Fail

There are these moments in science where you face a decision.

Am I going to be the selfish asshole here?

Or am I going to follow the Golden Rule?

and then, if you head a lab group, you think….

I am not just acting for myself. I am a member of a team and they have their own interests. Presumably all of the staff, at the least, have interest in having a job, here, in this laboratory group or they would have left. Trainees have explicit or implicit career goals- things they would like to accomplish here in this laboratory.

Do doing unto others as I would like done to myself is perhaps not in good alignment with what my other team members would prefer done to those others. And they may not have the same short term / long term concerns that I do*.

One of those things the team may not be all that concerned about is my collection of tender sensibilities. And what I mean by that is that we all evolve a code of behavior within our profession. Some of this is trained into us explicitly or implicitly by the departments, laboratories and subfields in which we have interacted up to the present. Some of this is no doubt due to the broad experiences from parents, teachers, coaches, social influences, etc from long before we thought about starting the life of a professional scientist.

And I’m here to tell you, Dear Reader, we all differ.

You’ve seen it here in the comments on this blog. Many of us have very different attitudes about the proper, ethical and morally right way to be scientists. Some of these are very clearly deeply-felt issues of asserted rectitude…which other people find to be absurd pedantry and/or utterly unimportant. Some of these are issues of reaction….”those guys in our field behave like this and it is bad”….which again proves the diversity of behavior within our respective professional lives.

There is another truism which I believe deeply. We’re all the asshole to somebody at some point in time. Not sure how this fits in but there you have it.

Science can be competitive. We all know that. There is sharp and pointed competition for scientific priority, for papers accepted for publication in the most highly-desired journals, for faculty positions, for grants, for graduate school admission in the right place and for a training opportunity with the right mentors.

Competition means, obviously, that you have to beat out the other guy. And science is not a time-trial. It is not just you against the clock. It is not even a pursuit race, much as we might describe it that way. Science is at the very least a mass-start race in which elbows, necessarily, are used to advantage. Some might think it is a full-contact sport in which a certain amount of checking is expected, legal and totally acceptable. Some may not like any contact.

So….what if your personal attitude is that science is time-trial or pursuit? Or perhaps it is a game of futbol that does not involve players ever touching one another, only the ball?

If that is your attitude and you are less-than-completely-correct, it’s okay. You still can play. You may even be able to tolerate taking the hit but insist that you, yourself, will never throw a check on anyone else.

Classy.

Also known as “the loser”.

Still, we’re just here to play, enjoy the game, find the beauty, eh? Who cares, as long as we still stay in the league?

Problem is, our teammates may not be so lucky. They may not be able to stay in the league if their franchise player*** refuses to mix it up. Their team might lose and fade into obscurity. Then they can’t showcase their moves in the playoffs or on Prime Time teevee broadcasts. They don’t get to play with the best of the best on their team, are always playing a cowering defense…and getting crushed anyway.

Point being this. I have been contemplating whether I have an obligation to play up to what the refs give me when it comes to my career. Should we be playing it physical with constant grinding defense? Should we take every opportunity to elbow and grab and hook when the refs aren’t looking?

Should Reviewer #3 behavior be my watchword, instead of the Golden Rule?

It’s perfectly legal.

__
*A trainee**, presumably, would prefer that the current short-term success of the lab is high, even if there are negative implications for the lab 5, 10, 15 years down the road.

**A technician may prefer that the laboratory is rolling in the dough now, to better facilitate raises, promotions, seniority and skill-acquisition should she or he need to jump ship in a few years.

***PI

Oscars

Damn.

Chris Rock.

Louis C.K. “…they’ll drive it home in their Civic”.

JoBi! Introducing a huge bit on sexual assault, no less. Wow.

…but nobody said anything about the “casting couch”.

Chris Rock.

Some guy being awarded the grant not because his work was that good in this application but because he deserved it for past performance. Wait…sorry, not a grant. Best Actor.

#icanhazpdf and related criminal behavior

I was slow to start watching “Better Call Saul” for various reasons. Partially because I still haven’t finished “Breaking Bad”, partially because I couldn’t see *that* as being the spinoff character and partially because I just hadn’t gotten around to it. Anyway, the show is about a lawyer who we know from BB becomes deeply involved with criminal law.

