Doing Science..

“Don’t do science because you think it’s the right thing to do. Do it because you find it exciting.” - Harold Varmus..

This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately. Ideal is what Varmus - one of my most favorite scientist/thinker of our time, said. But all of us who have come to do Science, do we all believe in that? For example, some of us, life and career has taken certain turns and we have ended up in the profession. Among this large group of people, some have found it to be exciting and fulfilling. More like an arranged marriage, where you have gotten married first, loved your spouse later. Those have at least found love. But for a number of unfortunate ones, it becomes a job to maintain livelihood. This actually is not bad considering the parks, like very flexible working hours, occasional free travel to conferences etc. Of course you have to put up with poor pay scale. But as long as the grant money is flowing, it is not a bad life. But to what end? It is believed that the recession does not affect education or health care industries. But, eventually the revenue shortfall is likely to catch up with the research funding and we may end up in an unsustainable situation.

For the unfortunate ones among us caught in this, it would become very painful. Because, this profession does not let you develop a lot of other marketable skills. The only option left is teaching. I personally think it is a very rewarding profession. But, the trick is to land a reasonably stable job. Let's start with the Universities. Big universities generally do not hire people for teaching only positions. For a tenure-track position in any top to mid-level universities, the candidate has to have some research, which means grant. Even for four year collages, they look for teaching experience, and some research experience, which generally is not very compatible with high powered health-sciences research, because the typical health-science research is not compatible with undergraduate research that they are looking for. More appropriate for them is general basic biology research. So, what does that leave us with? My thoughts are following:

For the ones, who really find doing science is the most exciting thing that you can do with your life, go for it. If you are a post-doc or a Ph.D. student, find your area of research and develop your expertise in that small area. Your initial training should be in a lab where you will have plenty of access of your PI. Find a mentor with whom you can find a connection, your mentor should be able to get you excited. Then move to a big name lab in your field, where your PI's name can take you further. Don't change your field during your post-doc, unless you are willing to spend longer in your training. Have a very focused goal to develop your own grant. Because during the job application/interview, you have to have a very well developed fundable research proposal.

If you are like me, who got into science because that’s where life events took you to and later on grew into it and found exciting, you should follow the above advices as soon as possible or it will take you longer than it is needed, like me!! Two things you need to learn, how to be curious and how to pay attention to the detail.

Certain very useful numbers:

• Starting Salary: $ 80,000 to 90,000/yr for medical schools, for all other departments/divisions/schools, at least $ 10,000 less.
• Startup package: Excluding your salary, $400,000 to $600,000 for 3 yr. again for med schools, for others less.
• Complete Salary Support for 3 yr. afterwards, 30-70% depending on the reputation of the school, exceptional ones 0 % !! Rest, you need to cover from your grant.
• In case of dire financial situation, the university has the right to reduce your salary even if you are tenured, but failed to support yourself completely from your grant.
• For state universities these numbers are substantially lower.

Once again, it is not as hard as people say it is.

If you want to be in science to maintain a decent livelihood one very good option is to work in the industry. If you can manage to develop one set of expertise which is valuable to a pharmaceutical company, you would be a high value candidate. A lot of times these are technology oriented. My experience in this is all theoretical. But you should be ready to be very flexible in terms of your project. Another key issue is to develop very good connections and network. It is not very easy to land a big pharma job. More than 90 % of industry recruitment happens through network not via Nature/Science advertisements.

For the ones who happen to have a Ph.D. and doing post-doc, one under-explored possibility is technical writing/grant review/scientific management. NIH hires a lot of people in grant management field. But you have to remember something which I found here. A number of journals hire scientific writer editors which are worth exploring. Once again networking is the main key in theses options, but the pay scales are better or equal to med school levels mentioned above.

Further Resources:

Nature's guide for mentors
HHMI Lab Management
Breaking All the Rules
Follow career advice at Science Careers

A day at Pittsburgh Zoo

Washington DC Landmarks

How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children?

This is a very thoughtful Post from David Pogue..

