On some women I happen to find inspirational….

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

Eleanor Roosevelt

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent
Eleanor Roosevelt

I, like many others, think Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the premier inspirational women. She was an amazing lady, the first First Lady who actually did something with that role besides throw dinner parties. There are a plethora of things to admire about her, foremost amongst which is her appointment post-First Ladydom by Truman as the Chairperson on the United Nation’s Commission on Human Rights where she was instrumental in drafting the first ‘Magna Carta of human rights’ as she called it. This was a time, after her husband was dead, she could have rightly chosen to just retire quietly and go about her business but she didn’t.

Like all humans and public figures alike, she is complex, she refused to run for any sort of an office and was an avid opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). I always find this curious and often can’t reconcile this with what else I know about her, but then I never had a conversation with her and I didn’t grow up in the turn of the 20th century.

Amazingly, and perhaps apocryphally, she considered herself ‘ugly’ and was very shy. If you read about Eleanor a common theme is that she felt less than in many ways (for instance her son reported she never ran for public office, despite many offers to do so, because she was frightened) and was horrified when she discovered that her husband was having a long-term affair saying ‘The bottom dropped out of my own particular world’

Yet despite this or maybe perhaps because of this, she still pursued many self-less endeavours for no (apparent) sense of self-aggrandizement. I find this laudable, instead of wallowing in self-pity or ennui Mrs. Roosevelt tried, in her own way, to make the world a better place.

Dolly reopening the Smokies


It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.
Dolly Parton

Like her music, penchant for plastic surgery or not, the woman is a tough lady. Growing up in Sevierville, Tennessee in close to absolute poverty, Dolly Parton began to sing. Lots of girls of her generation began to sing (Tammy Wynette,etc) but Dolly at a young age insisted on having the rights to the songs she wrote, then she went on to invest her money wisely.

Dolly is a philanthropist, she gives back to Tennessee from opening her theme-park Dollywood which amongst other things gave jobs to many people in impoverished Sevier county to her advocation of Education and efforts to help save the Bald Eagle. She hasn’t just taken the money and run; she has given back to a community that means something go her.

What I find stupendous about Dolly though, in addition to her philanthropy and business acumen, is that she has created her own image, an image that in fact allows her to be completely private. Her husband runs an asphalt business in Nashville and has never been photographed as her husband, she wears so much make up and wigs that she can merely take them off and walk out into the world and no one knows who she is. That is smart.

Mary Anne Handel

I will not allow you to compromise my dignity by continuing to allow you to yell at me
Mary Anne Handel

Most of you won’t know Mary Anne Handel, she was a genetics professor at the University of Tennessee when I was an undergraduate. She is one of the most dignified woman I ever met. Later in my life I was a laboratory technician on the same floor as Prof. Handel’s lab. She often took the time to come and talk to me and she always treated me with dignity and respect (which wasn’t necessarily a given when you were a lab tech).

A close friend of mine worked for her and recounted a conversation to me when someone was a bit heated over a scientific discussion with Mary Ann. Her response (quote above) is one of THE most appropriate responses to being yelled at, ever. This dignity, confidence and calmness is what I will always aspire to.

Alabama Whitman

And sometimes Clarence asks me what I would have done if he had died…I tell him of how I would want to die, but that the anguish and the want of death would fade like the stars at dawn, and that things would be much as they are now. Perhaps. Except maybe I wouldn’t have named our son Elvis.

Alabama Whitman

Although not a real woman but a prostitute played by Patricia Arquette in True Romance (1993), Alabama was one of the first ladies in any film that I had seen that was tough.

In the film, through some sort of the usual complications seen in films, Ms. Whitman is being beat-up by a gangster (thug) who is trying to get her to tell him where her boyfriend hid the (stolen) cocaine. In this violent scene, Alabama (unlike many female film characters pre-1990s) fights back! She fights back even though she is loosing and crying and you are convinced she is going to give-up, but she doesn’t she fights back and (barely) wins. Then she puts on her unsensible shoes, make up to cover the bruises and goes about fighting the gangsters in the best way she can. Tough – perseverance – you gotta admire that.

