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"

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.

New Directions

I’ll open this post by making three obvious statements, which might appear to be unrelated:

1. I haven’t posted on this blog much. I can see from my history I made three posts in July of 2010, and that it’s been largely dormant since then. This is, I believe, because my blog really lacks a purpose, and has drifted from the purpose I originally intended it to serve.

2. The job market for Ph.D.s right now, especially those who want to continue in academia, is simply terrible.

3. The inevitable change that comes with new parenthood is simply a change of perspective. No matter how many times you are told that it will happen to you, you never quite believe it.