Young Scientists 1978

 

The following report was published in the Madras College 150th Anniversary Booklet

Young Scientists of the Year 1979 The Biophysics of Blushing
by Lindsay Patrick Seymour

'Young Scientists of the Year' is an annual competition organised by BBC television and sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The competitors are pupils from British schools who have undertaken some scientific project outwith their normal course of studies. The competition features twelve entries, which are judged by a panel of eminent scientists usually drawn from universities or industry. In particular. Sir George Porter, director of the Royal Institution, has a long standing connection with the programme. As everybody who is anybody knows, the 1979 'Young Scientists of the Year' competition was won by a team of five pupils from Madras College. The project was entitled The Biophysics of Blushing' and presented an attempt to make a scientific study of the phenomenon of human blushing. This embraced a wide variety of activities ranging from organising a questionnaire aimed at discovering the types of situation which people thought would make them blush to designing and constructing electronic systems for detecting blushing in a reliable manner. The team members were Matthew Allen. Andrew Cormack. Angela McClean. Nicola Pyke, and last, but not least, me. Patrick Seymour. The project was supervised by Mr W. J. Reilly. head of the Physics Department at Madras College. What follows is a fairly informal account of the events surrounding the winning of the 'Young Scientists of the Year 1979' competition. I have kept scientific detail to a minimum, so nobody need fear that this article is going to read like a chapter from 'Physics is Fun'.
The Biophysics of Blushing started life as an exhibit at a science fair held in Kirkcaldy in June 1978. At this time the team was much smaller, consisting only of Angela McClean and Nicola Pyke.

As an exhibit, the project was a great success, particularly with groups of school children visiting the fair. One person would be selected to play the 'victim' and would be connected to the equipment so that factors such as his pulse rate could be monitored. His friends would then humiliate and embarrass him us¬ing techniques limited only by the imagination in an attempt to make him blush, in general, the children were more interested in making the victim blush than in whether or not the equipment was able to detect the blushing. However one person who did take a serious interest was Colin Riach. the producer of'Young Scientists of the Year', who was on a sort of talent-spotting trip looking for potential entries. The school subsequently accepted an invitation to enter the Biophysics of Blushing for the competition.

Following this, it became clear that the project was going to be a much larger piece of work than had originally been envisaged, and by October 1978 the sophistication of the equipment had been increased considerably and the team had expanded to five members. The aims of the project had also been ex¬panded, or at least formalised somewhat. The areas of interest were the conditions giving rise to blushing, the physical aspects of blushing, and the possibility oflear-ning to control blushing. A detailed discussion of these issues would be out of place here, however no description of the Biophysics of Blushing would be complete without a brief account of the scientific background and I hope that the following will be of interest.

Research had suggested that very little was known about blushing, the chief reason for this being that skin colour was difficult to measure. Although the physiologist had available to him a wide range of equipment for measuring factors such as skin temperature, perspiration rate, or pulse rate, there was no device which could be used to provide a reliable measure of skin colour. Thus the development of a 'Blush Meter' during the Biophysics of Blushing project opened up possibilities for original research. It was important to relate blushing to existing scientific knowledge which in practical terms meant comparing the blush reaction with reactions which had already been measured and understood. For example, most people are aware that the heart beats faster during periods of anxiety and so it was interesting to see whether or not the blush reaction was accompanied by an increase in heart rate, and. if so, which reaction occurred first. These and other considerations led to the design of an experiment in which a volunteer was connected to devices which provided a constant record of his heart rate, skin temperature, skin colour on the cheek, and perspiration level on the fingers. Perspiration is in fact a very sensitive indicator of anxiety or arousal and is the measure used by many 'lie detectors'. The volunteer answered a standard set of questions, some of which were intended to produce mild embarrassment and possibly blushing. Most of the questions were fairly neutral so as to help the subject to relax between blushes. For example, most people can answer the question. "How many sugar lumps do you take in your tea?" without undue unease. The requirement for embarrassing questions which had a high chance of producing blushing regardless of the age or sex of the subject motivated some research into the types of naturally occurring situation normally associated with blushing. Since the project existed within a school environment, the embarrassing questions had to be chosen very carefully so as not to be personal or likely to cause offence. Ethics apart, insulting somebody so that he got up and walked out with a lot of wires still attached to him could have been an expensive business! With these considerations in mind a questionnaire was organised in an attempt to pinpoint some of the topics which would make Mr Average blush. The questionnaire was distributed to two hundred pupils at Madras College, one hundred and sixty eight of whom were mature enough to take it seriously. One finding was that a lot of people thought they would blush if asked to sing or dance in public. This was confirmed experimentally, and almost everybody we tested showed some kind of embarrassment when asked if they would like to sing "Baa Baa Black Sheep" for instance. The most remarkable thing was that this included members of the school choir who considered themselves to have good voices and who could no doubt sing without inhibition in the choir environment.