Alabama Whitman

and driving her man off into the sunset, priceless.

Posted in women | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Should we fund projects or people?

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

Its a question put out there by Times Correspondent Hannah Devlin on Twitter. I think the answer is a resounding, projects, projects can I say it again projects.

Idealistically it is certainly true you should fund the best people: I think it is pretty safe to say when most of us are hiring someone they will at least try to pick the best person for the job (in the absence of corruption but well that is another matter).

In many ways, the safe bet by the governments/funding bodies is to fund ‘people’ instead of projects – and if you pick those people carefully you are pretty certain they will deliver; they will publish high impact papers etc. In the short-term what is not to love?

But I think in asking these question we have to think of what it means to be ‘successful’. As Jack Stilgoe pointed out on his very nice post about this question the funding people policy is a policy supported by many who are big scientists who define “scientific excellence, as measured by scientists, for scientists.” In the short-term maybe this means you are an FRS and have like I don’t know 30 Nature papers, but time will tell if this is a long-lasting success or just a branch of science that runs into the dust.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a very successful zoologist in his day and gave us a complete classification of invertebrate zoology as well as basically coining the term biology (in the professional sense). However Lamark also believed in what is now called ‘Lamarkism’ – a theory that organisms can pass down acquired traits to thier off-spring – such as the Blacksmith’s arm, or the giraffe’s neck – which doesn’t really work any more, we know this theory pretty much isn’t true. But it was a good theory at the time the only reason we know it isn’t in hindsight is that new ideas (like Darwin) came along out of nowhere and made more sense.

In the long term only funding people disconnected from projects is a bad idea. First of all the people that would like get funded by this mechanism (if we moved entirely to that) probably already get money anyway. And to get more money, as it stands, even the great and the good have to write new grants with a new ideas and yes this is annoying to have to do every few years, but it still means your idea is vetted in some fashion.

Secondly,funding only the elite would cut your science base to shreds, where would the new people come from? Where would the new ideas come from? Where would the diversity be?

I say this because some people are very specialized while others are not, if you are specialized in one technique, one system – while you may do fabulous ground-breaking research, you may not be able to produce a future generation of scientists by which to stimulate new ideas. And your ground-breaking research may actually be the modern equivalent of Lamarkism.

Posted in UK Science policy | Tagged , | 36 Comments

The New College of Humanities; is this the future?

Posted on June 5, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

This morning I read about The New College of Humanities (NCH) ; or rather before I read about the New College of the Humanities, I read alot of RTs on Twitter about the BBC article on New College of the Humanities – many of these tweets which were pretty damning of the thing.

But as Mary Beard says in her blog A Don’s Life: .

…if there is to be a sustained assault on the humanities, then maybe someone has to get off their ass and take the teaching into their own hands

she then quickly goes on to remind us of why it isn’t Oxbridge (and it isn’t) and really more like a US 4-year school (which it is). I really like Mary Beard’s blog; I’d love to have a drink with the woman… but I digress.

If you go to the New College of Humanities website they are offering a Degree (undergraduate only) from the University of London and they are offering (at a more expensive price than HEFCE uni’s) a lower teacher to student ratio; more private tutorials; a 20% scholarship rate for those who can’t afford the eye-watering tuition – and in that sense it is almost identical to a 4-year US undergraduate private school – some of which give you an excellent undergraduate education; oh and they want the money up front.

This model I don’t think is necessarily bad. Higher education in the UK, like it or not, is changing or is going to have to change because there is an 80% cut in the HEFCE teaching budget to Universities; with no clear alternative to how to deal with this other than raise tuition fees. I for one am not even sure with an 80% cut the rise in fees are going to amount to enough money to educate all that want to be educated.

Around 43% of the UK population go to University (or is it higher, I couldn’t find a good source for this) and how to pay for this? This is a huge problem, even if there were no economic crisis.

Setting up private universities might indeed be the way to go (though we should remember the NCH is a private college not University (which in itself seems kind of weird to me; but safe on the organizers part), those that are outside the HEFCE model where a true free-market approach could be used. Similar to what happens in the US. Now there is not any kind of real free-market model; its looking like just about everyone is going to have to pay the same fees (yes I know some are slightly cheaper but £9K vs. £8.5K isn’t really a big difference). I am also biased about this I guess, I have a degree from a US university which I paid for, mostly myself. So in my pysche I think; of course you have to pay for it (or someone does).