There’s a point in Season 1 where one character has a heart to heart with another character about the second person’s criminal act.

“You are a criminal.”

He then goes on to explain that he has known good guy criminals and a bad guy cops and that at the end of a day, committing a crime makes you a criminal.

Anyway, dr24hours has some thoughts for those criminal scientists who think they are good guys for illegally sharing PDFs of published journal articles.

Manuscript acceptance based on perceived capability of the laboratory

Dave asked:

I think about it primarily in the form of career stage representation, as always. I like to get reviewed by people who understand what it means to me to request multiple additional experiments, for example.

and I responded:

Are you implying that differential (perceived/assumed) capability of the laboratory to complete the additional experiments should affect paper review comments and/or acceptance at a particular journal?

I’m elevating this to a post because I think it deserves robust discussion.

I think that the assessment of whether a paper is 1) of good quality and 2) of sufficient impact/importance/pizzazz/interest/etc for the journal at hand should depend on what is in the manuscript. Acceptance should depend on the work presented, for the most part. Obviously this is were things get tricky because there is critical difference here:

@drugmonkeyblog depends: additional = needed to support conclusions, or additional = I wish you were interested in my thing.

— Michael Hendricks (@MHendr1cks) February 25, 2016

This is the Justice Potter Stewart territory, of course. What is necessary to support and where lies the threshold for “I just wanna know this other stuff”? Some people have a hard time disentangling their desire to see a whole ‘nother study* from their evaluation of the work at hand. I do recognize there can be legitimate disagreement around the margin but….c’mon. We know it when we see it**.

There is a further, more tactical problem with trying to determine what is or is not possible/easy/quick/cheap/reasonable/etc for one lab versus another lab. In short, your assumptions are inevitably going to be wrong. A lot. How do you know what financial pressures are on a given lab? How do you know, by extension, what career pressures are on various participants on that paper? Why do you, as an external peer reviewer, get to navigate those issues?

Again, what bearing does your assessment of the capability of the laboratory have on the data?

__
*As it happens, my lab just enjoyed a review of this nature in which the criticism was basically “I am not interested in your [several] assays, I want to see what [primary manipulation] does in my favorite assays” without any clear rationale for why our chosen approaches did not, in fact, support the main goal of the paper which was to assess the primary manipulation.

**One possible framework to consider. There are data on how many publications result from a typical NIH R01 or equivalent. The mean is somewhere around 6 papers. Interquartile range is something like 3-11. If we submit a manuscript and get a request to add an amount of work commensurate with an entire Specific Aim that I have proposed, this would appear to conflict with expectations for overall grant productivity.

Representation in manuscript review

One of the things that determines success in science careers is the opinion ~three peer reviewers have about your manuscript as offered up for publication in a given journal.

Hopefully I do not have to rehash the way that journal identify of a scientist’s published work affects career success.

Hopefully I do not have to rehash the way that bias creeps into what otherwise is supposed to be objective analysis.

And let us leave your well-intentioned, but hopelessly naive calls for blinded peer review aside until that nirvana is reached.

Do you think about reviewer diversity at all? Many journals publish a year-end list of all reviewers (these don’t say how many each reviewer wrote, of course). Have you ever scanned them for, say, gender balance? If you are an AE or EIC….does diversity* concern you?

On the author side, would you work to ensure your suggestions for potential reviewers are not biased? Do you ask for about as many women as men? Does ethnic or other minority characteristic of your suggestions play a role?

I’m guessing the answer is no?

I have taken to trying to suggest equal numbers of male and female reviewers when I submit a manuscript. This is pretty simple in my fields of work, so long as you think about it.

Other forms of representation? Not really possible, is my first thought. But….now I’m thinking about it. Maybe I’ll put a few people on my usual lists that I do not typically consider.

And when I get a chance I’m going to go through those published reviewer lists. I’m curious how the journals I think of as being in my field are doing.

Scitweeps: Do you make sure your reviewer suggestions are gender balanced?

