I had been reading a paper for a journal club, and one of the authors on this new paper was an individual that had done the aforementioned, and later retracted a significant publication. That’s how the topic came up, and a few interesting conclusions were soon reached about people who have indulged in this indiscretion:

1. All the examples we could think of were postdocs.
2. All of the publications that were retracted were in very high-impact journals.
3. All of these postdocs/papers came from extremely good laboratories with well-known, well-funded PI’s.

These three facts leads one to an obvious conclusion as to why people fake it: pressure. Pressure to produce novel work of the highest caliber, and pressure to get a job and start one’s own lab.

The problem is this, however—nature itself is the best and most objective reviewer there is. One of the nicest things about experimental science is that, if a result is true, it will be true again, and again—to varying degrees, perhaps, but it will be true no matter how many times one repeats an experiment.

And every scientist must know that deep down, you may be able to fool a human reviewer, but you can’t fool the experiments that will attempt to replicate your work. So it’s a very interesting study in the human psyche, these examples of people who have to know what is ultimately going to happen, but fake it anyway; it reminds me almost of a Coen brothers movie, or Dostoevsky, if we’re getting all literary and stuff (let’s hope I spelled that correctly).

This caused me to worry a bit, for a couple of reasons. First, if you can’t figure out how to bring in money as a scientist, that’s a problem. Equally troubling, though, is that the reviews I received for those applications (I’m thinking specifically of the NSF) seemed pretty capricious. Example: the first year I applied, the reviewers thought the stuff I had listed for community service, etc. were great. The second year I applied, I got ripped for not having enough community service, etc., even though I actually had MORE things to list for both of these things compared to the year before. Huh? Also, I think by the time you were finished, the application wound up containing more information about how often you tutored underprivileged students in college or “communicated science to the public” or how early you were elected to Phi Beta Kappa than the actual details about your scientific proposal. Kind of a bummer. And I’m not saying that those things aren’t important for a scientist, or for any good citizen with a knowledge of science, to do; I’m just saying that it felt like the selection process was more focused on those aspects of one’s CV than one’s potential (or demonstrated ability) to actually produce quality work in the lab.

Then, like a ray of light from the heavens, the NRSA fellowship appeared. Now, I never expected to take solace in the NIH grantwriting process, but you know what? I actually think it’s a decent way to go about funding people. Sure, I was fairly happy with my score, and I didn’t have any enemies in my study section (somehow), and I didn’t have to complete anything close to an entire RO1 application. But I actually felt like people who knew something about neuroscience read the damn thing; the issues they had were totally reasonable within the context of the experiments outlined. I don’t have enough preliminary data demonstrating I can achieve that goal? Fair. I’ll have to get you some more. The interpretation of those results could be problematic? That’s true. I’ll have to take that into consideration.

Yeah, it takes a lot of time to do the application; yes, you have to be able to demonstrate that you can actually do what you propose; and sure, the topic has to be (or has to be spun convincingly to appear) at least mildly health-oriented. But all I wanted was for someone to judge me and my proposal objectively on our scientific merits, and that’s what I got. Thank you, NIH. Now tell me if I’m funded already, I can only check the era commons website so many times a day before I start to feel bad.

I’ve taken to making a lot of lists in recent months in order to organize my thoughts about the work I need to do. I have four projects I work on, some more and some less in collaboration with others, and outside of those, I’m doing a few experiments I like to think of as “favors with authorship” for other people in the lab—control-like stuff requiring a moderate-to-strong amount of effort for a least a couple of months, but not reinventing the wheel. The lists go like this: the shorthand title I used to refer to the project goes at the top of the page; then, I list the control experiments I need to do for the project, followed by the materials I still need to order, followed by the code I still need to write for data analysis, and I end with a list of questions I want to answer with the project (a.k.a, why are we doing this again?). I do this probably twice a week.

All of the projects require the development of at least one new technique, and they range from going-to-take-a-lot-of-time-and-dextrousness-but-probably-doable to nobody’s-been-able-to-do-this-yet, let’s-hope-it’s-because-nobody’s-tried-too-hard. I’m in the lab at least 6 days a week. All is going well, so I really can’t complain; I should be able to graduate in about 6 years, and I imagine several papers will come out of the work.

Fine. I tell you all this because it brings me to the question I want to ask: is this what graduate school was designed to require in order to achieve the PhD? The obvious answer is no; plenty of people graduate with less, some without a first-author paper, some without any publications at all.