I suppose the fear is that the NCH will only educate the ‘elite’ and the ‘rich’ – but there are so many other factors that decide whether or not you go to University in the UK it is difficult to assess whether this fear is actually justified, realtive to who already goes to University. Acceptance to the ‘top’ universities depends more on where you go to school; what your post-code is; what your socio-economic status is, etc., etc. And given that the NCH at least on paper say they will offer placements for 20 % of people who don’t pay, this may offer opportunties to some people that would not have had them otherwise.

Elitism bothers me, it bothers me alot, but I am not sure that is what this is. Who knows what their selection process will be in reality? The NCH seem to have a fairly liberal attitude toward admissions, eg they will tell you the grades you need to have to be accepted upon interview. It may be that they meet a potential student from a really bad school and say you’re good, as long as you make a C in blah you are in.

It also may turn out to be the opposite and it may turn out that the students that go to NCH have degrees which don’t allow them to go to a job, or to graduate school or law school or whatever else they aim to do.

I am not sure how to feel about this in total yet, but I think its all too easy to look at who is setting up the school, how much the fees are and think – oh dear its just elitist. But I think we need to be careful about any unconscious bias about this. And only time will tell if this is a workable model for the UK.

Posted in higher education | Tagged , , | 23 Comments

Death by a thousand cuts: is it time for a change?

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

Just in case I wasn’t paying enough attention to the news or even Twitter, last week I got an email from the EPSRC saying..

As a result of the 50% reduction to the Research Councils capital budget, EPSRC has taken the decision to make immediate changes in the arrangements for funding equipment. This is in addition to, and ahead of, the longer term changes across RCUK in response to the Wakeham Review. Further details can be found on the EPSRC website.

The interim arrangements for funding equipment will apply to all proposals submitted prior to 1st May 2011.

Harsh, ex post facto decision if you ask me. After the fact decisions are bad for all sorts of reasons, similar to restrospective laws which are ‘frowned upon’ in the UK (according to Wikipedia) and out-and-out illegal in the US. I can’t really blame the research councils – what are they gonna do? The government has made these cuts and research councils because they are funded by the government have no choice but to adhere to them, they are in a tight spot.

I have had some discussions with my science and non-scientist friends about this who asked:
Can’t you just borrow someone else’s equipment?

Yes and no, depends on the equipment. Even if the answer is ‘yes’ this is easier said than done. What if your colleague down the hall has 5 students and post-docs in active research? How exactly is another research group going to ‘borrow’ this equipment which is constantly in use by the people that, well, own it? Remember borrowing your parent’s car? Didn’t always work out when Mom had to go to work.

Some equipment; even if its available can’t be shared. Different research groups are different because they do different research and different kinds of research aren’t always chemical (or biologically) compatible. The glove box is a great example – you can’t (or shouldn’t) just bung any old chemical into any glove box. From Chemistry 101 or really just home cleaning chemistry we all know that different chemicals can possibly react with each other – you don’t dump Caustic soda down your drain followed by a treatment with acid – it will explode. Same goes for glove boxes.

Anyway, before I digress too much…

There are some beautifully written (and spoken) arguments about what these cuts this will do to research science in the UK and why these cuts are potentially so harmful. On the other hand, I have heard (and read) the opposite opinion which summarized seems to be: Scientists are just going to have to deal with it and do more with less.

Summarized (and over-simplified, certainly) these two basic views are:

1 – Scientists need money to do research and can’t do research without money. If only bits of research of research are funded, whoops there goes your base and in 20 years, the UK will suck for science.

2 – Scientists need to stop wingeing about the cuts, get over it and learn how to do more with less.

Both of these points of view bring up one central question –

How do we change the current model of doing scientific research?

As academic research scientists we are trained to write for money from funding bodies to do research. The funding bodies are predominately government funded or philanthropically funded. The basic research cycle is get money, do research, publish papers, start cycle again. This is the current paradigm.

