Thinking about science–what do I look for in a graduate student?

One of the questions that I was asked recently is “What do you look for in a graduate student?”

Just as an aside, that vaguely reminds me of a film I saw some time ago where one character asks another “Have you found Jesus?” The answer, of course, was “I didn’t know he was missing…”

But back to the serious issue of what a graduate student should be like. Ideally, I could say many things: honest, curious, meticulous, trustworthy, talented and bright, and the list goes on and on. But the really important trait, that separates the wheat from the chaff–in my humble opinion–is dedication.

Now we’ve had this discussion multiple times over the past year on OT–about what dedication really means. In particular, Jenny’s recent blog extolled the virtues of reasonable work hours, eschewing a 24/7 work mentality. I don’t disagree!

So how do I see dedication? Although some may disagree, I think dedication comes from a willingness to really engage in the science–in a manner that one is willing to keep part of the mind open to thoughts of science even outside the lab.

I don’t mean that every waking second outside the lab needs to be spent planning experiments and reading papers (although a certain amount does help, especially for those early in their careers)–but it is leaving one’s mind open–”on standby” so to speak, that shows me which young scientists are really involved in their work.

Do I have a concrete example? Well these are examples from my own experiences:
I work a lot with membrane tubules and vesicles, that look like this under the confocal microscope:

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So during the winter when I looked out the window and saw these icicles, immediate my brain was seeing tubules!

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And more recently, as rain pattered down the window on the 7th floor by my office, I was also astonished to see how water drops formed “tubules” and underwent “fission” into vesicles before my very eyes!

Do I expect everyone to have such unusual imaginations to be good scientists? No.

But I do think that a 9-5 workday where science and any vestigial thoughts of it are shutdown down after hours—just won’t cut it in the big leagues.

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Art and Science–take 2

Last evening I had a wonderfully unique opportunity to sample a complex mixture of art, science and creativity at the elegant Orpheum Theatre in Omaha (circa 1927)–in the form of modern dance!

If you can spare just a few moments for a few highlights of the performance, please have a look at this video of the Momix Botanica modern dance group:

The group made phenomenal use of costumes, special effects, lighting and talented dance to recreate everything from a flower’s growth to fireflies on stage. Spectacular! Greatly recommended to any of you who have the opportunity, and they travel the globe…

In other recent news–I’m in the news. The editor of the “Jewish Press” of Omaha interviewed me–about my two novels. I even managed to put in a plug for Occam’s Typewriter into the mix. The interview, for those with insomnia or otherwise bored-to-tears, is given below.

Happy Mother’s Day to all those mothers out there! I must say that there is clearly an unfair bias to fathers, in that Father’s Day falls outside the school year and is therefore largely a forgotten event…

 

 

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godless (yes, not goddess or goodness)

This is a post that has worked its way in my head to the top of the pile. It’s initiation was triggered by a cluster of stimuli, including discussions with friends. However watching the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) program (available in its entirety for free at this link) on the well-publicized Dover school board’s attempt to introduce intelligent design into the science curriculum of schools in this district several years ago (Kitzmiller vs. Dover area school district), was the real motivator.

I didn’t watch program alone; in fact the entire family climbed into bed together and watched our little laptop in fascination as the story depicted the attempts of new earth creationists to disguise their “intelligent design” as a valid scientific theory.

While I had been aware of this famous court case, I have not been up to date on all the specific details. It was remarkable observing to what lengths the anti-evolutionists went to disguise the inherent fundamentalist religious agenda that they were trying to promote.

The parents and science teachers in Dover country, Pennsylvania, eventually triumphed over the school board in court–and were even able to show that a creationist textbook had merely been converted to an intelligent design textbook by changing a few words in a few sentences. Famously, one sentence wasn’t even properly “proofed” and it could actually be demonstrated that it still contained remnants of the word “creationism” (instead of the “intelligent design” it was now supposed to support). This intermediate, “cdesign proponentsists” (supposed to be “design proponents” but not having properly erased the “creationist”), became dubbed the “missing link” between creationism and intelligent design (see below)!

Of Pandas and People (1987, “intelligent design” version), p. 3-41:

But I do not want to debate intelligent design or creationism in this forum; it would be ‘preaching to the choir,’ as a semi-appropriate metaphor might indicate.

No, instead I would rather go a bit deeper and stir some additional controversy. One of the charges of the school board anti-evolutionists in Dover, PA, was that the teachers and those opposed to intelligent design were “godless atheists.” Just like me. Fair enough. Or is it?