So why don’t I take my foot off the gas pedal? Two reasons. The first is global—if I take my foot off the gas pedal, what happens when I go to apply for competitive postdoctoral fellowships and positions? PhD programs may not like the fact that students have to take on more and more ambitious projects that take longer to complete in order to publish well (at least in neuroscience), but unless we find a way to universally lower people’s standards for what needs to be accomplished to be successful in science—for publishing, funding, and securing faculty positions—which sounds like a dicey proposition to begin with, I don’t see any way around it.

The second is more local: unpublished data suggests that the only way a graduate student can get out of the Axel lab, and I imagine other high-powered labs as well, if they don’t want to leave academic science or gnaw their foot off at the ankle like a fox in a bear trap, is to do really good work. You are ambitious because you have to be; you work hard because your goals require it; and if you succeed, it’s only because that was your only option from the start.

So now, to my final point: are great expectations something to complain about? I pretty much knew what I was getting into when I joined the lab; I knew that it was, to borrow a phrase used in sports ad nauseaum (or is it Nike ads?), a situation that required me to go hard, or go home.

Yes, the expectations are high, and great work is demanded from you. But you have all the money you could ever need—and that’s only a slight exaggeration—to purchase equipment and supplies, and to pay your way through grad school; you have lots of connections with other great labs, as well as journals; you’re surrounded by incredibly talented and smart postdoctoral fellows, some of the best in the country; and you’ve got the ear of one of the best scientists in the world. So, complaining about having to meet high expectations when you’ve got every imaginable resource at your disposal? Sounds kind of lame, doesn’t it?

Should we as graduate students shake our heads in dismay when we’re forced to be truly ambitious in our goals, either by local or global factors, or should we suffer with a smile on our face because, in the end, it’s going to make us produce better work, and better scientists, too? I know that, if I had to make the decision all over again, I’d choose the same exact lab, and the same expectations… but I’d better save it for my farewell speech. Three or four years from now.

First, Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article, “In The Air,” in which he argues that big ideas/scientific discoveries aren’t unique products of genius individuals that would not have happened as quickly, or at all, if that particular genius had never existed (e.g., the theory of natural selection, the invention of calculus), but are pretty much inevitable discoveries that will occur in due time, and the the scientist that gets attached to the theory or invention (e.g. Darwin vs. Wallace, Newton vs. Leibnitz) is often something like the winner of a game of scientific musical chairs. I don’t particularly like how I summarized that idea, the grammar is all wrong, but hopefully you get the picture (and you can read the essay here at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell).

Second, I caught the last 3/5ths of one of the most awesome movies ever, Terminator 2: Judgement day, on cable the other day; aside from being one of the only movies I can recall to incorporate liquid nitrogen into the plot, it also resolves one of the movie’s core problems in a way I always found unsatisfying as a scientist, and made me think about the Gladwell article immediately (I’d read the article a day or two earlier). So the movie basically revolves around the fact that sometime during the 1990s, a scientist/engineer invented a new kind of microchip that has a number of special properties that go pretty much undescribed, but we are told that at some point, the microchip, which is being employed in computers and “cybernetic” organisms (metal endoskeleton covered in living tissue) the military uses as soldiers, has the ability to learn, and eventually the machines in which the chip is being employed suddenly become “senitent”—that is, they spontaneously gain consciousness and revolt against their creators, leading to apocalypse, more or less (Hence the “Judgement Day” thing in the title). Well, that idea is interesting in and of itself, but the more interesting thing to me is how the people trying to save the world from this scenario choose to deal with this problem—go back in time, find the creator of this chip, and have him destroy it and promise never to reveal his invention. Voila. World saved.

Huh? Even before the Gladwell piece, I remember thinking, so either this scientist has such a high opinion of his creative abilities that he believes no one else will EVER figure out how to make the same chip, or this is just a Hollywood movie and I am overthinking things. Probably the latter.

My teams are the Boston Red Sox, the New England Patriots, and the Michigan Wolverines (and I have a special place in my heart for Notre Dame, because I was raised Catholic, they have my favorite fight song of all time, and I dated a guy who pitched for the Notre Dame baseball team when I was in college). I just want to take this opportunity to give a shout to the New England Patriots, who not only kept me company this afternoon while I spent hours performing surgery on a mouse and delivering odors to the animal’s nose while imaging glomerular responses in the olfactory bulb, as well as every other Sunday I’ve had to work over the past few years, but on going 18-0 and winning the AFC championship today. Kudos, boys. And thanks for the memories.

