I am not sure how many people read my blog, and it may be presumptive to assume anyone noticed my absence from Nature-Network…but I wanted to put up an explanation for why it has been more than a month since I posted a blog.

A year ago I was diagnosed with and Atrial-Septal Defect. This hole in my heart was asymptomatic for the most-part. I had some skipped heart beats-but I was working on my dissertation and was constantly stressed, so those were not out of the ordinary.

The ASD never really affected me in my youth (I played baseball and basketball pretty seriously in high-school and before)…but I started to get really tired this past year. I am a young guy, so this was out of the ordinary.

After the ASD was discovered, I had to delay the repair until after my marriage and graduation. Then I started a new job at the NIH, and being a new post-doc-I wanted to get off to a good start, so I delayed it further.

Finally, I realized that health must come before my career (a very difficult realization especially for a young post-doc) and I had an Amplatzer device inserted into my heart subcutaneously.

The amazing doctors at Johns Hopkins University (where I turned down a post-doc position-darn!) were able to implant this device in my heart without resorting to open-heart surgery this month. The surgery does have some residual risks, but my recovery time was short…

I am so thankful for this. I am getting my life back to normal-and that means more blog posts in the future!

These type of things, especially when you are as young as I am, make you really take stock.

We need to stop trying to kill our postdocs in this country. I know we are all racing for the answer- and the zero-sum game of science leaves many lives broken…but to loose the quality of life in the process may render that answer, whatever it is, meaningless.

We must teach our postdocs how to have lab AND life. Both will benefit.

This duty lies with you and only you-our mentors.

This makes me so angry but what makes me even angrier is that NONE of my colleagues has the guts or leadership to get out there and challenge this drivel.

I warn you my science leaders-you reap what you sow. Oprah has a vast and tuned-in audience, and this “book” has large sales figures. Your lack of scientific leadership and silence on these issues will eventually lead to a population that undermines and questions the validity of your own work.

Don’t believe me? Just look at what the silence of many economists just lead to in the world credit markets.

You better catch up to the times, or else the cute Galileo Galilei story taught to your children will not be such a distant memory.

Postscript: I feel the need to add an addendum to this post, read below:

Why is my anger relevant? Why am I so passionate about the lack of science culture and leadership?

If we look at the recent global problems with the capital markets, we begin to see an argument made that “open market capitalism” which I equate with “open markets of ideas” is dead-that regulation is the key.

As I have written in earlier posts, regulation by central planners will not end at economics-it will continue to science and this will lead to a decrease in innovation…but this is for another time.

The real issue is that “…the real wealth of nations lies in human capital, not its financial markets. Financial markets can be fixed if human capital exists. Without human capital nothing can be fixed. The USA remains the only Western country with a growing, highly skilled population.”

Having a highly skilled population is the key to research, development, innovation and ultimately-WEALTH!

But if you have a population that shuns innovation and knowledge for the safe haven of relativism and dogma (as can be seen in the Jenny McCarthy link I posted), then you have essentially a low skilled population of backward-thinking “flat-earthers.” (Warning: I am not discussing morality and religion here, just thinking about science…)

If this is the case, the both they and us, the supposed “enlightened” ones, will be sinking on the same ship.

To keep the highly skilled and growing population we need-we need science leaders that are willing to challenge the relativity that is so popular on the self-help and “science” shelves at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore and on Oprah. There are right and wrong answers and although not as fun as dogma, these answers are our ultimate road to truth and freedom.

This will be an uncharacteristically short post.

When I am looking at electrical signals recorded from neurons, how do I really know that those signals are not out-of-context snapshots?

What comes to mind is is the gibberish generator.

Look what it did to this sentence:

To be, or not to be: that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?

It turned it into this:

To bear to troud make arms againsolence dread of? Thus rathe that patience to greath, the dreath thus for in the rub; fortune, the resolution is and name of ther respect the quietural shocks thus…

Looks like a sentance to me, even has some statistical and punctuation regularities and even psuedo-words.

Without knowing the “language”, we are sure to find mulititudes of statistical patterns in the brain, but do they mean anything?

I noticed that the author of this page asks the same question (unfortunately I already wrote this post so I am not erasing it).

But the question remains-without the context (or homeostatic understanding of the baseline electrical activity of the brain) am I just studying statistical gibberish?