Actually, no. Some of the key figures who fought valiantly for evolution and to keep creationism and its disguised form out of the classroom were not atheists at all, but rather devout believers in god, and churchgoers. In interviews, they were very much upset at being deemed godless, when in their case, religion did play an important role in their lives.

All this brings me to an interesting question: can one be a scientist and still have faith?

In my younger and rebellious days, my answer would have unequivocally been “NO.” Not that I thought that one can’t be a good scientist and have faith, but I thought–in those days of my youth–that the two were not compatible.

My views have moderated since those times, so don’t attack me YET. But although I do think differently now (despite maintaining my godless mindset), I do want the opportunity to explain how I arrived at that outlook.

As a child and later in Israel, I was absolutely horrified by the amount of religious coercion I encountered. The lack of tolerance for anyone who didn’t believe. The lack of civil rights for one who didn’t believe. In Israel, it’s as simple as there being no civil marriages, no public transport on the Sabbath, no bread allowed to be sold during Passover and the list goes on and on. It has progressed to the point of denigrating women and in some cases not allowing men to hear women sing in the military (supposedly not allowed as it is considered immodest and ‘tempting’).

So coming from such an intolerant background, where religion typically represented a rather tyrannical form of “for me to carry out my religious duties, everyone else has to do A, B and C…,” I fought back. Fire with fire.

For me, fighting back meant going to similar extremes in the opposite direction. So I formulated the following philosophy: Science is the pursuit of the truth, in a dispassionate and objective manner. Science is built on logic. Religion (and I did not discern here) on the other hand is based on a “leap of faith” that requires one to willingly suspend logic and disbelief–in order to believe. Therefore, religion opposes science and is bad.

I took this one step further, in my fight against religious coercion: if one is willing to admittedly disband logic to believe, then there is a slippery slope between believing in a god, and stepping away from that belief to other illogical beliefs that might endanger society. This too, is admittedly not unheard of. After all, most terrorist attacks and many wars result from beliefs that “god wants me to do this or that.”

Having “mellowed” over the years, or perhaps having learned that things are not so simple or straightforward–realizing now that the vast majority of  people who ‘believe’ or partake in religion are good people, tolerant, advocates of science and education, and people who often give back to their communities–I found that I desperately needed to update my thinking. And I have.

In the PBS Nova program, there is actually a statement about the young earth creationists noting that “while the vast majority of religions and religious people have been able to come to terms and make peace with the idea of evolution and Darwinism, only the extreme fundamentalists continue to put up a fight.” And this is certainly true.

So while I remain a proud godless atheist, if your own beliefs do not require converting me, I accept you just as you are!

How about you?

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However…

Have you ever had a manuscript was accepted unconditionally without any revisions? In speaking with many scientists, it turns out that this seems to be a once in a lifetime phenomenon. Indeed, it has happened to me but once.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was once a graduate student. Actually, this manuscript was submitted in the course of my Masters reserach, and was my very first paper. As the first-author, and as a student with two advisers, I actually took care of the submission process myself. Not knowing any better, I also put myself down as the corresponding author. Little did I know that this is not something that a Masters student normally does.

In the month following the submission, very much against my will, I was serving a bout of the most awful reserve duty in the Palestinian city of Nablus, based in the old British headquarters building (shown 50 years earlier in this video from the Guardian) when the reviews came back. Part of my tour was spent guarding the so-called “Joseph’s Tomb” a flashpoint of contention between Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the midst of a large Palestinian city. But I’ll save this for another rainy (stormy?) day.

Joseph's Tomb: Israeli settlers and Palestinians have all but ablated any meaning for this site

I spoke to my wife on the phone–a pay phone (remember those?)–and she read me the editorials letter and critiques. I was crushed. I thought that was the end of my attempts to publish this manuscript. When I finally returned to the lab and showed the letter to one of my advisers, he glanced at it and said immediately “Oh, it’s in. We should have sent it to a better journal.”

As it turned out, my inexperience in reading and interpreting letters from editors led me to believe that a request for changing a few words in the title was an absolute rejection. Little did I know that I would never have it so easy with future submissions.

