“The anti-science sentiment is entirely the fault of well-funded Koch brothers and people like them.”

I was helping out with the petition to get Obama’s attention on the issue of biomedical research funding.  Amongst the flurry of emails, I got one that said essentially this:

“I’m trying to get people to sign this petition, but some people are pushing back because they’re not really sure of the value of science.”  The email then went on to point to this article that discussed how conservatives have been steadily becoming anti-science, while other groups still thinking science is OK.

That email coincided with another interesting and related event.

I saw a Facebook post by a conservative person that I know.  (Yes, I actually know some conservatives! The horror!)

The mentioned a blog article that was about a woman in Pennysylvania who’d recently had a baby.  She’d intended to have that baby with a midwife at home, but the midwife couldn’t make it in time due to the speed at which the woman went into labor, so she called an ambulance.  So she had the baby in the hospital parking lot, inside the ambulance.

Doctors took the baby from her.  They made excuses for why they weren’t returning the baby.  Then, finally they told her this: we’ll return the baby, but first you have to authorize a Hepatitis B shot. The woman says to them: um, no, I want to have my husband here, and baby should be tested for Hep B first, to see whether the baby is even at risk.

At that point, a clueless hospital social worker called the police, confiscated the baby (WTF??!?!), and ejected the woman from the hospital.  The “reasoning” (if you can call it that) is that the woman wasn’t properly looking out for the welfare of the child by authorizing the Hep B shot.  So, the rationale goes, the child needs to be taken care of by authorities.  Obviously they’ll be better at caring for this child than a mother that refuses a Hep B shot!  She must be totally off her rocker!

The mom was allowed to come back in to feed the child every three hours, but had to sleep in the car.  After childbirth.

The next day a judge said WTF?!? and released the baby back to parents.  After the hospital had already given the Hep B shot, against parental wishes. So there!

What’s this story got to do with the petition, science, and biomedical funding? They’re linked in an important way.  But one more story, before we bring it all together here.

As I write this post, I’m on a plane, headed back from Mississippi.  It’s the poorest state in the union.  I was there helping them out with a program that is designed to get more underrepresented groups into biomedical research.

I heard stories like this: “When we first started the program, many of the colleges didn’t even have a basic science lab.  We had to beg and plead with administrators to get them to consider sparing space for this.  The kids who participate in our summer research programs often have never seen a pipette before.  They don’t know how to dress for work, don’t know how to do a Google search, don’t understand even the most basic elements of doing research.  And, there are some entire counties here that don’t even have a single MD!”

The efforts of these folks to develop more MD’s and scientists is laudable.  It’s a big uphill battle.

So, back to the first email.  After that email came, I made a point-in-response.  The point was this: we scientists need to take some responsibility for the anti-science trends.  We need to become better at communicating about and doing outreach for science.  If we don’t do that, then the anti-science trend is going to continue.

In a series of quippy emails that followed, one person kept saying: no, there is ZERO blame on the part of scientists for this situation.  This is ALL the fault of well-funded, anti science interests like the Koch brothers.  It is all due to these people who want to strangle science because it gets in the way of industry, by bringing up pesky issues like climate change. They are well funded, and it’s the only reason for the trend against science now.  Let’s not take responsibility, let’s fight.

No culpability.  No admittance that we scientists could be doing a better job.  Only finger pointing. “It’s THEIR fault! They’re wrong! We must do away with THEM and their wrongdoing! Then it will all be better!”

The adamance and arrogance of this very superficial opinion by a fellow scientist really startled me.

Here’s why: the two other science-related stories I tell above have nothing to do with the Koch brothers, but everything to do with the anti-science trend.

In the case of the woman whose baby was stolen, it’s simple: there was a clash of beliefs.  The hospital staff believes it is best for everyone, without exception, to have a Hep B shot.  The woman-with-baby believes that a Hep B shot should be given only if absolutely necessary, and is concerned about the risks (there are risks, BTW).  She is part of the growing anti-vaccine movement.  I know several anti-vaccine folks.  Each one of them truly believes that vaccines are dangerous, and that they are doing what’s right for their kids.

We scientists might argue that the facts are on our side, and that kids should be vaccinated. (I vaccinated mine, BTW).  Yet, in the one such debate I’ve heard, the anti-vaccine person was eloquent and passionate, whereas the pro-vaccine scientist (an epidemiologist) was dry and factual.  Guess which person won that debate, by swaying more people to her side?  Yep – the anti-vaccine person.  This is not Koch brothers, this is passion and eloquence versus dry statistics.  Passion and eloquence will win, every time.

