Mind the Gap

I’ve recently purchased a new flat, so the past week has featured a whirlwind of the usual routine-breaking activities – packing, schlepping, unpacking, painting, trips to Ikea and B&Q, switching over all the utilities and changing addresses. Having calculated that this is the 20th dwelling I’ve moved into since I was born (and the 9th since I emigrated from the United States thirteen years ago), I should be used to it by now. There is, of course, that lovely feeling you get – rather like I envision one would feel in a sanatorium – when you take a day off to start unpacking: dazed, tired, rather bewildered and not quite believing that it’s really true as you blink in the sunlight of a workday afternoon. The sense of unreality increases as you re-create familiar spaces in an unfamiliar room: my work area, for example, which is a particular arrangement of desk, shelves and filing cabinet along with a selection of well-loved books and art, a combination that still looks, at this moment, both right and wrong at the same time.

If you live in Britain, one almost unavoidable problem is the length of time it takes for broadband to be re-established – an atmosphere of disconnection that only enhances your sense of unreality. Very unfortunately, my iPhone’s service provider does not muster up enough signal in this part of Rotherhithe to allow me to send text messages or download more than email headers, so my internet abstention is absolute. (Therein lies a tale for another time – a proposed local phone mast was recently overturned, in a triumph of sensationalism over science, by a rampant eco-community group convinced that the so-called magnetic rays would disrupt migratory birds taking off and landing at nearby Surrey Water. The council didn’t seem to have the heart to fight back.)

My telephone line was connected on the 12th of this month, but apparently the phone company will need ten working days to allow my broadband company to reactivate my old account. (The fact that the phone company is much quicker when you choose to take broadband from it instead of another company is probably not a coincidence.) In my case, that turns out to be 15 calendar days, so I’m stuck offline until Friday. Now, I’m seriously questioning this time frame. First of all, what’s with the “working days”? Is switching over broadband such a time-consuming procedure that some poor flunky must labor over it day after day, hour after hour, to make it come to pass? Will a weekend or two really interfere with that process? Or is rather, as I suspect, a small series of very minor acts – the filling of online forms, the pressing of buttons? Apparently not, the broadband providers assure me (with their alarmingly calm Scottish call-center accents): it takes five stages, it’s still with the phone company, our hands are tied.

(This is the same phone company, I might add, whose computer a few months ago spawned an anomalous virtual entity apparently referred to as “robotic autocease” which cut off my phone line for no reason. I was referred to a crack team of forensic phone specialists in Manchester dedicated solely to sniffing out and abolishing the many instances of robotic autocease codes that are prowling the company’s computers, looking for their next victims. It took seven days on that occasion to reactivate my line, despite having a perfectly healthy dial tone – and yet more time before broadband was reinstated.)

Yesterday on Radio 4 (the sole broadcast from the outside world that I can receive in this place), I heard the Labour Government’s call for Superactive Broadband for all UK homes by 2016 (after which point I couldn’t get Muse’s song ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ out of my head – it scans so nicely: try it yourself with the appropriate satanic guttural overtones). If we can’t even switch on a wireless account in fifteen days with the existing infrastructure today, I’m not going to hold my breath for the future.

So in the meantime, I write blog posts and LabLit articles here at home, copy them onto flash drives and try to upload them at work between experiments. I write short fiction – the sort that doesn’t require referring to Wikipedia. Some of my freelance science writing work languishes for lack of online time to research them, and I spend all my lab coffee breaks paying bills and doing all the other chores that you can’t do without the internet these days. And I can’t follow the Nature Network or other online community threads adequately – so apologies if I’ve seemed distant.

Yes, it’s all very frustrating, but a tiny voice inside my head admits that it’s sort of nice to let it all go for a fortnight. So this is me signing off: primordial scientist-writer, living on the equivalent of bugs and rainwater.

Why can’t we just speak plainly?