Today the standard for publication in most self-respecting journals has become very high. While this is a good thing, overall, it has led to some things which aren’t so good. Inevitably, now, every author quickly scans letters from the editors of journals looking for the “However” word. This is because these letters frequently begin by saying how the manuscript does not meet the standards for the journal and so forth, but often there is a small opening in the form of a “however statement.” This statement often leaves the door open for a series of revisions and additional experiments that if successfully carried out will allow the editor to re-examine the manuscript. And we all know that in today’s scientific environment this usually means months and months of additional work leading to a pile of new figures often taking shape as “supplemental figures.”

Having said that, “however” can also work the other way around. Many a grant review explicitly writes that the proposal is “novel, interesting, and well thought out” and then shoots everything down with a “however statement.”

But back to the issue of supplemental figures and additional data. This has become a consistent theme in modern biomedical research–for better or for worse.

I am currently on the editorial boards of 3 journals, and most recently joined the editorial board of a major and long-standing general biochemistry journal. At a recent meeting, the issue of reviewers requesting more and more data to be deposited in never-ending files of inadequately reviewed supplemental PDFs, underwent serious discussion. Indeed, I am happy to say that this journal has taken a leadership stand and decided that overall supplemental figures should be reserved for Excel files, lists of proteins, arrays and other such data that doesn’t properly fit within the manuscript itself. At the same time, the journal would like to discourage reviewers from requesting that authors who have shown data using cell line A, also show similar results with cell lines B-Z.

Back in 1994, when my first paper was accepted with only a textual revision to the title, there were no supplemental figures. There were no online journals. It seems that the ability to publish online without the necessity of paper has led to a new standard where authors are clearly discouraged from using the phrase “data not shown” or “unpublished observations.”

I think it’s fine and desirable to hold authors to rigorous scientific standards. At the same time, as a reviewer and also as an author I would like to believe that minor points that do not directly relate to the key findings of the manuscript do not all have to be shown and should not slow down the publication and advancement of science. After all, isn’t the goal of publishing to allow other scientists to take advantage of these findings and move science forward?

NOTE: As it turns out I’ve just scooped “The Journal of Cell Biology” editorial with my blog! For more discussion on this very issue (!!!) please see: http://jcb.rupress.org/content/197/3/345.full

Published April 30, 2012 // JCB vol. 197 no. 3 345-346
The Rockefeller University Press, doi: 10.1083/jcb.201203056

    • Editorial

Minimizing the “Re” in Review

  1. Elizabeth H. Williams1,
  2. Pamela A. Carpentier2, and
  3. Tom Misteli3

 

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The Hunger Games: educational assessment

It seems that these past few weeks have been insanely packed with travel, and some of it not particularly fun. As I await boarding of a flight to an editorial board meeting, I recall that a week ago I drove 200 miles to (and 200 miles home from) Grinnell College in Iowa (directly east of Omaha) for an invited talk and pleasant meetings with faculty and students.

I enjoyed my visit and returned to Omaha only to drive another ~200 miles in the other direction early the next morning to Grand Island, Nebraska, for another speech contest that one of my kids was participating in. While the contest was fun, driving there in fog as thick as soup (literally) and returning through driving rain, heavy winds, some light hail, and almost no visibility on the famed Interstate 80 was not so much fun. My muscles ached all week from straining forward to see through the windshield.

But rather than complaining, which is something I’m quite good at, I thought that I’d do something different (something I’m probably not very good at) in this blog and review a film based on a young adult fiction book that both my kids have recently read. I should note that as a child I never read any young adult fiction, stepping directly into adult fiction at quite an early age (and I recall being rather puzzled at sex scenes in some of them…).

The film is “The Hunger Games,” the first of a trilogy, and my 10 year old son was my companion. As I do not want to give too much away, I’ll make this a relatively brief review. The film (novel) is set in a futuristic environment (USA) in which the premise is that there is a very strong and powerful central “capital” that controls 12 poor and subservient territories (or districts as they are known). Having rebelled against the mighty capital many years earlier, as punishment the capital holds a gladiator-like competition every year in the capital collecting 2 youths (12-18 years old) by lottery from each of the districts. The competition is one based on survival of the fittest, with the contestants being required to kill or be killed, and the last-standing survivor of this horrific “game” being declared the winner and allowed to live on as champion of the “games.”

I have heard many negative comments about the film and book trilogy–that it is too ‘graphic,’ that children and youth don’t need any additional violent films to add to the growing repertoire, and so on. Having seen the film, I beg to differ.

