We biologists tend to speak of “wet” science as the gestures we carry out at the bench, involving buffers, enzymes, culture media and other such waterlogged reagents. This is less science than engineering, perhaps, but it is fun, and I miss it. Molecular biology involves the transfer of microliters, cell culture the transfer of milliliters, bacterial work sometimes the transfer of liters, but I miss a second-nature look for the meniscus. It’s cooking, and I don’t have time for that at home either for the time being.

Actually, cooking does not take so much effort – planning the meal does. And that is true in science as well. The planning part is the dry science, and the real added value of any thinking I do, as much as practical hands-on lab experience is also useful when helping my students think of an appropriate set of quantitative RT-PCR primers. Jenny’s agenda is another example of this sort of dry science.

But ordering reagents, offering urgent corrections on a colleague’s manuscript and on a proposal to the French delegation to the EU Framework Programme 7 Health initiative, and arranging dry ice shipments of cells is beyond dry. It’s desert. I can derive no sustenance from these.

Hence a blog post, instead.

I was struck at the difference between my experiences and Bob’s, when reading his reply to a recent meme to which Cath had responded way back in December.

The fact that I was born in America does condition the responses a fair bit. Given the coverage, I suppose I can go and die happy now.

Bold for “have lived through”; italic for “would like to do”, since I don’t know Textile well enough to change colors. Nor, apparently, for making this look like a sequential list. Sigh. Something to live for, I suppose.

1. Started my own blog
2. Visited Hawaii
3. Watched a meteor shower
4. Given more than I can afford to charity (this is subject to definition, no? In the end, you always can afford it. More than I can afford would oblige me to receive charity, and I’ve been there, and it’s humiliating)
5. Been to Disneyland/world (sigh)
6. Climbed a mountain (proudest of the Gourgs Blancs)
7. Held a praying mantis
8. Sung a solo (sorry)
9. Bungee jumped
10. Visited Paris
11. Watched lightning at sea
12. Taught myself an art from scratch (knitting, crocheting and leather-work)
13. Adopted a child (someday, perhaps, as my partner is not so enthusiastic and we already have two, so are not good candidates)
14. Had food poisoning
15. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
16. Grown my own vegetables
17. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
18. Slept on an overnight train
19. Had a pillow fight
20. Hitchhiked
21. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill (in recent memory)
22. Built a snow fort
23. Held a lamb
24. Gone skinny dipping
25. Run a Marathon
26. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
27. Seen a total eclipse
28. Watched a sunrise or sunset
29. Hit a home run (only tried, but it won’t happen now)
30. Been on a cruise (Meh.)
31. Seen Niagara Falls in person
32. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors (depends which)
33. Seen an Amish community
34. Taught myself a new language (Pig Latin? Rudiments of German or Hebrew?)
35. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
36. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
37. Gone rock climbing
38. Seen Michelangelo’s David
39. Sung karaoke
40. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
41. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant (sandwiches don’t count, I suppose)
42. Visited (any part of) Africa (Morocco)
43. Walked on a beach by moonlight (Sand Beach on Mt. Desert Island, combined with #24)
44. Been transported in an ambulance (peritonitis)
45. Had my portrait painted
46. Gone deep sea fishing
47. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
48. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
49. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
50. Kissed in the rain
51. Played in the mud
52. Gone to a drive-in theater
53. Been in a movie (an extra in Junior)
54. Visited the Great Wall of China
55. Started a business
56. Taken a martial arts class
57. Visited Russia
58. Served at a soup kitchen
59. Sold Girl Scout Cookies (still shudders at the memory, and I wasn’t even a Scout. I hate selling things, which is why #57 is not on my wish list before I die)
60. Gone whale watching
61. Got flowers for no reason
62. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
63. Gone sky diving
64. Visited a Nazi concentration camp
65. Bounced a check
66. Flown in a helicopter
67. Saved a favorite childhood toy
68. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
69. Eaten caviar
70. Pieced a quilt
71. Stood in Times Square
72. Toured the Everglades
73. Been fired from a job
74. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
75. Broken a bone
76. Been on a speeding motorcycle
77. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
78. Published a book (only parts so far)
79. Visited the Vatican
80. Bought a brand new car
81. Walked in Jerusalem
82. Had my picture in the newspaper
83. Read the entire Bible
84. Visited the White House
85. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
86. Had chickenpox
87. Saved someone’s life
88. Sat on a jury
89. Met someone famous (see #55 for pop culture icons among these)
90. Joined a book club
91. Lost a loved one (permanently)
92. Had a baby (or two)
93. Seen the Alamo in person
94. Swam in the Great Salt Lake (but I dipped a foot in Mono Lake)
95. Been involved in a law suit
96. Owned a cell phone
97. Been stung by a bee (not to my knowledge, but I still harbor an ancient phobia)
98. Ridden an elephant (turned down the opportunity in Thailand)

January 1st’s issue of Nature is stuffed with enticing articles that are taking me away from the agenda that I intend to write for all the things I want to get done today.