The idea of learning to control blushing was based on the principle of 'biofeedback'. This technique has been successfully used to control other physiological functions. For example, few people can directly control their heart rate. However, if someone is attached to an electronic device which emits a "bleep" at each heartbeat, then this extra awareness may make control possible given sufficient practice. Eventually, the skill may be mastered to the extent that the machine is no longer necessary. It was thought possible that this approach might be used to gain control over face colour using suitable equipment. It should be emphasised that the intention was to help people for whom blushing was a severe problem rather than to prevent the man in the street from blushing at all.

By November 1978 much of this research was being put into practice and Madras College pupils were enthusiastically volunteering to be 'wired up' to our equipment. On 28th November 1978 the BBC sent a film crew to the school to make a three minute film of the team in action for use during the programme covering our first round in the competition. The filming was a very tedious business. They started off by taking us out into the town and filming us pacing up and down a narrow lane with high walls. This was intended to convey some kind of sinister atmosphere which, despite being very artistic, seemed totally ir-relevant. After this we returned to the school where the proper part of the film was to be shot. The filming actually took place on the stage, and the previous few days had been spent moving our equipment down from the Physics laboratory and trying to persuade it to work in the new environment. The rest of the morning was spent watching the film crew trying to get the lighting adjusted to their satisfaction aided and abetted by an inarticulate young man from the BBC studios in Glasgow. Meanwhile the trendy young female film director and her not-so-trendy director's assistant had wandered off into the town to look for haggises. By afternoon the technical problems had been resolved and filming began in earnest. This consisted of filming the team members demonstrating the various pieces of equipment in use at that time and this apparently simple procedure took until about eight o' clock in the evening to complete.

After this we had three weeks left before the recording of the first round itself. Most of this time was spent in the laboratory embarrassing further subjects and producing the detailed project report which was required for submission to the competition judges.

The first round of 'Young Scientists of the Year 1979' was recorded at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham on 19 December 1978. The other teams were from Burford School and Worksop College. The Burford School project was on animated road signs. The pictures on these road signs appeared to change as you moved towards them. For example, the normal 'men at work' road sign could be replaced by one in which the man actually raised and lowered his shovel. It was hoped that this mechanism could be used to make road signs which were more likely to attract the attention of road users than those in general use. The team made the interesting point that at the extremities of vision the human eye is in fact only capable of detecting objects which move. This project was the winner of the 'Young Engineer of the Year' competition and had received a great deal of interest and publicity. It was good to see this technique for producing moving pictures being applied to something more worthwhile than the animated pictures of Mickey Mouse which one used to find inside boxes of breakfast cereal.