The evils of jargon have been in the news recently, when local governments were taken to task for excessive use of management-speak in their literature. Coincidentally, the topic has also reared up in several vitriolic comment threads in the scientific blogosphere. One irate reader – apparently not a scientist himself – even went as far as to accuse scientists of purposefully using jargon in their everyday professional lives to muddy the waters around their research and to keep ordinary people in ignorance (of, presumably, their shifty, nefarious intentions as much as their actual data).

While I would be the first person to expound passionately on the importance of scientists learning how to explain their research to the public in ordinary language, I am absolutely bewildered – and a little angered – at the suggestion that jargon amongst scientists is merely a vehicle for underhanded obfuscation and not, as I always assumed, a useful tool at the heart of peer-to-peer communication in science. Jargon has a bad reputation, true, but what is it, really? Yes, it’s a complicated word or phrase that requires training to understand, but it also – more significantly – offers those in the know a substantial shortcut for communication in exquisitely precise terms.

Ponder, if you will, the following phrase of pretty standard and relatively lucid cell biological jargon:

We used immunofluorescence analysis to assess the phosphorylation status of JNK and ERK, and concluded that these two effectors are downstream of Ras signalling and involved in damage-induced apoptosis.

Yes, it sounds a bit scary if you don’t know anything about cell biology, and I’m sure your average person on the street couldn’t follow it. But they’re not the intended audience, and the complexity is not just cosmetic. Just imagine if we were expected to stand in front of an audience of fellow researchers in the field and convey the equivalent information in normal speech:

We used a test where we probed for the presence of a small chemical decoration on the side of a protein, which is a fancy name for one of the building blocks that helps make our cells work properly. The decoration, or phosphate group, on this protein building block we’re studying is a thing that helps convey energy, so when you put it on or take it off, you can influence whether a protein is “on” or “off” and therefore able to act as a sort of cellular message-boy, telling other parts of the cell what to do. So anyway, this test involved using special proteins called antibodies, which happen to be key weapons deployed by our immune systems to fight off germs, but in this case we are using them because they can home in on any other protein we want and stick to it. The antibodies are invisible, so we have to stick a fluorescent decoration on it so we can see if the target protein is there or not. …

Are you as tired as I am yet? And that’s only conveyed, quite vaguely and not very usefully, the first eight words of the sentence. And in fact I didn’t do a very good job even at that; each noun in my sentence could probably launch an entire chapter in an undergraduate science textbook – assuming you did biology in high school as a firm grounding. Which is a pretty big assumption these days.

Far from fettering science – and other diverse professions ranging from law and medicine to women’s studies and history – and probably more prosaic professions like plumbing (“Bob, could you pass me that longish metal tool with the ring-like structures on both ends, each of which is canted up at opposing seventy-degree angles?”) – jargon frees us gloriously from vague and roundabout descriptions whose meaning could easily be misunderstood – that is, if we didn’t fall asleep before the end of the explanation. I’ve sat through a few scholarly meetings in the humanities, and even though I don’t understand half of what these academics are saying, when someone says “post-humanism” and the rest of the room nods earnestly, I don’t think they’re being pretentious and showing off; no, I accept that I am witnessing first-hand the transmission of an extremely complicated concept on which entire theses have been written – all in five syllables. Jargon allows us to say exactly what we want to say in a few words as possible, so we can spend most of our time discussing the implications of our research – or better yet, doing more of it.
Jargon sets us free.

Why can’t we just speak plainly? Because, amongst ourselves, it would be a disaster. So next time you hear someone complaining about the evils of jargon, remember what a little life-saver it actually is.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to dash off and co-IP my RIPA lysates – ta ra.

Science is a fickle mistress. Anyone who’s been in the game as long as I have knows that experiments work only occasionally, and streaks of bad news are inevitable. In fact, I think it’s the mark of experience when you can derive genuine pleasure from an experiment with a clean negative result; that is, one that disproves your hypothesis or otherwise fails to advance your work, but at least has the good grace to do so irrefutably, with perfectly behaved controls. Because after all, this situation makes a nice change from those countless other times when something’s just gone wrong – when you suck your precious cells right off a glass cover slip during a wash, say, or pipette a chemical intended for well A into its next-door neighbor. Or worse, from the times when you are convinced you didn’t make a single mistake, but the results are nevertheless ambiguous – like the perfectly blank Western blot film that taunts even competent biochemists on occasion.

