An open letter to YFS

Dear YFS,

I think it is a little early to write your memoirs.

Science has let you down. It's obvious. Nobody mourns something they didn't once cherish. I bet there was a time in your life when you met every challenge in front of you, and received plenty of encouragement- otherwise how would you have gotten this far? And I bet you developed a vision of your future- if you just kept on course, one day you would stand next to Isaac Newton and Marie Curie, helping your species take the next step into a glorious future.

Only it hasn't quite worked out that way. The scenery has changed on your path, and its destination seems less clear. The path rarely seems to be leading to utopia, and on some days it seems to be leading somewhere much worse. On average, perhaps, it seems to be leading to something like Motel 6- workable, but not inspiring. In any case, it's less than you were expecting.

So now you have choices. You can check into Motel 6, and accept the disappointment of your dream being much less than you thought it was. Maybe you could take out some of that frustration on those that come after you. But you have another choice. Can you accept that maybe the dream as you knew it is dead, but you are not dead? The child had a dream of what adulthood would be like. It turns out the child didn't quite have it right. Can you forgive the child for that? It is not too late to have more dreams. Ones that are more in-line with the reality you have come to appreciate with your more grown-up perspective.

So stop for a while. Take stock. The path has not led where you wanted, but you have undoubtedly learned some things along the way. Look back at your papers, and find your favorite accomplishment. Not the one that got you the most recognition, or did the most to advance your career, but the one that was the most honest and creative and inspired. Maybe you're the only one who ever really appreciated it. So what? A lifetime of learning and growth went into it. How many people, out of all those alive, could have accomplished anything like it?

I've not made much of a splash as a blogger. I don't know if a single person ever read my blog. Nevertheless, it has served its purpose for me. In the blogosphere, like nowhere else, I found that I was not alone in feeling lost, frustrated, and disappointed. And it is your anger and frustration, YFS, that makes your blog so meaningful and so real. If anything, it shows that you still care. The world is not all that it could be, and you're not OK with that. And because you're struggling now, you could gain an immense advantage over the people who seem to be gliding along. Anybody can handle success. Imagine what you could accomplish, knowing what to do with both success and failure.

So what if you're not winning the game? If you were, perhaps you would not be able to see all that is wrong with it. In a hundred years, who is going to remember the rules of the game as it is currently played anyway? We've just gone through the greatest economic collapse in several generations. Society and its assumptions have been shaken to their core. Much needs to be rebuilt.

I am not going to blog anymore, at least not anonymously. When I started a year ago, I said I was setting out in search of a better job, a new career. I haven't found one yet. I am in the same lab, in the same situation, facing more uncertainty about my future than I have in decades. That is OK. No matter how badly I am losing the game, I see no need to check out now. The broader game is not up for me until my last cent, my last bit of dignity, my last bit of strength, are all gone. There is a ways to go.

Good luck.

Strychnine in the guacamole

A disgruntled lab technician sabotages a stack of experiments at SLAC. The blogosphere reacts with contempt, outrage, and surprise.

The outrage is justified, but the surprise is phony. Does anyone in academic science really not understand what is going on here? People cannot tolerate, indefinitely, relationships in which they perceive they lack power. Most people stop short of what Oommachen did, or of doing what the Columbine shooters did. Many, like Milton Waddams, don't go much farther than mumbling bitterly. But anybody who feels helpless will eventually find some way, however misguided it may be, to make that feeling go away.

I'd imagine that someone who destroys an experiment and signs the results with the name of her alter-ego has been feeling isolated and disillusioned for some time. But that is how a lot of today's young scientists feel. Did Oommachen have any legitimate avenue for protest? When she did protest, was she heard, or was she ridiculed? It's interesting that, before she decided to do things IWW style, she had already turned to a somewhat less extreme form of protest- simply staying away from work. (Evidently that wasn't enough.) Oommachen was an accomplished scientist with almost two dozen publications, some first-authored. I'm not trying to justify her actions, but simply to dismiss her as "lazy" or "crazy" is absurd. She acted the way people do when they're in situations they can't figure out how to handle.