I have been thinking about this idea for about 8 months now, and I am working on developing it into a business model. At the risk of having someone steal it-I thought I would share this with you all at Nature Network with the hope of finding an appropriate journal to publish a formal article I have written on this. I also would love to hear your thoughts about this idea.

So Bill Clinton (and others before him) has been touting the idea of microfinance in third world countries to improve the standard of living by bolstering businesses that would not be considered profitable by banks. In essence, since banks will not give loans, these businesses can get financial services from local donors. One version of microfinance is the donation of small sums of money (5 USD or less) by random anonymous donors over the internet. Kiva does this sort of thing.

This got me thinking, can we bolster local investment and interest in local science through the use of microfinance?

For example, let’s say you live in Buffalo, NY and you just had an Aunt develop Alzheimer’s. You may begin by searching the ’net and finding all kinds of organizations where you could “donate” your money “for research.”

Most people realize that with large organizations less and less of that money actually gets directly to the labs where it is needed after it is swept away by administrative overhead. Furthermore, these organizations are far way and usually disconnected from the communities where the research is done. On top of this, most people don’t really know what “research” is even being done.

What if you could find a researcher in Buffalo, NY that is doing Alzheimer’s research and you could make a small donation directly to that researcher to be used to cover overhead for that lab? Then you would be directly investing in the researcher and would probably be interested in the local “research scene” in Buffalo. This in an oversimplified nutshell-would be the essence of microfinance of local research and development.

Granted, such grassroots support of research makes a minimal input economically (albeit it will have some impact-people could choose to donate whatever amount they want from 5 bucks to 10,000). The larger input would be socio-economically, with local communities supporting the researchers in their area, thus becoming a local political force for the advancement of research and development in thier city of town. In turn, researchers would be more apt to explain to the public the implications and progress of the research they are doing in order to get more microfinance funding.

Let me emphasize that this is not meant to take the place of the grant system in this country or charitable organizations like the Alzheimer’s Association, which does great lobbying work. It is meant to supplement small overhead costs for local researchers in the local economy and produce more public interest and investment in research.

Thoughts?

Is there even a journal where I could publish the more formal version of this?

Much ink has been spilled about the debate on evolution vs. creationism. Many in the scientific community argue that this debate, especially within the context of American public education is an impediment to scientific progress.

I don’t believe this is true. Why? Because the debate is out in the open and the arguments for both sides are visible in the mass media.

In this age of information warfare, the scientific community is loosing the battle against real threats to its legitimacy. I can discuss at length why, but I won’t in this post. These threats are subtle and not paid attention to in the mass media, but they are serious nonetheless.

What I want to do is point out the real threat to scientific progress in America. I will use one example to illustrate my point.

People like this “Dr.” (you need to read the whole bio to understand this post.) are appearing on late light radio shows like “Coast to Coast AM” which boast millions of listeners per night.

Although it is obvious to you, the scientist, that this “Dr.” is bogus and makes unsubstantiated claims using pseudoscience, I would argue that most of the people that pay taxes supporting your research grants can not so easily tell.

This “Dr.” is very good at couching non-facts in plenty of scientific-authoritative sounding language. Furthermore, this “Dr.” will be on a radio show this week, talking to millions and millions of listeners about this pseudoscience. Even if some percentage dismisses the “Dr.”, just based on the numbers-another large percentage will accept.

How many millions listen to you about the work you are doing and why it is important?

How many radio shows and internet broadcasts have you been on?

(And I don’t mean to be insulting, but obscure podcasts and NPR “science Fridays” which airs a low-ratings slot in the afternoon do not count for much).

You might say, “They will find us…” Wrong. This is the age of the internet-the signal-to-noise ratio on objective truth just got exponentially worse. You must go to them, or risk loosing them.

Now you might ask, “If we are educating kids in science, who cares about these adults listening to the shows and believing this crap.”

Well, we should care for two reasons: 1) I outlined above…these adults pay taxes that fund research 2) these adults teach the values they internalize to the children around them. These adults fuel the undermining of scientific progress by providing an ungrounded counter to what is taught in our public schools-overtly and subversively.

I ask: where is our forum in the mass media to discuss real science in front of millions?

We need this desperately.

We need scientists who won’t dismiss and alienate the layman by publishing books with inflammatory titles like The God Delusion, but who will get out and engage the children and the adults alike, in a non-confrontational manner. If you show them respect, they will be more likely to think aboout your arguments.