Yes, there are graphic parts to the film. But at the same time, I see this as a highly critical and very educational portrayal of western society. The film depicts the gluttony and hedonism of those in the capital who are only seeking their next “fix” of entertainment in a world where attention spans are often measured on the second hand of a wrist watch. The audience and television commentators and interviewers who are mindlessly immune to the idea that lives are being lost in these games, and are merely plying for humorous and witty comments and ‘ratings’–along with their quirky hairdos and attention-seeking dress. These segments, in my humble opinion, are far more intense and difficult than the graphic fighting scenes of the youth in the games themselves (not that those are easy to stomach).

One of my first reactions to the film, watching the combination of thrill-seeking audiences and mind-numbing TV interviewers and commentators was today’s reality of “Reality Shows.” Not that I actually ever watch television and have ever seen them, but I know enough of what they represent to see that the author and director of the “The Hunger Games” has certainly taken offense at these new icons of popular culture and aimed arrows at them. As it turns out, in reading an interview with author Suzanne Collins, she notes that she came by the idea while channel surfing and seeing station after station presenting reality shows and images from the Iraq war.

So while this film may stretch the imagination a little far from present day life in the western world, the gladiator-like scenes combined with ridicule of the path of instantaneous make for a very compelling discussion with one’s children, or perhaps even just to serve as a reminder that our own adult lives should never be taken lightly as a point for amusement. This film has earned a strong recommendation from yours truly.

Note added April 22: I have failed to make perhaps the most important point that I had intended. This post was supposed to correspond with Holocaust Day–and while not addressing the 11 million Jews, Gypsies, communists and many others who were systematically gassed to death by the Hitler regime–the film does evoke a very pertinent question: “AT WHAT POINT IS LIFE NO LONGER WORTH LIVING?

The concept of putting someone (or an entire country) in a situation of “kill or be killed” is a recurrent and critical theme in the film. And we all know that if this particular dilemma had been answered differently by those under the control of the Nazi murder machine, the outcome of Hitler’s attempts to wipe Jews and others off the map might have ended differently.

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Relativity Theory

How many times have we been told in the course of our lives “It’s all relative?”

I hear that over and over. And I suppose that there’s a lot of truth in that statement. If we push aside considerations of moral issues, the “Non-Einsteinian Theory of Relativity” probably holds true in many cases.

When I was a child, one of my father’s Uncles, Dr. Wilfred Gallay, was a renowned chemist and the head of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemists (IUPAC). He lived in Ottawa, Canada, but in his fairly frequent visits he made a strong impression on me. In fact, his stories of DNA and cloning probably set me in motion for a career in biomedical sciences. But great Uncle Wilfred, who by the way patented a new type of glue that enabled the Allies to manufacture planes far more rapidly, left me with a legacy of his own personal “Theory of Relativity.” My own relative’s relativity theory.

My great uncle, a highly competitive man by all accounts, once made the following statement to me: “It doesn’t matter what grade you get in school or university, as long as it’s higher than that of everyone else.” Hence, his personal “Theory of Relativity.”

Why I am suddenly sounding off on the relative nature of things? What set me off? Allow me to explain.

Over the past 6 months I have received a number of international grants to review. Unlike my jobs reviewing grant proposals in the US system, which usually include a heavy stack of proposals (10 or more per review session), most of these international grants arrive as a single proposal to review. Sure, it’s easier than reviewing 10 of them, but it means that the reviewer has absolutely nothing to compare them with.

To their credit, some of these agencies supplied an online critique form that explicitly gave instructions to the reviewers to say “Should be funded” or “Should be funded if there are sufficient resources” and so on. Others, however, had an arbitrary scoring system leaving the reviewer (me!) guessing as to what that means.

So how would someone, having received a single proposal to review, have a basis for judging whether a grant should score “Top 1%, Top 5%, Top 10%” and so on? And what does that mean? If the proposal is great, and I score it top 5%, is that a mark of complete approval? Or are only first percentile-scored grants funded?

This is very frustrating for a reviewer, and I’m sure even more frustrating for the applicants. So for those of you on the other side of the pond who have any influence on your funding agencies, it might be worthwhile to use it!

As for me, while great Uncle Wilfred’s “Theory of Relativity” may seem rather cold-blooded to some, my respect and appreciation for him continues to grow.

 

 

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A Secular Passover

First, my best wishes to anyone celebrating Easter, Passover or any other holiday. As a representative of one who celebrates the latter, in my own secular way, I thought I’d post a few words about it. After all, my knowledge of Easter is quite limited, although I was happy to send Jenny her Paas Easter egg dyes a few weeks ago. I wonder if the “Paas” has anything to do with Paasover…?