My whole life is science, really, and if I did not do science, I would do nothing. I put this observation forth without judgement; it is neither noble nor foolish, interesting nor banal. It just is. It isn’t often that I notice how focused my life has become—just five years ago, I had yet to take calculus, or see the structure of a protein. What was life like then? What did I do? What did I think about? What did I worry about? How did I calculate my success? What was I climbing towards? And what made me stop? How did I become a scientist?

Only those rare days when work ends early, and I don’t have any errands to run, laundry to wash, papers to read, data to crunch, or lectures to prepare, and there are no baseball games or football games to watch, and no podcasts to listen to, do I realize that if I was told I didn’t have to go in to lab the next day, I wouldn’t know what to do. Probably go to a museum. Food shopping. Call my mother, perhaps. But I would not be a scientist were I not obsessed, and it’s fair to say that most of us are not obsessed with money, we are not obsessed with fame, and we are not obsessed with the kind of things other people desire; we are obsessed with getting where no one else has been able to get before us, and being able to get back down in reasonably good condition, before doing it all over again.

The walls of Columbia University are not impenetrable to this force, and getting bench space in the Axel lab is always contentious, especially for a grad student. I spent the four months of my rotation perched like the Buddha in front of a bunch of metal drawers that supported two moldy water baths and my laptop computer, but had no gap in which to uncoil my legs. After I officially joined the lab, I was promoted to a small desk shoved next to two growling incubators in the room where we keep our fly stocks. All I remember about that space was the amount of white noise those incubators generated—great for reading papers, it was like living with a pair of noise-blocking headphones sewn into your scalp. That and how much fruit flies like coffee, particularly swimming in it, especially when it’s mine and I’m tired. Eventually, after a mere two years, one of our postdocs left to take a position at Brown University, and I got to assume half of his old bench as my own.

The best or worst part of finally getting a bench, depending on your archeological inclinations, is having to clean out the decades worth of old papers and slides and films and equipment that currently reside there. One of the most interesting things about working in a lab that has been around for so long is that every day has the potential to take on the character of a visit to the Smithsonian—“See this table? This is where the NMDA receptor was first cloned. This stapler? It belonged to future Nobelist Linda Buck, before Tom Jessell ‘forgot’ to bring it back after borrowing it.” And while cleaning out my new bench space, I found the most astounding artifact of all: a yellowing, tattered piece of paper that appeared to be a schedule for a weekly lab meeting.

I am told by those who have come before me that we used to have lab meetings, many years ago, B.P. (Before Prize). But the concept that we would convene regularly to talk about data, a common practice in every other lab I’d ever known, had been laughable for as long as I could remember. At some point I think someone even drew up a new schedule, but every time enthusiasm for reviving the get-togethers managed to surface it would soon be squashed, like a drunken attempt to start “the wave” late in a game when the home team is losing terribly. Then, one quiet evening at the tail end of a relatively mild New York summer, Richard decided he wanted to have lab meeting again. I believe Chinese food was involved, but I can’t remember exactly. And so a new schedule was drawn up. And my name was second on the list.

My name is Dara, and I’m going to be your tour guide for the next few, well, however long blogs usually last. I’m a third-year graduate student at Columbia University, in the neurobiology and behavior program we have here, and I work in the laboratory of Richard Axel, MD, the 2004 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. (Or is it “Physiology or Medicine”? I can never remember, and have never felt like checking). He won the Nobel for discovering, with Linda Buck, the rat olfactory receptor gene family, as well as the anatomical and molecular elucidation of how the olfactory system works that followed their landmark discovery.

And me? I graduated from Harvard University in 2003, with a degree in government and a lot of time wasted writing for the “Harvard Lampoon” humor magazine and watching baseball. How did I wind up a neuroscience graduate student in one of the most hardcore molecular biology labs in science? Well, stick around, and someday you may find out. Until then, I’m going to be your connection, your woman on the inside, your disher of the dirt, revealing all about what life is like as a plebe in the world of high-powered science.

And you? You will be my procrastination enablers, my sweet readers. I think this may be the start of a beautiful friendship. And I hope you enjoy this blog, which I humbly call “The Nobel Savage” (five points to whomever pinpoints the literary allusion first).