Don’t you just love those silly new year’s resolutions? (But I did walk up the five flights to my lab this morning.)

Quote of the day:

“It seems like there’s a deadline every day,” one of the transition staff lamented to me. “They obviously can’t all be meaningful.”

The links between inflammation and cancer – we all know it’s true, and now it’s being proven, molecule by molecule.

The International Year of Astronomy – and how well that ties in with my current reading-for-pleasure. Once that novel’s done, I’ll have to get back to keeping house in the evenings, but for now, the book takes precedence.

I’ve plowed through all my e-mails in under two hours! Yippee!

So, yes, I did fall off the edge of the earth in the last fortnight of December.

I’m of a dither as to what I will recount.

Shall I make you jealous with mouth-watering menus of end-of-the-year feasts at labs in Toulouse and Paris, at home and elsewhere around the country?

Shall I tell you that I devoured a thousand-page novel in the last three days while nursing a virulent cold, after the departure of four of my in-laws? Or that I saw Australia with the female members of said in-laws, and Madagascar 2 with my kids (without recommending either film to my faithful readership over a proper visit to either country)?

Shall I regale you with the politics of certain collaborations underway, and how different they can all be from one another? That “get it in writing” is not enough, and that it is possible to spend two hours writing an e-mail?

Shall I inspire you with the latest victory of my grad student, who will bring glory down on our heads, and how strange but nice it is to be on this side of the fence?

Shall I compose that stupid post I have been meaning to since October, with documentation, images and all at the ready?

Let us draw a modest veil over these and other initiatives, and wipe clean the whiteboard with some ethanol in the form of champagne or armagnac (for no one uses slates anymore, and I will be visiting friends in Bordeaux in fewer than twenty-four hours).

Out with the old, and in with the new! (Hats off to David for the latter.)

Scott’s recent post inspired me to dust off the old hat and hold it out, as will perhaps become the norm in Italy.

Should you want to directly support the purchase of lab supplies to enable research in medical genetics, I have the charity for you. (No joke.) My research group, among the many at the Necker Children’s Hospital, can directly receive money from private donors.

Research on rare diseases is particularly dependent on private funding for its breakthroughs. The researchers and doctors of the world-renowned Necker Children’s hospital have therefore established an official management instrument for such funds, called the Institut Necker, which supports both basic and clinical research projects at the hospital by providing a legal mechanism to distribute external funding in a transparent framework with light administration overhead. The Institut Necker is subject to the same rigourous financial disclosure and audit requirements as any private French non-profit association. It provides for both donors and its beneficiary research members a guaranteed conduit to apply dedicated funds where they are needed most – in the laboratory.

This is sort of our black box for buying all those things – and sometimes for employing technical assistance – that are difficult or impossible to do with public calls for proposals. For example, it pays for tickets on non-national airline carriers, leaving more money for buying reagents. It enables us to establish a contract within weeks, rather than (sometimes) months, for summer interns (when they do get paid, which is not rote). We can get posters printed in town if need be and buy printer cartridges that arrive the same year. (Then again, we have to pay value-added tax. But the value is often added in flexibility.). Make your checks out to: Institut Necker, account HIRSCH-HE, 149 rue de Sevres, 75015 Paris, France . Mrs. Harb will send you a receipt. If you’re in France, you get money back on your taxes with it, by donating to a non-profit association.

I also wanted to thank all you wonderful editors at Nature for publishing two beautiful papers directly in line with my interests (for once, rather than interesting papers outside of my expertise that take time away from what I thought I was supposed to be doing because I’m [shhhh] intellectually promiscuous).

As I was coming in to work, I had already decided to entitle my post thus, even before reading rpg’s “awwww….”-inspiring piece in Futures.

Saturday afternoon, between batches of holiday cookies with my son for school, getting ready to accompany him to his soccer game, making refrigerator magnets with my daughter, helping her wrap her friend’s birthday present, and preparing a hurried lunch after their tennis lesson, I received a telephone call from Tunisia.

Since my hands were covered in cookie dough, I was not fast enough to pick up before the answering machine took over. My colleague was visiting his Ph.D. student in Tunis to help her write up a paper, and wanted my opinion on a point of discussion I had suggested he include based on another paper I had read. (The details are unimportant for you, dear reader. Tell me otherwise if I am wrong.)

My decision was to send back a quick text message (with clean fingers) saying that his paper should indeed not hinge upon that point. But my laptop was still at work, since I knew I had a family-oriented weekend ahead and would not use it, and I would probably need to double-check the implication.