Still, a scientist cannot live by clean negative results alone. Although you know full well that the ride is supposed to be bumpy, and have long since developed a thick skin from a thousand little failures and disenchantments, you still, sometimes, let the bad patches get to you. So it was for me last week when, looking down the microscope, I quickly assessed that an entire week’s work – upwards of 18 hours’ hard graft – had all come to nothing. At that moment, I experienced the strong desire to walk out of the lab and never come back. It doesn’t matter how instinctively you know that the effects of disappointment are only temporary and will eventually to be swept away by that rare experimental success. At that moment, you want out. Badly.

After that black spell at the microscope, I took the Tube home. As I sat there, surrounded by near-catatonic commuters, my eye was suddenly caught by a recruitment advert for MI6 Secret Intelligence Service:

Would a scientist make a good spy? I briefly toyed with the idea of a career change. The poster invited me to remember what the last person who’d left the carriage looked like: true, I’d idly watched passengers straggle off at Westminster, but couldn’t for the life of me recall a single face or outfit a mere thirty seconds later. And this is a person who spent literally months looking at millions of cells with the sole purpose of distinguishing differences. Best not to give up the day job, I thought, even though the point was probably moot: they don’t even trust we non-Euro resident aliens to vote in local elections or become civil servants, let alone don a black balaclava and abseil down some enemy building under a new moon or slip truth serum into a high-ranking foreign diplomat’s martini.

Fortunately, the black clouds disperse just as easily as they gather. Today, for no reason whatsoever, things started to look up. I went into the tissue culture suite feeling fully recharged and eager to redo my failed experiment. I took simple pleasure in harvesting my insect cells, counting them in a glass hemocytometer, seeding them into their circular wells and introducing the double-stranded RNAs to silence particular genes over the week. I spoke about my most recent results at the lab meeting, hearing a ring of confidence that has not been evident for some time, and sensing people responding positively to my manner. I didn’t even mind opening up Adobe Illustrator and rejigging those figures yet again for a recent Major Revision decision – in my gut I know we’ll get it in third time lucky.

For the moment, everything’s all right again.

Sing it, Frankie:

That’s life, that’s what all the people say.
You’re riding high in April,
Shot down in May
But I know I’m gonna change that tune,
When I’m back on top, back on top in June.

On my way into the lab yesterday, I noticed major construction works going on in the main university quad. I was struck by how small and dainty the bulldozer was – only about the size of a bicycle – and by the fact that there didn’t seem to be pipes or anything else useful being unearthed to account for the massive swathe of fine grass that had been exposed.

And that’s when I noticed the cops – half a dozen Metropolitan police in full regalia, buttons and brass glinting in the sun as they staked out the cordoned area. And the handful of men and women in white disposable suits, pawing through the rain-soaked dirt one clod at a time. As I watched, one of the CSIs pulled out a deflated black balloon – no doubt debris from yesterday’s lackluster anti-budget-cut demonstration – and examined it briefly before throwing it over his shoulder. In no time at all, a few heavies had erected a square green tent to hide whatever ever it was they were exhuming.

Or whomever.

The rumors had already hit my department by the time I got there: human remains, it was said – nobody knew how old. Maybe they’d discovered some stray bits of Jeremy Bentham that hadn’t made it into the Box? Fodder for your next novel, a few people quipped: you could call it Death on the Quad.

Murder turned out to be the day’s theme. A few hours later, one of our PhD students was giving his viva talk, and my boss launched his introduction like this:

“He had a very unusual career path into Biology. In addition to doing a Bsc in Physics and a Master’s in computer science, he spent a couple of years working for the Ministry of Defense. So not only does he look like he can kill you, but he actually can.”

Which is certainly one way of intimidating a thesis committee.

Yesterday morning I woke up and realized that the entire logistical edifice underpinning the scientific profession is flawed. What’s more, I didn’t just see the problem; I had a glimpse of its solution.