A Culture of Safety (?)

Low pay, long hours, meager prospects for advancement - these are the reasons academic lab workers often wonder how much they're valued. Well, now it's possible to put a dollar value on the life of a lab technician - $31,000. That's the amount UCLA was fined after the death of a 23-year old technician in an academic lab accident last December. Just to call it a "fatal accident", though, does not capture the reality of what happened. The technician, Sheri Sangji, was handling a syringe of a highly dangerous and spontaneously combusting chemical. She spilled it on her sweater, which burst into flames covering nearly half her body with burns. After what must have been 18 agonizing days in the hospital, she died of her injuries.

Naturally this incident has sparked a lot of chatter about safety in academic laboratories. In his statement, Patrick Harran, the professor in charge of the lab where the accident occurred, mentioned something about establishing a "culture of safety". Presumably, this means a culture that is proactive about minimizing hazards, foreseeing risks, and taking safety issues seriously. Most scientists will agree to these things in principle, but do we in fact have such a culture in academic science? Please. A culture of lip-service to safety, maybe, but when is the last time you have seen anyone in academic science (other than Sangji) suffer any kind of real consequence as a result of a safety issue? Let's take, for an example, myself: as a graduate student, I forgot about a warm water bath in which I was heating a plastic tray. The water evaporated and the plastic melted, filling the building with fumes. And what was the consequence to me? A few people made jokes about it in the hallways for the next week. Another time, I forgot about a bunsen burner I had left ignited on a lab bench that was cluttered with paper. Again, no consequence beyond a verbal reprimand.

My advisors have not exactly been safety zealots, either. Over the years I've seen them get irritated when people spend time cleaning and organizing, dodge questions about hazards, and complain about the expense of buying latex gloves. In general I haven't found that people in academic science take safety very seriously. My "X-ray safety training" consisted largely of a guy telling me not to stick my finger in the beam. More than once, I've noticed how scientists think safety precautions are funny, i.e. "hey, look at Mr. safety dork in the lab goggles!" There is pressure to cut corners, a distaste for formal procedures, and a tendency towards workaholism; if anything, these things make for a culture of un-safety.

So should I be worried? Could I be the next victim? Yes, I could, but no, I am not worried. Despite the lack of a culture of safety, and even with occasional accidents like Sangji's, the truth is that academic science remains one of the safer occupations. From a quick glance at the CDC database , I get the impression that accidents- though they do happen in science- are much more common in blue-collar professions. The reason we have a low fatality rate in academic science has nothing to do with a "culture of safety"- it is because what we do is just not that inherently dangerous. We generally don't work with heavy machinery or climb in high places. We sometimes work with dangerous chemicals, but in limited amounts (Sangji was killed by a spill of two ounces of t-butyl lithium; imagine an industrial operation involving two tonnes of the stuff.)

Saying that academic science is low-risk, though, is different from saying that it is no-risk. The risk will never go all the way to zero, but could we push it any closer? If currently our accidental-death rate is one every five years, could we push it to, say, one death every twenty years? I think we could- in fact I think it would be relatively straightforward. It's done routinely in other industries that are more inherently dangerous (think of air travel, for example). We could put better procedures in place, and make sure they are followed (Sangji's death would almost certainly have been prevented by wearing a lab coat). We could institute both positive and negative incentives, e.g. rewards for pro-active minimization of risks, and real consequences for negligence. So why don't we do more of these things in academic science? The reason, I think, is simple- we don't want to. The cost is too high. Safety, on the whole, is a trade-off, and despite our penchant for win-win solutions, making our labs substantially safer would involve substantial inconveniences and would mean less productivity in terms of gathering data and writing grants. I think we've collectively made the calculation that the trade-offs that could have prevented an accident like Sangji's are not worth the cost.