Passover is a Jewish holiday that is supposed to celebrate the biblical (and mythical?) exit from slavery in Egypt. Archaeologists are not entirely confident of the biblical account, but no matter; whether the Jewish slavery story is concrete or metaphoric, its message is important.

To a certain extent, the true meaning of the holiday (in my humble opinion) has been hijacked by a host of largely irrelevant rituals. “Kosher for Passover” stamps on foods at the supermarket and so on. I have little patience for what I deem as superstitious rituals, but the meaning of the holiday has a lot of symbolic importance for me.

So did I have a Passover meal with my family? I did.

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Perhaps not what you envisioned? A Chinese and Thai combination Passover meal? Well why not?

But we did have home made Matzah ball soup. Well more precisely, Matzah ball and Matzah cube:
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My son asks “why is this Matzah shape different from all other Matzah shapes?”

To a certain extent, secular Jews have been attacked by their religious counterparts for being “lite,” for not having any serious “content” and for being immersed in materialism and capitalism with little regard for moral and educational matters. As though only through religion can one be conscientiously concerned with issues of morality. I find this truly condescending, to say the least.

So at our little family Passover gathering, what did we do (aside from the food, of course)? My spouse brought up the question of what values do we all want to pass down to the next generation. Language, heritage, culture. And why this is important.

As for me, I have recently become interested in the Jews who lived in America’s deep south, in the pre-Civil War Confederate America. It turns out that there were about 25,000 Jews living in the south (many fewer than the north), mostly in New Orleans, Shreveport, Lousiana (where I visited for a seminar a couple years back, not knowing that this was a key city for southern Jews ~150 years ago), and Memphis, Tennessee.

While most of these Jews were not wealthy plantation owners, some were, and I asked my children to imagine a “Passover Seder” where Jews were celebrating freedom from slavery while being served by African American slaves. How surreal!

The Jews of the south were, by all accounts, extremely loyal to the Confederate, with over 1000 Jewish men who served in the army. This seems to have stemmed from a strong desire for acceptance, which was clearly lacking in Old World Europe. In any case, we learned the fascinating story of Judah Benjamin, the so-called “Brains behind the Confederate.” He was a Jew from a Sephardic or North African background, probably quite brilliant as he attended Yale law school at the age of 14.

Benjamin rose up the ranks of the south and became perhaps the closest confidante of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate leader. Some say that this was enabled because Davis felt no threat of being “overthrown” by a Jew, especially one as loyal as Benjamin. He was alternately finance minister, minister of war (during the civil war times) and played a major role in all decisions in the south. At one point he owned a plantation with 150 slaves, which he sold when he became entrenched in politics.

During the course of the civil war, and particularly as the south began to crumble, Benjamin became known for his radical proposal that the south should emancipate any slave who volunteers to fight in the army against the north. Imagine that idea: African American slaves potentially fighting to keep their fellow slaves enslaved! This was strongly vetoed as going against everything the south was fighting for. One politician criticized Benjamin’s idea by saying that “if the black slaves could make good soldiers, this jeopardizes everything that our belief in slavery stands for.”

Following the assassination of Lincoln, despite his having nothing to do with it, Benjamin was rumored to be involved. He fled over the pond to England where he lived out his life as a successful barrister. An American historian and biographer, Eli Evans, speculated that had he stayed in the US, America might have had its own “Dreyfus Affair.”

Based on these issues, we were also able to explain to our children the “Blood Libel,” the centuries’ old story that Jews make the unleavened bread, or Passover Matzah from the blood of Christian children. Absurd as it sounds, my own grandmother and her family propelled themselves away from the “Pale of Russia” to the New World to escape the pogroms carried out to avenge the alleged killing of Christians.

Well, enough said. I suppose that my explanations of our secular Passover will not convince those who make it a point never to be convinced, but I am secure in my own lack of faith and secular lifestyle–secure in that I do not feel any moral inferiority.

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Ph.D. Pranks and Comeuppance

Seeing as April 1st has come and gone, I would like to dedicate this blog to one of my favorite Ph.D. pranks (I’ve reported on a few in this forum in the past)–AND to tell you about a little email note that I received a few days ago. Let’s start with the e-mail, and here it is, verbatim:

Dear Dr. Caplan-

My name is Jim Hager, and I am the manager of Publishing Corps. We have read both of your novels, Matter Over Mind and Welcome Home, Sir. Our publishing editors believe your novels to be fantastic and very well written.We would like to present you with an Outstanding Author’s Award for 2012. Congratulations! In a few days time, you will receive a check of $525 for your efforts.