What sparked all this off? Well, my career fears have been very close to the surface in recent months. It isn’t only mounting urgency inspired by the erosion of my last-chance fellowship – the consequences of economic recession promise increasingly poorer prospects in a game that was always going to be dicey. Our Faculty of Life Sciences just announced redundancies aimed at ten percent of research staff and, as funding bodies tighten their belts further, this may be only the beginning. If institutions can’t even hold on to the lab heads that have already established themselves, what hope is there for the likes of me?

They always say that the scientific profession is like an apprenticeship, but with a blast of unexpected clarity, I suddenly don’t buy this argument any more. If I were training in a normal craft or guild, I’d have a reasonable chance of joining its ranks at the end. Teach me to be a plumber, and in five years’ time, I’m pretty confident that I’d be out there fixing sinks and installing dishwashers for decent money.

Why don’t we have the same assurances in science?

Then I started thinking about the population biology of your typical lab – and the numbers just don’t add up. Trainee scientists – PhD students and postdocs – are not, as we all assume, bona fide trainee scientists – i.e., being trained to become lab heads. That couldn’t be right, because there are only a limited number of positions. If you merely wanted to train enough people to eventually replace you, your average lab head would only want to end up with one replacement – or maybe three or four, just in case of attrition. But this is not what happens. No, an average successful lab head will train up dozens of potential replacements. If a successful lab head runs a lab for 30 years, with say 4 PhD students at any one time, and assuming an average stint duration of 5 years worldwide, you’d expect about 6 “generations”, multiplied by those 4 positions = 24 potential replacements. (I leave postdocs out of the equation, as they train in multiple labs and can all be considered as former PhD students for the purposes of the math.) Even if half of these students don’t make the cut – die, drop out to have kids, get bored and do something else – the lab-head is still replacing herself more than 12-fold. Therefore, the argument that science is an “apprenticeship” is a gross misnomer, because only one of these 24 progeny will find a lab of their own – or fewer, if positions start being cut due to harsh economic times. That’s not what an apprenticeship should be about at all.

No, instead, what the lab head is doing is exploiting relatively cheap, disposable labor to bolster her personal reputation and that of the institute that houses her. And as unflattering as this may sound, I think it is more about money and disposability than we’d like to admit. Because whenever I ask why permanent research scientist positions for experienced post-docs are incredibly rare, I always hear the same explanation: they cost too much. If someone is good and has a lot of experience, you have to pay them what they’re worth: fancy that.

(As an aside, I know from experience that even if you are happy to take a very large pay cut and compete with newbie PhD students, or even graduates, for a rare research assistant or scientific officer job, you are still unlikely to be hired when you have too much experience for comfort.)

Let’s leave aside for a moment the idea that you get what you pay for: that an experienced post-doc can probably produce significantly more results than an inexperienced one, and a massive amount more than a new PhD student – that they may actually be worth the extra salary. It doesn’t matter: what you lack in quality you have in quantity: those dozen or so ‘apprentices’ under your lab roof at any one time may be horrifically inefficient, but they eventually get the job done. If they didn’t, the system would have ground to a halt ages ago.

No, the lab head and his reputation are fine; his university gets a good score in the national assessment, and scientific progress marches forward smoothly. Instead, our system passes the buck on to where things don’t run so smoothly: the bulk of the disposable apprentices, hitting a brick wall. Of course some can continue on in research, either productively in industry, or securing a rare, semi-permanent research associate position. But many leave science altogether, and some go into science-related jobs where a PhD or postdoctoral experience can get you hired: scientific publishing, science journalism, patent law, venture capital consulting, policy, public engagement, biotech sales, medical charity administration. I am not saying that these alternative careers are not viable or important. But should the meticulous, ridiculously long training of these practitioners be in the hands of the taxpayers and other contributors who think their money is being earmarked for scientific research? Is it fair that the bulk of, say, Medical Research Council-funded studentships and postdocs are being trained ultimately for other professions? What would that little old lady who wants to leave her entire inheritance to Cancer Research UK think if she knew that the majority of the apprentices trained with her money will end up in the City or working for journals or museums?