And guess what’s going to happen with the story of the mother whose baby was taken away? More fuel for the anti-vaccine fire!  This is the worst possible public relations blunder by the supposedly pro-science hospital that this woman interacted with.

Does this have anything to do with well-funded anti-science people like the Koch brothers?  Nada.

It’s about a clash of beliefs, where one side is eloquent and passionate, and the other side is dry, boring, and authoritarian.

Unfortunately, this clash makes science look bad.

How about the visit to Mississippi?

More than anything, the problem with science there is lack of access. Lack of relevance.  Lack of interest.  Lack of knowledge.  The culture in the many impoverished areas sees no direct impact of science on their lives.

Again, is this due to the Koch brothers or other well-funded anti-science people?  That’s hard to believe unless you’re a tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.  And if you are the tinfoil type, then let me tell you the real cause: little brown men from Mars!

In seriousness – both of the above cases of things trending away from science, there’s only one antidote.  It’s not going out and doing head-on battle with the Koch’s of the world. That’s impossible, anyway, unless you’re a multi-billionaire.

The real way forward is simple: communicating better about the value and benefit of science.

If that damned hospital social worker had, instead of trying to force the vaccine, done some very effective education and persuasion, the long-term effects on the likelihood of the kid getting vaccines would be greater.  As it is, she probably alienated the parents permanently from visiting hospitals or medical workers, and she gave a rallying cry to others who just don’t trust the science behind vaccines or the workers who administer them.

In Mississippi, the effort I was supporting is all about educating people: getting people from impoverished areas training in the biomedical sciences.  Some of those people have already gone to med school and graduate school.  Many of them have vowed that, once they’re finished, they’ll come back to their communities to help.

This is about education and communication.

Even in the case of “doing battle” with the anti-evolution folks and the climate change deniers, that battle can only be fought with effective words, education, and persuasion.

Unfortunately, a lot of scientists either don’t feel that we have the time for that, and/or we lack training in the effective doing of that.

And that’s where our culpability comes in.  If we want things to change so that the anti-science trend doesn’t continue to erode funding and support for science, then we’ve got to change our ways.

We must become passionate advocates for science.  We have to become vocal and well spoken in support of science.  We have to learn how to “market” the value of science.  

If we don’t admit the problem, and vow to do better, then we will lose. If we point a finger at others, we will loose.

This is not a battle that we can afford to loose.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, and use those little social widgets above to let your friends know.

Cheers!

Recently, I posted a link to a story by the Atlantic over on my Facebook page called “How Your Cat is Making You Crazy.” The article discusses Jaroslav Flegr, a Czech evolutionary biologist who has been studying Toxoplasma gondii, or the brain parasite which can be passed from cats to humans.

But this article isn’t really about that: this article discusses how Flegr and his research haven’t always been taken seriously–in fact, just the opposite. His idea (that T. Gondii actually works to reroute neurons) hasn’t gained much traction, despite sound research.

Science, as a human institution, is far more conservative than it would like to admit. As a group of humans, we fear what is different and new. From Flegr’s wild hair to his “psychedelic” science, he has a hard time getting his well-researched science accepted. As he says in the piece: “There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Reviewers may have been offended.”

Flegr is just one in a long line of scientists who have challenged conventional thinking–and persisted despite not being taken seriously. It’s a prestigious list which goes back to the days of Galileo and includes Einstein.

So this is my call to you, fellow researchers and scientists: don’t be afraid of offending, of being labeled as ‘crazy.’ If Galileo had done this, the sun may still be thought to be orbiting the Earth. Your passion to create a solid body of research is what moves innovation–and as the educational system breeds this out of us, we need all we can get.

It depends on what your definition of is is… but the white house shut down the biomedical research funding petition with only 10 hours and 446 signatures to go, with signatures coming at 4/minute.  At 2PM. On a Sunday.

Weird.

Maybe it was a typical moronic computer programmed to cut it off at exactly the same time of day that the petition was started.  Or maybe it was a conspiracy by the White House because they knew that if this hit the threshold, they’d actually have to pay attention.

Regardless of the cause, it is a damn shame that the petition was shut down when it was clear we’d hit the target.  Much like running 24 miles of a 25 mile marathon then having the race officials tell you, “oops. our computer says the race is over. sorry.  good work making it 24 miles, though!”

So. Another petition was created.  Please spend a few minutes to sign this one.

Don’t let the White House shut biomedical scientists out.  Don’t let them ignore us.  What scientists do is far more important to the health and wellbeing of the economy and its citizens than Rush Limbaugh’s stupid escapades and other trash like that which gets so much airplay.

