Episode 2: Brian Spurlock

Brian Spurlock on navigating the intersections of religion, queerness, neurodivergence and science.

About Brian

Raised a fundamentalist Christian, Brian Spurlock came to understand their queerness and neurodivergence through a love of science, going on to found a Queer STEM Writing Group. This episode takes a thoughtful look at the intersections and tensions of religion, queerness, neurodivergence and science through the story of a biomedical scientist.

Brian is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States, studying mitochondrial structure and function over the course of cardiac reprogramming and ageing. They participated in the eLife Ambassadors 2022 cohort.

Transcript:

Intro (Milly McConnell): Welcome to eLife Community Voices, the podcast shining a spotlight on the remarkable individuals behind research. Join us each episode as we feature personal stories that reflect the changing culture of research. We're here to shed light on the remarkable achievements and challenges faced by those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of knowledge.

Godwyns Onwuchekwa: Welcome to another episode of eLife Community Voices and thank you for joining us. My name is Godwyns Onwuchekwa. I am the Head of Communities at eLife and I am your host for this episode.

My guest today is Brian Spurlock, a postdoctoral researcher in the Chen lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying cardiac narrative medicine. They were born and mostly raised in Mississippi in the US, and completed their undergraduate training at the University of Mississippi, and their PhD at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 

Outside of research, they are passionate about comedy, science communication and the history of the early church. They have written pieces for the magazine, Hot Potato News, and Society Blog about how their queerness interacts with their career, and have an upcoming piece for the Voices of Academia blog about their ADHD diagnosis and how it impacts their work. 

As an eLife Ambassador, they started the Queer Science Writing Group on discord to be a place where queer people in STEM fields can find community and discuss their works in progress. They also played a reporter in an episode of the Canadian reality TV series, Mississippi Snake Grabbers. They live in Greensboro, North Carolina, with their compositionist husband, Sam, and too many cats to count.

So, Brian, tell me a bit more about yourself, apart from all this going on.

Brian Spurlock: So yeah, I'm Brian. I am a fourth-year postdoc. I just started my fourth year a couple weeks ago in the Chen lab at UNC Chapel Hill. I study how mitochondria help regulate acquisition of cardiomyocyte cell fate. In mammalian hearts, the cells that you lose after an ischemic event like a heart attack don't grow back, and so our lab studies turning the cells that move into that injured area to populate it with scar tissue to keep the structure of the heart together. And we turn those into functional cardiomyocytes to help people after a cardiac injury recover cardiac function and hopefully not go into heart failure. And I look specifically at mitochondria during that process.

Godwyns: This sounds all very interesting. Is there anything that inspired or motivated you towards this particular field?

Brian: Yes. So it all started when I was a junior in high school, and I was having religious trauma, as you do, and I read Francis Collins – the former director of the NIH – I read his book, The Language of God, and it's all about how he is a theistic evolutionist. He is a committed Christian who doesn't see any conflict between Darwinian evolution and natural selection and the Bible. But I was fascinated by this appendix that he had in the book about therapeutic cloning. It's an appendix on bioethics, and as part of the bioethics chat, he talks about therapeutic cloning, and specifically he was talking about the kind they did for Dolly – somatic cell nuclear transfer. And Dolly the sheep, I should clarify for anyone who doesn't know, the first cloned mammal. So he was talking about potential applications for somatic cell nuclear transfer in medicine and I was utterly fascinated. It didn't take me long to decide this is what I want to study, this is what I want to do with my life. And so I studied biology and chemistry in undergrad in grad school, I did a couple of regenerative medicine projects, but it was mostly cancer focused with still mitochondria as my driving motivation, and getting on that track was about the mentor I chose more than anything else, but I'm so glad that I did because there's so much interesting stuff to look at with the mitochondria. Finally, in my postdoc, I joined the Regenerative Medicine Lab, a lab that I had long admired and respected – I've been reading Lee's research for years, so I'm living out my high school self's dream, I guess.

Godwyns: So that's good. You used the word – you were having religious drama. I'm assuming that is not just only about science and regenerating cells and all of that. There must be other aspects to it, especially at that young age, that resulted in that religious drama.

