My Father the scientist circa 1935

Originally I was going to post just about being thankful.

See, despite shrinking budgets and challenging times, we scientists are a lucky group – especially those of us who have benefitted from the budget largesse of the USA towards our endeavor.

When else in history has any society spent so much money on people simply exploring and figuring out who the world works?  Never.  It’s actually amazing if you think about it.

We are so lucky to be living in a time when society has had money to spare for such things.  I can only hope it will continue in the future.

So when lamenting about the challenges that we face, it is good to keep this in mind.  Just imagine if, instead, we were beholden to rich patrons to fund our work – ones whose tastes were fickle and craven?

We’ve got something to be thankful for!

But … (there’s always a but…)

I want to say “no thanks” to university bureaucracies.  I don’t know about you, but in my own case, I’ve seen so much sclerotic implementation of arcane and byzantine architectures of arbitrary rules that my head is ready to explode.

Seriously – if you think about it, almost half of all money that NIH, NSF, and other agencies give out as grants go to fund the university bureaucracies.

I don’t think anyone set out to make these for malevolent purposes.  Quite the opposite, they grew out of the desire to “protect” and “do good.”  But in the ones I’ve observed so far, they’re like trees whose branches have grown too big for the trunk.  They soon topple over by their own weight.

In other words, they are big money pits.

And that’s a real shame.  Given that we have had this tremendous opportunity to do great science, and to have a big part of the money and momentum sucked away by bureaucracy is simply a damn shame.

So, I give one thumbs up to being thankful for the opportunity to do great science

And I give one thumbs down (no thanks) to bloated university bureaucracy.

What about you? Thanks or no thanks?  I want to hear from you.

ps – have you grabbed your copy of the free report on the five keys to a successful science career yet?

How dare you to “speculate” about what your results might mean?

That’s the attitude I’ve received twice now, from two different reviewers, on two different papers.

In the latest case, we did some work related to antibiotic resistance, and we found interesting new pathways activated in one resistant strain.

At the end of the paper, we speculated about what these pathways might be doing. We even came up with a model for it.

We didn’t claim that this was “the correct answer” – we just said, “hey, here’s our model, it’s the best we can come up with given what we know so far.”

The important thing about a model is that then you have something to test.

Science always proceeds in two stages:

1. Start with a model (e.g. a hypothesis)
2. Test that hypothesis, attempting to falsify it

For some reason, certain people seem to think that science solely consists of step number 2 – falsifying.

But, actually, step 1 is just as important, if not more. Step 1 is what leads to the real innovative leaps (and things like Nobel prizes).

But, because it involves “creativity,” and because nobody really understands what “creativity” is (a topic for a future book of mine), it gets swept under the rug.

Hence, when we use our creativity to speculate and build a model of what our results might mean, we get reviewers who say: OMG, hey, that’s way too speculative! You shouldn’t put that in your paper!

Let’s consider two scenarios:

1. We publish a paper with just the results, giving no interpretation/speculation.

2. We publish a paper with the results plus our speculative model of what they mean.

Which one of those two papers is more likely to lead someone to follow up to actually figure out what is going on?

In case number 2, where we provide the model, it is easy. We’ve provided a model, and all someone has to do is to test it (or prove it wrong).

In case number 1, we’ve only provided some data. Someone else can go test it to make sure that their data produces the same results – but if they also refuse to speculate about what it means, their paper will be even more boring than ours (unless it is a conflicting result).

Speculation is the cornerstone of science. It is what pushes things forward. I don’t like reading papers that leave me without any speculation as to what the results mean – they are dry and boring. And I certainly don’t like writing such papers because they are dry and boring.

As long as speculation is labeled for what it is, nobody is being misled. Any reader can choose to agree with it or disagree with it. In fact, that goes for any model of anything – they are just models, and they’re all speculative.

This comes back to my core motto: don’t be afraid to be proven wrong. You may be wrong. But if the fear of being wrong prevents you from speaking out and arguing a concept to the best of your ability, you’ll go forever unnoticed, into obscurity. I’ve decided that obscurity is not for me. What about you?

———

ps – The paper was accepted with only minor revisions, despite the objections of the reviewer over our speculative model.

Academics have a love-hate relationship with money that, I think, can sometimes impede forward progress.

I bring this up because of an email conversation with a friend and colleague of mine. I had asked this person about doing an interview for my online grant writing course, and I said I would compensate him for it. He’s someone who has done very well with grants.

He responded telling me that he was uncomfortable with the idea of “charging” for his grant writing wisdom.

I understand that because I previously held an attitude much like that.