It just suddenly seems very wrong indeed.

Dear reader: I have a dream. In my dream, Phase I, all lab heads train only 3-5 students over their career lifetime – just enough to replace the current generation of lab heads, with a few extra in case of attrition. These students would be the very best that the universities produce, and competition would be fierce. A few more of the lab positions would be held for post-doctoral training of those few students. But the bulk of research staff in the labs of the world would be made up of permanent, professional scientists. These would be paid a lot more than ‘apprentices’, but you probably need far fewer of them to get the desired results. And perhaps a few more students and postdocs could be trained with money paid into a general institute kitty contributed by the other professions who now skim off science’s leavings. After all, these companies – banks, law firms, publishers, big pharma and the like – are getting the benefit of good staff without contributing to the bulk of their education and training. This way, you’d get a more efficient lab, all talented scientists would have real prospects in research and morale would be a lot higher. Perhaps more meaningfully, those who leave the bench for related jobs would not have to suffer through a superfluous number of postdoctoral years funded by siphoned-off research money that was intended for purer pursuits – you only need a PhD to do many of these jobs, not eight years of postdoctoral servitude during which pension and savings accumulations are concomitantly delayed.

What happens when the pool of permanent research staff is ten or fifteen years away from mass retirement? Here’s where we reach my dream, Phase II. Gradually you start expanding the university science places and PhD positions, letting in perhaps 2 to 3 times more than you’ll need to replace each of the permanent staff as they go offline. Eventually, with adjustments, the system should reach an equilibrium: enough PhD students to stably feed a majority pool of permanently employed, professional research scientists, each lab with a traditional lab head at its helm and a team of true apprentices.

Could this ever happen? I’m not sure, because it would take a cataclysmic culture shift. You’d have to persuade the universities to get rid of the bulk of their science undergraduate cash cows and their cheap research labor; and you’d have to convince labs and grants to find the funds to hire people long-term. You’d also have to disgorge and work through the digestive track the current glut of tens of thousands of starry-eyed students, the majority of whom are headed for broken dreams and jobs elsewhere. Make no mistake, it’s a massive oil tanker sailing at a brisk clip.

At a recent retreat, we had a guest speaker tell us about a massive new biomedical research institute being built at St Pancras in Central London. I raised my hand and asked: will it be business as usual for the temporary nature of postdoctoral staff? The speaker misunderstood me, explaining with pride that they were looking into arranging four or five-year positions for post-docs instead of the normal two to three. But imagine what might happen if a major, conspicuous institution like this decided to implement a plan like mine. Others would watch – and if successful, the model would be copied. Because one institute can make a difference. For example, historians often credit Cambridge’s Laboratory for Molecular Biology for instituting a cultural change in how science is done that spread throughout the entire world. Change is possible – but not if we’re too afraid to complain that change is sorely needed.

So who’s with me?

As Editor of Lablit.com, I often receive interesting emails in the magazine’s Inbox. By far the most common are from readers letting us know about specimens of lab lit (realistic mainstream fiction featuring scientists as central characters) that we may have missed. Our curated List of novels currently stands at a bit more than a hundred, with about ten in the current inspection queue and more being suggested every month. Nearly every novel listed is written in English, but this is not deliberate: we can only report what we know about, and all suggestions we’ve had to date (aside from Daniel Kehlmans’s Die Vermessung der Welt) have been for English language titles.

Last month, however, we received an engaging email from Lennert Coumans, a Dutch masters student of immunology at Maastricht University, alerting us to the existence of the novel Impact Factor by Paul Brand, a pediatrician and researcher in Zwolle. Although the title is in English (presumably because the concept of the impact factor is a universal evil), the rest of it is penned in Dutch with no apparent translation available. The novel, Lennert reported, is about a female PhD student whose life swerves into chaos after a night of passion with an unscrupulous colleague at a scientific meeting.

