“A smart mother makes often a better diagnosis than a poor doctor.”
– August Bier (1861-1949), German surgeon
I HAD originally intended to share this piece during last month’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
But between business write-ups, responding to reader queries, model-building, running regressions, robustness checks, super heavy back-to-back engagements and family commitments – not to mention the mental gear-shifting that comes with each task – it just didn’t happen.
I also needed time. A chance to revisit old memories. To sift through scattered thoughts.
Most of all, to find the right frame of mind.
Switching between ‘B3’ and ‘P15’ every week isn’t frictionless.
Then came a gentle but persistent nudge from Dr Wong – a gastroenterologist at a hospital here and a colleague of my wife, Jillian – asking if I’d consider writing something for the occasion.
I said yes, of course – though not immediately and certainly not reflexively, as I’d noted in my last column: Saying no is self-respect.
Thankfully, a press holiday last week meant no immediate editorial obligations.
Still, calling it “pause” – a word I now associate less with rest and more with 90-day tariff reprieves, branching scenario trees and worst-case models – wasn’t as simple as it sounded.
The muscle memory lingered.
After a few days, the break gave me what I needed: a clean window to start ‘composing’ again.
So, Wong, here’s what happened.
They don’t tell you beforehand that it will be a choice between having a career in science or starting a family.
That’s the message Jillian heard loud and clear many years ago, in her first job after completing a fellowship in gastroenterology with a focus on hepatology in the United States.
During a routine departmental meeting, a senior specialist announced that pregnant women were a financial drain on the department.
She was sitting visibly pregnant in the front row.
No one said anything.
She took a leave of absence when our first child, Bella, was born.
Three years later, we had a son, Hayek.
That second pregnancy was a surprise, and she worried that taking another leave would sink her career.
So she pressed on.
When Hayek was barely three weeks old, she flew nine hours to a conference with him strapped to her chest.
Before delivering her talk, she made a lame joke that the audience should forgive any “brain fog”.
Afterward, an older woman pulled her aside and said that being self-deprecating in public was a disservice to female doctors.
It felt like an impossible choice: to be a bad doctor or a bad mother.
The data suggests she wasn’t alone in feeling those pressures.
A 2019 study by Emory University found that more than 40 per cent of female physicians leave full-time clinical practice after their first child.
By 2016, men still held about 70 per cent of all hospital-based medical positions worldwide.
Especially for field researchers, who collect data in remote and sometimes perilous locations, motherhood can feel at odds with a scientific career.
How did she respond to the challenge?
Through an act of academic defiance that mirrored my own.
She began bringing kids on her scientific expeditions, a move I quietly applauded.
For the first time, she seemed to grasp what I’d been up against all these years: the slow, quiet way people diminish you – not for what you do, but for who you are.
I knew there would come a day she couldn’t outrun it.
And when it arrived, she’d pay – not in the language of blame, but in the simple currency of consequence.
This is the price of progress.
It’s a form of rebellion that is available to mothers not just in the sciences but also in other disciplines that require site visits and fieldwork, such as architecture and journalism.
Bringing kids to work with you doesn’t have to be something you do only once a year.
It started for her as a simple necessity.
When Hayek was just under two and Bella not yet five, she took them on an expedition to the base of Mount Kenya in Africa, to study how fungi help trees defend themselves against the elephants and giraffes who feed on them – a unique biological model offering potential insights into the evolutionary strategies hepatitis viruses employ to evade the human immune system.
Hayek was still nursing, and she didn’t want to stop working.
I came along to stay with them at base camp.
As time went on, she began to embrace the decision to bring us on her expeditions, not as an exigency of parenting but as a kind of feminist act.
When meeting other male researchers in the field, the reaction was typically the same: they assumed I was leading the expedition.
It was mildly amusing.
Perhaps it was the name – “Medecci” does have a vaguely doctor-ish ring to it.
Or maybe the clipboard and pen gave me away as someone in charge.
I’d smile, correct them gently, and make it clear I was there in a supporting role – Jillian was the one running the show.
Once the facts were established, researchers were supportive and even willing to lend a hand.
Looking back at those expeditions now – after more than a dozen, in far-flung areas around the continent – she understands that bringing them into the field was more than a rebellion: our presence on those trips also changed the way she did science, and for the better.
She started tasting soils in the field – a technique she now uses to notice subtle differences across ecosystems – only after seeing our kids eat dirt.
Children have an uncanny ability to make local friends quickly; many of those new friends have led Jillian to obscure terrain and hidden fungal oases that she otherwise would never have come across.
And our kids’ naïve minds routinely force her to rethink old assumptions by asking questions that are simultaneously absurd and profound.
Can you taste clouds?
Do fungi dream?
How loud are our footsteps underground?
What can feel like an inconvenience is often a blessing in disguise.
Children force the patience that scientific discovery demands.
A year later, we travelled to Lesotho, in southern Africa.
Collecting fungi in such a rugged landscape required horses, guides and months of precise planning.
But Bella caught the flu.
Rather than mapping underground fungal life, we spent the week in a hut in a highland village with no running water or electricity, eating fermented sorghum.
As the days ticked by, Jillian began to panic, thinking of the fungi that would remain unsampled.
But one morning, as Bella’s health improved, we were invited to cross a small mountain pass on horses.
The local herder allowed Jillian to collect dark soil among the agricultural ruins of his ancestral village.
It was a type of soil she had never seen – with fungi that would have remained undescribed had we stayed on track.
Thank you, chaos; thank you, kids.
Bringing children with us continues to challenge expectations, and that’s exactly the whole reason.
In the summer, we embarked on an expedition in Italy to study fungi exposed to extreme heat and wildfire.
Hiking across mountains with kids was hard, and made even more arduous because a documentary film crew followed us.
As we wrangled fungi in burn sites, the cameraman strategically positioned her for shots without kids, presumably so the footage would look more “professional”.
Female researchers are right to fear being seen as unprofessional.
How they talk and how they dress are constantly under scrutiny.
Any deviation from that standard is often considered suspect.
The primatologist, Jane Goodall, famously placed her young son in a cage so that he could safely join her in the field, and it is still a point of controversy, decades later.
At its core, feminism is about having the power to choose.
For female researchers, this means having the ability to bring children into the field – or the full support to leave them at home.
The pressure is acute because women on scientific teams are significantly less likely than men to be credited with authorship.
So for her, it is crucial to keep collecting data with her own hands.
What do our kids make of all this?
It’s complicated.
They both love and hate our expeditions.
Frustrated by a grueling day of fieldwork, my teenage daughter screamed at her mother, “You love science more than you love me!”
At that moment, she – like so much of the scientific world – believed that the decision was binary: science or family.
But by taking them into the field, Jillian is relentlessly affirming that she won’t make that choice.
They won’t make that choice either: just last month, Bella and her classmates launched a school science project on soil fungi.
We are taught that good science requires detachment.
But what if being a mother – with all the attachments that entails – allows you to explore different but equally fruitful scientific narratives?
Last February, an article by the editor who oversees the Science journals argued that researchers should not be afraid to acknowledge their humanity.
We should take that sound advice a step further and challenge the ideal of detachment.
Perhaps by exposing our vulnerabilities – such as the children we are raising – we can change the system.
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at med.akilis@gmail.com
