck Press, which caters to the scientific community with high quality e-publication of reference works, narrative nonfiction, and fiction. Physics Today recently caught up with Nadeau to discuss her book, Introduction to Experimental Biophysics: Biological Methods for Physical Scientists (CRC Press, 2011).

PT: You have an unusual academic background. How did you end up taking that path?

Nadeau: I originally planned to apply to medical school or an MD/PhD program. Since my goal was to do research, I knew a quantitative background would be valuable, more than was provided in my undergraduate degree. So I applied to graduate school in physics hoping just to do a master’s but fell in love with physics research and never looked back. When I graduated in 1996, quantitative biophysics was just starting to become a hot topic. Henry Lester, a neuroscientist at Caltech, had an attractive webpage for that time and had an explicit call for theorists and mathematicians. During my postdoc in his lab, I learned to do molecular biology, electrophysiology, and fluorescence imaging. A few years later, JPL started recruiting for the Center for Life Detection, wanting people with precisely those skills to look for traces of life on Mars. It was a perfect combination of engineering, physics, chemistry, and biology. I’m still involved with life-detection research, sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency, and I travel to Arctic Mars-analog sites in Canada.

PT: What motivated you to write this book?

Nadeau: I teach a Molecular Biology Methods intensive summer course—three weeks, five hours a day of gene cloning, protein expression, even a little crystallography and electrophysiology. The students learn a huge amount, but one complaint all of them had was that there was never a good textbook. I tried using some other texts, but none of them were just right, and most had too much theoretical background without discussing the practicalities of how to learn and implement new techniques. The students in my research group also all need to master many of these techniques, and I found myself struggling to put together a background reading package for them. Finally I decided to just put it all together the way I wanted it, and the book was born. I often call the book, “What I Wish My Students All Knew.”

PT: Is the influx of physicists, and are advances in analytical technologies, changing the way biological labs are run and the way conventional lab protocols are followed?

Nadeau: Definitely. Biology used to be essentially observational, with data presented as images, [and] with little quantitative analysis. Physics and physicists are changing what techniques are used, which analytical tools are applied to the data, and how the results are interpreted. I can give you a simple example: a cell labeled with dyes or probes of three different colors. Traditionally, someone imaging this cell would try to pick filters to show each dye at a time and exclude the others. But there is always overlap between channels, the brightness of the probes differs, so it is hard to be quantitative. Now we have hyperspectral imaging techniques that allow us to input the full spectrum of each dye and its quantum yield, and deconvolve [separate] the resulting signal. We can also use analytical techniques to determine whether two dyes tend to colocalize in a cell or to exclude each other. Another aspect that is changing is statistical analysis. The key biology journals are now requiring full descriptions of the statistical techniques and software used and the methods for determining significance. It’s no longer acceptable to average three data points and give a big error bar.

PT: You recently cofounded a publishing company. How long have you been interested and involved in the publishing business, and would you compare and contrast editing and acquiring manuscripts to authoring one?

Nadeau: I’ve always loved books and done a lot of freelance editing, medical writing, and even ghostwriting. Publishing is very different from writing. As an author, your responsibility begins and ends with the manuscript. As a publisher, the manuscript is your starting point. It is a long and convoluted process from manuscript to book: There is formatting and what we still call “typesetting,” though of course no lead is involved, only software. Formatting e-books and print books is very different because of the requirements of e-readers. The book also has to be marketed, distributed, and sold. We are printing all of our fiction, because a lot of people still like to curl up with a novel. For nonfiction, most of it is electronic only, and we’re trying to take advantage of the newest features of e-books in order to make our books searchable and interactive in new ways. For example, we’d like the reader to be able to click on an equation and carry that equation over to a LaTeX editor or a mathematics program such as Mathematica.

PT: What books are you reading at the moment?

Nadeau: The Emperor of All Maladies (HarperCollins, 2010) by Siddhartha Mukherjee, narrative nonfiction about cancer; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown Publishers, 2010) by Rebecca Skloot about the story of HeLa (Henrietta Lacks’s) cells, which touches on various bioethical issues and is a fascinating story; The Demon Under the Microscope (Crown Publishers, 2006) by Thomas Hager, about antibiotics, which, as a side note, talks about how graduate school was invented. And many, many submitted manuscripts! I go through at least two full fiction submissions per week.