When Chantle Swichkow jumps on a zoom call, it is not clear if it connects from the laboratory or its house. She is in her kitchen, but there are clear marks of a scientist at work. A microscope is on the counter on its left, at the top of a stack of thick manuals. A large whiteboard dominates the background, documenting more than a dozen fermentation projects in parallel with their status and their next potential steps.
“I also have a whole small configuration here with sauces and vinegars,” she says, triggering the camera. Its home experiences manage the entire range of fermentation consumables. She bakes bread, kombucha craftsmanship and Kimchi concocts. She also tried to make miso from a type of tortilla chip and create her own fishing rings from fermented fruits.
Like many people, Swichkow’s passion for home fermentation experiences started during locking the COVVI-19 pandemic. At the time, she did her doctorate at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), studying genetics of metabolic diseases in mice.
“I was so used to getting up every day and having laboratory experiences. “I ended up throwing all my experimental anxiety in a leaven of leaven that my husband had given me,” she said.
She became so intrigued by the genetic variation of yeast as her postdoctoral studies at the UCLA, which ended last December, focused on the genetic architecture of yeast-bacteria interactions in fermented environments. She would carry out laboratory research, but also used her expertise – and sometimes yeast – to conduct her own experiences at home as part of a hobby that continued beyond locking.
“One of my favorite projects now is my own personal sourdough starter that I call the Frankenstarter,” she says. “I brought a handful of different leaven that I collected, some in a bakery, some of industrial contexts, in my postdoctoral laboratory, but I have left, and I ended up combining them all together.” (Swichkow notes that it generally did not eat the experiences that come out of the laboratory.)
Chantelle Swichkow has experienced the manufacture of miso with Takis, a type of tortilla chip.Credit: Chantle Swichkow
Bringing work at home does not always consist in making delicious food, and to all scientific disciplines. Virologists cannot bring their specimens back in their door cases, and chemists cannot play with dangerous chemicals at home. But for scientists in certain areas, there are means for scientific knowledge to influence – and improve – hobbies.
Cook
In laboratories, researchers follow the scientific method: questioning the world, making assumptions and testing them accordingly. Swichkow applies a similar setting in the kitchen.
“This is what is the question,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s” Can I make vinegar from this remaining bottle of wine? ” And if I do, “what will it have a taste?” “”
Yvonne Henskens, a biochemist specializing in hemostasia at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, also sees overlap between her laboratory work and home cooking projects. She follows the project management processes with her “experiences” at home producing sourdough, cheese and yogurt. His laboratory is the emphasis on the development of blood tests. But she says that the project management process is identical. “So I say, that day, I have to do it. That day, I have to do it. And then I have a checklist. “
These laboratory control lists and houses can be alike, because the two processes involve exploration, documentation and tests. In the first step, she thinks of new reagents (or ingredients, if she cooks), followed by a review of the literature. In the laboratory, it means looking for the history of tests or reagents, and in the kitchen, it means reading recipes. It then tests the variables, such as time or temperature. Finally, it is the presentation time, either at the clinic or at the dinner table.
Swichkow describes a similar process. “I send things in the same way as labeling cultures in the laboratory,” she explains. “I even got a whole set of laboratory ribbons and pens because I really like this process,” she said. “I keep meticulous notes because, for me, it is reproducibility.”
But flexibility is also essential. According to Henskens, a protocol is important but, in certain circumstances, it can be modified. “I want people to understand what they are doing, follow the protocol, but also divert if necessary,” she said. In certain situations, such as meeting a strange result, the laboratory technician could decide to carry out an additional check, calibrate an instrument or use additional reagents, she adds.
“It’s the same with the recipes,” she says. “You really have to taste and then have the ability to change it.” Take lemon juice or red peppers, which will never taste each time. “Knowledge of the ingredients and their variation, their properties in different cooking techniques makes it possible to deviate from recipes.”
Another outlet for science
Jacob Brejcha also attributes his skills in science to science. The transition of a baccalaureate into chemistry to a master’s degree in chemical engineering in 2021 meant that the time he spent in the laboratory has shrunk. But he channeled his passion for practical experimentation in the kitchen, finding an outlet for skills such as patience and precision, which he had perfected as the first cycle at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
“Many of these reactions take a long time, so if you spoil something, you are probably not going to finish your laboratory work,” explains Brejcha, who is now working as a license at the Purdue Research Foundation, a non -profit institute that promotes entrepreneurship and helps researchers get patents. “Sometimes these pastry projects take several hours, so it is important to be really a stickler to get the right measures.” Other aspects of the scientific method also slip into its kitchen – insulating variables and taking stock of what went wrong to improve the next meal.
A scientific training does not only improve hobby at home – the gardens are also a place where expertise can shine. Conservation biologist Shaun McCoshum at the Westwood Professional Services engineering and survey firm in Odessa, Texas, applied an approach to gardening conservation.
“Conservation is trying to rebalance nature and let things in disorder support the fauna and help these natural systems to continue and clean the damage we have made, either from invasive species, pollution or overall destruction of the habitat,” he explains.
In his garden, he tries to find means for native species, such as Toads, to prosper. And like Brejcha, he uses the scientific method. “I have sandy soils gradients in different pockets, but they all have the same sun exposure, and they all have the same type of vegetation cover,” he explains. “I try to control as many variables as possible to see what floors will support what species.”
Shaun McCoshum collected and weighed monarch butterflies before publishing them as part of his scientific approach at home in gardening.Credit: Shaun McCoshum
Knowledge and scientific skills can also improve other hobbies that take place outside the home. Rosalie Phillips, mechanical engineer from the Agiliti medical crew company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, spends most of her healthy healthy days, a role that requires both computer and physical engineering work. But in recent years, she relied on practical projects outside the works, exploring the world of glass neon. It is supposed to be a creative outlet, but she applies what she learned throughout her education and her career.
“One of the greatest things I take from my day up to date is practical spatial understanding,” she explains. The complex glass tube that keeps the neon in place must often be in delicate and deliberately in shape. “You can rarely fold them in specific order,” explains Phillips. “You have to plan five steps in advance to make sure that nothing confronted with itself.”
Likewise, she said, engineers learn to be meticulous with their projects because if they spoil something, they have to spend several hours when they can try again. “The desire to make sure you measure everything and install everything so that when you do it, you are preparing for success, is definitely learned from mechanical engineering,” she said.