Brian: Yeah, it is a sort of long journey from there to here, so it's sometimes hard to put myself back in that place, but I realised from a fairly young age that I was queer – I identify as gay – and that was not really something you could be in my church family growing up. And because I loved the people and the faith so much, I thought that I had to find a way to fix myself, to make myself straight or to just hide that part of me and cut it off.

I spent years and years praying about it, trying different things to get it under control, and then, sort of separately from that, I started learning about the natural world, and it didn't line up with what I was taught in Sunday school, you know, which I think is more a failure of imagination on the part of the younger creationist set than it is anything else. But I was reading about it because I was starting to think, you know, I like the science stuff, and maybe I want to do that with my life and, if I do that with my life, I pretty much have to accept that Darwinian evolution is what's happening.

And so that put me on the Francis Collins book, and eventually I read a whole bunch of religious books – a lot of C.S. Lewis, a lot of Karen Armstrong – trying to find a way to be a committed,  like, even at the time, I was committed to being a fundamentalist Christian while having these other seemingly competing ideas in my head, like my budding queerness and love of science.

I don't want to say that it was learning more that caused me to ultimately leave the faith, because there are very smart people, smarter than me, who are committed Christians and sincerely believe in some version of the truth of the Bible. I don't want to denigrate that at all, I just, at some point in college, realised that I had stopped believing in the literal, the more miraculous parts of it. It happened to me by accident. I was reading Karen Armstrong's biography of the Bible one day, and she made a point about the nature of Jesus in the Bible. And in my head I was like, well, that's obviously not true. And then I was like, whoa, whoa, when did that happen? I formed a sort of new system of beliefs that my church family growing up would not recognise as Christian, and I accept that, but it was very hard. I don't want to understate that because this was life or death.

Godwyns: So those conflicting thoughts and discoveries and actualisation of your belief system, your thought process, your personality, they converged in science in a way because you were looking for a different way or an answer to some of these things. Is that the right way to put it?

Brian: I think so, yeah. I had two really well-formed ideas in my head. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but – and I had always been, I mean honestly taught in Sunday school to ask questions and look for the truth. My church wasn't a church that shied away from doubt. They just sort of expected that if you started doubting, you'd eventually come back home. And I didn't exactly. But I did embrace that and really looked for what I thought the answers were, which is, I guess, both a testament to my love of learning and, maybe on some level, even my love of empiricism, but also a testament to how I was trained and taught, even in that environment that became more and more hostile as I was drifting further and further away from their conclusions.

Godwyns: Of course, if you're drifting away from the laid-down rules, it usually never goes well, I would assume. But you know, the first time I met you, the first time I encountered you in a meeting, it was to discuss some things to do with LGBTQ interest and, you know, what came across was the menu that you have – very sensitive, very caring personality but, at the same time, you sound like an activist, someone who is quite bold and very ready to challenge norms. So it makes me want to ask you, how do you make it look so easy as an activist, you know, challenging things while remaining so calm?

Brian: I really appreciate that that's how I come across. I actively try to give that demeanor to the world, and I'm glad that it is, at least on some level, working. I don't know in terms of activism how effective I am, exactly. But I grew up having really strong opinions – a lot of black and white thinking, which I think is somewhat related to neurodivergence, but I still have very strong opinions and what I've done is, with age, I've learned to not be as aggressive about it: very calmly state what my opinion is and why. And I think neurodivergence helps me with that too, because it takes me a while to react to something that people say. I have to hear it and then listen to it after I hear it. And so I don't give my first reaction very often when I respond to a question or something – it's my second or third impulse, rather than my first impulse, and I think that helps me be gentler about how I talk about things. Maybe? I don't know if that answers your question.

Godwyns: No, it does. You know, I think riding on the notion that sometimes activists can be quite forceful in the way they put things or talk about things, but obviously you are not, it doesn't mean that all activists are very forceful, but for someone who finds themself in an environment where they have to constantly, maybe, challenge others to recognise their difference, you know, you've mentioned that you're neurodivergent and what that goes with, and the fact that, because of that, you sometimes have to listen twice, perhaps just within yourself. So it makes me think, when you find yourself mostly in an environment where conformity and tradition are the rules, how do you manage it, especially within academia, where everyone needs to have certain ways to do things and sometimes ignore the person that focused on the subject? How do you manage to thrive within this environment?