So instead of a real culture of safety, we have something similar to what computer security expert Bruce Schneier calls 'security theatre'- practices that give the appearance of going to great lengths to mitigate risks, but that in reality do little. One tell-tale sign that a proclaimed security measure is really security theatre is when it involves little cost to the person putting it in place. For example, in the years after 9/11 the Department of Homeland security put up signs everywhere promoting vigilance against terrorism ("if you see something, say something"). This certainly gave the appearance that the government had made counter-terrorism a high priority, but did anybody ever really demonstrate that these signs (which must have been a minor expense, considering the size of the federal budget) actually made anybody safer? How about the "safety division" at your University? Its existence gives the impression that your University cares about safety, without costing much (perhaps five salaries in an institution that employs thousands.) But does the safety division really make you safer? As with the terrorism signs, it's very hard to know, because the risk is small to begin with. Such situations encourage security theatre, because it's difficult to prove or disprove the effectiveness of any approach. If a bad thing happens, say, only once every five years at worst, it's difficult to prove that you've made it even more rare.

When security theater fails (as it always does), and an accident happens, and we're not willing to admit that we took a calculated risk, then we need somebody to blame. The most telling part of Harran's statement is where he points out Sangji's role in causing the accident: "I underestimated her abilities in handling such materials", he says. But this is the paradox of safety: individual accidents are always the result of individual actions, but overall accident rates are the result of environments and policies. This point was made humbly and elegantly in the autobiography of General Omar Bradley, a commander in World War II. If you looked at any one casualty, he said, there was always some way it might have been prevented- if the soldier had been wearing his helmet, if he had been more alert, etc. But on a large scale these things always averaged out, and though individual casualties could always be blamed on individual soldiers, overall casualty rates for whole armies never could; these were solely the result of the decisions of the highest-level commanders. I think scientists have a hard time understanding this, because of their tendency to see things in terms of a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest. For despite their well-known tendency to vote Democratic, scientists have at least one thing in common with the right-wing crowd: a reluctance to acknowledge systemic causes for individual problems. Newt Gingrich looks at a woman receiving welfare to support her children, and concludes that she must be lazy. Never mind that her city hasn't nearly enough jobs to meet the demand for employment. A professor looks at a postdoc who can't find a tenure-track job, and concludes that it must be because he's not trying hard enough or is not smart enough. Never mind that an overwhelming majority of postdocs today will not find tenure-track jobs. So is it a surprise that a professor looks at a technician who died in a fatal lab accident, and concludes that she must have been careless?

I'm afraid the accident at UCLA will bring on little more than a surge in security theatre, but let me suggest something else. Maybe it's unrealistic to think that we'll ever have a real culture of safety in science, but at least we could spread the blame and consequences around a bit more fairly. The accident, after all, was not entirely Sangji's fault. Professor Harran states that she did this kind of experiment all the time, without incident. Perhaps he hopes this will exculpate him, but rather, it demonstrates that a fatal accident could have happened in his lab at any time. So it seems unfair that Sangji should bear the blame and consequences alone. After all, at the time of this writing, Sangji remains dead, while Harran's career seems to have continued with little more than a hiccup- a recent article about the accident said that Harran was "at a conference and unavailable for comment". I'm guessing it wasn't a conference on lab safety. I think it would be appropriate for Harran to suffer a serious career setback as a result of this accident. That may sound harsh, and it is. I don't think Harran sounds like such a bad guy. His shortcomings in safety precautions don't sound any worse than those of the average scientist. But the same could be said of the technician who died in his lab. Without a true culture of safety, every so often, awful things are going to happen to people who don't deserve it. Just ask Sherri Sangji.

Over the Hill

In 1905, his Annus mirabilis, Albert Einstein published five papers, each of which laid foundations for the next century of physics. One of the papers described special relativity. He was twenty-six years old at the time.

Rosalind Franklin was an X-ray crystallographer who did the experiments that allowed Watson and Crick to publish their famous structure of DNA in 1953. She did the experiments in her late 20's.

Évariste Galois originator of many important modern mathematical ideas such as group theory, died at age 20.

