If science is a narrative, then sometimes you have to read between the lines.
Consider, as case in point, the humble Acknowledgements Section of your average peer-reviewed journal article. I have always been fascinated by this little afterthought of a missive, consigned to the end after all the “important stuff” and, unlike the rest of the text, probably dashed off at the last possible second. On the surface, it’s a rather relaxing and positive little place: the authors thank X, Y and Z for providing key reagents, and members of their laboratory for helpful comments, and colleagues for proofing the manuscript, and funding bodies for providing the dosh to make it all possible. Here is where a bit of human warmth is finally allowed to permeate the barren tundra of scholarly wisdom; you can picture sepia-tinted senior common rooms glowing with amiability and good sportsmanship, tea being poured and biscuits being passed around (and no one ever helping themselves to more than their fair share).
But alas, interactions amongst scientists aren’t always so collegial. In fact, one’s peers can be downright petty, obstructive and sometimes even malign. In consigning only goodness to the Acknowledgements section, we’re missing out on a brilliant opportunity to tell the story of our work in all of its entirely. In this spirit, I hereby propose introducing a new section to the standard scientific manuscript: the Disacknowledgements Section. This would honor all the people who obstructed the research; the cast of characters – shall we refer to them as anti-authors – without whom the work would have proceeded much more briskly and less painfully.
Below, I highlight a few personal favourites from my own scientific career. (Although I’ve tweaked details here and there to obscure identities, the fundamentals of the examples are all true.) Feel free to chime in with your own – I can assure you it’s quite cathartic.
- The authors wish to disacknowledge Dr X, who sat on the graduate student grant committee charged with judging the first author’s third-year fellowship (proposing to hand-sequence thousands of viral genotypes to search for patterns in mutation during disease progression), and who was instrumental in rejecting it because he thought there was “no way any student could sequence that much DNA in one PhD stint”. Four years, a megabase and six first-author papers later, she begs to differ. (To be repeated in the Disacknowledgements Section of all six papers, with gusto.)
- The authors further wish to disacknowledge Professor Y for insisting that not only she, but also her post-doc, be authors on the paper for providing a small bit of patient control tissue. Please note that this study also used human tissue provided by seventeen other individuals, none of whom thought that their effort merited authorship – and indeed, they would have been embarrassed to be honoured thusly. (See Acknowledgements for these lovely individuals.) Note that Professor Y had professed herself completely uninterested in the project, and indeed strongly against it in principle, until she found out what surprising data came out of it and what a good journal it was going to be submitted to; even after muscling in on the act, she never did read the manuscript or had any idea what it was about – and neither did her post-doc.
- The authors also want to disacknowledge minor co-author Dr Q who, not being a native speaker, nevertheless read the entire manuscript and made only one comment: that her collaborative data would be pulled from the paper if the first author (a native English speaker) did not change the word “material” to “tissue” when referring to the samples used in that assay.
- The authors would like to disacknowledge the co-last author Professor B, who threatened to pull his data entirely from the manuscript if the third author, his PhD student, was not promoted to second author. We would like to note that this bogus second author performed only one Western blot in isolation during a rotation (see Figure 3F for her contribution) and had little idea what the main thrust of the manuscript was about. Meanwhile the demoted third author had been working on the project for three years, was responsible for two of the key findings, but was (to quote Professor B) “just a technician.” Readers might also be interested to know that in the country in which this paper’s lab resides, second authors are allowed to include such papers as chapters in their PhD thesis. Coincidence? We don’t think so. (The first author is also a little cheesed off at the last author for caving in to this outrageous demand “for political reasons”, but after throwing a few pipettors across the room and calming down a bit, she did understand that, in not having tenure, he had little choice).
- Finally, the authors would like to disacknowledge Bigshot Professor P, who sent his post-doc halfway across the world solely to spy on the first-author’s poster and pump her for a few helpful details. Once the first-author cottoned on, she ended up having to publish the story half-finished in a minor journal to avoid getting fully scooped by P’s lab, which was about ten times the size of her own. (This is a lovely, nail-biting story of intrigue and sculduggery in its own right, which might end up one day soon in the first author’s blog as a separate post – or possibly in one of her novels.)
I think in Scots, we could call these “ach-knowledgements“. Begrudged mentions at best.