Here was my response and thoughts on the topic:

David,

Fantastic piece. I’m glad to see your rational judgment about the internet danger. I would be wondering what the over-reacting mother would do about her child’s sex education. An interesting read would be Sex Ed for the Stroller Set by JODI KANTOR . Although there are horror stories like: Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World, and ‘My Space’ hoax ends with suicide of Dardenne Prairie teen , I do believe they are very limited in no. As a parent of pre-teen, I think it is most important to teach children the difference between right and wrong as early as possible. So that they can make the right judgment when exposed to such dangers. They should be made aware of the dangers of the online world in a similar way to other earthly dangers of living as soon as possible, so that they can protect themselves. The other aspect would be the parent education. Parents also need to be as fluent as possible with the online world of Blogging, Myspace, Facebook etc. There is absolutely no pride in making statements like, “My daughter can figure out photo e-mailing better than me”. Please, it just makes you look dumb and creates a far lager generation gap with the next generation.— Saumen Sarkar

A Day at the Aviary

Comments on Stephen Quake's Column on Science Funding

Link to the original Article

Thoughtful and wonderful. Great choice of topic and columnist, Olivia.

As a new faculty (haven't been a year yet) my feelings are very appropriately described by Dr. Quake. Since I've joined the new position, I've been telling people that it is exactly like a small business. The Institution gives you some capital (with strings attached) to start your business. They pick you, not always based on your scientific potential, more based on your success in obtaining funding - if you have been lucky to post-doc with a scientist in an Institution where your mentor and the Institution allowed you to write small grants and made supporting commitments. Then the real struggle begins - you’re essentially expected to establish, sell and turn a profit (in the form of indirect costs from your grants) back to the investor (the Institution) within let’s say between two to three years. I personally do not know a lot about typical venture capital funded start up businesses, but tend to think that these are some quite extreme parameters that a new faculty is expected to operate. This excludes all other faculty related commitments – typically 15% of expected time.

Having complained about all that I do realize, and in fact cherish the fact, that above all “we get paid (albeit poorly) to pursue our hobbies”. There is typically no “boss”, and no regular work schedule. However, one aspect I find objectionable about some of the senior scientists/faculties. Some of us do not value the communication of our science part. I have heard very senior and excellent scientists say that there should be a mechanism where you just staple your papers and NIH should fund you. Two objections - first it is your responsibility to the society, which is funding your research, to communicate your science. Thus you are responsible to write simple well explained grants, so that people see the importance of your research. Second, it just shows blunt arrogance. How many Americans really know the name of NIH compared to NASA? Do they know that NIH’s annual budget is much higher than NASA? Why the country which spends highest amount of money in scientific research still have debates about evolution among common people? I think we scientists have really done a poor job of communicating life science research to the society.

As with other services, science has just become more and more expensive. With the advent of knowledge and discoveries, it always opens up more questions, more new topics of research. The list of interesting scientific problems always grows in geometric progression. On top of which, the amount of findings reported in a typical scientific paper grows with time. There is probably no journal which will now accept a paper reporting cloning and sequencing a gene! Thus, financially most of the times, the cost of a scientific paper published today is higher than five year ago just in terms of content generated. Therefore, it is not sustainable to practice science this way. This makes the determination of interesting project worth funding even more difficult. We do need to think about a different way to go forward. I don’t know what and how, but want put forth one idea: Biosphere. How about creating a portal for creative ideas in modern biology? I think there is a large no. of ideas, thoughts, that glimpses scientists' mind, and never get tested, because of practical limitations. But, there is someone, somewhere who may be able to test the idea or hypothesis. Therefore, the portal, which will primarily work by wiki principle, will provide people the chance to check out ideas, or get thought provoking facts. This can help in changing a large no. of me-too type experiments and papers and we will rest easy knowing that some of our radical new ideas might get tested and stop complaining about NIH funding.

The bottom line - Convenience

Convenience, or a false sense of convenience, is the most important thing that people want.Why did the explosion of blogging, podcasting etc., essentially content generation exploded in internet era? Part of it is of course ego satisfaction, as I had discussed before, but the other part is it has just become very easy and convenient. I think this should be the most important thing in any product design, marketing approach. I'm sure most marketing guru knows it, but it sometimes get lost in other complicated issues.

Several examples: E-mail - just because it was easy and convenient. Now, when other more convenient ways of communicating are becoming available e.g. texting, tweettering, people are slowly shifting. Think about why do we use all the abbreviations and shortcuts. Wikipedia has become one of the most referenced source, because, it is a lot more convenient to find info and refer to it than finding any other source. In fact our sense or perception of truth, I'm sorry to say, a lot of times depends on convenience. I can argue that one reason for Barack Obama's history making successful campaign was they were very effective in making it more convenient to organize, and get involved than before.

Am I sounding cynical? Well, I don't mean to. It is only because the word "Convenience" has some negative sleazy connotation. May be a better word/phrase would be "make it easy"....