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Naturally I was hooked – but alas, the book was no longer available on Amazon. At this point Lennert stepped up to the plate, offering to bring me a copy on his upcoming holiday in London. My Dutch is fairly passable after a four-year stint in Amsterdam, though I’ve never tried to read more than the local rag, De Volkskrant, in that tongue. But what better opportunity to try?

The handoff occurred yesterday in The Olde Mitre (hat tip to Matt for the recommendation) with soaking wet feet over a few pints of Adnam’s Broadside, followed by an unsuccessful but very damp attempt to assuage Lennert’s girlfriend’s sudden acute craving for pannenkoeken in Soho. On the Tube trip home, I couldn’t resist having a quick peek at the opening scene: in which our heroine, Marieke, feeling sexually restless (like “a free bird”) after a brief, unfulfilling relationship with a cove called Max, is standing coyly at her poster, scoping out all the male scientists passing by…

Don’t tell him about your data, sweetheart. He’s not worth it.

There’s a new kid on the block in our institute: a shiny high-content screening apparatus. I don’t want to engage in any gratuitous product placement, so let’s just refer to it as the Swanky Apparatus. A market leader, this sleek number costs about as much as a house and is the showcase piece of our just-built state-of-the-art screening lab. Not only will its confocal front-end incubate and photograph your billions of cells in stacks of multiwell plates, but its brain will analyze them for you in real-time. Understandably charmed, the entire population of our building is now busy cooking up proposals for how best to entice this machine to peek into the darkest corners of our lines of research and throw up an enticing cache of biological signals out of a veritable abyss of noise.

I poked my head into the half-unpacked lab recently to admire the Swanky Apparatus, along with the massive liquid handling robot that had been brought in as its live-in valet. The head of the lab – let’s call him the Master – was only too happy to show it off.

Although it’s all very impressive, I must admit to feeling a little depressed at the thought that this machine could probably repeat my entire two and a half year stint in the lab in about ten seconds, and not even raise a silicon sweat in the process. Knowing how fed up I am with screens at the moment, my boss mercifully suggested I forego the intensive two-day training course. But my lab mates returned full of wondrous tales about the machine’s prowess – with one odd footnote.

“You can’t actually see what the cells look like,” my benchmate said. “We asked the Master how to access the photos, and he looked and us and said, _why would you want to do that?_”

And therein lies the rub. The Swanky Apparatus’s raison dêtre is all about reducing biological complexity into numbers. Its built-in software packages are all tailored to translate pixels to math, comparing the control cells to the experimental samples and working out, numerically, how they differ. And it calculates the so-called zed score – the line under which you decide that the numbers are not above background – that the genes or conditions giving rise to them are not hits. This clashes a little bit with the raison dêtre of our lab, which is interested in why cells and tissues take up their particular shapes in order to perform their functions. Of course some aspects of the appearance of cells can, to a certain extent, be represented numerically: the software can segment individual cells, and count them, and measure their sizes, and tell if they’re dead or alive, and no doubt do a lot of other common tasks very well indeed. But how well could it say that this particular phenotype or texture is a bit funny looking, subtly but reproducibly? Much less tell you what that means?

I have to admit that, at this point, I would kiss anything that came along and decided on my zed score for me – even the Swanky Apparatus. I’ve gone through my visual screen exhaustively, and our talented research assistant has gone through a replicate screen even more exhaustively, and we are currently fighting it out trying to agree on a Venn diagram consensus based on what our eyes and brains can see. It’s all quite messy, and a bit subjective, and very, very exhausting, but from this murk of human observations, refined over a long period of time, patterns are slowly starting to crystallize. And to me they feel a lot more believable than a column of numbers.

The scary thing is, though, that I don’t know if this new upstart robot, given the same task, would give substantially different answers. Even more scarily, if it did, I don’t know how you could tell which one of us was “right”.

If a laboratory is like a family, then some days I feel like the black sheep.