Hahahahaha! Nice one. And pirates would probably call them “arrrrrgh-knowledgements”.
At least you have the satisfaction of immortalizing these bastards for all eternity in your novels.
Hmm… plots similar revenge
Yes, with tricks of fiction one can quite nimbly avoid the libel lawyers — even in the UK. Or so I hope.
This is an absolutely stellar idea. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid such anti-authors myself, but I’ve heard some real horror stories from various friends, who will all now be receiving a link to this post in their email.
Thanks, Cath – though am amazed that any author could avoid some even small instance of obstruction or frustration.
The hidden drama and political intrigue in science is just begging to be made into a TV series.
Well, I’ve been saying that for years, Wilson. There have been very few attempts, but they group into roughly two camps: the zany sit-com full of lovable boffins, and the slick drama/intrigue ensemble charged each week with saving the world form some new scientific peril. We haven’t really had the sort of thing you’re talking about – although if anyone wants to pay me to write a screenplay, you know where I am.
Great post, Jenny – funny, to the point and heartfelt.
A bit like Cath, I have not personally had too many problems with this over the years – but maybe that is partly because I didn’t do too much time as a downtrodden PhD student/postdoc (I rapidly became a downtrodden junior PI…). I have seen a lot of it go on, though.
The disputes I have been involved in directly have almost all been around instances of “ride-along senior author” – once or twice I did cause ructions by insisting such people not be on papers. I have been on papers with “guest” authors (people who gave cDNAs, for instance), but the general rule of thumb operating has been that the “main” PI author gets to decide who is going to be a guest author – so if my friend whose project it mainly is wants to “stroke” their contact Dr X with a cDNA-provision mid-list co-authorship, then I wouldn’t feel I could object that much. If it was mainly my project, or a 50:50 collaboration, that would probably be different.
At one point I was hopeful that extended and clear “Contributions” statements were going to solve some of this – I actually wrote an editorial about it a few years back, which is here.
The Contributions statements are as ripe for abuse as authorship itself. Honorary Author has actually done nothing? No problem – just say “Dr X contributed to the overall project design” or something else intangible that can’t be checked up on independently.
What really got my goat about the Professor X scenario in the post (second bullet post) was that I gained not one but TWO honorary authors for this tiny bit of control tissue – and it elevated them above all the other medics who gave us tissue as a matter of routine but would never have dreamed of demanding authorship for such a gift.
…are you saying someone who didn’t contribute to the work shouldn’t be on the paper? 😉
You’d think that the ‘guidelines’ appearing in different journals over the last few years would fix this, e.g. those for the journal Limnology and Oceanography:
“Authorship: Every person listed as an author must have: 1) contributed substantially to the study’s conception, data acquisition, or analysis; 2) contributed substantially to drafting the manuscript; and 3) approved the final submitted manuscript. All three conditions must be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship.”
The last statement, if applied, would exclude people way beyond the examples you give…
Inspired!
But…
… don’t underestimate the power (and inaccuracy) of author paranoia. It never ceases to amaze me how poor authors are at identifying critical referees. That is, only about 1 in 10 pronouncements that “Referee X is clearly Dr Y, whose criticisms are little more than an attempt to obstruct us as his direct competitors” come close to the mark.
More often (though certainly not in the majority) Dr Y is among the more positive of referees. In the last year alone, I’ve had several instances where authors implored me to ignore the comments of Dr Y, not realizing that the detailed and enthusiastic comments of Dr Y were the only reason I was leaving the door open to allow them to respond to the criticisms of the other referees.
But of course, just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean your peers aren’t out to get you. More common (and more amusing) is the refrain “Referee X is clearly a moron who has never worked in this field. I implore you to ask an true expert, such as Dr Y, for advice. He’ll set you straight!”
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess the identity of Referee X.
Yeah, loads of last authors would fly off papers in that case. It all sounds very idealistic, but it’s never going to happen. Lab heads are judged by their last authorships, even when they are such bigshots that they don’t have time to contribute to all the papers in their groups.
Sorry Ed, our comments crossed.
Yes, I chuckled over this sort of thing all the time when I was an editor. But in my opinion, paranoia is a lot more warranted than blithe goodwill when it comes to authorships.
I guess you meant “Professor Y” in your “two added AUs who did nothing” story, Jenny.