Brian: There have only been a few times that I have felt like, in interacting with others, my visible queerness or my idiosyncrasies were damaging those interactions, which is not on me, obviously – that's attitudes of whoever I'm interacting with – but it hasn't happened very often. I've had a lot of really supportive people around me in my scientific career, which has been nice, but I do think that this is maybe true for everyone: there are times when I tone it up and tone it down, times when I dress a little more conservatively and take out the earrings and maybe take off the pride lanyard, especially at conferences and stuff where I don't know anyone, I can be a little more reserved. And then there's sometimes where it's better to know up front if they have a problem with me, so I just put it out there. That way, the only people I'm interacting with are the people that don't have the problem because other people avoid me.

Godwyns: That's true. I can relate to that. It's sort of a pragmatic way to engage with other people. Sometimes you have to determine what is the priority and how you go about it.

Tell me a bit more about how these things inspire you, or, you talked about – you used a particular phrase, saying it could be damaging to others. Are there any demotivators as a scientist, or are there any inspirations as a scientist, when you think of your life broadly, the different aspects of it, how they fit in? How do you weigh it?

Brian: I've always thought of myself as curious, but I do think that having something internally challenge my entire worldview, like realising that I was gay and that that was incompatible with the version of Christianity that I believed in, made me a lot more open to asking questions, and I do think that that's had an impact on my career choices and my research.

I think that what draws me specifically to regenerative medicine is that these cells that I'm trying to change, they're, you know, they're terminally differentiated. They're supposed to be fixed. But somebody ten years ago asked the question, well, what if they're not just that simple and figured out that there's a lot more plasticity than had initially been the consensus. And I think that there's something very queer in that, maybe capital Q queer as in queer theory, more so than queerness as it's more colloquially understood.

But I do think that, on a fundamental level, queerness is about challenge. It's about challenging binary. It's about challenging consensuses. And I think that because I had to challenge my worldview in myself through circumstances that were nowhere in my control, I am a lot freer, I think, to challenge things that other people take for granted. I think that's been really helpful for me in my career.

In terms of demotivators, I'm not always great at talking to people. And that's weird because I agreed to come on a podcast and have a conversation with you, but I think people find me a lot often. For a long time, I felt like I was struggling to be taken seriously in academia. There's less of that now. Lee is a fantastic boss, and the people that I've met at these conferences, the more heart-centered conferences that I've gone to, have been mostly kind, but I always feel like I am saying one weird thing away from people just sort of turning me off in their brains.

Godwyns: Yeah, I mean, awkward moments happen. You know, there's always that point when someone feels that they are not in the right place or something similar, you know. Some people call it imposter syndrome, but it happens to most people, from what we know these days, that people speak out about mental health and all of that, there's always the niggling idea at the back of someone's mind, whether they are saying the right things or at the right place and all of that. So, when I was in the US in May, we met up for lunch – thank you for that – it was interesting to, you know, chat with you face to face for the first time and listen to you and talk about your ideas and your aspirations. If I circle back to what you were discussing about feeling out of place in academia, what keeps you pushing on?

Brian: First, our lunch was a lot of fun and I'm really glad we did it, and thanks for inviting me and thinking of me when you came over here. 

I think that when I am at my lowest, what keeps me going is this is how I'm earning my paycheck. But I think that, in a bigger sense, the thing that drives me is kind of that 16, 17 year old kid who was terrified and just starting to sort of learn about life and about what life could be outside of the box I had put myself in growing up. And I think that passion that I discovered reading that appendix and the Francis Collins book, it's still alive, very much. I want to honour it. I don't find passions very often. I find hyper fixations very often, but genuine passions is rarer for me, and so developing that so young, I just, I don't know, I stuck with it and I am sticking with it, even if I don't end up as a PI or whatever, I'm potentially interested in working for a journal, even like a scicomm magazine. I think even in those spaces, the passion is what will drive me, like reading other people's research, hopefully helping them make it better, helping them communicate it to other people – I think those are things that I'm good at and they all sort of evolved out of a kid reading a book.