So where do we go now? The system is constraining in itself and there are not a whole lot of other options out there. Its not about people not working hard or whining I think its about where else can an academic researcher possibly go to get money? And please don’t say industry, please, if I am realistic about my core research – industrial applications may well arise but not at the very least for 5 – 10 years.

So, again, where do you go to get money for research? What do academic scientists do?

I have some ideas of course, I am far too opinionated not to, but ideas have to be set up into some kind of structure to work, which takes a huge amount of effort which I need to be applying to writing research grants, writing research papers so that I can get said research grants to write more research papers.

What next? I think the system is going to have to adapt somehow, and quickly. The government seems to be making cuts almost randomly which are personally giving me a bit of vertigo. It feels like Death by 1000 cuts, perhaps this is the Con/Lib secret plan for science funding? Not being a conspiracy theorist, I doubt it. The government seems to be just trying to hang onto the old system however they can without any foresight for the future – sort of slicing randomly with a blindfold on.

What I think we need to be doing, collectively, as scientists, as policiticans, as scipolicy people, as science-interested people is thinking hard about how to change the system and where do we go from here. The cuts are upon us whether we like it or not, and now its time to start thinking about the future on the large scale, the system scale – its time for a change.

Posted in UK Science policy | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Worms, worms, worms – how to treat your compost…

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

On averting a compost disaster

I think everyone should have a wormery but that is probably just because I own one. Its great for compost and easy to use even if you don’t have a garden you can compost away in your kitchen and make your houseplants happy, or just dump it in your neighbour’s garden or in green spaces. You can do this without guilt – its nice dirt that makes everything grow better.

This is my old kitchen wormery; pre-outdoor area

Wormery

which I purchased from the Recycle Works, Ltd. Its full of Lumbricus rubellus and Eisenia fetida – a.k.a Red, Tiger or Brandling worms. These are proper composting worms, which aren’t the same as earthworms. Earthworms merely move around soil while composting worms actively compost; that is they eat your garbage turning it into lovely nutrient rich soil.

We recently moved into a new flat with a back garden patio (yea!); and we inherited a much larger much more swanky composting bin, which I am particularly excited about, hello lovely herbs and plants – a composting plus!

new_compost_bin

It was full. I gave it a quick stir, as its good to stir/turn compost to keep it aerated so it doesn’t honk and there appeared to be (on the surface) lots of kitchen scraps just decomposing. So I ordered 1/2 kilo of my composting friends to take care of business and left it for a week; usually if its aerated enough, the worms go to town. A common misunderstanding about womeries is that they stink, which they can do if you let them go anaerobic, but if you have enough worms and keep them with good airflow, they just smell like dirt.

After a week I really I opened it. On the surface it seems quite innocuous
inside the offending bin

but when I started to stir it stank, not only that but the worms were fleeing. My fine wriggly friends were either clustered on the surface of the bin or were working their way out the bottom and under rocks in the garden. This is definitely weird worm behaviour because basically a womery to a worm is like an all day eat all you like affair – what’s not to love? So I opened it, took a big stick and gave it a BIG turn and what did I find?

Diapers! Lots and Lots and Lots of diapers! Not the gentle lovely compost-able diapers (with no absorbent gel packs) but big hunks of nasty gel laden (heavy!) diapers. No wonder my worms were getting the hell out of dodge, can’t say I blame them.

DO NOT PUT BABY DIAPERS IN A WOMERY! Unless you buy the ones that are especially made for composting and even then you need to flush the actual poo.

Stifling my gag-reflex, I bagged up (plastic bags around my arms) the diaper culprits; this was yesterday and I am still disgusted. I am proud to say though, as of this morning the smell is gone and my new compost bin is already looking healthier.

Want to know more about composting via vermiculture? You should read this book Worms Eat my Garbage by Mary Appelhof or have a poke around Recycle Works, Ltd website. As long as you don’t put Diapers in your womerly, I highly recommend getting one as its great for any gardener or anyone who is just tired of putting food scraps into a landfill.