I think that one is down to the lab PI as well. Prof Y is clearly a _Drittsekk _(my only word of Norwegian!), but sadly such people exist. Your PI should have told Prof Y firmly that simply coughing up a sample WON’T get them co-authorship. Preferably right at the beginning:
“We’ll be sure to acknowledge…”
But if not then then later. Were I the PI I would have used all the OTHER (non-AUs) contributing tissue as an argument:
“We have a lot of other tissue samples, sometimes lots from one lab, and they are not authors.”
– But I think it probably needs to be done right at the beginning, otherwise your PI perhaps would fear that Prof Y might write to the institution/journal and make trouble, demand results from “their” tissue be removed from the paper etc etc.
I suppose what I might be tempted to do then, if the person couldn’t be crowbarred off the paper, is put the word on the street about them. Not sure I would complain about them out to their own institution or funders, though some people might – esp. if the funding is from an organisation which REQUIRES “open” material transfer – but I would almost certainly tell every other mutual acquaintance to give them a wide berth. Nowadays the internet probably makes this even easier.
Heh. I am amusing myself thinking up the appropriate hashtags for the ensuing twitterwar.
#tissuegate
#greedyauthorshipgrabbers
#twat
spring to mind.
But seriously, Professor Y held sway in that university in a way particular to certain small countries where big fish tend to turn into bloated fish because of the size of the pond. Crossing him/her would have been career suicide for the last author – who, you are right, should have made arrangements at the start about how credit would be bestowed.
Understood re. the Professor Y thing. It sounds like one of these:
One of the real problems with such cases is that the PI (I mean your PI) emerges “sadder but wiser”, but only a bit bruised… but the people really getting shafted are their sidekicks who really did the work, as your post makes clear. Of course, that hurts the PI most too, as they would feel they had let the people working for them down. I guess the best one can do (as a PI) in such cases is level with people.
In the “Prof Y” set-up you describe, saying “no authorship” right at the start would be the only way – then if you are not meeting peoples’ price (like authorship) they are, er, free to decline to help.
It is annoying to have to be that formal, though – I guess it is natural to assume people won’t try to extract ludicrous tribute, with things working on a kind of unofficial but logical sliding scale, like:
– Surgeon who gives you a one-off tissue specimen – not an AU
– Surgeon who routinely collects tissue for you and is interested in research and gives advice on clinical aspects relating to project e.g. for grants – probably an AU
– Surgeon who routinely collects tissue but isn’t that interested in the research – in between, probably not BUT could go either way depending on the politics etc etc.
I give lectures to the incoming grad students at our place on “Fraud and Authorship”, and I always point them to the kinds of “Code of Conduct” rules Steffi quotes, which come from journals or from the ORI etc etc. But inevitably one then has to say:
“But I think you’ll find that in reality it’s a bit more complicated than that”
Thanks, Austin. I agree about authorship being fair in case two and arguable in case 3. Hell, there are some technicians who make loads of figures but “aren’t that interested in the research” deep down, who still deserve to be authors for sheer sweat.
I think honorary authors are here to stay – as long as there are politics, and no way to check if someone truly has has “contributed meaningful to the overall project design” or whatever get-on-paper-free excuses that can be trumped up.
Wow, lovely point made and must say very beautifully put across. Fortunately, most of my research papers did not mention the unrelated names. It is not only the acknowledgement section, but I find such unrelated names making appearances in the main author list. I recently came across a very pertinent paper which mentioned the author’s name along with superscript and tagged this author (superscript as b) has made significant contribution. This very statement makes me doubtful about the contribution and confirmed herd authorship.
Finally, this post reads minds of many scientists and yes would like to read anti-acknowledgement section in research papers 🙂
There are many institutions (fortunately not including any I’ve worked for) that should provide a blanket Disacknowledgement (drat that’s a difficult word to type!) for all of their faculty:
The authors wish to disacknowledge the Chair of their department, whose name appears on this paper for no particular reason other than that if it didn’t, certain of the authors would have no hope whatsoever of continued employment.
Thanks, Payal. I have never heard of an authorial footnote mentioning exceptional work – to me, that should be the first author by default. I wonder if it was a co-first-author-gone-wrong scenario – was the footnoted author second by any chance??
What I’m talking about, Winty. But fortunately that’s never happened to me.