Then I started a business (that one was to turn recycled plastics into kayaks and sailboards). It failed. I dumped thousands of hours into it, put my graduate work on hold, and spent 10′s of thousands of dollars on it – all down the tubes.

So I had to ask myself, what was the payoff for that investment? The reason I had made that investment in the first place was for the hope of a dual payoff:
1) Helping the world by finding good use for recycled plastics
2) Making some money in the process so that I didn’t have to scrape by any longer on a graduate student stipend

It didn’t work out. The only payoff was the lessons that I learned (boy, I can still remember that smell of plastic as it bakes in a rotomolding oven!). But I’d never have risked it if it were for just #1 alone. It was the combination of #1 and #2 that kept me going at it.

Flash forward to today. I’ve invested 100′s of hours creating a website, developing advice, working on a book. I’ve taken time away from my lab, from my family, and from my other business. I’ve been stressed out, up late many nights, and have taxed my finances to get it going. I haven’t done the one thing that I love most (whitewater kayaking) in well over a year. Instead, that time has been spent developing this content to help people (like #1 above).

Would I have done all this simply out of charity?

I’m sorry, no.

I like helping people. But there needs to be an economic payoff for doing so – particularly when it involves such a huge commitment. Number 2 above is an integral part of the equation.

If it were just a matter of giving a bit of advice here and there, I’d do that for free (and I often do, both on this blog and on my mailing list).

But when it comes to really helping people with a difficult skill like grantwriting – it takes more than just a few moments. I’ve spent at least 50 hours of my time developing my online grant writing course. And I continue to develop and refine it to try to improve the ways in which it helps people become better at expressing themselves.

I would never have committed that time to it if there weren’t some kind of economic payoff. I think it would be a bit crazy to help other people compete better against me in the pool for grants, just out of the kindness of my heart.

I do want to help, but setting up the infrastructure to really help people in a meaningful way costs money.

Have you ever wondered why, when you ask your colleagues for help, they often don’t have time to help you?

I’ve wondered about that often – and that question relates to this one of money.

As academics, we’re expected to do all sorts of stuff, “for free”. By “free,” I mean, doing things that don’t bring the grants in that often pay our salaries – things like teaching, mentoring, committee work, service work, etc. As a result of all the “free” stuff we do – it becomes very difficult to really do any of it very well, or very deeply.

Young scientists need a lot of mentoring. But that is another “free” activity on the part of the mentor. Some mentors find the time to do a lot of it anyway. Many do not. This is particularly true once you join the ranks of faculty. I had very little in the way of active mentoring. While I’ve made a big deal here of my interactions with Marshall Edgell, who helped me learn effective grant writing, we’re talking about 10-20 hours of total interaction over a span of 8 years. That’s not much.

Because it is “free”, it gets thrown in with all the other “free” stuff that needs to get done, of which there is always too much for the available time. So, it often doesn’t happen. I talked to at least four people at this NHGRI meeting I’ve been at who felt that they had almost no mentoring, and regretted the lack.

On the other hand, if someone comes to me and pays for consulting, or pays for my grant writing course, that changes the dynamic entirely. First, they’ve shown a serious commitment to get help. Second, I’ve now received their money, so I have a strong ethical and business imperative to deliver meaningful value for them. Am I perfect about that at all times? No – but I strive to get as close to that as I can, given my insanely busy life.

In fact, I’m now in the process of hiring an additional support person to keep up with all the issues with running a business like this (I already have one person helping out). That will free me up to develop new products. I have some great ideas to help you, but I can’t make them happen until I can free up some time.

And here’s the thing: I can’t pay those people with vapor. No, I have to pull out that checkbook and send off some big checks. That requires money flow, which requires charging for stuff. And if I’m charging for stuff, then I feel obliged to pay my interviewees for their time.

So, to help people in a deep way, I’ve concluded that there must be an exchange of money. Through that exchange, I’m able to help people more than the “free” model for two reasons:
1. I have a stronger imperative to do so through having received that money; and
2. The person on the other end is usually a better student, because they’ve made an investment of hard earned dollars to improve themselves, hence they strive to maximize the experience.

In contrast, I often see students in my department’s grant writing class taking the learning for granted. They won’t have to write “real” grants for many years (if ever). It is not an immediate need for them. Plus, it is paid for as a deduction from their stipend, so they never feel the pain of investing the money in the education that they’re getting. It feels “free” (even though it is technically not free), so it is not taken as seriously. If we made them pull out the checkbooks every semester for each class, they’d probably take it more seriously.

I think that there’s plenty of room in this world for good, free information. But for deep information that requires a real investment of time and energy to develop and keep up to date, the “free” model doesn’t work well.

