Glancing at the calendar this morning, in these holiday-stagnant, seminarless summer weeks in the lab, I realized that I am coming up to the midway point of my current research appointment. Like that strange illusion of endless summer that most American kids probably experience when school breaks for three months in June, January 2012 seems like a long way off to me. For me, here, I’m still a child in July: the summer birds yet linger, the goldenrod has not yet started to bloom and the evenings continue to glow right up to bedtime.
Today, I exist as a pure research being: setting my own agenda, following the science where it leads. I have a salary, a secure semi-independent affiliation, a generous consumables budget and no obligation to write grants. But sure as the leaves will turn gold, the geese will fly and the mornings will become edged with that perfect crisp coldness, this dreamy period is bound to end. And when the metaphorical autumn comes, I will need to have published a few decent papers if I want to carry on in my new/old profession.
Publication: it’s been weighing heavily on my mind these past few days. Because I was re-entering research after a four-year career break, it took nearly a year for me to get up to speed. Yes, I orchestrated three very large screens and generated quite a number of solid results in that time, but it took a good dozen months for my brain to re-engage with the knowledge and skills needed to truly hit my stride. And for the subsequent six months, instead of tidying up the unexciting loose ends needed to dispatch my screening paper to the Great Beyond, I’ve been testing the biological promise of a select few key hits that came out. To be sure, I need a bit of biology to elevate the screen to a publishable level, but the characterization has been led more by excitement and instinct than by strategic, manuscript-style thinking. In other words, I have been chasing glimpsed hares through the forest rather than herding my data like sheep.
My boss isn’t helping. He’s been urging me drop everything and tackle those promising leads, the genes that might reveal not just small cogs, but entire machines. And he’s right: this is the fun part, and the activity most likely to lead to the sort of high-profile papers I will need to compete. But personally, I don’t like unfinished business. If something needs to be written up, it really ought to go out the door. Besides a splash of biology, closing the deal will require a lot of hard, unexciting work: analysis, statistics, the tidying up of annotation. Pie-graphs. Lists. Supplementary data. Cajoling a major co-author who’s understandably distracted by a new lab, a new project. Long hours staring at Excel spreadsheets and MetaMorph screen review apps.
Really, I ought to be able to do both: devoting a large fraction of my time to sheep-herding, chasing a few hares where I can. And I keep saying I will –
– after the next fun experiment.
Oh boy do I know that feeling. After a major screen—or in my case, microarray—it’s so, so tempting to chase interesting genes than to do the ‘proper’ analysis.
Hey, isn’t that what
computersgrad students are for?I need a tame bioinformaticist chained to my desk.
What do they eat?
Canonically, coffee and pizza, I think. Perhaps diet coke at a pinch.
Too bad they don’t drink miniprep supernatant.
Maybe Australian bioinformaticians do.
We only let our flies eat vegemite.
“illusion of endless summer that most American kids probably experience when school breaks for three months in June”
THREE MONTHS???!!!
Sorry, that was the part that initially jumped out at me. More sensible comments may appear after I’ve got over the shock and jealousy.
At least your screen worked (grumblegrumble).
A PI of my acquaintance demands that papers are written as you go. A constant stream of writing, reading, experimenting, editing, discarding, re-writing. I think there are pros and cons with this… one big pro, you dedicate the requisite time to learning to write. The con, much of that is wasted…
The argument that the paper should be half-written—i.e. you know which you want figures and where everything is going to go— before you start an experiment, has some merit.
I never did that, of course.
The problem with mapping out your paper as you go is that you are making a strong assumption about the outcome of your hypothesis (“X does Y, and I need to prove that’s true by doing A, B and C”) before you actually know it’s true. I suppose in some cases this could lead to discarding outcomes that don’t favor your hypothesis and being resistant to alternative conclusions.
Not an issue for my screening paper, but something I normally keep in mind.
Absolutely, and that’s the other side of ‘some’ merit. I’d wager though that most papers, which aren’t actually testing hypotheses, would remain unaffected. That’s an argument of a different nature though.
Swallows twittering in the skies. Add these, and your bucolic idyll will be complete.
Would that be Figure 3 then, Henry?
yep yep yep. Experiments over papers ANYTIME. Experiments over grant applications, goes without saying. Science is way too much fun when you’re in your stride.
And it’s so good when you are finally sucked into something. When the way opens to a hundred different possibilities, and you keep seeing possible patterns and links and relationships. I think I get a little obsessed in this state.
Say it ain’t so.
A great post to read on a
lazyquiet Friday afternoon as I watch boats on the bay, trying to ignore the demands of paperwork around me. Almost made me run into the lab, but it is Friday….I think a little bit of obsession is healthy. Someone will clobber me over the head if it gets out of hand.
Our last paper (excellent of course) has taken a year to write and has bounced around 3-4 journals by now. I am losing track… The length of time it takes to publish these days is one of the reasons that I am all for starting to write as soon as possible. Experiments can never be neatly tied up anyway. On top of that, no matter how good the paper is the reviewer will no doubt feel obligated to come up with a series of experiments that will take several month to complete.
With your skills as a writer, it should be a easy to write the paper, right?