Newspeak

We scientists are using some odd language to describe our careers these days: we are undergrads, then grad students, then postdocs, then perhaps PI's. We're sponsored by the NSF and the NIH.

Why can't we speak in English? Does it really save so much time to leave four letters out of the phrase "graduate school"? Perhaps it has more to do with a distaste for being reminded that we're still in school, despite having already graduated.

Neologisms can change the way we think. Take, for example, the term "NIH". Most people outside of science don't know what the NIH is, but told that it stands for "National Institutes of Health", could probably infer that it is a part of the federal government concerned with medical matters. Those of us who are intertwined with the NIH know that this description is far too general. For sure, the NIH supports health scientists, but the term "science" has a much broader meaning than the kinds of activities the NIH actually supports. For example, imagine a scientist who proposes an exciting yet unlikely hypothesis (let's say a 1 in 10 chance of being right). To test the hypothesis, the scientist designs a set of experiments, which will be pursued to completion no matter what the "preliminary" results. The results of the experiments will be published, whether they confirm or deny the hypothesis. Is this "science"? I think yes, but anyone seriously hoping to get NIH funding would never submit a proposal like that. To get NIH funding, you submit preliminary results in support of a hypothesis you know is probably correct. This may be a good way to do science, at least some of the time-- it's not that the approaches promoted by the NIH are bad, it's just that for many scientists NIH is so dominant that it's easy to forget that there are other approaches. "NIH" is not just an institution but a whole culture of science, indeed a way of life for some. The acronym therefore has a meaning far more precise and far less flexible than can be conveyed by the mere English phrase "National Institutes of Health". Perhaps by concentrating on our "NIH RO1", rather than on our "National Institutes of Health Research Proposal", we can avoid the unpleasant thought that we lack the freedom to define "research", "proposal", and "science" as broadly as the English language would allow.

That's why when someone talks about their "pubs", I question whether they are really just trying to save the time it takes to say "-lications". At least we're not calling ourselves "FirstAuth" yet.

That neologisms should be a red flag was pointed out, of course, half a century ago:

Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it. The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable.

In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker's mind... The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further. So did the fact of having very few words to choose from.

-- George Orwell, "1984"

Harder to get, worth less and less

There was little chance of me growing up without acknowledging the scientific greatness of Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Galileo. These names and a few others were literally embalzoned along the top of the building where I went to Junior High School. From ages 12-14, my formative years, every time I looked upwards (which I did frequently, because of the school's problem with seagulls) I was given a reminder of these great names and their contributions to science.

One of science's biggest draws is the chance to become famous- to earn lasting recognition, to earn a place for your name along side those great ones. This presents a dilemma, though. The top of that building was full- there was no room for any more names.

There are only two solutions to this problem:

1. Make room by kicking somebody else's name off.
2. Make room for more names, with a bigger building or a smaller font.

Since there are more and more scientists, all of whom want lasting fame, option (1) becomes more and more difficult. To get on the building, Galileo had to compete with his contemporaries plus maybe a few ancients. I, on the other hand, would have to compete with my much-more numerous contemporaries, in addition to Newton and Galileo, who are still hoarding their spots, despite being long-since dead. Making room for more names-- option (2)-- means that each spot becomes less valuable, because the capacity of each person's mind to remember and honor a set of famous people remains rather limited and more-or-less fixed; i.e., despite there being twice as many scientists today as there were a generation ago, people today do not have twice the ability to remember who is famous.

Fame, one of the main draws for practicing research science, is becoming ever-more elusive, and at the same time becoming less and less valuable.

A few suggestions

In the transition from postdoc to assistant professor, the Peter Principle is at its strongest. A successful postdoc is skilled at basic research- planning, performing, and publishing experiments- yet these things are a minor part of the job description of an assistant professor, who is suddenly thrown into a management position. Running a lab is like running a small business, but what does the science "training pipeline" teach you about that? Not much. I think some professors are willfully, if not consciously, resistant to the idea of becoming better managers of money and people. They've been hired for their skills as a scientist, after all. As a result, science labs can be very poorly run at times. So how could this be fixed? Ideally, newly-hired professors would take a three-month training course in management. Meanwhile, I have a few of my own suggestions:

Set reasonable goals and deadlines.