“Thanks, Cath – though am amazed that any author could avoid some even small instance of obstruction or frustration.”
Oh, plenty of minor stuff, but nothing worthy of public humiliation, by a long shot 🙂
“Minor frustrations” would be like the mirror image of “helpful comments”. It’s all admissible!
Bravo, Dr. Rohn! Bravo! This reads even better than your lablit novel. Just kidding! But this has so many elements of truth that it immediately struck a chord… Next in series, salutation to anti-reviewers perhaps? The final modification of a paper that is accepted ought to contain an homage to the reviewers that critiqued it!
Yes. Ow. We obviously are working with many of the same people.
Seriously, though, these are the real culture wars of science. I’m a footsoldier in these, and I always seem to be on the losing side (eg. for the last situation, my postdoc would have been 1st author on a back-to-back that would have made a better splash than the journal the other lab decided to hurriedly publish in, thereby undervaluing their own work, breaking their word to us, and completely shafting said postdoc who now is struggling to get her paper published since it is now “confirmatory” rather than “gene discovery”.
I’ve been in every one of these situations. Except the six first-author papers. How about being advised to leave science and pursue a more “literary” career?
Wonderful post. Thanks for venting so productively.
@Kausik Some journals, like EMBO, are making all reviewing correspondence available to readers (except for the identity of the reviewer). I sort of like this idea because I think people will be less petty if they know people are reading their criticisms, even anonymous – I like to think it will temper some of the unnecessary bad manners on both sides.
@Heather How about being advised to leave science and pursue a more “literary” career?
Someone actually said that to you face? Ye gads. I hope you told them where to stick their careers advice.
Your situation with the back-to-back recently happened in our lab – but fortunately their attempt backfired: they’d messed up and had to do some silly revisions so it was our paper that ended being published first!
“How about being advised to leave science and pursue a more “literary” career?”
Heh. Been there… heard that.
So rest assured, it isn’t just postdocs / research fellows that get told this stuff…! Some of one’s senior colleagues just can’t stop themselves dishing out “helpful” advice. All for your own good, of course.
One of my former Heads of Department, in a moment of great clarity, once said to me:
I have always toyed with the idea of a disacknowledgements section in white ink on white paper as the last page of my PhD thesis. Reading this I am even more tempted.
Zelda, I love the idea of white-on-white name-and-shame page in the thesis! Stroke of genius.
Austin, I guess colleagues think lab heads blogging is even more irregular than post-docs blogging (the latter, at least, having the folly-of-youth excuse). It’s really a pity, isn’t it?
“Austin, I guess colleagues think lab heads blogging is even more irregular than post-docs blogging.”
True, though actually they were saying that stuff to me long before I was a blogger. I think my card was first marked when I wrote a piece for the Faculty newsletter likening the regular exhortations of a motivational nature that the then Dean was sending out to the old Eastern Bloc newspapers:
You get the idea.
Interestingly, our current Dean doesn’t do this, nor our University President. Is the Provost of UCL still sending out those weekly 3000-word email bulletins?
This certainly strikes chords. And you have to perhaps also feel for those whose years of ‘foundational’ work spent, say, ruling out the wrong candidate, are denied an arguably justified authorship on the eventual big paper, and are fobbed off with mere acknowledgement.
‘Free-riding’, eh? Interesting how asymmetrical attitudes become.
Taking literary revenge? Well, if it was good enough for Orwell…
@Austin Yes, the Provost’s Newsletter is still the best reading around. Also I suspect that not a few of the female staff around here are secretly in love with him solely because of the weekly missives.
@Lee It’s an excellent point about the fact that people working hard producing important negative data which steers others are seldom allowed on the paper. It hasn’t applied directly to me yet, but if this ever happens on one of my projects I will certainly consider including these. I’m just hoping that my entire screen isn’t just one big example of that.
@Jennifer, loved the post, it reminded me of a paper where 1 author did experimental design, experiments, figures and bulk of text, and the others “commented on the manuscript”…
@Zelda, great idea, but take care that your thesis will probably be published as a (searchable) PDF somewhere, so should someone google supervisor’s name+twat, you could well come up top result… So make sure it’s embedded as an image! You could set it as “background” on every single page…
Thanks Nicolas. Actually I suspect that many papers first-authored by experienced post-docs are largely one-person endeavors, but you’re never going to see that reflected in the author list. Despite all these rules of conduct, do you think any post-doc dare leave off the lab head even if he/she did nothing but provide the environment? I think not.