In the Manhattan project- the federal government project that moved from concept to working atomic bomb in about the time it now takes to get a PhD- the average age of a participating scientist was 29 years old.

I see a pattern here and a lesson for all the thirty-something postdocs out there: if you haven't had your blockbuster Nobel-prize-worthy idea by now, chances are you never will. I'm not saying you can't continue doing wonderful, creative things - things that younger people couldn't dream of doing - into your 40's, your 50's, or your 80's. I am saying that making a great fundamental stride in science probably isn't one of those things.

Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right, then our academic system does not reflect this reality. These days, scientists (at least in my field) are still considered "in training" well into their 30's, when it may very well be that natural peak performance time, at least as far as scientific imagination is concerned, is in one's 20's, and that the appropriate time for training is in grade school, not grad school. It would be as if, to join the Olympics, you had to go through training until you were 35, waiting in line behind all the athletes coming before you. The athletes seem to have learned how to adapt to this reality. They recognize that there's a peak period in life for the kind of performance they're looking for, and they have designed the career around the reality. There's a place for older athletes too, just not at center court any more; instead, they coach, they commentate, they go on TV to sell cars and razor blades. Can't scientists do the same? Can't we recognize that in some things, age does matter? Let's have a place for our middle-aged and older scientists that recognizes their increased maturity and wisdom. But is it realistic to have them submitting application after application to funding agencies, saying that they're on the cusp of a revolutionary new idea?

Hard-core

Recently a strange individual began hanging around my lab, using the equipment and reagents, making demands on my time. I found out that he is unemployed and trying to figure out what to do, working for my advisor for free while deciding whether to go to graduate school. He is now commuting half an hour each way to spend long hours gathering data for someone else's grant applications in exchange for no money and no progress toward any kind of degree or certification. My advisor is as intimidating and as demanding toward him as toward anybody else. His motivation, I presume, is the thought that someone will surely notice his intelligence and hard work and it will pay off somehow.

Now that is some extra-strength Kool-Aid .

Does this happen in any other industry?

Laziness vs. Leadership

The lab I work in, like many others, has been living in fear of bankruptcy-- the last few grant proposals have been rejected, and what money we have is stretched tight. I often get the feeling that my advisor thinks this is the fault of the postdocs and grad students- that if we would just work a little harder for a little less, our funding problems would be solved.

University research labs are not alone in blaming their predicament on the greed and laziness of their lowest-paid workers- the leadership of the American auto industry is doing the same thing when they complain about the high price of unionized American auto workers. I suggest that those leaders also look at their own decisions over the past few decades as an explanation for their current crisis: for example, the decision to develop large, fuel-guzzling, once-profitable trucks and SUV's while neglecting fuel-efficient compact cars and hybrids. The lowest paid workers were in no position to challenge that lapse in judgement, and no amount of hard work or sacrifice on their part could have made up for it.

So, professors, do you really think the problem is that your American postdocs are too greedy and lazy? Perhaps the financial strain science labs are experiencing is a reflection on scientific leadership, not just on the people who work in those labs. After all, many professors seem eager to make it clear that they are in charge-- my advisor certainly has no qualms telling postdocs how to spend their time. That's fine, but if you're the decider, then next time one of your grant proposals is rejected, you need to reflect on the quality of your decisions. They're probably more important than whether or not I come in to the lab on weekends.

A rare glimpse

I have seen the enemy, and he is us.

I went to lunch with my advisor and a visiting speaker. I was mainly a spectator for the unusually candid conversation between them. A great deal of the conversation consisted of complaining.

Among the things they complained about were that they:

• Are not paid enough or fairly
• Have too many unofficial responsibilities
• Too often take the burden of assisting incompetent people while getting little in return
• Experience abusive treatment backed by threats against career advancement
• Want more recognition of their contributions to their departments
• Sometimes suffer consequences from "shaft clauses" buried in the fine print of their employment contracts

In other words... they are indistinguishable from grad students and postdocs.