It was a pleasure to read your books, and we hope to read more of your novels soon.

-Jim & Publishing Cops. 

Well, how flattering! And a nice sum of money. But something didn’t ring kosher. Why would anyone award me money “out of the blue?” And would an editor from a publishing company sign off as “Publishing Cops” rather than “Publishing Corps?”

Suspicions aroused, I scoured the internet and did not turn up any “Publishing Corps” although there was a Jim Hager who wrote a book called “Alligators under my bed and other Nebraska stories.” Nonetheless, I became quickly convinced that someone “was having taking (thank you Richard) the piss” as you people on the other side of the pond would say. But who could that be.

I thought of enemies and people who would love to see me embarrassed or trodden on. Who could it possibly be?

And then a hunkering suspicion floods my brain. After showing the e-mail to my spouse, I sidled up to our home office on the 2nd floor. Only to find my 13 year old daughter and 10 year old son huddled over a laptop in stitches from laughing. What did I do to deserve such treatment from my own kids? Probably telling them about my own pranking exploits. Such as this one:

As a graduate student in Jerusalem, my mentor was desperately trying to attract an experienced and talented postdoctoral fellow. At the time this was particularly difficult, because the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, unlike the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, had an attitude that the Hebrew language must be preserved at all costs–including in science. I will save stories about this unusual and outdated position (which is now defunct) for another time, but suffice to say that learning Hebrew was a daunting way of limiting the international applicant pool. And practically every Israeli-trained graduate student with an eye to continue in science goes abroad.

So one day I invented Bruce Miller. Yes, invented. I wrote up a sparkling CV for him, which included a Cell paper (but only one so as not to arouse too much suspicion). Bruce completed his Ph.D. in Australia, and though outside the field of T cell receptor signaling (because then my mentor would have known of his work), he was extremely interested in T cells. Better yet, his wife had just received a position with the ballet in nearby Tel Aviv, making it necessary for Bruce to find a position in Israel. Ahhh yes, the art of a credible prank (that’s where my kids went a little awry).

When the e-mail came through and was read, I was sitting and ‘reading’ patiently at my desk. After all, as a senior graduate student in the lab, who else would my mentor turn to in her excitement at having–perhaps–identified a strong postdoc candidate?

I feigned a complete lack of interest, saying “Oh nice” with no conviction, and I could sense the frustration mounting in my mentor. After all, we’d worked closely for 4 years or so, and she-knew I-knew how hard she wanted to find a suitable postdoc. By this time, I was on the verge of completely disassembling my intestines, trying so hard not to break out in guffaws. I had to leave the room. And quickly, excusing myself with a mere grunt.

As it turned out, my mentor was deeply insulted about my lack of “loyalty/interest” in this wonderful possibility! So when I did finally ask her about Dr. Bruce Miller, without her ever telling me his name, it took a few minutes until she caught on. Fortunately I could run pretty quickly in those days, and a 40 m dash around the department allowed to to outrun a tough PI with a 25 ml glass pipette raised over her head. But she managed to equal the score some time later–perhaps a story for next April Fools Day…

So regarding the prank my offspring played on me–I have no one to blame but myself!

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Accountable Anonymity

Being heavily involved these past few weeks in reviewing piles of grants, I have been thinking a lot about the power that anonymity can confer. And how it can, when there are no checks and balances (or in the case of misuse by a person lacking in moral standards) be abused as a power base.

Despite these concerns, first as a reviewer and now as a chair and reviewer for a certain funding agency, I do believe that overall the system works. The fact that there may not be sufficient funds available to support many outstanding projects and the necessity of choosing between “outstanding,” “better than outstanding,” and “almost outstanding” does resonate in my nightmares, but unfortunately we are all in the same boat. And I hope it isn’t sinking.

So how does this process succeed despite the cloak of anonymity? Why is power generally NOT abused? First, I like to think that most scientists and reviewers are fair-minded people who can easily imagine the situation reversed with their own grants on the line. That’s probably sufficient for most instances. But in addition, there are other “checks and balances.”

