In doing research for my previous World View piece for Nature about the lack of female science pundits, I came across the notion that women might be discouraged from expressing their views in public in part because they didn’t want to deal with nasty responses. I can sympathize with this perspective. Even though I don’t let it stop me from speaking my mind, I am naturally conflict-adverse and can often feel physically sick in the midst of it. But I strongly believe it’s more important to speak your mind than allow fear of reprisal (or ridicule) to stop you.
Last week, I published a second World View piece in Nature, about post-doctoral career problems in the life sciences. There was a very robust response in the comment thread, by email and in the blogosphere. Overall, I received hundreds of responses from all over the world, the vast majority of them supportive.
I am not going to discuss the post-doc topic further here; the point I want to make is a lot more meta. In a few of these responses, I encountered a recurring trope: irritation that I was writing something similar to something that someone else, somewhere, had once mentioned. The implication seemed to be that in matters of opinion – even something as often discussed as post-doc careers – particular ideas could somehow be owned.
Is there any justification for this view? First and foremost, there is a big difference between an op-ed and a scholarly article. And it would be very difficult, in a 700-word piece, to enumerate all the hundreds of influences that led to my ultimate argument. I am writing from the perspective of someone who has been in the academic system for more than two decades: in that time, I have absorbed thousands of conversations from colleagues in coffee rooms, in pubs, and in the banter of the laboratory. I am also writing as someone who is precariously close to being squeezed out of the system herself: indeed, in the past few months I have thought of little else, and bored my readers here with some of that angst. More recently, as I’ve got more into politics, I’ve started having conversations with various stakeholders about the issues, canvassing as wide an opinion as I can. For the piece, I needed to frame the argument for an international readership, and I needed to propose a solution (of arguably many), and for this I chatted to many different people, including a number of esteemed scientists. All of this was distilled, in a quite painful process, to fit on one page of a magazine – and was then further cut and refined by an editor, a subeditor and a copyeditor, some of this out of my direct control.
The internet is a big place. There are millions of voices, spinning out words into the void. And I am extremely time-poor, unable to take in more than a few blogs from time to time. An infinite number of monkeys would probably reproduce my Nature piece in full, while a sub-infinite number of bloggers collectively have probably said every part of it at one time or another.
But does this mean I didn’t have a right to say what I said, to put my own spin and stamp on the well-known tide of post-doctoral angst, to propose a solution – not the solution, but one possible one – to get a discussion going? Is the protestation “But I wrote about this last year” really a good reason to expect others not to? If we all think an issue is worth discussing, and none of us can read everything, surely the best thing to do is just to embrace all the various versions that struggle to the surface in the messy scrum of the online world. Implying that people have stolen ideas when they are probably just unaware of them is counter-productive. Convergent evolution is bound to happen whenever enough people are thinking along similar lines, and collectively, many overlapping voices will be more powerful than one. Indeed, the day after my piece went live, I opened up EMBO Reports and saw a piece by Howy Jones about women scientists that echoed a few points in both my recent Nature pieces. I was happy, not upset, that the arguments would get even more exposure.
If there had been infinite space for citations, and had an infinite amount of time to read every blog on earth, who would I have chosen? I am a big fan of Michael Teitelbaum, and have blogged about his views before. I was taken to task for not acknowledging Beryl Lieff Benderly, whose work I honestly have never come across before – but I’m glad I have now, because her stuff looks well worth a serious read. I’m sure I’m unaware of hundreds of other key voices. But I’m not going to apologize for saying what I needed to say, in my own words, in my own particular corner of space-time. Because sometimes you just have to speak out.
Jeez. Whatever goes around, comes around. Now and then we editors at Your Favourite Weekly Professional Science Magazine Beginning With N get taken to task by Professor X complaining that the conclusions of the paper by Professor Y aren’t new, because Professor X published the same thing ten years ago and hadn’t been cited. It’s the not-being-cited part that rankles, of course. In many (perhaps most) cases, an investigation found that Professor X had done no such thing, or, at least, his conclusions were not as well-founded as those of Professor Y.
Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, the fact remains that however many people have written on a particular subject, your piece is uniquely your take, and therefore different. It is as I wrote elsewhere recently – someone came up to me and suggested I write a book on human evolution. I responded that everyone and his dog had written about this subject – which I knew very well, having just reviewed a stack of six books on the topic for the London Review of Books. Yes, quoth my interlocutor, but it would be YOUR book on human evolution. And he was right. How could he not be? So knickers to the nay-sayers, we say.
Thanks, cromercrox. Your comment has left me with a warm, squidgy feeling inside. The perfect antidote to nastiness. How’s the book going, by the way?
Warm and squidgy. Ugh 😉
The book – haven’t started writing it yet, though the first couple of chapters are pretty much scoped out in my mind. I need to get into the ‘zone’ first. I might need to take a couple of days off to get myself going.
