My Only U.S. Election Post (or why I'm watching Game of Thrones instead of the debates)

The U.S. election is in full swing, and like the two previous elections I've been in the States for, and like so many car accidents, it's hard to look away. I will say this about U.S. politics: it's freaking entertaining. After the emergence of the "forty-seven percent" video, it's so easy to deconstruct the libertarian mindset being advanced by this country-club millionaire and all the country-club millionaires that he represents, that it hardly even seems worth trying.

The problem is that after all the hoopla of the conventions, after all the speculation and the debates and the polls, what's really going to happen? Not in November, but in 2013, and in the next four years. Mitt Romney has been next to silent on what he would do as president, even if he won both the House and Senate. Barack Obama is pretty unlikely to get a House majority or a significant margin in the Senate, and we've already seen the best he could do when he had both: a health care bill so watered down that it may as well have been  a Republican proposal (and was, but let's not even go there).

My first contribution to the Brandeis Science blog

My first post at a widely-read (ie, not this) blog is based on my friend Dennis Brietsprecher's recent paper in Sciecne.

The Information Diet: Some Thoughts

I recently read "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption" by Clay Johnson, on my Kindle. Kindle allows you to immediately post to Facebook when you've finished a book, thus telling the world that you read and what you're reading. You don't necessarily need to say what you thought of the book, but I suppose it's implied that if you made it through the whole thing and chose to share it with the world, then it must be good enough. Indeed, I liked this book, or at least parts of it. It's ironic, however, to finish a book about information obesity and then immediately post about it on Facebook, so I waited a couple of weeks for my thoughts to digest, first.

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.