Talking with undergrads

"That's the sort of thing you should put in your notebook"

"That's the sort of thing you can find on Google"

"That's the sort of thing you should wear gloves for"

Addressing the Alarming Rise in Zombie and Mermaid Sightings (actually, citings)

Drawing by Sean Adams, 
http://iamamermaid.com/2011/09/09/michelle-mccrary-and-zombie-mermaids/ 

A few weeks ago, the Center for Disease Control was forced to issue a statement that there is no zombie virus. While this might seem an absurd thing for a government agency to say, the whole story is somewhat more convoluted. As I learned from a talk given by science writer Carl Zimmer and posted online, the CDC had posted a story on its website with instructions to prepare people for the zombie apocalypse. The intention was to create greater awareness of disaster preparedness issues so that, by thinking about zombies, people would give some thought to earthquake, hurricane, and disease outbreak-type situations. In other words, a PR stunt. The strategy backfired when rumors started on the web about a real zombie apocalypse, and went viral. At that point, the CDC was tied up in the matter and forced to sound ridiculous.

Don't say the "P" word

By now, nearly everyone who is part of the biomedical workforce has read about the Biomedical Research Workforce Working Group's report and its recommendations. The leader of the working group is Shirley Tilghman, President of Princeton University and my fellow alum, molecular biologist, and Canadian. In the past few years, she has done more than perhaps any other person to improve the plight of trainee scientists.

The report's recommendations are covered in the linked article, so I won't rehash them here. They include: increased postdoc pay and benefits, a reduced biomedical workforce, more graduate students supported by training grants, and education of graduate students and postdocs about alternative careers. 

I want to instead focus on the quotes attributed to Bob Horvitz, Nobel laureate and MIT geneticist. He opposes the recommendations of the report and gives his reasons. Here are two of them from the article:

 "One wants to be sure that the principal investigators, who are supposed to be doing the research, continue to have enough flexibility to be able to support the research they want to do," he said. Taking away that flexibility, he argued, could reduce research productivity.

Followed later by:

But ACD member Horvitz was skeptical. The money to raise postdoc salaries "has to come from somewhere,” he said, and given NIH's current budget woes, it might be impractical to raise postdoc pay. If PIs were forced to make do with fewer (but better paid) postdocs, he argued, lab productivity would probably decline.

It's Not a Game

It would be disingenuous of me to claim that my current desire to change careers is motivated by the career and not by own circumstances, and the problems with me are detailed in previous posts. But still, the current state of the profession doesn't help. It is one thing to work very, very hard to get to that first hint of a great discovery. It's another to work very, very hard to ensure that your science is of exceptional quality, especially when no one's looking that carefully. When this is the case, it's easy to feel like the people winning the game aren't doing so by playing within the rules. A recent commentary in Nature (483:509) alluded to the large number of sloppy mistakes that are creeping into papers. When the goal is to push out publications as quickly as possible, the ugly reality is that the incentives are often in the wrong direction: being sloppy can work to the benefit of the laboratory publishing the paper.

Two high profile examples of this have recently appeared: the finding that the effects of an "anti-aging" gene disappear when the controls are done carefully (Nature 477:482), and the whole debacle surrounding the infamous "arsenic bacteria" story. Now that the refutation of the conclusions of the original paper have been accepted, it's worth taking a step back and recalling that NASA originally pitched this as being relevant to the study of extraterrestrial life. There isn't any bigger splash you could make with the popular press. When the paper was made available and it was clear what it was really about, I think the public was somewhat disappointed. Let's just be clear that this had nothing to do with extraterrestrials. The idea that a living thing using something other than the CHNOPS elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, sulphur) has anything to do with alien life is frankly confusing.

Error bars in Excel

I recently upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010 and quickly regretted it. While Microsoft continually makes their programs more visually appealing, very rarely do they add any improvement in functionality, and quite often, things only seem to get worse.

(On a related note, I recently read that Internet Explorer is the only web browser still using a faulty method for interpreting CSS layouts, which is why for the forseeable future, all webpage files will have to begin with an otherwise unnecessary piece of code that does nothing but tell IE to behave properly.)

Anyway, as a scientist, I'm always using error bars. Error bars are a visual way of representing the uncertainty associated with a measurement ... and they are critical for everything we do. No data is meaningful unless one can ascribe an estimate of how close a measured value might be to a true value - a number we can never be totally confident of. So error bars are important. And they keep getting harder and harder to find.

Webpage-building: I definitely dig this

After doing only the very first Dreamweaver tutorial I've already built a webpage (it's for the postdoctoral association that I've recently become President of, but that's another story). It's not beautiful, but it's the first webpage I've written that isn't simple HTML. This was fun: really fun. One thing I discovered is how little Dreamweaver actually does, or rather, that there is a whole range of degrees to which you can lean on it. It's like training wheels. I did most of the work in split screen mode (where you see the page you're creating on one side and the HTML on the other) and found that after a little while, it was easier to simply enter the code myself than use the built-in functions.

The other thing I learned, hardly surprising for a fist attempt, is how important a comp is. For this project, I started with one of the standard layouts, then began modifying the CSS to customize it. Without a plan in mind, the various divs, paddings, borders and margins quickly got out of hand. I'm not sure they all add up in the final website, but it looks OK and it's satisfactory for our current needs. This was mainly a learning experience in any case.

Jorge Cham and the Higg's boson

A wonderful new animation appeared today about the Higg's boson and just what is going on at the Large Hadron Collidor. The drawings are by Jorge Cham, of PHD Comics fame (speaking of which, today's comic seems to be about career crises, which suits this blog just fine).

I have always been interested in particle physics, though I have no formal training in it, and this cartoon is a bit of an inspiration that some science training doesn't go amiss when communicating with the public - he seems to have a firm grasp of the science while also creating an informative (and fun) video.

I hope Jorge is making some money with his various endevours; when I saw him speak at Princeton some years ago he definitely had a job other than professional cartoonist. I know his books draw a profit, but really, when your primary audience is grad students and all the content is available online, you can't expect too many sales. His Wikipedia page makes no mention of his "day job", however.

Informing people about science seems to be a new direction for him ... perhaps as his audience moves out of grad school and into the world he'll find an increasing market for scientists wanting to find new ways to communicate with the public.