I don’t mean that I’m unpopular or causing problems – far from it. In my first two years in the lab, I spent a large part of my research time doing things that would help the boss or the group: ordering all the consumables and equipment, organizing events and clean-ups, aiding with recruiting and the budgets and (as we’d just moved into the institute) making the connections with other labs needed for that all important scrounge network. If a visitor showed up and the boss couldn’t be found, I’d be the one that would pick her up and drink teas with her in the common room until he had returned; if something needed doing, the administration and support staff quickly worked out that I was a surer bet than my boss for making things happen. I sent out all the cells and reagents requested of us by other labs, I dealt with the Material Transfer Agreements, I made sure the pipettes got calibrated and broken equipment fixed or replaced. I did this all without rancor: I was desperately happy to have returned to the bench in any capacity – to have found a lab that would take a chance on someone with my eyebrow-raising career back-story.

When our talented research assistant was hired, along with a few more enthusiastic and can-do colleagues, many of those burdens were taken from me, but in the meantime I was still spending most of my time carrying out high-throughput screening; first in fixed cells, and then those few months in Heidelberg doing it live. The saga drags on: I’m still finalizing the list of hits, cleaning up the annotation and, in the limited hours I can squeeze in, scrabbling to do the cell biology and biochemistry needed to elevate one of our shortlisted genes to showcase status – the fun stuff, but the effort feels so woefully superficial compared to how it could be if only I were allowed to specialize.

And as my fellowship slowly expires (23 months and counting), I am starting to feel a mounting sense of futility and fatalism. I am the only one in the lab, save for our research assistant, who doesn’t have a defined, hypothesis-driven project: how does X work? What is the function of the Y pathway in this model system? How does Z contribute to cancer, or cell polarity, or morphogenesis during development? As I search for interesting genes (“unbiased screen” might be a euphemism for “aimless trawling”), even the rotating students and the summer students have more focus – and payoff. It really hit home the last few times I heard my boss give a seminar. The talks were different in content every time, but the striking thing was that I have never once been featured in them – though the names of colleagues who joined the lab long after me are now starting to feature in the fabric of the lab’s research narrative. And that is because nothing I have done to date has been interesting biology.

Some days, me and my robots and my 20,000 tiffs and 2 terabytes of live-cell imaging movies feel like a circus sideshow. I can hear the music and laughter in the main arena, but can’t quite work out how to get inside out of the cold.

As I scanned through the bad news, I noticed with interest that my reaction was strangely muted. Of course I liked the paper and wanted it to get published, and was disappointed when “on this occasion”, the editors “regretted” to inform us that they were “unable to offer publication” – how well I know the standard euphemisms all editors learn to cut and paste from handy templates their very first week on the job. But the fact that I’m not the first author seemed to impart a detached, almost anaesthetic vibe to the whole dreary proceedings. When you’re the lead author, a rejection feels like a kick in the stomach every single time, no matter how many years have passed since your first. When you’re not, the overriding reaction is more a fatalistic sense of impending tedium.

It all started last year. The original manuscript, authored by a few of my colleagues, had been close to getting into a respectable, general-interest biology journal of impact factor circa 10, but a few key experiments were lacking and the referees, although largely positive, had failed to persuade the editor that any future efforts were worth waiting for. Meanwhile, the first author had moved on and I was drafted in to fill in a few missing pieces experimentally. As my efforts proved useful, I got bumped up from middle to second author and, sort of by default, ended up taking control of the car halfway through its rather bumpy road trip, even though I was still only riding shotgun.

Submitting papers, as many of you know only too well, takes a hell of a lot of time. The text, for me, is the relatively easy part. But your average multi-panel figure can take days to assemble and get just right. The files come off the confocal microscope in inscrutable formats that only ImageJ can read; the TIFFs must be created there in its serviceable but clumsy little universe, their channels separated or merged, then imported into Photoshop for tweaking and cropping before being placed into Illustrator and properly scaled and labelled for the final mock-up.

It’s not hard, but it eats up an amazing amount of time. So when the boss casually remarks, “I think maybe we should add that other control panel to this figure, and can you show the RGB merges as well – oh, and [yelling at your back as you try to escape down the corridor] maybe make a blow-up of all the relevant areas and put them alongside, with a few arrows?” – your heart sinks. Especially as, when you’re riding shotgun, it’s not always obvious where the departed first author has actually stashed the original files, let alone what he’s called them. So appended to the usual conveyor belt of image processing is a flurry of emails with someone whose mental hard-drive is slowly being overwritten by newer and more exciting things.