For example, as chair, I assign a proposal to 3 reviewers. Not only are these reviewers anonymous to the researcher who submitted the proposal (although the list of all the reviewers on the committee is made public knowledge), but the identity of reviewers remains unknown to each reviewer until the actual meeting. So the net effect is that each reviewer wants to appear knowledgeable, reasonable, fair, and consistent to his or her peers on the review group. I perceive that this desire to do a good job and be recognized by one’s peers is a major positive influence in the review process. It is similar for manuscripts reviewed, although in the latter case recognition comes primarily from the journal editors. The reason for this is that journals don’t disclose to a reviewer the identity of the other reviewers, although they do share the comments made.

Thinking about anonymity and the responsibility that comes with it, I couldn’t help thinking about the internet and the growing problem of cyber-bullying. My 13 year old daughter recently had her first paid acting gig for a play called “The Secret Life of Girls” and was interviewed in this article.

SLOG poster

This play deals with cyber-bullying, and the conditions that allow this type of bullying to prevail in a teen-age environment.

But teen-agers are not the only ones who bully or suffer from bullies on the internet. The ability to hide one’s true identity and post vile and vulgar comments seems to be rampant, and not unknown in the realm of science bloggers. For one who believes that pretty much anything I write about can and should be read to to my spouse and 13 + 10 year old children, I am appalled at the language and–well–abuse that I see spewing from some bloggers. All in the name of some lofty ideal (gender equality, racial equality, and so on)–yet the impact is to turn away supporters from these ideals. After all, if this blogger is a “supporter,” why would I want to have any part of that? I often feel fortunate that I don’t usually have time to read the blogosphere more widely, as I am not anxious to come across more of such distasteful behavior.

Let me be clear: I do understand the need for anonymity in certain circumstances. However, along with anonymity there comes an extra burden of responsibility. People who hide behind anonymity for the sole purpose of bashing others, stirring up controversy and wielding power are misusing their anonymous stature. Not only is this cowardly, but it’s immoral.

And they should probably think carefully before doing so. After all, in the age of wikileaks and wikianswers, anonymity is hard to keep. Just ask “Who is X?” online and it is easy to unmask the identity of many such anonymous bullies.

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Updates

Update #1: I had my first book signing at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln book store, where 10 copies of my book were graciously ordered.

book store

I had a lot of fun and talked for a couple hours to some really nice people. All three of them, though, were employees in the book store. Ah, well, I’ve often said that I would give a seminar on my science work to a single interested person. So why not a Q & A about Welcome Home, Sir?

Update #2: Well I’ve now owned my iPhone for several weeks. After a bit of a learning curve, especially regarding how the various emails link together,  and after downloading a variety of applications that were already part of my old BlackBerry—I admit that this thing is a cut above the BB. In every way except one, and that’s the ability to type quickly.

Now I admit that the iPhone does have a pretty smart auto-correct program that frequently anticipates words and can really save typing time; at the same time I found that it’s easy to get into trouble. Writing to a female researcher and saying “I’d like to see the way you work with those “THONGS” (rather than “THINGS”) and I’m up the creek without a paddle. Or I may have to use the iPhone to paddle…

So emboldened by my appreciation of the new technology, I set out to explore the famous APPs that I have been hearing so much about. In fact, I remembered some time ago on Cath’s blog, reading about various humorous applications to measure productivity, and Henry describing how he “wiped the floor” at scrabble.

Well searching for myself, I was immediately able to download a program called “Molecules,” which I believe that Stephen Curry discussed at one point. Pretty fascinating to be able to carry with me a little 3-dimensional image that can be rotated at any angle to show off the protein domain whose structure I helped solve a couple years ago.

Among these applications I came across a little program called “Cal Concentration.” In this APP, the researcher need only type in the concentration desired (for example 50 mM), the molecular weight of the solute (let’s say 121 for Tris) and the target volume (let’s say 500 ml)—and lo and behold the thing spits out the following:  Dissolve 3.025 g of solute into the solvent and make up the final volume to 500 ml. Similarly, the APP will calculate mass-volume percentages and volume-volume percentages just as easily.

Wonderful?! I suppose. Planes fly on auto-pilot and the pilots can still land on their own if necessary. At least I hope that’s true. How long will it be until such basic calculations are no longer done manually? Will this lead to advanced thinking and greater calculations? Or will students and researchers stagnate and no longer be able to function without a smart-phone in their pockets?

I’d like to be optimistic—after all, one can’t stop technology. One needs to “go with the flow.” But I think only time will tell.

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