We have no problem with deadlines. We like deadlines. But please make them reasonable. What is a "reasonable" deadline? That is open to discussion. At the very least, a reasonable deadline is in the future, not in the present or in the past.

Meet concrete grievances and suggestions with concrete replies.

As a hypothetical example, say that a grad student asks, "can we have some more beakers?" This would be a poor response: "Other labs may not have to worry about money, but I do. When I was a grad student, I had even less than you guys do. You wouldn't need more beakers if you didn't break them all the time. I'm not buying more just so you can break them." How about this instead: "I know having more beakers would make your work easier. However, before I make it a budget priority to buy more, I want to see if we can do better by using what we have more efficiently and reducing the rate of breakage. Please try this for three more months, at which point we can discuss again whether we need to invest in more glassware." If that's too much work, how about simply: "Sorry, no."

Use deliberation before you give direction.

In that you are my supervisor, my time is your resource, just like your money is, so it makes sense to treat them both as something valuable. You weigh the costs and benefits of your purchases, giving more thought to the bigger purchases. Similarly, you should deliberate before asking me to do something. It may take you ten seconds to think of an experiment for me to do, and a day for me to do it. I then lose the opportunity to spend the day doing anything else. Learn the meaning of the term Opportunity Cost. Is it fair to ask that you put, say, eight minutes of thought into a request for eight hours of my time?

Financial Engineering

Several others have commented recently on a trend of bright minds leaving science to do, of all things, financial engineering.

I've met people who either made this leap or were thinking about it, and now the phenomenon has reached out to touch me. As part of my fishing for a job (in academic science or outside it), I recently threw in an application to a Wall Street finance firm. "What the heck," I said to myself, not expecting much to come of it. I got a telephone interview. I have no background in finance, but they don't care: they want people who can think abstractly.

As it turns out, I won't be going to Wall Street any time soon. Though parts of the interview went well, I was a bit rusty on questions of the "OK, so let's say you toss a fair coin five times..." variety. Still, by giving me a telephone interview and an hour of their time, they showed more interest in me than any academic institution in my field has shown lately (or seems likely to show any time soon). What does that say about my country's priorities?

Drinking the KoolAid

Upton Sinclair famously declared that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Similarly, it can be difficult to get scientists-in-training to use common sense when they perceive that their future in science demands that they don't use it. For example: if every professor has, let's say, about ten "trainees", and all of them have the same goal of becoming professors themselves, common sense dictates that only a small portion of them will succeed (let's say, about one in ten).

Yet the "trainees" continue soldiering on, in pursuit of a goal that most of them will not achieve. So why do we do it? How does one become addicted to the particular brand of kool-aid that is today's science training, and why does one continue drinking it, sometimes for decades?

Step 1: Begin kool-aid diet

Ten years ago, as an undergrad, I first stepped into the world of academic research by joining a lab. Funding, grants, CV's, etc. were the last things on my mind-- I just wanted to pursue my project, which I was enjoying tremendously. I was surrounded by impressive older people like grad students, postdocs, and professors. Though they were doing interesting work, from many of them I could sense an undercurrent of dissatisfaction. Even in my young state, I understood the gist of it: their careers were stalling while their peers who had gone into other fields were making twice the income and having better opportunities for advancement. Yet even though I understood these things, I said to myself, "OK, so they have some concerns. But isn't it worth it? They get to spend their time reading and writing these interesting papers, talking to these interesting people, thinking about these interesting problems. Is it really such a big deal that they have less money and fewer job opportunities?" This is the very essence of the kool-aid. I had become an imbiber to the core.

Step 2: Become immersed in kool-aid

By the middle of graduate school, the idea that my future as a scientist was so important that it was worth any trade-off had become so ingrained that I no longer had to reflect on it. It was simply the lens through which I saw everything that happened. Once, it seemed I might miss out on one month of pay (while making <$20,000/year) when I went on a fellowship after being a TA. My advisor's response to this was, "Well, you're still eating, right?" At the time, I thought he had a point.

Step 3: Rediscover the idea of a kool-aid-free life.