Get mad.  Tell your friends and colleagues.  Sign the petition, and then forward this message.

WE WILL NOT BE SHUT OUT!

Thanks for all that you do,

ps – I can see you. You haven’t signed it yet, have you?  I’ll send my toddler army to smother you in Winnie the Pooh dolls if you don’t sign it.  You know what to do.

One of the most difficult jobs I have in teaching people how to write better grants boils down to convincing them of one simple thing:

A grant is not about promoting or pursuing your own interests, it is about promoting and pursuing your funders and reviewers’ interests.

If you are so lucky as to be at a place where you can find the juncture between your interests and reviewer/funder interests, then you’re in the sweet spot.  But most people aren’t.

I have worked with a lot of people on their grants.  I’ve had some stellar successes helping folks – in fact, in the last month I’ve heard from at least three people that credit me for helping them to very good scores on big NIH proposals.

But, I’ve also seen too many good grants fail.  These are grants that are well written and well-planned, but fail to capture the interest and excitement of the reviewers.

Don’t good ideas always come when you’re in the shower, or driving the car?  The other day when I was showering it struck me why many good grants fail: too many people are treating science as a hobby rather than as a career.

Here’s my own distinction between the two:

A hobby is a self-reward-focused endeavor that you get joy out of, but that almost nobody else directly benefits from (or, at least benefit to others is not the core intent, though it could be a byproduct).  You do what you want, when you want to, often whimsically and playfully.  Timeframes are not important, since you’re doing it for fun.

A career is an other-focused endeavor, where you are exchanging your time and effort to serve others, in return for money or other material benefits.  In a career, if you’re not serving others, you won’t succeed for very long (though it always amazes me how many people treat a career like an entitlement). You have to do the service on their timetable and according to their wants, often subsuming your own.  That’s why you’re getting paid, because you’re spending your precious life time and energy in the service of someone else.

I’ll be the first to admit that in a tenured faculty job it is sometimes possible (for a while) to ignore this notion of other-service and nontheless retain the job and the pay.  But in most positions these days, if you do that for long, you’re going to be deemed “replaceable.”

Maybe there was some mythical time when grants were given out to hobbyists to “play” in science.  If there was such a time, I never experienced it firsthand (though I wish I had, it sounds fun!).

But in the present day time, hobbyists have almost no chance.  In your grant proposal, you must be doing something that serves the community-at-large.  You must do something that serves the funder.  You must be doing something that is on their timetable, satisfying their desires and needs – not yours.  In return for that, you get the money.

While more than almost anyone, I would love it if science could be more hobby-like (like it’s portrayed in the movies), it is not.  If you’re going to do grant-supported science, you must treat it as the career that it is.  That means that when it comes to thinking up ideas for your grants (assuming you want them funded), you can’t just propose whatever-you-happen-to-be-interested-in.  You must instead actually think about what-they’re-interested-in, and think about that very deeply.

If, in doing that reflective exercise, you can find something that represents an intersection of your interests and their interests then you can count yourself amongst the lucky few.  But even if you can’t, don’t be deceived.  If you treat it as if it is a hobby (i.e. trying to “sell” a project that comes from a self-centric place rather than an other-centric place), you’re not going to get very far.

Want to learn more about figuring out what they (your funders, reviewers) want? Have a look at my book, Four Steps To Funding.

This stressed out dude will not bring clarity or focus to writing his grant.  Don’t be like him, it does not lead to success.

To take the stress out of writing, develop a good writing habit

Through my work with academics in grant writing, one of the most common concerns I hear is how to find the time to actually sit down and write. The days of an academic scientist (and most people, nowadays) are chock-full of an endless series of fires and tasks that need attention: hundreds of emails, questions from employees, administrative requests and paperwork, reviewing of papers, helping students, committee meetings, recruiting, and on and on.

It’s enough to make some folks want to sit in the Bahamas sipping margaritas for the rest of their natural lives.  Ok, I must admit, sipping margaritas in the Bahamas sounds appealing even without the excuse of being ridiculously overworked.  But anyway…

All of this comes on top of the bigger tasks of writing papers, writing and applying for grants, and actually doing some science! How to find the time for it all?

In many cases, the answer is this: never. I know plenty of people who work 80 hours a week, every weekend, and never take a break, and are still buried in all there is to do. (Yep, I know what that’s like – it used to be me.  But now I’m a reformed workaholic. Yay!)

Despite the brutal hours, the important work, the big work, gets put off and oft seems to never get done. When it does get done, it’s only at the very last moment, in a flurry of mad, frenetic activity to meet a pressing deadline.