Before going to bed last night, after having fulfilled many – but never all – of the domestic duties I had intended to, I reached down toward the bottom of the stack of books, catalogues and other things cluttering up my night table, and opened up A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. I find that I can read a couple of pages of these essays and feel recharged.

…as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain,—”women never have an half hour . . . that they can call their own”—she was always interrupted.

Still true.

For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.

How futile to only spend time with my children, when countless potential people could benefit from my words of wisdom, distilled this weekend with my colleague now returning from Tunisia? Perhaps that moment of inspiration was lost indefinitely? As much as I believed a friend’s observation that one’s children will remember board games played with their parents more than the absence of dirty mugs in the sink, I had a moment of doubt. How many of us have felt that laundry and ironing (in particular!) were futile exercises in running on a treadmill, no advancement to be made, and entropy winning the battle?

I will live on in my children’s chance off-hand remarks to their loved ones, that they remembered stringing garlands on the banister like that. (Low-resolution rendering, lossy over time and someday to not be replayed anymore except in derivation.) And in my publications – although who will know which words were mine, in most of these? Ah well, personal glory is not for the likes of me.

Female Science Professor is hosting the first, but I hope not the last, FSP Statement of Purpose Contest on her blog.

You still have a little more than a week, and a number of pointers, to devise a gem even better than the following example of a Statement of Purpose to get into a Ph.D. program in science:

How many roads must a man walk down, before they can call him a man?

Bob Dylan wants to know the answer to this question and so do I. I have always loved quantifying impossible things, and I want to continue to do so in graduate school. I would not stop at counting roads, though, because counting roads means looking down. I also want to look at the sky.

How many times must a man look up, before he can see the sky?

That’s another thing that Bob wants to know, but in this case we disagree about the important question. I want to know how many times must a man look up before he can really know the sky and what is in it. The sky has always been a mystery to me ever since I was a child. What is the sky? We must know this before we can count things in it. I do not like science fiction though. I love science.

In the classes I have taken as an undergraduate, my professors have attempted to teach me many things, but the things I want to know are not in books.

I have always collected things: shells, pebbles, cats. I even tried collecting staplers for a while to try to get over my fear of them, but although that didn’t work well, it shows that I am not afraid to face obstacles and at least try to overcome them. Now my passion will be collecting data.

I think that the graduate program at the University of X is the best one for me because you have a lot of faculty who count the atoms in our universe and our planet. Some of these atoms even make up Bob Dylan, his roads, and the sky we both want to look at and know.

As FSP adds,

Entries are welcome from prospective grads. This gives you the chance to write the SOP you would have written had you not been limited by concerns about professionalism and good taste.

I was reading this article from the New Yorker about finding good teachers in the American free-for-all education system(s), when I hit on this paragraph. Substitute “research” for “teaching”:

In teaching, the implications (…) suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs (…) an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded¹, the way it is now. (…) An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot — both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

All emphases mine.

To enter successfully into research in biology, at least, one does now have to carry out fairly poorly paid apprenticeships. These are known as postdoctoral stints. However, the correlation between success during the postdoc (as measured by nebulous “quality” and more concretely, quantity of publications) and the capacity for successfully running an independent research group is a little tenuous.

This period usually lasts for at least two years past the Ph.D., but in Europe at least, should not extend past six years, for fear of being considered to be “burned out” and no good to science anymore. This has been codified by the EU Fixed-Term Contract Directive, which with all good intentions specified the necessity for “a framework for preventing abuse caused by the use of successive fixed-term contracts or relationships.”

I knew someone who admittedly was not a great independent scientist, but was useful in his own way – technically competent if you gave him direction. But since he had his own Ph.D., he could only seek employment as a lab research director-in-the-making. Otherwise, he was over-qualified diploma-wise. He got to the end of those six years as a postdoc and thanks to the EU Fixed-Term Contract Directive, was unemployed for nearly a year before getting another short-term contract, this time more appropriately as a research engineer. This is a waste for everyone, not least for him if he wants to feed his family. It would have been more of a waste of course, had he become the director-in-the-making with his own research group, but decades of investment in his education by the state did not pay off, because the state had no way of admitting his qualifications into an alternative career path. Glass ceilings of course abound in the other direction, as well.