Posted in random | Tagged , | 17 Comments

Some thoughts on science and paradigms

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

A while back I wrote a post about active vs. passive voice – which isn’t the most exciting topic on the surface, admittedly, but the comments and some of the Twitter conversations I had about this were.

Part of what ensued was a debate about ‘science being about the data’

Here are some comments on that topic:

I guess at the root, I disagree that science is about the data; scientists collect data in service of larger paradigms, which do not change based on the results of experimental testing.

and:

But the passive voice disguises the agency of scientists – it makes it sound like the word of god – this was done, these results were seen. In a sense it’s a rhetorical trick, a sleight of hand, which makes us forget that human beings, with all their fallibility, biases and preconceptions, did those experiments, observed the results, even thought of the question to investigate in the first place. Science strives to be objective, but there’s always some subjectivity.

I would agree that there is some truth in these statements – taking the first statement scientists collect data in the service of larger paradigms –
There is alot of truth in this: the majority of science is performed within the current paradigm – most of where we as scientists experiment is within the current framework, certainly – but there has to be a separation between the data themselves and the interpretation thereof which is not apparent in that statement. The data are the data, the interpretation is placed into a wider paradigm which it usually fits until it doesn’t (see Thomas Kuhn – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – good book (link is a .pdf)).

Greater theories and hypotheses, the broader view of putting together alot of experimental data, are not always correct but they are not permanent laws, that is they are not immutable – Newton’s Laws are not absolute and in fact have been turned over, in part, by Quantum Mechanics, which will again probably be turned over by something else. All a scientific law essentially means is – There has never been an instance where we observed this not to happen –

For instance whenever you drop something off the top of a big building, it falls to the ground (eventually). Full stop. When this stops happening, such as when things started to be observed that Newtonian science couldn’t explain, well then it will be time to adapt laws and theories again. This is one of the lovely things about science, it is indeed mutable and has a built in mechanism to adapt – which I think is something that is largely forgotten when discussing science in the media.

Paradigm shifts are also in reality gradual shifts, though they don’t always seem gradual on the surface, especially when you learn about them after the fact. This point has been made much more clearly by people other than myself, again by Thomas Kuhn in another of his books – The Copernican Revolution. In short astronomers, amateur and otherwise had been collecting more and more data on planetary movements trying harder and harder to get it to fit into the standard model – it didn’t work. So what happened? The ‘Copernican Revolution’ which was not a single Eureka moment, it was a body of scientists saying ‘hmm, that is funny, it doesn’t really work’ and eventually several of these thoughtful folks tried to put together alternatives – Copernicus didn’t live in a vacuum.

Now taking the second point on rhetorical tricks – do we really think that scientists are tricky, untrustworthy and trying to cover things up? I am sure that is not what is intended by this statement, but this is almost how it reads. Of course this does happen (climategate?) but maybe scientists are just trying to interpret their results in the best way they can? the data is still the data – which is biased by experimental set up – but this is why when you write a paper you explain your experimental set up.

Most of the time, its the interpretation of that data that can be a problem. And sometimes new data, discoveries, come to light and put everything on its head. Science is about taking a series of observables (or things you see happen – data) and trying to make some sense of them. This is not always straightforward, and I agree with the statement that scientists strive to be objective, but there is always some subjectivity – I think this is an important point, but is not the only point or really the focal point of science, you do always have to be aware of unconscious bias; but anything has subjectivity, its just the way of the world.

I just examined a student for her PhD, after her viva we had a discussion about what a PhD in a scientific subject is. I think it is easy to forget that you actually receive a Doctorate in Philosophy not a Doctorate in Science. This is an important distinction, though you may practice science and be a scientist, ideally part of receiving a PhD is about critical thinking, which means you aren’t a slave to your data but can actually think critically about you are doing and when the data you (or someone else) collect does or DOESN’T fit into the current paradigm. This is easier said than done, but it is a laudable, idealistic goal which I must admit I can only strive to achieve – I am after all human.

Posted in Philosophy of Science | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The week Britain went crazy

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

I think Britain has gone mad –

It used to be Keep Calm and Carry On in the face of a crisis- now its more like Run Around, Panic and come up with wacky ideas.