Jennifer, after I wrote that comment, I saw your lablit site for the first time. The only thing more embarrassing than preaching to the choir is preaching to the pope, so sorry about that.
Devil’s advocate time: I suspect that not everyone would be happy with a portrayal of scientists as human beings, flaws and all. The popular assumption is that to be rational is to be unemotional. If people outside the ivory tower knew about the petty squabbling, clashes of egos, and cutthroat ambition of people who purport to be above this, what would the consequences be? It’s almost like there’s a science PR machine that wants to make sure scientists appear to be unemotional and detached.
On a related note, here’s a Science article on attempts to standardise authorships:
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2010_04_16/caredit.a1000039
Thanks for the link, Wilson.
I rather suspect that if people outside the ivory tower knew about the petty squabbling, clashes of egos, and cutthroat ambition of people who purport to be above this, it would ultimately be better PR than people thinking we are emotionless, detached automatons. Shock, horror: scientists are human! I’d rather take the advice of someone passionate enough to throw a pipettor across the room in anger than from someone who never smiles and is “above all that petty human emotion nonsense”.
bq. “It’s almost like there’s a science PR machine that wants to make sure scientists appear to be unemotional and detached.”
For those of a certain age, I think we can blame Mr Spock of Star Trek for that…
Not sure about “passionate enough to throw a pipettor across the room in anger”. Might be an interesting person to talk to, but likely very difficult to work for. At least based on the examples of this type of personality I have met in science over the years…
@Pok, Thanks for sharing the link 🙂
Actually, Austin, I was talking about myself in that anecdote. People do say I’m good to work for – probably because I throw my bennies in private. 😉
Your take is a great approach to a tricky subject, I like it.
Partially related to the topic, Peter Lawrence wrote an editorial in Nature 21st February 2002 about credit for authors titled Rank injustice. It opens: “What has rank to do with the process of creative science? Very little. What has rank to do with the politics of science and the allocation of credit for discoveries? Almost everything.” Might be worth tracking down again. (I’m not just being lazy, dinner has almost finished baking and will have to shoot off…)
I wrote a follow-on piece, although I’m not sure if eight years later I agree with everything that my younger self wrote. I wouldn’t bother reading what I wrote (it’s a bit of a ramble and some parts today I cringe a little at), but the key thought is that research and support credits ought to be listed as two different types of credit and that this might disentangle these issues a little.
Excellent article and brilliant idea! I enjoyed reading this nice article and it also reminds me some of the cartoons in Phdcomics.com. I have seen and heard about this horror stories from many of my friends but unfortunately no one can protest agaist such an incident. Now a blog of this kind will definitely help to express the opinion and experience of every research student.
As I read that, I got gradually more aggravated. Has anyone here ever read, or even heard of, the ICMJE Uniform Requirements for Authorship? Admittedly, we are not in the field of medicine here, but it is this sort of nonsense that gets people like me in a heap of trouble. The press is whining shrilly and ignorantly about what it wrongly calls ghostwriting, and points the finger squarely at the pharma industry. NOT GUILTY! The worst offenders in every case are the authors themselves playing stupid politics of this sort.
bq. “Actually, Austin, I was talking about myself in that anecdote. People do say I’m good to work for – probably because I throw my bennies in private. ;-)”
Heh. I once kicked a filing cabinet with all the force I could muster and put my back out – it was several hours before I could walk upright and several months before the back pain went away. Admittedly
(i) I did it on a Saturday in the lab on my own, so no witnesses; and
(ii) the trigger was the computer eating my entire Thesis reference list that I had spent a day typing in
Anyway, since then I have always tried to, er, moderate the reactions.
A thought struck me while reading a news report this morning, and I found reflexions of that thought in Nigel’s comment above:
I don’t hold with such an all-encompassing generalization; the phrase ‘authors themselves’ is loaded because of obvious reasons. However, what I was wondering about is how much of the blame can be apportioned to the authors – particularly in special circumstances, such as, say, the Wakefield paper in Lancet.