EMBO Reports published a Viewpoint back in 2003 by Niall Dillon entitled “The postdoctoral system under the spotlight” and it continues to be highly relevant with respect to the French system:

To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous comment on democracy, the postdoctoral system has many disadvantages — until you look at the alternatives. If postdoctoral researchers are not employed on fixed-term contracts, it will be necessary to give them permanent appointments immediately after they obtain their PhD. Because there are very few researchers fresh out of a PhD who are ready to run their own research group, they will have to be employed on permanent contracts within existing groups. Such a system has operated for many years in France and the experience there shows the negative aspects very clearly (Goodman, 2001). Faced with a decision to employ a researcher who could be there for life, laboratory heads tend to opt for someone they know, which very often means someone who has completed a PhD in their lab. As a result, French academic institutions have an estimated ‘inbreeding’ rate of 65%, compared with 5% for Britain (Soler, 2001)² — inbreeding refers to researchers remaining in the same institution throughout their careers and shows a negative correlation with scientific productivity. Because of the inherent lack of mobility in the system, it is difficult for young scientists to obtain permanent positions in France, and many French scientists end up working abroad. French researchers also complain about a system that often denies them scientific independence for much of their careers.

Massimo can sympathize.

Dillon makes more good observations about the downside of U.S.-style postdocs before continuing, “It is essential that scientists themselves make the case that maintaining scientific excellence requires a type of career organization that promotes mobility and scientific creativity while still giving fair treatment to the people who work in academic research.”

Primary and secondary schoolteachers in the U.S. should assume the responsibility for negotiating what they will accept, to improve American education, in exchange for the automatic tenure they currently “enjoy”. Or it may well be taken away from them in any case.

Ph.D. candidates in science should be informed early on that there is a bottleneck in getting employed like their immediate models, their advisors, and that not everyone will make the cut. It is therefore crucial for Ph.D. programs to conduct outreach to former alumni in alternative career paths with whom Ph.D. students could spend a short apprenticeship period during their training.

—-

¹ Which it used to be in France, right out from the Ph.D.

² This is much less true than it used to be thanks to national hiring commissions, except for the universities, where a significant reform has also been undertaken this year whose effects we might see in five-ten years.

Last week (and until tomorrow) I experienced how to be a scientist as a single mother, as my husband was traveling all over Europe on an intense pre-Christmas meeting extravaganza.

The science definitely suffers. Or at least, advances much more slowly.

However, life as an expatriate in Europe took a pleasant turn as my children and I joined my husband in Madrid for the weekend, using low-cost transport with a little low-cost frustration thrown in, though of course all turned out well in the end. My thoughts on the jet-set experience are consigned here – they are not really science-related enough to bear much repeating on NN.

I thought I’d profit from my stump instead to quote the following editorial by Kai Simons from an October issue of Science:

“There are no numerical shortcuts for evaluating research quality. What counts is the quality of a scientist’s work wherever it is published. That quality is ultimately judged by scientists, raising the issue of the process by which scientists review each others’ research.”

What propositions do you have for objectively ranking one researcher above another, as value for money from an institutional perspective, when everyone has a unique topic and/or approach? When peers have a limited set of journals that they read regularly, and they may not be able to judge that a given journal is highly regarded in a different field from their own?

It’s a tough call, and while impact factor is meant to rank journals, it will naturally reflect to some extent on the people who publish in those journals. I think it is utopic to hope otherwise. I think the only measure of quality of a publication is in the notice it attracts – but even then, there are fashions and personalities that ensure that sometimes “quality” articles are “rediscovered” far after that new notoreity may have benefited their authors.

What about the position of an author in the line-up? Is a researcher who publishes as a middle co-author in ten articles in a year really worth so much less to the scientific enterprise than the researcher who is senior author on one? Certainly, the former would bring in less grant money, which is often a covert consideration for institutional ranking. But objectively? Do we all need to be leaders?

It makes me think of that phrase, “a nation of leaders”. If everyone leads, who actually does the hands-on work?

That brought me to this discussion of the possible role of managers of creative innovators. Like us scientists. I’d be very happy to outsource my management roles to someone more competent, but it’s a matter of trust, and I don’t see anyone in my hierarchy who is more qualified than I am to act in my interests. Scientists leading scientists is somewhat like the blind leading the blind.

I’m away from home, now, but Mike has challenged me to participate in a silly game that Henry embellished and I can not resist the opportunity to procrasinate for fun and (intellectual) profit.

The problem is that I am in my in-laws’ home, and most of the books I can get my hands on are unlikely to have been read by most of you, and in French to boot.

Here’s one, that was originally written in English (so I had to hunt all over to find the original text to put it here). Can you guess who wrote it, if not the book from whence it came?

‘Yes, I distinctly remember hearing the clock on the mantelpiece strike two.’ She nodded towards an eight-day travelling clock in a leather case which stood in the centre of the mantelpiece.

At my discretion, I have put two sentences. Henry did that. If other appropriate books come to hand and the meme is still playing in a couple of days when I can get to my own library, I’ll add to it later.

The suggested rules are, take ten books, and transcribe the fifth sentence from page fifty six.

Tag, you’re it, Clare, Maxine, Richard, GrrlScientist, chall and Ricardipus ! Go get ’em.