Godwyns: That's true. Now that you talked about, you know, helping and supporting other people, it takes me back to pick on something that we mentioned earlier during your introduction about setting up the Queer Science Writing Club, which I know, when you started doing that, how much dedication and commitment you put into it, just to provide a platform for other people to be able to find support. So a peer support group, essentially through writing and some other people contributing to, or helping them look at their work. Do you mind if I ask you how that is going now?

Brian: Not at all. It's not super active yet. The team that I put together to sort of moderate the discussions and everything, we are working to make sure that, when people join, there's already an established community of people chatting and we have our monthly meetings, but we just don't have the membership right now for it to really be self-sustaining, but I think we're working on it, I think we'll get there.

But really, the idea was born out of knowing a lot of fiction writers who are dedicated, published writers, and they talk to me about how important their writing groups were to getting their writing up to the level it needed to be to get it out to other people. And I think that people who have family, who have done grad school, for instance, or were born into a sort of community of scholars – they just sort of naturally set up these groups for themselves within academia and the sciences, even, where they send their work to a close friend to get their take on it, and then another close friend and that sort of thing. And they have a community of people who can go through and tell them, “hey, maybe you should shore this up a little bit” and I realised that I didn't have anything that fit that, really. I have friends who look over my work and they're fantastic, but it's not the same as having a group where everyone there is invested in improving their work. I wanted to target specifically queer people because I've gotten feedback before that I thought was, for lack of a better word, homophobic. And I just wanted a community of queer people to be able to, like, go through each other's writing or presentations and make comments and give feedback, and so we're all helping each other to be the best communicators we can be, which helps in careers for getting grants or getting papers published. And I think it has the potential to do a lot of good. We've helped each other a lot in our writing. We helped somebody with his oral presentation and he ended up winning an award, so that felt really good. And the ideas were like a completely supportive community and we're not going to be judgy or unpleasant, we're just going to say, “hey, this would maybe work better for what you're going for.” 

You mentioned in the introduction how much I like learning about the early church. I've been reading a monograph called ‘The Origins of Early Christian Literature’ by Robin Walsh, and she is making an interesting argument that essentially the best way to understand about the people who wrote specifically the synoptic Gospels, is to understand how writing communities worked in 1st and 2nd century Palestine basically to get anything published enough that it could last for 2,000 years. There are enough copies that one of them is likely to survive. You had to be part of a community of people exactly like I'm talking about, who had the sort of contacts and apparatus that you needed to, first of all, get your writing to be the best it could be and then get it out to other people in a sort of networking group. It sounds kind of like peer review, honestly, but it's sort of the same people every time, going back and forth with each other's work before putting it out. I just think it's so obviously such a good way to write that people have independently invented it multiple times. 

I really hope that this community can be helpful to people. I think it's entirely possible that it could become something like that, where this is a community that we all go through everybody's work and help it be the best it can, and then we help each other, even outside of the actual composition process, and introduce people to people, or mentor, or that sort of actual community. That was a lot of talking, but that's sort of my vision for the writing group.

Godwyns: You’re a very thoughtful speaker. To a large extent – although you started answering that question by saying you're not sure it's been successful or something like that – to a very large extent, it's actually achieved some things. Although you're still in the foundation-laying process, you've gone on to support some people, including the person you mentioned about their oral presentation – congratulations to them and to your group for supporting them through that. Incidentally, it's going to produce more things, but, you know, results – as you probably know, being someone who is conducting research studies all the time – results or achieving something all the time is not the only way we can show results. Sometimes we put some foundational blocks for others to come along and build on it. It might not be in the same place, but it could be in other ways. So you have started that – incubated that group. Whether it turns out to exactly what you dreamed about is not the eternal result, and I hope you take pride in what you've achieved with that.

Brian: Definitely. I'm really proud of the small community we've built, and I think we support each other. I hope it grows and becomes something that can sustain itself over a long period of time. But yeah, I'm really happy with what we've built and the work we're doing or trying to do.