The Worksop College team had been working on an electronic fuse. As every good handyman knows, a fuse is generally a small tubular object which lives inside a plug and which gives rise to extreme irritation when it blows. While this type of fuse is perfectly satisfactory for protecting domestic appliances such as lights or electric carving knives, there are problems with some types of delicate scientific equipment due to the damage which can occur during the fraction of a second between a fault developing and the fuse actually breaking the circuit. In some cases the problem can be solved by using special 'fast blow' fuses which operate faster than normal fuses and are correspondingly more expensive. However, even these can be too slow. The only truly satisfactory solution to the problem is to use an electronic fuse. This device is itself a piece of electronic equipment. It monitors the power being supplied to the equipment to be protected and disconnects the power as soon as a fault occurs. Thus the effect is the same as that of a conventional fuse although the operation is much faster since the speed depends on the switching action of electronic components rather than on a mechanical effect like the melting of a piece of fuse wire. The electronic fuse also has the advantage of being reusable since it is not itself destroyed in the course of protecting the equipment.

The team from Worksop College had come up with an original design for an electronic fuse which they hoped to patent. There was also some possibility of the design being commercially manufactured.

The afternoon before the day of the recording was spent setting up our equipment in the studio. Each team had been allocated a sort of booth at the side of the studio for this purpose. In fact the studio we were in was the one used for the popular television series. "All Creatures Great and Small", or "Animals" as it was called in the trade. The following morning was spent discussing the projects with the judges. The judges for this round were Professor Sir George Porter, Dr Colin Blakemore. and Professor Eric Ash. They visited the booths on a rotational basis until all three of them had had the pleasure of grilling each team. As far as I know, the winner was decided on the basis of these sessions in the morning and also the project reports submitted by the teams rather than by the interviews recorded during the programme itself. The afternoon was devoted to a rehearsal or 'stag' of the whole programme, apart from the bit at the end where the winners were to be announced. As with the original filming the emphasis seemed to be on sitting around doing nothing while people mumbled television jargon at each other. Nevertheless, it gave us our first real indication of what the finished programme would be like. The programme started with the presenter. John Tidmarsh. introducing the judges and the teams. Following this, the three teams were dealt with in turn. For each team this involved the showing of the film shot at the team's school followed by an interview with the judges. Finally, the judges were required to give an assessment of each entry and to announce the scores As mentioned earlier, this final stage of the programme was not included in the rehearsal. One positive thing was the discovery that 'being on television' was a lot easier than I had imagined. The interview with the judges, which had loomed large in my mind, turned out to be a relatively painless business since, as soon as you started to speak, your mind became fully occupied with the question you were trying to answer and the cameras around you paled into insignificance. That having been said, I found that I was extremely sell-conscious whenever I was not talking. In fad simple things such as walking from our table to the middle of the studio prior to being interviewed by the judges suddenly became major hurdles when you started to wonder whether or not you would be able to walk in a dignified manner and sit down without looking clumsy. The studio audience started to arrive in the late afternoon. This consisted of crowds of enthusiastic pupils from the three schools taking part in the com-petition. Through my preoccupation with the scientific aspects of the project during the weeks leading up to the competition I had never really absorbed the fact that a group of people from Madras College was being carted all the way down to Birmingham for the occasion, and I was quite surprised when the studio started to fill up with familiar faces. The recording of the programme itself was very similar to the rehearsal in most respects, the main differences being the presence of the studio audience and the welcome news that we had won. The marks out of one hundred were 76 for Madras College. 67 for Burford School, and 60 for Worksop College. After that it was time to pack up and go home. On the bus back someone, who will remain nameless, gave me a drink of 'orange' which turned out to have been diluted using vodka instead of water and my memories of the event are hazy after that point.

Having refused to believe that we were capable of winning. I had been assuming that the project would terminate at this point. Instead we found ourselves faced with preparing for the final which was to be recorded on 2nd and 3rd February 1979. This left only three weeks after the end of the Christmas vacation. There was no shortage of things to be done since much of the equipment had room for improvement. Amongst tin-new activities undertaken was the construction of a new Blush Meter. With so little time remaining it became necessary for the members of the team to start missing increasingly large numbers of their normal classes in order to find time to work on the project. Some pupils and teachers seemed to view this as a sophisticated form of "sciving". In fact this was far from the case, and I actually used to look forward to the classes I was able to attend since they represented positive relaxation compared with the frantic struggle to make progress with the project. As well as conducting further experiments, we produced a supplement to the original project report which in some cases seemed to involve writing about things virtually before they had been done. Those three weeks slipped by very quickly and we were back on the road to Birmingham almost before we knew it.