The rejection letter I was reading was from the first attempt at resubmission. After overhauling the figures and text, we’d gone for this particular journal for its audience, even though its impact factor was significantly lower (about 7). But despite nearly squeaking in at the previous and more significant journal, the current one hadn’t even sent it out for review. Why? Because we didn’t have the “mechanism”. (As the first author so eloquently put it by email, if we’d had the mechanism, we would hardly be submitting the paper to them, would we?)

So what to do next? The paper is nice, self-contained; the referees of the first journal thought it important, innovative and of interest to a broad readership, and it deserves to be in a decent journal. Yet all of us were reluctant to spend much more time on this – especially me, with my ticking time bomb of an expiring fellowship. I certainly couldn’t take the experiments to the next level without abandoning my own projects altogether, and to be frank I wasn’t keen on spending even a few more days preparing the manuscript for a major rewrite.

In the end, the decision was ludicrous, and was based entirely on formatting. I drew up a list of half a dozen suitable journals of about the same impact factor and made a table with three columns: word limit, figure limit, and structure (whether the Results and Discussion should be merged or separate, or whether it didn’t matter), and we just chose the journal that was most flexible – in other words, where we wouldn’t have to make cosmetic changes like cutting or rearranging words, or relegating figures to Supplementary (which would have involved having to change text on the figures, or rearranging some of the panels). Fortunately it was the journal I was secretly favoring, but I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit would have sacrificed that choice if it weren’t convenient. It just seemed like enough was enough: we’re here to do experiments, not to fiddle endlessly with Adobe products. Either the work should made public, or it shouldn’t.

Ludicrous or no, in the end I was able to resubmit in under thirty minutes. Just a quick EndNote reformat, a tweak of the running title, a simple conversion of all the figures from CMYK to RGB. (And of course the cover letter – nothing amuses an editor more than reading the name of the journal you were previously sucking up to.) Blissfully the current submission system was a lot more intuitive than the previous one and, twenty-four hours later, my adopted baby was safely in peer review. It got me to thinking, though: we don’t necessarily need the utopian ideal of one universal submission template for all journals. If journals are flexible and adopt a relatively standard format, it doesn’t take long to reformat, and I think most people could spare those thirty minutes. But journals, especially in that key 5-to-8 impact factor range who bottom-feed off the rejects of their betters, beware: if you insist on having non-standard formatting or are completely rigid in some of your requirements, busy people like me will probably just shrug and choose your competitors instead.

As any hard-working scientist knows, it’s difficult to rack up a respectable publication list on one’s CV.

Or is it? Today, while during a routine PubMed search, I ran into something puzzling: two seemingly identical articles:

Curious, I took a closer look. The bottom article appeared in Cell in 2006, while the top was published a year later with the same title and author list in Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology. The abstracts were also identical. Clicking on the top version, I found it to be a book chapter in a Springer title devoted to (according to its website) “meetings proceedings” of “multidisciplinary and dynamic findings in the broad fields of experimental medicine and biology.” I thought it was a bit odd to publish a proceedings of work that had already been published, but at that point I supposed that book publishing can lag behind that of journals, so perhaps the relevant meeting had come first.

My university doesn’t have access to Adv Exp Med Biol, but a colleague who does took a quick look and said that, though the article indeed was the same, she couldn’t see any reference that the work had been published in previously in Cell – except that in its Acknowledgements, there is a link to the Cell paper’s supplementary data, suggesting that the Cell paper was published before the book chapters were even assembled (ruling out the book publishing lagtime theory). Meanwhile, Adv Exp Med Biol apparently has an impact factor; I assume Elsevier, the owner of Cell Press, gave permission for Springer to mirror the article without acknowledging its source, but was it really wise to give up citations on a high-profile paper to a close competitor?

More interestingly, how common is this sort of double publication? And how do people feel about it?