Maybe the whole world has gone mad but I live in Britain and this week seems to be mad week… This is mad in the British sense, insane, not really pissed off but then again that might be part of it too.

I have been out of the loop for a couple of weeks, but started reading the news more carefully this morning instead of just flipping through to see what was going on in Libya and Japan.

First thing Monday morning STARTUP Britain was announced – which on the surface seems kind of OK. It even has a website which has a link to ‘find an idea’ though it didn’t have any ideas, just what other people had already done, ho hum, guess I’ll have to come up with my own.

The website oddly also contains a picture of David Cameron looking like a Baptist minister on the front of a church bulletin (complete with breaking clouds) even though it is a non-profit, non-government funded thing.

David Cameron
David Cameron (sans clouds and sultry ministerial look)

You can buy the starter pack for a mere 25 quid – which contains well mostly some free 1-3 month contracts and a Barclays business account with 25 quid already in it! Joy – ooh and you can design a logo – and that, uh is about it. How is this going to inspire people to open business and be successful? It seems more like a recipe for Bankrupt Britain, or maybe I am missing something or its all a part of the Big Society thing I don’t understand and keep thinking I am missing something.

Then I found a link to Peter Atkins’s OUP blog about his new book –On being – where he tells us that:

Science is still stumped by some of the great questions of being. It still is unable to provide the answers to perhaps the two greatest questions of all: how something came into being from absolutely nothing, not just empty space, and how that something acquired the ability to reflect on such questions (that is, the emergence and nature of consciousness). But neither great question is outside the grasp of science, and both are becoming open to investigation. As scientists are cautious optimists, there is every hope that these truly great and extraordinarily difficult questions will give way to their mode of investigation.

Cool, a real theory of everything, eventually when we grow up, or when our children’s children’s children grow up, we will know it all, no un-answered questions. And science is going to solve everything. Or maybe Peter Atkins is worried about his funding too and decided it was high time he wrote a book.

I could say more, but this is enough, after all its only Monday.

Posted in britain, science | Tagged , | 12 Comments

On human kindness, sickness and the NHS

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

It’s easy to feel cynical about the world, especially at the moment; but this week I am amazed at the acts of human kindness in this world.

One of my in-laws suffered a stroke or rather a sub-arachnoidal hemorrhage late Monday afternoon on his way home from a weekend visit with us, his family, in a car park. He is still in intensive care and still unconscious. He is old, as every medic knows, diagnosis/prognosis in these cases aren’t so easy – balancing human equilibrium is not always straightforward.

The Intensive Care Unit ain’t a pretty place, it’s a place where there is unrelenting pain and sickness. And though many of us want to die in a manner more similar to Rupert Brooke’s view of death the reality can be very very different, as Wilfred Owen, the poetical antithesis of Brooke who wrote about death, unflinchingly in all its sorrows; knew all too well.

But then there are these amazing people who work for the NHS. Who have the extraordinary gift of human kindness, extraordinary because they seem to have a super-abundance of it. They have waived the ‘visiting hours’ for us, because he is so ill and is probably their most critical patient. The nurses make us cups of tea and toast and ask every hour or so if we need anything. They field phone calls, they LISTEN, these lovely care workers listen to what ever the loved ones need to say, regardless of how banal or irrelevant. They bathe and talk to the patients gently, oh so gently, even when they are evidently asleep. They come and find us in the hospital just to tell us to not be afraid. They show us brain scans, chest X-rays, blood numbers, cat scans, MRIs, they find the doctors and techs that took them to come and have a chat. They are never snappy or sharp as I am sure I would be.

I have no conclusion, nor anything particularly poignant to say, but I wanted to just take a moment and express my gratitude toward those caring NHS workers who sometimes may be forgotten.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Somedays my brain just don’t work

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

My amusing friends might say “most days” or “did it ever”

Sometimes its easy to forget that thinking is actually hard work, thinking is hard, hard thinking is hard and it can be exhausting. As scientists, we are ideally trained in critical thinking, in tearing apart our own ideas and then trying to reconstruct them and put them back together again. In finding something that might lead to that ‘Eureka’ moment – though in my experience ‘Eureka’ moment is usually more ‘huh?, I don’t understand that’ moment.