I’m here to tell you (again, from experience), that isn’t a habit that is going to increase your likelihood of success (in grants or much of anything else).

Grants are kinda important (and, no, I don’t write grants using terminology like “kinda,” in case you’re worried about it).  Without grants, there is no funding, no employees, no research, and eventually no job. It must get done.

Yet we procrastinate until the last possible moment, until the deadline looms so large that we can’t ignore it anymore, much like a dump truck bearing down on us in the middle of a crosswalk.  Hurry! Get out of the way!  Write. Don’t sleep. Write. Don’t sleep.  Don’t talk to anyone.  Write. Stuff food down throat quickly. Write more!

Yep, and sometimes I’ve seen an entire grant completed in the week before the deadline (usually not good or successful grants, mind you….)

Besides being an ineffective way to write a grant, this is also incredibly stressful for everyone involved, and often results in poor writing and an unsuccessful proposal.

By contrast, the most successful proposals are usually the ones where the investigators have clarity, focus, and make regular and consistent progress towards the end goal. This goes for papers too.

The pre-requisite to focus

One of the major challenges you may find yourself facing, when presented with a complex task like writing, is simply being present, i.e. being HERE and NOW. No mentally hellish trips to the study section/review meeting. No rehashing of the argument with the collaborator yesterday.  None of that.  Just you and your word processor. Yep, it’s hard!

Presence is a pre-requisite to being an effective writer. You cannot be focussed on a complex task if you are thinking about 100 other things like how am I going to work those budget cuts into my project, Julie’s paper has been on my desk waiting for review for a week, I need to call back my colleague to discuss a potential collaboration, and by the way do we have any food in the house for dinner?

Those thoughts rob the mind of clarity, energy and focus because they put the mind somewhere else in the future or the past. I’ll say it again because it’s so gosh darn important: the mind must be present to the task at hand to be effective at writing.

Being present and focused, however, is not something we generally have been taught much about. Instead, we are usually taught the opposite – how to multi-task, how to plan, and how to analyze past events.

That means if you’re trying to implement this idea of being “focused”, you’re going to have challenges.  Your “focus muscle” is probably going to be pretty weak, much like a flabby bicep that needs a workout at the gym.

You might be surprised at how hard it is to maintain focus on one thing for an extended period of time. Or maybe you’re not surprised. I used to only be able to maintain focus for 5 minutes at a time, unless I had one of those dump-truck sized deadlines looming, that forced me into focus.

But just like the muscles in your arms or legs, regular use and practice will make them stronger. If you make a regular time to focus on writing, your muscle will get stronger until you can be far more efficient with your time (hey, how could I run a $1M/year lab this year, along with blogging, book writing, managing a business, and teaching grant writing workshops – and still have time for sleep and occasional vacations?)

I recently listened to an interview with best-selling fiction author Stuart Woods. He has written over 30 books, and regularly publishes 2 books a year. As a full-time author, you might think he spends all day writing, but you’d be wrong. Instead, he spends 2 hours a day. Every day, at the same time of the day, he sits down to do his work. He spends one hour reviewing and editing his work from the day before, and one hour writing a new chapter. The rest of the day he spends time thinking about plot lines and characters while he is doing other things, but he only spends 2 hours of concentrated work a day. He has developed a practice of being present and focused on his work every day. Because he does this every day, his focus muscle has gotten very strong and now he is very efficient during this time. Efficient enough to complete 2 novels a year, most of which go on to be best sellers!

I offer this example to illustrate 2 things.

1. You don’t have to spend a lot of time each day in order to make good progress. And
2. You do have to spend SOME time each day in order to make good progress.

Set aside a clear and designated “writing time” each day and spend this time working on your grants or papers and you’ll make more progress than you would have thought possible. Best of all, when that grant deadline comes along, you won’t have to pull all-nighters to get it done and you’ll have a clear and well thought-out proposal.

In the next post, I’ll talk about how to find the time and develop your habit of a Writing Hour each day.

p.s. get your free “backdoor to funding” report, and sign up for my upcoming webinar that shows you the three-step model underlying all successful grants, right here.

I did this interview with Nobel Laureate Dr. Oliver Smithies in the Fall of 2010.  In this interview we discussed:

How to make the great escape from academia, and still have a career that feeds your family.

Please ignore that link I gave you in the video, the system failure rendered it nonworking. Instead, you can use this link.

And if you found this useful, please leave a comment or hit that Facebook Like button.

I wanted to find out: what is the most pressing challenge you’re currently facing in your science career, and how can I help?

