Knowing when

Sustaining a career in science--whether at or away from the bench--takes a lot, in fact much more than you think starting off. You need some smarts, a good work ethic, discipline, commitment...

But there's something else you have to learn along the way. It's not something you can learn from a book, a journal, or a mentor. It's something you can only truly from experience: how to read a situation and decide whether you should stay the course or walk away. Sometimes it's an experiment or a project. Sometimes it's a career path or a step along it. Most scientists I know are stubborn--I am one of the worst. We simply don't like the idea of "giving up" or "failing".  This can be a useful trait, yet there are times when leaving the table is the best decision we can make. If we want to stay in the game for the long haul, we better learn how to play. I leave you with the immortal words of Kenny Rogers... backed up by some Muppets.

Consistency along an unpredictable path

Continuity. As scientists, it's something most of us seek each day with every experiment. We look for consistency in our results, and when it is missing, we go back to see what went wrong. We search for those self-consistent details in our system, and if something does not meet expectations, we begin thinking of possible explanations, alternative interpretations, missing pieces of the puzzle.

Yet I sometimes have trouble identifying continuity in my life. My early career has sometimes felt like a random walk, bouncing between cities, adding and merging disciplines and skills, tweaking the path of my research and my career, sometimes making big decisions largely on the basis of a gut feeling. The last two or more years have been especially difficult, bringing doubt and guilt about choices I made regarding my career and my family. What seemed at times to be constant change and continual doubt was absolutely disorienting.

There has been one constant through this insanity: my husband, Paramed. Many people talk about the two-body problem--the challenge of organizing and executing two independent career paths, preferably in the same or nearby cities. It's stressful, frustrating, exhausting but can also be exciting and satisfying when things come together; sometimes it's a mix of all these thing. But there can be advantages to this "problem". I haven't had to worry about finding a roommate. There's someone around to help out with the laundry and cooking when I'm swamped...

Most importantly, I get to come home and talk to my best friend nearly every day. And that has been integral to maintaining another essential aspect of continuity in my life: staying true to myself. Training and work--from elementary school to EMS work to research--bring out the type A personality in me. I put a lot of myself into my work--some might say too much. I expect as much, if not more, of myself as my advisers have and do. From my viewpoint, this, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. But some institutions (like the one I'm in now) have a reputation for changing people--and not in a good way. Or maybe it's just the training process in general that changes people. I don't know. It's easy to become mired in politics, to let the stress get to you, to lash out because of your own insecurities. These things have happened to me and sometimes still do. Paramed knows me well enough to see when this is happening. He has listened to me rant and vent and cry. He has provided encouragement. He has told me when I'm being ridiculous or out of line or wrong (trust me not easy--I was born a red-head, and a stubborn one at that). He has asked me the questions I refused to ask myself. In short, he has been my minder, my Sam, the one who reminds me who I really am. Who I am is just as important as what I do. With help from my friend, I hope that is something that will remain consistent through out my life.

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This is my contribution for the Scientiae Carnival. There are still a few days to submit, so go forth and blog! :)

Critical reading vs. reading critically

"I can't believe that's a paper."

This was the statement of a colleague--we'll call him Ronald--upon seeing a manuscript on my desk. To my knowledge, he had not read the paper, or even the abstract, just the title. It was not groundbreaking work by any stretch, but it was a nice little methods paper published in a methods journal. It seems that part of Ronald's disdain derived from the fact that he had used the same reagent to label the same tissue for a slightly different technique. Since it was such an obvious and simple method, which Ronald and others in his previous lab had used under other conditions, clearly it was unworthy of publication*.*When something pisses me off, I am prone to using hyperbole--extensively, as you may note here. Although the statements here are not as absolute as I make them seem, the sentiments therein ring true.

Normally I get along quite well with Ronald, but that simple statement pissed me off, perhaps because it is just one example of a attitude among many postdocs at BRI and, I suspect, science in general. Almost inevitably discussion of a paper or seminar focuses on everything that's "wrong" with it: how they did the wrong experiments, used the wrong model, how limited the scope of the study is, that it's not novel or groundbreaking work... Sometimes they have perfectly valid points, but they seem to dismiss the value of the publication because it's not what they would do. They spend a lot of time thinking about how to invalidate the study and ignore its positive contribution to the field. There are a few exceptions: papers published in top journals of the field (unless published on study in direct competition with their own work) and papers published by colleagues and non-competing collaborators.

In graduate school, we are supposed to learn to read the scientific literature critically. The issue is what that means. Many people--especially trainees--use the first definition of critical: "inclined to find fault or to judge with severity, often too readily". We should be using the third definition: "involving skillful merit as to truth, merit, etc.". We're supposed to be looking for good and bad, right and wrong, founded and unfounded, and all degrees in between. When we finish reading the fucking paper, we should have a clear idea of what the results actually demonstrate, the caveats, and its utility, its contribution to the field.

Scientific publishing, in theory, is about the dissemination of knowledge. Some papers are going to change how we think about science or fill in large gaps of a given question or pathway. But not all papers will be "paradigm changing". Some papers reaffirm and expand upon what we already know; these are critical because, as we have seen time and again, there is usually something wrong with the process if no one can reproduce the results of another lab. Some papers alternative interpretations; even if in the end the alternative is wrong, these should help prevent development of tunnel vision, becoming so enamored of our own hypothesis that we become blinded to other possibilities. And some papers are reports of "simple" methods; these keep us from having to reinvent the wheel every time we do a new experiment and sometimes provide faster/cheaper/more sensitive methods than we had in our repertoire. The vast majority of manuscripts are not going to be published in the Cell/Nature/Science families of journals; this does not mean they are useless. It's time for postdocs (and maybe other scientists as well) to reevaluate how we read papers and determine the worth of a publication.

As an aside for those with access to EMBO Reports, I recommend checking out System Crash, a Science & Society piece about how emphasis on high impact publications and focus on short-term gains are affecting science.