Now granted not all scientists do this or do it very well, we see some of them in the news, but I would argue most scientists and people I consider to be *good* scientists do engage in critical thinking and engage their own self critiques. But not always, one of the things I am perpetually annoyed with is ‘received wisdom’ statements in papers, the sort of ‘it is well known that….’ line that when you go back through the references it isn’t actually well known at all, its just someone that is *important* has said they think “it might be possible that…” and those people that reference said great person think – well he MUST be right because it is Professor Blah that said it. Personally, I am often worried I have gotten something wrong in my analysis, over looked something basic in my papers, sometimes to the point of mild obsession that isn’t healthy – and my colleagues can tell you – somewhat annoying. This is part of the reason I am such a fan of peer review, it helps with a sort of ‘double check’.
But I digress…

Thinking is hard work – critical thinking is even harder, but sometimes especially in light of the current climate in research in the UK, I don’t really feel like thinking counts as real work.

You have to do it but where is the balance, we have to write papers and as anyone knows, to write a nice paper you have to actually think about what you are saying and think about what your data means and then put it into context with the current literature.

Currently, scientists are supposed to be doing ‘more with less’ – which means that activities such as teaching (which requires prep and indeed critical thinking if you are going to be good at it), admin tasks (fill in for yourself how much thinking you are required to do on committees) while at the same time doing more ‘high impact’ research – which is internationally acclaimed. As another aside international acclaimation is not so easy to achieve even IF you have international level research. There is so much literature out there and unless you actively promote your work (which not all of us have time to do) it sometimes it goes unseen – for years, even if the work is in high impact journals – and sometimes people become internationally acclaimed after their deaths (Lie algebra) – and then there is the what exactly is ‘excellence’ question –

Regardless, what all of these activities require is critical thinking and critical thinking or any kind of thinking takes time.

Now some of you may not have noticed but in many research institutions morale is pretty low at the moment, people are losing their jobs, those that are left have increasingly more teaching to do, and I, at least, am trying to write grants and publish as much as I can so that when the next round of cuts come I am safe. I feel an inordinate amount of pressure to be safe; I have a feeling that I am not the only one. But again all of this requires thinking, if I am going to have ‘high impact’ science and good papers and grants.

Its also not always easy to think under pressure – and I don’t mean in a someone is firing at you in your foxhole kind of way but rather a constant groaning stress of ‘I need to get this paper out’ ‘I need to get a grant’ ‘I need to be REF ready’ ‘I need to …. ‘ fill in the blank – which yields little time for thinking and even when you have the time you have to stop worrying and think.

And sometimes, well, even though I know I have to do all these things and they are indeed pending and constantly in my mind – sometimes my brain just don’t work.

How do we find time to breathe?

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Scientists need to ask ‘important’ questions – oh and stop “whingeing”

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Sylvia McLain

Scientists need to ask ‘important’ questions – oh and stop “whingeing”

Science question time on Feb 16th – put on by the Biochemical Society, CaSE (Campaign for Science and Engineering) and the good folks from Imperial College was, I thought, an excellent event. An invigorating panel loaded with a large variety of thought provoking questions. Sophie Scott was in my opinion the star of the panel with thoughtful and well-balanced comments and answers.

Mark Walport , Director of the Wellcome Trust, on the other hand, spent a fair proportion of his ‘air time’ telling scientists to ‘stop whingeing’, saying that scientists must ask ‘important’ questions – and defending, in a nutshell, an ‘excellence’ based structure of science research funding where less people are given more money. This wouldn’t lead to less jobs, he argued, but rather more focused work on ‘important’ questions. I am of course paraphrasing, Walport also had some good things to say, which I think were somehwat contradictory to his paraphrased statements above.

I have a lot to say about this but I will try to be brief

1 – I am so very tired of being hearing ‘scientists need to stop whingeing’ and the implication that ‘scientists’ are just lazy and not working on ‘important’ questions but rather as Walport suggested that lots of scientists sit around and work on non-important, esoteric, navel-gazing type of questions which are a waste of everyone’s time.

