Today Morgan discusses really really boring scientific talk titles. Giving a great science talk begins with having a great title, that captivates the audience and motivates them to come to your talk. Don’t be afraid of giving your talk an interesting title! You will stand out, because everyone else will continue to use boring dry talk titles. Standing out is good. It gets you noticed. Morgan shares her favorite title for a talk, “Modeling biology with equations is like strapping a …. ” (you’ll have to watch the video to find out).

Previously, I wrote about an upcoming meeting with the chancellor of UNC.

It was audacious of me to just call up and make an appointment with the head of a large, prestigious institution like mine.

But I like to live life on the edge.

My goal was to discuss entrepreneurialism within the university – and how the university bureaucracy squashes entrepreneurial spirt.

The layers of bureaucracy are thick here, layered like a truffle embedded inside a wedding cake….

The chancellor was surprisingly receptive to my visit.  He’s obviously a smart guy, and a scientist.  He wants to do right by the University and its faculty.

He clearly understood the problems of bureaucracy at UNC.  He said it is his number one mission to reduce it.

But every time he tamps down the bureaucracy in one division, it lasts for a little while until he turns his attention to something else.  Then it grows right back, like weeds in a place with plenty of water and sunlight.

Perhaps that is an apt analogy.  Cutting back the weeds never solves the problem.  They just grow back.

The only ways to kill weeds are to cut off their water or sunlight – or to poison them.  Since “poisoning” is not going to be an acceptable solution when it comes to bureaucracy, we have to implement one of the other solutions.

The sunlight and water of bureaucracy are money and rules.

Rules serve a purpose – at least in someone’s mind, at the time they are conceived.

Once they have served for a while, they grow stale, old, and smelly.  Bureaucracy thrives on them – while everyone else chokes.

And money helps support the beast.  One might try to choke off the money, but I guess that the people at the end of the food chain – the scientists – would starve before the bureaucracy does.

Every grant that a researcher brings in comes with “facilities and administration” (F&A) money.  That money is supposed to pay for things that support the research environment.

But it is all sucked up into the voracious beast before it gets to the place where it benefits the researcher.  Various people have pointed out to me various “worthwhile” things that it is used for.

Is 5 levels of bureaucracy to approve a hire, “worthwhile?”

It doesn’t matter whether it is “worthwhile,” even in the rare instance that it is.  It is not benefiting the research.  It is not benefiting the science that the grants are supposed to be supporting.

I work in a 30 year old building that is crawling with cockroaches.  I’m not sure who that benefits, except for the cockroaches.

The way to starve the beast is to bypass it.  The F&A money should go directly to the researcher’s most immediate unit (e.g. department).

The department then could apply it to do things like get the space that we need.

I can hear many people in humanities say, “but wait, that would starve our side of campus.”

I am very much in favor of supporting the humanities and many other non-science departments.  I have a personal fondness for philosophy.

But I am not in favor of supporting those departments with F&A money from grants that are given to me to do specific research.  That is misdirection at best.  The state and tuition should be supporting the teaching mission of the University.

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I was thinking about all the hiring problems we seem to have.  It can take (many) months to get a hire completed, because it has to go through so many levels.

Why is that?

My department seems to have an HR person (a “facilitator”) just to navigate the bureaucracy at higher levels of the system.

Instead, why not train her in the rules, and just let her do the work directly?  Then we wouldn’t need 5 levels above her (or however many it is).  It would be faster, cheaper, and would starve the beast.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think that many of the people that work within the beast are very well meaning and trying to do their jobs.  But when one is trying to do their job in a dysfunctional organization, the job is, unfortunately, promoting more dysfunction.

Out of date rules need to be removed.  But there would be massive resistance to that.

Money needs to flow around the bureaucracy, not into it.  There would be massive resistance to that too, but perhaps not quite as much.

Ideally, both would happen.  That would really take care of the problem, once and for all.

I hope the Chancellor is listening

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Note: I do plan to get back to topics of science careers and grant writing in the next installment.

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I just saw a neat talk by Eric Schadt, PhD who is the Chief Scientific Officer of Pacific Biosciences.  First he showed off the new sequencing technology they are developing, which promises to absolutely blow away the current “next-generation” sequencing technologies.  They use a micro (or maybe nano?) fabricated waveguide to isolate a single polymerase molecule, then they use fluorescently labeled nucleotides with a cleavable linker.  When each nucleotide comes into the polymerase for incorporation into the growing DNA string, there is a short pulse of light from the fluorescent marker, before it gets cleaved.  This platform is now coming to maturity for real-world DNA sequencing.  It will probably be the next “next generation” sequencing.  Or should it be called “third generation” sequencing?

So, that’s neat and all, but what I want to discuss is the second part of his talk.  They combined the genome information from this new approach with other types of “systems biology” data to begin finding gene networks that were perturbed in health conditions.  He showed results of one study focused on obesity, where they pinpointed several new genes associated with adipose (fat) storage.  From that, they have developed a drug that may prevent obesity and weight gain.

I saw this talk after just having biked into work, having hundreds of cars zoom past with people in them getting no exercise whatsoever.  So here this company is – like many others – developing a new drug that may prevent weight gain, when the real problem for many people (except the rare few with a genetic condition) is lifestyle.

I’ve just read the book “Vitamin D Cure” that discusses how many “modern diseases” (you know, the ones that didn’t much exist 100 years ago) are associated by lack of sunlight and hence lack of vitamin D.  So it turns out that many diseases – ranging from heart disease to cancer to gallbladder disease – are associated with chronic D deficiency.  That’s a lifestyle issue.  Are we going to “drug” that too?  Artificial sunshine in a drug?  Wait, that’s already been done, and it is called vitamin D.

I get frustrated at the prevalent point of view that we can “drug” every problem known to humankind.   For one, if we do “drug” every problem, then people’s lifespans will get longer.  Now that may be ok if the population didn’t keep growing, but it does.  The world already has 7 billion people, and it is increasingly clear that our ecosystems are being quite strained by that.  If people live longer – and nobody stops having kids – then we’re going to be in ever and ever bigger mess competing over scarcer and scarcer resources (think oil, fisheries, natural gas, water – basically, all the stuff that keeps us alive and healthy).  This will be especially true if people keep driving cars everywhere.

On the one hand, it seems good to help people by making a new drug.  But on the other hand, it may not help in the big picture.  I don’t know how to reconcile these two views.

But there’s also another issue, which is cost.  New drugs are extremely costly to develop.  Once this new drug is developed, who will be able to afford it?  Maybe a few rich people will be able to pay for this, and a few rare cases of medically necessary/genetically obese people.  But will the rest of the population, who are overweight simply because of their lifestyle choices?  Should health insurance pay for a very expensive new drug just because many people choose to drive everywhere and never get exercise?  I don’t think so.  Why not ask for health insurance to just start paying for cosmetic surgery as well?  I think it would be better for folks to just start riding their bikes more.

My research is fun, and will hopefully benefit people – but will it really help in the big picture?

Sometimes I wonder about that.