I shall refrain from reproducing the four thousand word account of the recording of the final which dwarfs everything else in my 1979 diary. The event was very similar to our first round in most respects except that there were four entries instead of three and there was much more tension throughout. The other finalists were from Poltair School. Castle School, and Bertram Ramsay School.

The Poltair School project was on the Taxonomy of Sponges. This involved cataloguing and generally investigating the large number of different species of sponge to be found on the sea bed near their home town in Cornwall. They had done this in a very methodical manner and had made a genuine contribution to this area of science since it seemed that very little work had been done previously towards cataloguing the sponges to be found in British waters.

Castle School had been investigating Cows' Diet. The project team consisted of two identical twin sisters who lived on a farm, providing easy access to cows. The project was essentially an exercise in chemistry. The diet of cows is important not only in relation to cow welfare, but also because of the importance to farm economics. The sisters were duly nicknamed the 'Cowgirls'. (Or perhaps it was 'Cow Girls'. I am not sure which is least inappropriate.)

The team from Bertram Ramsay School had developed an electronic aid for a handicapped child. The system enabled a handicapped person who did not have the physical co-ordination required for writing or using a typewriter to print messages via a computer. The computer displayed a table of the letters and other symbols which could be printed, and the user selected a particular letter using some simple action such as striking a metal plate with one hand at the correct moments. Messages were built up by selecting the required letters in sequence. The system could be modified to suit people with other disabilities who found arm movement too difficult. This project had a clear emotional appeal and showed imaginative use of a computer.

The judges for the final were as for the first round with the addition of Professor Aubrey Manning. I found it much less easy to keep calm than I had in the first round, and spent the afternoon before the recording feeling extremely sick having eaten too much for lunch in the canteen. The recording was punctuated with the usual stops and starts and continual cursing of the video tape recorder or 'VTR' which seemed to be responsible for most of the trouble. The biggest hitch came when they were about to announce the scores and we had to sweat it out for about half an hour while they put things right. Of course it was worth it in the end. The marks out of one hundred were 84 for Madras College. 80 for Poltair School. 71 for Castle School, and 71 for Bertram Ramsay School. As winners, we were presented with the Young Scientists' Trophy. The trophy took the form of a transparent case containing a coil of wire which had been used by the physicist Michael Faraday (1791 — 1867) who discovered many important electrical and magnetic phenomena. The trophy was retained by Madras College for one year, after which it had to be returned for the 1980 competition. The school also received a prize of £200 to assist further scientific endeavour.

That concluded the direct involvement with 'Young Scientists of the Year 1979'. However, the project persisted in one form or another for quite some time. The programmes were transmitted in due course, starting with our first round which was screened on Sunday 25th February 1979. I found that watching myself on television was much less dramatic than I had anticipated and I was totally unable to identify with the image of myself on the screen. The final was shown four weeks later on Sunday 25th March 1979 before an estimated audience of six million, a thought which I found fairly sobering.

The transmission of the programmes aroused a great deal of interest in the scientific world. As mentioned earlier, the Blush Meter seemed to perform a function not available from commercial physiological equipment, and the school started to receive inquiries about

the device and the project in general from all over the world. We also received letters from people for whom blushing was a severe social problem. Sadly, some of these individuals seemed to think that we had invented some kind of magic cure for blushing which would rid them of their problems overnight. One reason for such misconceptions may have been the coverage of the project by the press, which tended to be less-than-accurate. Our contact with the newspaper world reached a climax on Friday 23 March 1979 when we held a press conference prior to the transmission of the final. As well as being interviewed and posing for some extremely silly photographs in the quadrangle, we distributed a press handout. I had written this handout during the previous few weeks in the hope that supplying the journalists with clear and ac-curate information would encourage them to write clear and accurate articles. A bit naive perhaps but it seemed worth a try.