Godwyns: You know, we started this discussion earlier, talking about how you ended up or why you ended up in science and the particular field you chose to pursue, which is the regenerative medicine aspect. And it seems that, in my viewpoint, you're someone who takes adversities and turns them into – should I use the scientific word? – reproducible ideas and pursuits and ambition. Would I be wrong in concluding that?

Brian: I think that's right. I mean, part of it is I tend to say yes to most things, and that's been really helpful throughout my life. I've gotten to do some really cool stuff, like be on that reality TV show. But yeah, I think that, not to be too precious about it, but challenges are opportunities. You hit a hurdle that opens choices that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise. You can go over the hurdle or under the hurdle or around the hurdle, or maybe you can knock the hurdle down, but it forces you to stop and think about what to do next, and I think that can be really helpful going through life. Not that I want everyone to have problems all the time, but I do think that something about facing a challenge is you have to stop and think about what you're doing, and you may not do that as often if you're going through life without any sort of challenge at all.

Godwyns: Yeah, absolutely. We've talked about your teenage years, when you had the formative ideas and wanted to find answers to things that were troubling you, which started with – I quite like using your word – religious drama, but it led you into science. And in the introduction, during our chats over the period, we've talked about you as a queer person, a married man with your husband and your innumerable cats, and of course, someone who is being diagnosed with ADHD as well, as we talked about earlier. So, it makes me ask, you know, that is the true human being – there are various or many facets of individuals, but you've embraced all of yours. So, this pluralistic person, that is you, how is it today? How is it functioning today? How are you? How do you thrive? How do you make it work? You know, be all of these Brian's, if I can use that term, and still be your fabulous self and still be the scientist you are? And you did mention, you know, you're forming a writer's group, so you're also a writer, you are an actor. So, how does it all work? Revolve around each other? Time management, this and that, interest?

Brian: ADHD really helps and hurts. It's a double-edged sword in that, if I'm really interested in something, it's easy for me to just work on it ‘til it's done. I just sit down and knock it out, and that's been kind of the case for the science communication pieces I've written and, to some extent, for my actual research as well. I can manage to get myself to get in the zone or whatever. I think that's really helpful for getting things done. I had a boss once who said that if you were half as productive all the time as you are before a deadline, you'd be a world-class scientist. Which is probably fair, but I still, even with medication, have a lot of trouble with focus and setting my priorities. So my boss has helped me put some structures in place to address that. I have another lab mate that I work very closely with, and then Lee and I meet regularly, and I set daily and weekly goals and that sort of sort of thing.

I don't want to say that I have it figured out exactly, because I'm pretty bad at time management usually, and I will often spend hours on something that I know isn't the priority, but it's just what my brain has decided: this is what we're doing today because it's got to get done now. And so I don't know that I always put enough of myself into each of the different versions of me. I don't know that I'm always the best husband or the best visibly queer person, or the best scientist, or the best, you name it. But I have a lot of interests and I have the willpower to try to pursue them, and I haven't completely destroyed my career, my life, yet, so hopefully I'm doing all right.

Godwyns: Of course. You know, a lot of groups have formed recently for various underrepresented communities and individuals within science – let's keep it there for now – you know, there is the Queer STEM, black and neuro and all of those sort of groups. From your perspective – of course you're not speaking for everyone – but from your perspective, within academia, how does a queer person and a gay person, a neurodivergent person, thrive? Does it require more work?

Brian: I think it is improving for someone like me. I identify as non-binary, but I read as male to people and there aren't any pronouns or anything that really bother me when other people use them. So I read as male, I function as male. Even though I am visibly queer, people can still sort of expand their box a little bit to get their head around me. And so I think that even my ability to be very out and wear obviously outrageous things, obviously signaling my queerness, is a testament to how far we've come. In the US, I wasn't even allowed to get married until 2015, you know? So I would not have been brave enough to be out, I think, 15 years ago. I certainly wasn't. I didn't come out until later. But I think that the world has materially changed for us in that way, which has been cool. You know, we're seeing a sort of backlash to that now that I think it's going to catch all of us, but right now it's particularly aimed at trans people in our community and people who defy gender in bigger ways than I ever do.