In the years that that paper was out and about prior to the retraction, 10 of the co-authors retracted their names from the paper, stating that they did not ‘agree with the conclusions’. This is what I didn’t understand. If they did not agree with the conclusions, why allow the inclusion of their names in the paper in the first place? Or did they think that they could simply ride the wave created by the sensational paper, until the criticisms and revelations started coming thick and fast? And merely by retracting their names (and not doing anything else about the paper), can the (former) authors abandon their responsibility or mitigate their culpability?
It is not as easy as pointing to things like ICMJE or other guidelines attempting to regularize authorship and asking why isn’t anyone listening. The bottom line is that each discipline has its own authorial culture, built up over decades, and it’s not possible just to click your fingers and make it change. In the biomedical sciences, the lab head goes on the paper, and in the more prestigious last position, even if he has no idea what’s in the paper. Full stop. Like it or not, it’s a non-negotiable point and to turn around this particular oil-tanker you’d have to piss off a lot of very, very important people. Who’s going to rock that boat and martyr themselves for the cause? Not I.
Grant, thanks for reminding me of that Lawrence article. Not much has changed since though, alas.
Kausik, I suspect that the Wakefield co-authors were probably guilty of what many of us would be in similar circumstances – co-authorial trust. If you are a minor author, are you going to demand to see original notebooks and data of figures you’re not involved with? No, you’re going to proof the manuscript lightly, paying particular attention to your own parts, and assume that everything else in that paper has been generated in good faith. We have no reason a priori to mistrust our colleagues. They didn’t agree with the conclusions in retrospect, when they found out that their trust had been exploited. Although we will never know the full story, I do have some sympathy for their plight.
I hold out hope that Brian Deer, the investigative journalist from The Sunday Times who really ‘outed’ Wakefield, will now be able to write a book about the whole affair. I suspect that might give the whole story.
I can add my own small contribution here (from PhD thesis acknowledgments)… “I would like to thank Drs x and y for their incredibly valuable help and guidance through a difficult time, and would like to acknwledge Dr z for his invaluable help”. Can you read between the lines here? Dr z (primary supervisor) couldn’t.
Ah yes, damning with faint praise is the only weapon we currently have in our arsenals, isn’t it? I like the ‘in’ in ‘invaluable’ – good touch.
The “faint praise acknowledgement” I remember was the graduate student who thanked his postdoc “mentors” for all their help, guidance etc, then thanked his parents, and then finally thanked his supervisor, Professor X,
Fantastic diss!
You know how in the cartoons when someone thinks they’ve just come up with a money-making scheme, and they are made to have big pulsating dollar signs in their eyes? I wonder what might be a good equivalent for lab heads belatedly realizing that a heretofore neglected minion might actually have a top-tier result on her hands? Big Nature logos?
Austin: ouch.
Jennifer: In similar vein think I wrote in my commentary something about technicians (etc.) “making the boss’ idea work” and that these might sometimes be bigger contributions than might be appreciated.
As for eye-ball logos, how about images of them up behind the lecturn as plenary speaker? (One arm held aloft making a striking point, backlit for effect, etc.)
Or the Nobel Prize medal? That’d be easier to do in a cartoon. A little photoshopping would do the trick, even.
And speaking of Nobels, I wonder how many minions have been eased out of the prize because since you can give only three, and you have to include the big cheeses. How many times does the person who actually did most of the conceiving and executing actually get recognized?
Funny that you’d mention this, Dr. Rohn (not ‘Funny’ = Ha-ha; but ‘Funny’ = Hmm…) Here is an example that I came across recently, quite by accident.
Wow, that’s really sad. But I’m impressed by his poise – and as always, angry that someone who desperately wanted to remain a scientist, just couldn’t. He was obviously highly qualified, given his contributions, but there is no mercy in the system for temporary set-backs – or just a run of bad luck. I hope he finds his way back.
We discussed Doug Prasher (the guy Kausik was referring to) a while back on Corie Lok’s NN blog.
And more discussion about Prasher and the GFP Nobel on Jonathan Eisen’s blog here and at Terra Sigillata, in both of which you’ll find me lurking around in the comments.
I agree with Jenny that it is deperately sad that Prasher ended up not being able to find a long-term scientific job where his talents would be put to use – he seems to have had lousy luck with the labs he worked after Woods Hole re-locating or shutting down – but the idea that he was somehow screwed out of the Nobel by the winners of the Prize for GFP is an internet myth.