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 25, 2016

___
*Editorial boards are another place to look, those are published.

SCOTUS

In the interest of eliciting the most hilarious hypocritical illogic from the Republicans, Obama should nominate …..?

My nominee is Senator Lindsay Graham.

In which I again punch down at some totally sympathetic character

The Washington Post tells this tragic tale of woe:

In her nearly 2,500-word letter, Ben-Ora explained the complaints she had with Yelp, including how she was required to work for a year in customer service before she could move into another position.

“A whole year answering calls and talking to customers just for the hope that someday I’d be able to make memes and twitter jokes about food,” she wrote.

She’s 25.

In case you were wondering, yes, she did major in English, why do you ask?

She’s poor*, and struggling and doesn’t like it. Because the world should pay her six figures to write internet memes and shit. I guess. And this is all the fault of her employer somehow.

Because 80 percent of my income goes to paying my rent.

Nobody with a college degree can reasonably expect to move to the Bay area and have anyone feel sorry for them about not knowing what rent costs. The internet exists. You can check on that. Beforehand.

Let’s talk about those benefits, though. They’re great. I’ve got vision, dental, the normal health insurance stuff — and as far as I can tell, I don’t have to pay for any of it! Except the copays. $20 to see a doctor or get an eye exam or see a therapist or get medication.

Benefits? A mere $20 copay? ….and this is an outrageously bad sweatshop that she works for? ok.

Naturally, after posting her screed on Medium, the inevitable.

UPDATE: As of 5:43pm PST, I have been officially let go from the company.

Wasn’t that what you wanted?

__
via @forensictoxguy

*from her remarks, it looks like she is making $20K takehome, fwiw.

On sending trainees to conferences that lack gender balance

Neuroscientist Bita Moghaddam asked a very interesting question on Twitter but it didn’t get much discussion yet. I thought I’d raise it up for the blog audience.

Q for @NIH funded PIs: should we use @NIHFunding to go or send trainees to conferences that lack gender balance? @drugmonkeyblog @JanakLab

— Bita Moghaddam بيتا مقدم (@bita137) February 22, 2016

My immediate thought was that we should first talk about the R13 Support for Scientific Conferences mechanism. These are often used to provide some funding for Gordon Research Conference meetings, for the smaller society meetings and even some very small local(ish) conferences. Examples from NIDA, NIMH, NIGMS. I say first because this would seem to be the very easy case.

NIH should absolutely keep a tight eye on gender distribution of the meetings supported by such grant awards.The FOA reads, in part:

Additionally, the Conference Plan should describe strategies for:

Involving the appropriate representation of women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in the planning and implementation of, and participation in, the proposed conference.
Identifying and publicizing resources for child care and other types of family care at the conference site to allow individuals with family care responsibilities to attend.

so it is a no-brainer there, although as we know from other aspects of NIH the actual review can depart from the FOA. I don’t have any experience with these mechanisms personally so I can’t say how well this particular aspect is respected when it comes to awarding good (fundable) scores.

Obviously, I think any failure to address representation should be a huge demerit. Any failure to achieve representation at the same, or similar meeting (“The application should identify related conferences held on the subject during the past 3 years and describe how the proposed conference is similar to, and/or different from these.“), should also be a huge demerit.

At least as far as this FOA for this scientific conference support mechanism goes, the NIH would appear to be firmly behind the idea that scientific meetings should be diverse.

By extension, we can move on to the actual question from Professor Moghaddam. Should we use the additional power of travel funds to address diversity?

Of course, right off, I think of the ACNP annual meeting because it is hands down the least diverse meeting I have ever attended. By some significant margin. Perhaps not in gender representation but hey, let us not stand only on our pet issue of representation, eh?

As far as trainees go, I think heck no. If my trainee wants to go to any particular meeting because it will help her or him in their careers, I can’t say no just to advance my own agenda with respect to diversity. Like it or not, I can’t expect any of them to pay any sort of price for my tender sensibilities.

Myself? Maybe. But probably not. See the aforementioned ACNP. When I attend that meeting it is because I think it will be advantageous for me, my lab or my understanding of science. I may carp and complain to certain ears that may matter about representation at the ACNP, but I’m not going on strike about it.

Other, smaller meetings? Like a GRC? I don’t know. I really don’t.