A year before I finished graduate school, I was on the all-night shift at a national laboratory, finishing up those last experiments I needed for my dissertation. One other grad student, even nearer to finishing, was there with me. At about 3 a.m., we had the following conversation. "I used to want to be a professor, but not any more," he said. "They dangle the possibility of it in front of you at the start, but most of us will never make it. There are better opportunities in life." He then turned back to studying for his exam in business administration. In a few months he would be leaving the university with an MBA in addition to his PhD, and he seemed more excited about the former. "How interesting," I thought to myself; "this man appears to have stopped drinking the kool-aid. He has weighed his options and decided that a career in academic science no longer offers him the best deal. And his logic makes perfect sense. Not only has he thought it over, he has taken concrete steps to build a career outside of traditional science. Maybe I could do that too." That was five years ago. Remembering those vaguely dissatisfied colleagues from my earliest days in research, I was beginning to question the kool-aid. Yet I was still an imbiber: over the next few years, despite growing dissatisfaction with science "training", I did very little beyond take the next steps in the standard pipeline. I was still hanging on to the idea that I was going to "make it", that if I just continued to be smart and hard-working the system would reward me.

Step 4: Wean yourself off of kool-aid.

Even after becoming able to see the downside of the kool-aid, it can take a while to wean yourself off of it. Are you truly weaned? Here's a simple test. Repeat these three phrases to yourself, at least ten times: "I will never get tenure." "I will never have another first-authored publication." "I will never have my own lab." Now how do you feel? If you've said these things and you feel calm and at peace with the world, then congratulations, you've successfully weaned yourself off the kool-aid. If you find yourself thinking, "but wait, no... I'm smart... I could still get a PNAS paper..." then you are not weaned yet. You will continue to ignore any avenue leading away from being a famous scientist, even when common sense suggests that you do otherwise.

Leverage

The first professor I ever worked for, a kind and humble man who passed away before his time, was once presenting some recent results to a gathering of scientists. "This preliminary data fits very well with what we're proposing for this new training grant," he said. "And the point of doing the science is, of course, to get more money."

Everybody understood, right away, that he was joking. That was ten years ago. Now, people are still saying the same thing, only they're no longer making a joke.

Another scientist I once worked for explained it to me like this: once upon a time, when he was young, professors never worried about funding. They were free to concentrate on their classes and their research. This freedom made some of them complacent, and they didn't do very much of anything. The modern climate with its constant scramble for funding has lit a fire under scientists and made them more productive. But there is a downside to it, and I, for one, argue that it has gone too far-- our research scientists now sound like hedge fund managers:

"A junior PI must take a limited amount of start-up funds and leverage it into long-term external financial support for an entire laboratory."

Unfortunate.

Walking Toward the Exits

I haven't done too badly as a postdoc. I have a fair-sized pile of publications in good journals, a prestigous fellowship, and a handful of productive collaborations. I'm in a fairly good position to get some funding for an independent research program, which I could then use to nail down a faculty position. After that, the next hurdle would be to secure a large federal grant like an RO1. That would make me an established, independent scientist, and then who knows - NAS membership? Endowed chair? Nobel Prize? Maybe even a page on WikiPedia.

Only that isn't the plan - not any more.

A decade ago, I stepped into the pipeline by joining a lab as an undergrad research assistant. Ever since, I could see at least a vague outline of each subsequent step-- enroll in graduate school; obtain a fellowship; publish papers; defend thesis; obtain a postdoc position; obtain another fellowship; publish more papers. Sometimes the steps have been challenging, but I always had faith that I could succeed and I was willing to work hard. I haven't failed at any of the steps yet. Now, once again, I can see the next step (get my independent project funded), but for the first time in a decade I am making the conscious decision not to pursue it.

Though I see a lot that's wrong with the world of science, and though I've had my share of dark days, I refuse to think of myself as a disgruntled postdoc. I have too much to be thankful for. It's just that I look at the next step in the scientific pipeline, and though I see that it works out reasonably well for some , I have weighed it for myself and decided that I can come up with a better plan. I am still relatively young, I have a lot to offer the world, and I am convinced that I can find a way to fit in to society other than as a professor. I know this process will take longer than a day or a week, maybe longer than a year. Thank you, academic science-- I hope we have learned something from each other. I am now walking toward the exits.