I have not actually seen a story mentioning Prasher since the late 2008 ones. It would be interesting to know whether he did manage to get back into a job in science.
I am curious to know if the Nobel Laureates ever tried, at the least, to accommodate Prasher’s request for money, if not helping to re-induct Prasher into the active scientific
community.
According to one story I read, Laureates Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien paid for Prasher and his wife to go to Stockholm to be present at the ceremony as a public recognition of Prasher’s key role in the GFP story. They may have done other things too.
Thanks for all the comments – it’s an interesting story and one I should have known about before.
I found the link:
http://aspen.conncoll.edu/camelweb/index.cfm?fuseaction=publications&circuit=cconline&function=view&uid=34&id=220961235
which mentions about Prasher’s trip to Stockholm. Thanks, Austin.
Here is Prasher’s story as of Feb 2009:
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_02_13/caredit.a0900021
Thanks for the excellent links on Prasher and the GFP story, Easwara. I hadn’t seen either of those before.
I guess what they (and the story overall) tell me is that the science funding system has a lot of problems (as we have discussed many times before on NN) but at least some (most) scientists remain people of honour, if that isn’t too old-fashioned an expression.
Prasher’s case exemplifies the pathos of human life.
And I can’t help recalling the following lines from Thomas Gray’s Elegy:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Since we’re doing quotations, Here is another sort of apposite one that I first came across on David Colquhoun’s blog. Easwara might be able to tell me if it is authentic. It is attributed to Gandhi:
I feel like we’re descending into group therapy here: “My name is [firstname] and I am not a top-tier scientist!”
/wild applause
Heh. Ouch, Jenny. It is part of the reality for most of us, though.
When I started in research long ago, aged twenty-something-not-much, I used to tell people (only half jokingly) that my ambitions in science were to publish a single-author paper and to publish a paper in Nature. I think it was about a decade ago when it became clear to me that I was never going to manage either, no matter how many years I was in the biz. But hey, life goes on.
Oh, don’t close that tag just yet. I’m sure others want to share, too!
I think it’s all part of youth. When I was in my teens, I thought I was going to learn how to speak ten languages, master ten instruments and all sorts of silly things. After a certain age you suddenly realize that you won’t achieve most of what you want to do in life. It’s the same for science too.
To whomever reminded me about PDF’s and searching – thanks. My plan is to print out the page seperately and only bind it into the copy going to my parents, my personal copy and probably the one I am sending to my best friend who has helped me so much.
Just a little fuel to the fire. I’ve been in a questioning mood for some time now. Blame it on a combination of events in my PhD and reading several books [Freakonomics, The Black Swan, Parallel Thinking (don’t diss me for reading Ed de Bono, he has some interesting thoughts)] and asking questions generally about humanity.
I think "anti-authorship" is an interesting idea. But ultimately, it’s worthless. Here’s why. Academia is like any other field with people in it. In fact, it’s worse. Some people earn megabucks or megacredit, and others get the shaft. Then there’s Belle du Jour, who got megabucks for getting the shaft LOL! But I digress…
My point – while in academia, your career depends on validation. You constantly ask questions: What does my advisor think of me? What does my boss think of me? I need this recommendation badly – who do I have to please to get this recommendation? Your career is soo dependent on jumping through all kinds of hoops. Miss one, and you fall into oblivion.
Those in power know this, and will willingly exploit those who do not have power. It is the story of humanity, over and over again.
So I finally asked myself: Do you want to keep putting yourself in a position where you can be shafted? No, I said. No more. I also told myself that I wasn’t going to change academia because these practices benefit those in power, and are therefore entrenched. Instead, I’m changing my life path. I’m going into industry where I can get paid better.
Yes, I sold out, but not because I wanted shiny crap for myself. I sold out because earning well means that I improve my options and my independence. I’m not forced into one little narrow path any more. I now have a variety of paths that I can follow and where my talents can be useful.
I know many PhDs who went into finance. Many others derided and abused these people, and some say they went over into the dark side. I think the reality is that they finally saw the light, and decided that it was time to break away from the bondage and exploitation. Or worse – you could end up like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher
It sucks, I know. But I’m glad I woke up and smelled the BS…