It's never been easy to a) get a job, b) be taken seriously when you're visibly queer at all, but particularly when it challenges somebody’s rooted sense of truth, even if they only have that sense because they've never really thought about it. And I think that all of the trans people that I know in STEM have faced hostile mentors, hostile lab mates, hostility from reviewers, and I think that that is actually getting worse instead of better and that terrifies me. 

But as far as what we can do to make it better, I think that those communities you talked about – black and neuro, pride in STEM – I think they speak to what I was talking about with my writing group – that they are community, and there are support structures within these communities that help to mitigate the pressures from outside. And they're not perfect and they can't fix everything, but they're really important, I think, in keeping it possible for queer people to do the work of science and be taken seriously, have their work seen and read and discussed. And on top of that, structurally having more explicit support for particular needs of specific communities, if that makes sense. Like the National Institutes of Health in the US offers grants that are specifically for minoritised communities and underrepresented communities, and I think that can be beneficial. But it's also just little things like UAB – the Student Health Center didn't have an apparatus set up where I could get some of the vaccines that are recommended for men who have sex with men. And it was easy enough for me to just go to the health department, but I think things like that – where you find out that your university didn't really think about you when they were setting up policy and protocols and stuff – they're disheartening. Even though that was a fairly simple example, you'll occasionally run into something and it’s like, “Oh, I was not considered in this at all, which is fine, I don't need to be the center of the universe. But, um…” 

And so I think that just having the role, right, of these departments of diversity, equity and inclusion or however you want to parse it, is supposed to be to think about those things before they become an issue for a student or an employee. And now that those groups are under attack – open, sustained attack – it makes it harder to get out ahead of anything. Everything is just sort of politicised and gamified, I think, because once you decide that DEI groups are on the other team, you can disregard anything they say rather than, ideally, we would be listening to each other and trying to understand where everyone's coming from. Does that make sense?

Godwyns: It does. Yes, it does make sense, of course. I think it's sort of full circle. You know, you've taken some difficult challenges and turned it into a way to continue to thrive – not only thrive, but figure out ways to support other people in that environment.

Having narrated what you just did now, what do you see, how do you see the future, not for the broader or the entire field or science, but for yourself, where are you going from here? What are your next plans?

Brian: So I have two thoughts that aren't necessarily conflicting, but from pretty early on in my science career, I have wanted to work at a public institution that focuses on undergraduates. I like the idea of teaching undergraduates and spending a lot of time on teaching and still having a lab, but it not being the same publish or perish focus as a med school would maybe be. But those positions are really competitive and so are the med school positions – there just aren't a tonne of jobs in academia that are hatch free. But that's always been my vision because I believe in public school, I believe in training the next generation. But I do like research and I would like to keep doing research. But then my other thing is I love writing, and I think I'm pretty good at writing peer reviews and helping other people improve their work, so I think I'd make a good editor at a journal. So whether doing that as a service component of a career in academia or doing it full time, I think I'd be good at it. And I like the idea.

And so that's sort of where I see myself, just sort of doing smaller but still meaningful research projects, teaching and editing.

And then in terms of things I hope for, for academia in general and for science, I hope that more people experiment with different publishing models like eLife is doing. I have read a lot of criticism of eLife’s new model and a lot of support, but it worries me that people just seem to be fine with existing models and not trying to push the envelope or try something new. I hope people experiment more with what counts as an academic text, even, what do we qualify as academic as opposed to pop and scicomm? I hope there's a lot more experimentation with those models, and I hope that we stop bullying trans people.

Godwyns: Yes, I do hope so too, and I hope more and more people do hope so, especially within academia.

So thank you Brian. It's good to catch up again and have a chat. It's good to listen to you, especially your very well thought out ideas and approach to things. Thank you for your time today, and I look forward to keep on engaging with you and seeing your work as you progress. So yeah, thank you for today.

Brian: Thank you. This has been really cool. It's helped me think about some stuff in real time.

Outro (Milly): That's all for this episode of eLife Community Voices. I hope you've enjoyed it and you'll join us again as we hear more about the human side of science. To stay up to date with our community, you can follow us at eLife Community on Threads and X. Thank you once again to our guest, to the Communities team at eLife, and Neil Whiteside at freedom:ONE for editing this episode. Thank you for listening and see you next time.