In May 1979 we competed in the '11th European Philips Contest for Young Scientists and Inventors'. This took the form of an extremely pleasant, expenses-paid holiday as well as the competition itself. On Sunday 20th May we flew to Copenhagen in Denmark where we spent the afternoon in the Tivoli Gardens. That evening we boarded the boat to Oslo where the competition was to be held. The other competitors were mainly the winners of competitions similar to 'Young Scientists of the Year' which had been held in European countries. The following week was a busy one involving extensive sight-seeing in and around Oslo mingled with the various judging sessions and public open days at the competition. One of the highlights was a meeting with the King or 'Kong' of Norway who came to have a look at the competition entries. We were not as successful in the European competition as we had been on home ground. My impression was that the judges in Oslo were looking for projects which had reached some kind of natural conclusion. While a project involving, say. the development of some piece of machinery might be considered to be finished once the machine had been persuaded to work properly, the Biophysics of Blushing did not really fall into this category since it was very much a piece of open-ended research which continually opened up possibilities for further work. Nevertheless, we acquired another cash prize for the school to be used for the funding of further research. We left Oslo on Tuesday 29th May 1979 and flew to London where we spent the afternoon at the Royal Institution. One of the numerous benefits of being a member of the winning team of the 'Young Scientists of the Year' competition was associate membership of this organisation. We had a guided tour of some parts of the building and spent some time talking to Sir George Porter.

June 1979 marked the end of an academic year, and Matthew Allen. Angela McClean, and Nicola Pyke left school at this point reducing the team to Andrew Cormack and myself. I decided to take on the further development of the Blush Meter as a Certificate of Sixth Year Studies Physics project. Essentially, this involved making technical modifications to the design and carrying out rigorous performance tests which had not been possible within the timescale of the 'Young Scientists of the Year' involvement. Having become something of a master in the art of timetable manipulation. I managed to spend over half of my time in the Physics laboratory throughout Sixth Year working on this project. By February 1980 the Blush Meter was working to my satisfaction and I set about producing the project report which was required by the examination board. Being my usual brief self. I managed to restrict this to some fourteen thousand words of text and sixty pages of diagrams and illustrations. The school produced a number of copies of this document, most of which were distributed to scientific bodies who had expressed an interest in the Blush Meter although I have no doubt that a few ended up being autographed and given to friends and relatives. In fact I have heard rumours that a copy of this project report is sometimes shown to present-day Sixth Year Physics classes although I have no idea whether it is presented as something to aim for or something to avoid.

During the Easter vacation in 1980 the latest Blush Meter design was given some 'field trials' at a hospital in Oxford where it was thought that the device might be of use in the diagnosis of diabetes. Later that year the Blush Meter was patented at colossal cost to somebody somewhere. Some individuals from the Classics Department at Madras College were asked to devise a more formal name for the device. The name they came up with was 'Dermachromatascope' which, apart from being difficult to say. difficult to remember, and expensive to write using Letraset. was probably quite a good name in most respects.
June 1980 marked the end of another academic year and this time it was my turn to leave school. That being the end of my direct involvement with the

Biophysics of Blushing it is probably a good point at which to finish this article. Little need be said by way of conclusion other than that 1 was proud to be a member of the team which won the 'Young Scientists of the Year' competition in 1979.

Finally, even though inter-school competition is all too often dominated by sport - those sporty little people who like to dress up in their little costumes and run around a little field hitting a little white ball with their little sticks or kicking it with their little feet - I hope that our achievement will be remembered as having been intellectually just a little bit different and perhaps just a little bit more worthwhile.