I used good ol’ Survey Monkey, and got > 200 responses so far. Yay! The results were interesting and a bit surprising to me. They also caused me to go off on a bit of a rant about how to learn effective grant writing. Ok, not really a rant, but kind of a Morgan “being opinionated” kinda thing. Here’s the video:

Hope you find it informative, and if you do, please hit the Facebook Like button.

Cheers!

ps – if you want that link for the grant strategy session that I gave out in the video, it is here: http://grantfoundry.com/grantstrategy.html

Today I awoke, and checked my email early on.  Bad idea.  I ended up wasting a bunch of energy on one person’s negativity that had been aimed towards me.  He wrote: “You have lost credibility as a scientist and have become just another huckster.”  Wow!

I’m a huckster now!? Really?

In tomorrow’s Naturally Selected blog I’ll go into a bit more about what prompted him to do that.  In short, I had sent out an email to a list of folks with a link to a video by marketer Frank Kern.  The video sells nothing, and I stood nothing to gain from sending it, except possibly goodwill (which apparently backfired with a few folks).

Why did I send it? Because I thought it had a good message to share: that what we feed our brains with impacts the actions we take, and the success we get as a result.  Simple but important.

So here is this email (and blog comment) sitting in my inbox this morning, calling me a huckster, and it made me stop to waste some mental energy: “What in the world would prompt such a response??”  I think I have some ideas about the illogical thinking behind the email:

• Anyone who makes real money (like Frank Kern does) must obviously be a scammer, and so anything he says is bad…
• That if I send a message out containing a link to something by someone who makes a lot of money, then I must have some kind of self-interested motive, and be by association a scammer (and worse, huckster). (even if the link itself had nothing to buy…)
• Or, perhaps this: the sender of the email is tremendously resentful of Frank Kern’s success because he does not presently enjoy the same.
• Or, perhaps this: that all people are bad, and trying to rip me off.
• Or ????

All I can say to my erstwhile emailer is this: the video contained a message that you sorely needed to hear, but you were so busy defending your current mode of unproductive thinking that you didn’t even pick up the message.

———

More importantly than all that is the central message that I re-learned for the 50th (or 100th) time: do not check email in the morning, get real work done first. I teach this to others, and I usually follow it, but occasionally I slip up.  Today’s little slip-up reminded me forcefully that I must not make this mistake.  You shouldn’t, either.

If you are familiar with my mission of helping you maximize your ability to promote your work and increase your funding, you’ll know that I spend the majority of my efforts focusing on the positive, all the ways you can improve and be better.

But I need a break.

In this post, I would like to explore failure and your psyche. Still reading?

Great! (I’ve often thought a smaller audience was easier to reach.)

In the world of psychology, there is a concept called locus of control that is used to describe how people view their ability to control things in their life, or in the happenings around them.

There is a huge body of literature devoted to this broad topic.  It has been used in applications with students, in chronic pain management, and in other health-related issues, and, now: grant writing!

People are typically divided into 2 subtypes: those who have an internal locus of control and those who have an external locus of control.

In a nutshell, people who identify as having an internal locus of control feel that they have significant influence over their own state of being, their own life course, or the ability to affect their own world. Patients with chronic pain, for example, feel they have the power to improve their own well being and manage their own symptoms through exercise, rest, etc. to a notable degree.

Those who identify as having an external locus of control rely on “powerful others,” like doctors (or random chance) to direct their lives and state of being. Using the chronic pain example, patients with an external locus of control are far more likely to rely on their doctor to provide some kind of treatment or to give accountability to a larger, nebulous force.

What kind of person are you?

Let’s take this from the medical world to the grant writing world. Have you ever received negative comments back from reviewers that left you feeling incensed that they didn’t “get it,” or that your reviewers were biased, or that the grant system was unfair?

It is very easy to vent frustration at the other guy, the reviewers (I did plenty of this earlier in my career). It’s human nature.

It is also human nature for people to fall into 2 camps thereafter: those who are naturally introspective and, when done venting, are willing to look at their own contribution to the negative reviewer comments. And then, there are those who continue to blame the reviewers.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see not only the difference between these types of people, but how the latter scenario, the blamers, the people with an external locus of control, can experience failure more often. It’s not a judgment of personal style; it is reality.

At the end of the day, you dreamt up the idea and wrote the grant. It is your responsibility to ensure that your communication resonates with the reviewers.

This locus of control business is a very roundabout way of illustrating that when your grant gets rejected, it is a golden opportunity to learn from your mistakes, hold the mirror up and have some introspection. And if you’re not sure what to do next, ask for help.

By the way, this works insanely well in all other parts of your life, too.

If you want to gain more control over your own grant situation, you can get started, here.