Re needing time away to write, I hear you on that one! One scarcely has time to think.
“Warm and squidgy” and “knickers” are not perhaps the best things to think about together, especially in one’s dotage. Which is no longer as far off for me as I’d like.
Um, possibly not. As you were, everyone.
Jenny – it’s outrageous that anyone would be so arrogant as to think that once *they* had written on a topic, that everyone will have read the article, and that said matter is now closed. It all depends on the subject, and in the case of post-docs and their careers it is necessary, if one is to change the system, for many voices to be heard. Imagine the Science is Vital campaign if only one person had turned up at the Treasury. In fact, there were thousands of people all saying the same thing, and that’s what made the difference. It will take a proliferation of well-written articles such as yours to stir up what is a deeply fossilised scientific career structure.
… especially as the Maison Des Girrafes is, as I write, a building site. I think I shall take my iPad down to the Maison Des Girrafes Marine Biology Research Station ( = Beach Hut) for a couple of says…
LOL!
What Stephen said. It is always irritating to be “un-cited”, but people do not own particular ideas… even though in science they sometimes think they do…!
On a subject of such general interest, and which is based on opinion rather than on (e.g.) records of experiments, bashing you for not citing other people who have said similar things seems to be spectacularly missing the point. The point-missers may feel the other person said it better, but that hardly means it doesn’t bear saying again, even laying aside the “so this is my personal view” aspects.
If no-one were allowed to say/write anything that someone else had already said/written that would mean the end of virtually all discourse. (And certainly the end of all virtual discourse).
In any case, ideas flow and mutate and one version is almost never exactly identical to another version. Should West Side Story have been prohibited because it took its theme from Romeo and Juliet? Of course not.
Were people really expressing “irritation” when they said you wrote something similar to someone else, or just sharing? I ask, because you’ve thought *I* did this one time when I left you a comment on an old blog saying something to the extent of “so and so wrote about this here as well (link)”, but then I only meant to add to the discussion and because I thought you’d find the link interesting, since it was about the same thing.
I see this done a lot online, out of excitement to be able to share with an audience that’s clearly interested in the same topics as them. People who read your pieces and liked them will also have read similar things and want to share those, but when I see (or leave) a comment like that, I never interpret it to be an accusation of unoriginality.
It’s more like Amazon does: “If you like this, you will also like…”
Jenny,
I find it pathetic that people would complain about your voicing an opinion/idea that someone else, in part of in full, may have voiced elsewhere. Is not the whole point of voicing an idea or opinion to publicize it so that others can agree and support (or diasagree and dissent)?
I fear that the same egocentric attitude that is inherent (and detrimental) in science is rearing its ugly head…
I agree with all the other comments so far! If we only are “allowed to voice something when we are unique and noone has even mentioned it before etc” … wow, would there be a defening silence?!
I got the feeling that some people are always going to be annoyed/irritated/emotional about the fact that something ‘they have thought’ might be something other people think too…. but the other people get more attention for it?
I think citations in peer review journals are different, since that is more “I was first with describing the protein-protein interaction” but when it’s voiced when people express their feelings/thoughts about something like “the academic system as we see it right now”… well, I’d think we are a lot of people pondering about this and the main difference might be who actually writes it down, takes a stand and get it out in the ‘public’?
(I really liked both the pieces! I do think that the links in your blog post are mixed up though, the first goes to the second and vice versa.)
Looking at the comments on your postdoc piece now, it also seems to be a lot of self-publicity, where people are leaving links to something they wrote themselves in the comments. Again, that doesn’t mean they’re dismissing your opinion as not relevant because someone else wrote a similar thing before, but just using your article as a platform to get more people to their own page. After all, your audience is also going to be interested in similar pieces (or so they assume).
I never claimed the people who disagreed with me in the Nature comment thread, or left links, were dismissing my opinion – I’m always happy for people to dissent and point to their own writing. The comments I’m referring to in my post were those that specifically objected to me revisiting covered ground (some rather rudely), but none of these were in the Nature comment thread. I don’t want to point to them specifically because I’m personally not interested in dissing people back in public – and one was by private email.
The way I view this is that it is likely a form of jealousy. Your article (which was well written and relevant) appeared in perhaps the biggest of science news machines, Nature, and as when publishing research articles, where your writing appears matters. People who have written on this topic before, I suspect, in part were just a little jealous that whatever they said didn’t get the exposure and readership that your article did. They need to get over this and, as you say, feel happy that these issues will get some more people thinking about them.
Makes sense. Sorry you’re getting rude reactions.
Hey Jenny,
I just finished your second novel, and then found your article about post-docs, and then this blog!
I think everyone is spot on. I’ve always thought that the more people who express the same opinion, the better the chance for a real change. And maybe the fact that so many people seem to experience deja vu when they read this article indicates that this issue is coming to a head.