I thank Professor Moghaddam for making me think about it though. This is the start of a ponder for me and I hope it is for you as well.

Priority

I am working up a serious antipathy to the notion of scientific priority, spurred most recently by the #ASAPbio conference and the associated fervent promotion of pre-print deposit of scientific manuscripts.

In science, the concept of priority refers to the fact that we think of the first person to [think up, discover, demonstrate, support, prove, find, establish] something as somehow special and deserving of credit.

For example, the first paleontologist to show that this odd collection of fossils over here belonged to a species of Megatyrannoteethdeath* not previously known to us gets a lot of street cred for a new discovery.

Watson and Crick, similarly, are famed for working out the double helical structure of DNA** because they provided the scientific community with convincing amounts of rationale and evidence first.

Etc.

Typically the most special thing about the scientists being respected is that they got there first. Someone else could have stumbled across the right bits of fossil. Many someones were hotly trying to determine how DNA was structured and how it worked.

This is the case for much of modern bioscience. There are typically many someones that have at least thought about a given issue, problem or puzzle. Many who have spent more than just a tiny bit of thought on it. Sometimes multiple scientists (or scientific groups, typically) are independently working on a given idea, concept, biological system, puzzle or whathaveyou.

As in much of life, to the victor go the spoils. Meaning the Nobel prize in some cases. Meaning critical grant funding in other cases- funding that not only pays the salary of the scientists with priority but that goes to support their pursuit of other “first” discoveries. Remember in the Jurassic Park movies how the sober paleontology work was so desperately in need of research funds? That. In addition, the priority of a finding might dictate which junior scientists get Professorial rank jobs, the all-important credit for publication in a desired rank of scientific journal and ultimately the incremental accumulation of citations to that paper. Finally, if there ends up being a commercial value angle, the ones who have this priority may profit from that fact.

It’s all very American, right? Get there first, do something someone else has not done and you should profit from that accomplishment. yeeehaw***.

Problem is……****

The pursuit of priority holds back the progress of science in many ways. It keeps people from working on a topic because they figure that some other lab is way ahead of them and will beat them to the punch (science always can use a different take, no two labs come up with the exact same constellation of evidence). It unfairly keeps people from being able to get rewarded for their work (in a multi-year, multi-person, expensive pursuit of the same thing does it make sense that a 2 week difference in when a manuscript is submitted is all-critical to the credit?). It keeps people from collaborating or sharing their ideas lest someone else swoop in and score the credit by publishing first. It can fuel the inability to replicate findings (what if the group with priority was wrong and nobody else bothered to put the effort in because they couldn’t get enough credit?).

These are the things I am pondering as we rush forward with the idea that pre-publication manuscripts should be publicized in a pre-print archive. One of the universally promoted reasons for this need is, in fact, scientific priority. Which has a very, very large downside to it.
__
*I made that Genus up but if anyone wants to use it, feel free

**no, not for being dicks. that came later.

***NSFW

****NSFW

Interlude

__
This version is for Comradde PhysioProffe

Second Thought on Glamour Pr33p P33ple

If establishing the priority of scientific observations or findings is so important, another thing these people should be doing, tomorrow, is to cite conference abstracts in their papers.

It was not so long ago in the neurosciences that citations of Society for Neuroscience Abstracts would appear in archival reports.

We can return to this and it would go a long way towards documenting the chronology (I am working up an antipathy to “priority”, folks) of an area of scientific work.

Treat your published papers as those of your competitors

No scientist should *ever* be afraid to publish a finding that contradicts their prior publications.

Club I don't want to join: PIs whose Neuron paper contradicts earlier Cell, Science or Nature paper.

— Dan Tracey 🇺🇦 (@Hoosierflyman) February 15, 2016

Thought on Glamour Pr33p P33ple

I do not know why they don’t just submit their stuff to JIF 3 journals.

Everything would be “accept, no revisions and can we get you a coffee Professor?”

All their supposed problems would be solved.

A comprehensive guide to using social media to your advantage

1. Entertain yourself.

Thing I am realizing

Being a decent person is fundamentally incompatible with achieving great things or making significant structural change happen.