At least I can’t figure out how it is supposed to work.

I think that by focusing too much on “free” sharing of information in academia, we’re forgetting the massive monetary infrastructure that supports that “free” – tuition, taxpayers, grants, etc. It is not actually free at all, but we think of it as free because we don’t see the costs.

As Mark Joyner talks about in Simpleology, it requires time, money, or energy to accomplish anything in life (or some combination thereof). Without one of those three, you’ve got nothing.

The only way I can think of to make the time available to help people is by getting paid to do so.

What do you think? Is there another way? Let me know in the comments.

The dreaded R word. Here, I’ll say it: recession! Administrators in academia seem to be freaking out about it. I understand why… the big budget cuts that they deal with are tough. The question is, are they dealing with those cuts in the right way? Does penny pinching really work? Get the inside scoop from Morgan, the Not So Boring Scientist (formerly Meta Morgan TV, an overly boring title)

The great health care reform debate of 2009-2010 stirs up controversy and passion alike. The health care reform foes label all attempts to change things as “Obama socialism” and the pro reform people say “we all deserve health care, even if we drown in bloated bureaucracy.” Morgan takes a stand on the issue. Which way will she fall? Towards the lefty/liberal side or the righty/tighty side? Find out in this episode!

This evening the family and I needed an escape from the over-cluttered house. We went on a glorious family outing consisting of stopping at the local Fish Place, and then going to the local food co-op for dinner.  When I was younger, I would look at people my age now, and think -  I don’t want to be like that.  And now I am like that.  But at least I was there at the co-op having a dinner with my family.  There were more solo diners there than there were groups or families.  And not many of them looked very happy.  Several were sitting around at 6-person tables by themselves with their faces immersed in their laptops, at 7 PM on a Saturday night.  I think there’s something wrong with this picture.

It ties into something I realized when I was out mountain biking earlier today.  We have a 2 mile trail maintained by our neighborhood that is used for hiking and mountain biking.  Back when I moved here 7 years ago, the neighborhood would always come together to maintain the trail.  There was a actually a trail committee, and whenever a big tree came down across it, folks would soon go through and clean it up.  I used to participate in that.  But now I’m super busy between being a parent, being a professor, and trying to get a business off the ground.  So I haven’t helped out.

But the thing I noticed is that nobody seems to be working on the trail these days.  Everyone seems hyper busy.  I occasionally run into a neighbor of mine who used to do a lot of trail maintenance, and recently he, too seems busy.  Everyone seems busy.

Yet I thought we were in the midst of some kind of economic tragicomedy.  I thought unemployment was at a high point since the Great Depression.  I thought people were supposed to be slowing down, doing more things in neighborhoods.  It may be true some places, but not here in this college town.  Life is busier than ever.  And people seem more isolated than ever.

Earlier this year I traveled to my old stomping grounds in Utah.  I got together with an old friend there.  I asked her how some other mutual acquaintances were doing, and she said she didn’t really know – she didn’t get out much at all.  She spends most of her time in front of the computer. I see her on Facebook all the time.  We are more connected digitally than in person.

Is this really the way it should be?  Many of us are working harder than ever, and many others unemployed, and fewer of us are actually talking to each other face to face.  We’re all so busy and immersed in the digital world that we don’t sit down and make human connections.  At least that’s true for me.

I like blogs – both writing my own and reading others.  But is it really a substitute for face-to-face interaction?  I think our communities and world are becoming increasingly fractured by the lack of real interaction.  We may still interact with people on a casual basis – at the grocery store or at work.  But where are the deep, meaningful interactions?  I find them lacking.  And I’m not the only one.

There’s a friend of mine who lives about 40 miles away.  I used to see her regularly.  Now I don’t.  For a while, I thought it was just me and my busyness.  But it is not.  She is hyper busy too.  Last time I saw her, she said she rarely goes out to do things with other people anymore.  She doesn’t have time.  And she doesn’t have kids yet.

What is going on? I don’t think this situation of having large numbers of people living in relatively close proximity, none of whom have any kind of real bonding going on, is a good thing.  It is a recipe for problems.  And sure enough, the USA doesn’t appear on any of the top-10 lists of the world’s happiest people.  One commenter on that site said this was because the US is busy “defending” the world.  I call BS on that one.  It has nothing to do with defending anything.  It has everything to do with how we’ve chosen to structure our lives and our society.

Economic problems like what we’ve experienced aren’t a good thing.  But I had hopes that one good thing would come out of it: more and better connection between neighbors and families.  I’m not feeling that happening.  How about you?  Have you experienced no change, improvement, or decline in your feeling of connection to people over the last year or two?  Leave a comment with your story.

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