First of all this is hard to prove in any real sense, if you want to try and make a statement about this in terms of funding (who gets funded and who doesn’t), this doesn’t work so well. As almost everyone that writes grants is aware, you write a significant larger number of grants than you ever get funded for. Does this necessarily mean that your question isn’t important? but I will say more about this in a minute…

This attitude really bothers me. And its not just Walport (others, such as Vince Cable who said most reserach in the UK is ‘not excellent’ relatively recently)

Stop whingeing and get on with it –
What bothers me about this is that it is just a throw-away thing to say, and it instills anger in people trying to do research, telling a group of educated people to shut up and do your job publicly only increases hostility between the people who are ‘in charge’ (of funding, of decisions, of whatever) and the people doing the science – Apparently pyschology isn’t an ‘important’ science because maybe if it was Walport would have read something about how bitching at people isn’t exactly the best way to get them to be efficient.

This attitude indicates that people like Walport aren’t listening to complaints by scientists – some may be legitimate some may not, but it seems to me if you are in some sort of position of administration for a grant funding body it should be a part of your JOB to listen to what the people that are doing the research actually think about how you are funding it. There are times when people do need to shut up and get on with it – but in this instance it is dismissive and an easy way out on Walport’s part. If you just tell people to shut up and go away it keeps you from having to address any real questions.

2 – Scientists need to be asking “important” questions.

Really, did we not know that? Most people that do scientific research feel they are asking important questions – I really doubt there are people that go to work and think – I am going to do my OWN research on a non-important question just becuase I don’t have anything else to do today.

and as @Stephen_Curry asked – well who decides what is ‘important’? I have blogged about this here, in the long-term you NEVER know where discoveries will come from. Do your peers decide? As Walport argued all funding comes by virtue of a peer-review grant process, yes it does, but peer-reviewers can be and are constrained, it depends on the funding scheme and importantly on the number of grants that are funded.
For instance, if all research councils decide that they are only going to fund certain topics than only people that work on these sexy topics will get funded. Deciding what topics are “sexy” is a dangerous game, as it is easy to identify sexy science when sexy science is ALREADY successful, but this greatly destroys your base for up and coming science or science that may well be “sexy” in 20 years, but maybe not so sexy now.

If only 3% of all grants are funded than many ‘important’ questions will get cut based on sheer numbers. Ranking importance isn’t easy to do for any peer-review group as they may be wrong and they don’t have crystal balls that peer into the future. Paraphrasing from the US Television Drama The West Wing, Einstein probably wouldn’t get funded today – people like Einstein would have been writing grants to funding bodies that were headed by people like Lord Kelvin who thought that physics was dead, in short he would have never gotten funded.

3 – People will keep their jobs they will just work on common problems (‘important’ questions)

This is good in some respects but it very much depends on the research. The Atomic bomb was a good example of very smart people working on a common problem. Working towards a specific technological advance is another very good example.
But only funding research like this is limiting and short-sighted.
One of the great strengths of the UK science research system, at least in the past, is that it tends to fund quite broadly – lots of ideas from blue skies research to established research – but you have to fund things across the board.

I am not arguing that really good scientists shouldn’t get money, they should and they already do, maybe they should get more but you have to fund younger scientists and less well known scientists with new ideas so that in 20 – 30 years you will have new sexy science instead of a monolithic non-diverse structure – like in ecology and finance – you need a diverse system to allow growth into the future. The danger is that if only 3 research topics get funded what happens when that research begins to reach a natural end? Where do you go next? If you have a pool of research (like a gene pool) you ensure, as much as you can ever ensure, that the soil is ready for the future and that you don’t end up with the scientific equivalent of the Hapsburg Chin.

Scientists as a group, of course have room for improvement, we can do things better, like communicate, but I don’t think continually telling us to get on with it, stop complaining and work on ‘important’ science is getting anyone anywhere. I think there needs to be some give on both sides – Scientists listing to what those in charge say and those ‘in charge’ taking some time and care to listen to working research scientists, not those who already have their FRS or Nobel prize, but those who are at different levels in their careers.

Posted in Mark Walport, Science Question Time, UK Science policy | Tagged , , | 21 Comments