From the Octagon to the Lab Bench
"It ain't about how hard you hit! It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward!"
If you wanna do good science, you’re gonna have to move like Alex Pereira and Jiri Prochazka.
Hands of Stone
On Saturday, October 4th, Alex “Poatan” Pereira reclaimed the UFC light heavyweight title in a brutal eighty-second beatdown of Magomed Ankalaev. There was deep catharsis in this win.
Pereira lost the title to Ankalaev earlier this year in a tepid, anticlimactic snoozer of a fight. The Brazilian kickboxer looked like a shell of himself in the contest, easily backed up by the Russian fighter and unable to land any of the devastating knockout punches that had become his calling card. After his blistering rise to the championship, losing the belt in such dull fashion had casuals ruminating on Pereira being “overrated” or “fraud-checked”. The former champ, infamous for taking fights on short-notice while nursing injuries, claimed he had (once again) gone into the bout compromised. He swore the rematch would be different. His detractors sneered at what they perceived to be excuses. MMA fans are no strangers to watching legends crash and burn overnight and many felt this was the beginning of the former champion’s inevitable downfall.
Pereira proved them wrong in devastating fashion. That is resilience.
Float Like a Samurai
Earlier that same evening, Czech maniac and modern-day samurai Jiri Prochazka put on an equally gutsy (though far bloodier) display of resilience in an all-out war against American Muay Thai fighter Khalil Rountree Jr., pulling out a victory from the jaws of defeat.
Jiri has put on so many fights fitting this bill that I don’t even know where to start. His title win a few years ago against the grizzled veteran Glover Teixeira is one of my all-time favourite fights, an eleventh-hour comeback for the ages, and one of my go-to ways to introduce someone new to MMA. And the madman did it again on Saturday - getting battered for two rounds, somehow staying on his feet and then going completely berserk in the third and final round. There was technique in his victory, yes. But Jiri’s ability to stalk Rountree, overwhelm him with force and brutally knock him out with a nasty left hook is all down to spirit. He outlasted Rountree. He took his punishment and dished it all back. He refused to be broken, and in that battle of attrition, in those slivers of time where weakness threatens to break down your door and steal your resolve, he withstood the pressure. He endured. That is resilience.
To me, writing about science doesn’t stop at dissecting research papers and studies. Anybody can do that. I’m interested in what biology can teach us about being human - see my cancer and genome editing posts. I’m also interested in what doing science teaches me about being a human, and how lessons learned at the lab bench might intersect with or be recontextualized by achievements in other arenas (like combat sports). Understanding being human through science and thinking way too hard about dumb stuff is the mission statement of the Pit - always has been, always will be.
What can scientists learn from fighters?
Science is an adversarial process. Ideas and conclusions are thrown into the fires of experimentation again and again, subjected to every possible stressor, beaten black and blue by falsifiable hypotheses until the poor researcher in question finally lays down his pipette and wearily grins, knowing that he has established something approximating a new fact about the world beyond a reasonable doubt.
This is a fight. This is a contest of will between a human seeking new knowledge and a cold universe that is not keen to give up her secrets. Racking up failed experiment after failed experiment, negative result after negative result, demands something more than perseverance. It demands resilience, which I’d define as the capacity to take a beating and transmute it into something productive.
It is therefore necessary as a scientist to come back from your losses the way Alex Pereira did, and to endure your beatings the way Jiri did. Most kids enter grad school with the momentum Pereira entered the UFC title picture with - great GPAs, a strong CV, a bunch of folks patting them on the back, the whole nine yards. Many, if not all, will quickly realize how little their academic performance in classrooms translates to success in a laboratory. Because it often doesn’t matter how well you grasp the current body of work in a given field, or how adept your understanding of a given biological system is - once you adopt a scientist’s hubris and attempt to contribute to that field or manipulate that system, you will be met with failures. Regardless of how hard you work, you will be met with pushback. You will have to fight. And you will lose a bunch of those fights, maybe most of them. Those who succeed in science are those who, like Alex Pereira and Jiri Prochazka, are too stubborn and too resilient to have their spirits broken by adversity. They do not allow past failings or present weakness to sap their self-belief.
This is the nature of not just doing science, but doing anything worthwhile. You will accumulate failures. One who does not fail has not found themselves at the edge of their capabilities. As far as I’m concerned, the only “true” failure state is, paradoxically, not racking up any failures at all. This is certainly true in science, where a lack of negative results almost certainly means you never pushed past your intellectual safe haven into the unknown. There’s a lot to be said here about the academic and funding systems which actively punish negative results, but at a base, “pure” level I believe this all holds true. In the words of renowned bodybuilder Tom Platz, one must seek to “achieve failure”.
And I think there are broader truths here that can be extrapolated to any high-achieving endeavor. Doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and workers of all stripes trying to push themselves to a new level of aptitude will encounter opposition. Any human seeking meaning and contentment and peace will encounter opposition. Everything in life, as Teddy Atlas has often said, is a fight. To overcome that opposition, to use its presence as motivation, to walk into the fight and truly love the carnage - that is the essence of improvement and attaining mastery, agnostic of discipline.
Which leaves only one question. When you’re sweaty, and bruised, and bleeding, and the crowd has lost its faith in you, and your back is against the wall, and you’d like to do nothing more than throw the gloves down, throw the towel in, and drag your ass home… are you still going to stand, knuckle up and give them five more minutes of hell?