We too can be a real threat to scientific progress.

When I was in elementary school, 7 years old, we had auditions for our “compassion day” keynote speech. I won the audition for the speech. The speech was Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

I am a white dude (except during the summer when I tan ever so slightly). I beat out my friend, an african-american, to win the spot.

When word got around the elementary school, some parents protested in a letter to our music teacher, saying that I as a white kid, could never understand the meaning of those words.

Mrs. Gosnell, who was also african-american wrote back to the parents, in a letter (a copy of which I have kept all these years) saying-isn’t this type of protest exactly against what MLK’s speech was about?

On the night of the speech, I got up on the stage in the gym and Mrs. Gosnell told me to project as loud as I ever could-that my words would settle the debate.

Tonight we Americans nominated the first african-american in western civlization to a real position of power in our society, on the anniversary of MLK’s speech.

I am not a democrat, nor am I a republican, but I am damn prouder than I have ever been my entire life to be an American.

This is for you Mrs. Gosnell-I am so excited that we all have taken MLK’s words to heart in this country to begin to put this debate to rest.

Sorry to my science peeps, but I had to shout this from the mountaintop.

I have been reading Jonah Goldberg’s new book looking for ways that I can disagree with him and to the contrary, I have found it quite enlightening, even though the title sucks.

Anyway, I started thinking about my own work in the field of schizophrenia research. I do basic research (I am an electrophysiologist) so my work is far removed from what I will discuss, but it is connected none the less.

At the outset, lest you think I will be invoking images of marching Nazis, I want to say I am not talking about that sort of fascism, and not all fascism is Nazism contrary to how we colloquially think. I think it goes without saying that I think all forms of fascism are bad, but not always based on evil intentions. The phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions…” comes to mind here.

Finally, to make this as crystal clear as possible, I define fascism as an ideology which seeks to achieve a “pure” nation or race, by promoting cults of unity, strength and purity-using totalitarian statism to achieve this goal.

OK, now that we have done the housework, here is the real problem I want to think about this week, and it is very simple:

Let us say that my work in schizophrenia research leads to the development of a drug that reverses the effects of this horrible disease (note: I am NOT talking about genetic therapies, which are a whole different discussion).

If I develop the drug and the FDA requires treatment with the drug, did I just contribute to statist control over other people? If I know that the endpoint of my research is to develop something that will be used to eradicate disease, does that make me a friendly scientific fascist?

What if I develop a cure for cancer? Would fascism (aka statist controls of others’ behavior) be acceptable for me in this case?

I know this is a difficult dilemma for those of us who do not believe in the control of daily life by groups of central planners, but who do want to help people.

Who wouldn’t want a cure for cancer to be given to everyone on Earth! For those who refused treatment, would we need even more state control to protect them from the social discrimination that would surely follow such a choice?

Discuss.

Doing in vivo electrophysiology has got me thinking about the direction of my field, neuroscience. In recent years, because of funding and other societal factors, more emphasis has been placed on the speed and efficiency at which data is generated into publishable results. Much of this has been discussed in other blogs-touching on subjects like “being scooped” or “competition between labs.” Much of this external pressure is healthy and promotes progress.

However, can there be a time where the speed and efficiency begin to behave like a linear asymptote when it comes to the training and effectiveness of our next generation of scientists? In other words, can training our future post-docs to place high regard on speed and efficiency actually undercut scientific innovation?

Much of our current post-doctoral training in the US is focused on developing technical skill sets and the ubiquitously-used word “independence.” However, implicit in the “independence” is the learning of tacit knowledge, knowledge that can only be obtained by close interpersonal interaction, observation and hands-on training. Others have used the example of a bread maker. One can not build a machine to make bread until one has put hands in dough and understood the subtleties of kneading. This skill and only be taught by visiting with a baker.

This process of obtaining tacit knowledge is often slow and tedious, with many pitfalls. In my own case, it has taken me quite a while to learn, screw-up, and re-learn in vivo recording. However, with an emphasis on the speed of publishing results, if the experiments did not work right away, I may have been shuttled off to another project. But doing so would not have increased my depth of understanding, only the breath of techniques I will have tried.

We need to be more realistic about how we are teaching future scientists. We should spend less time emphasizing number and speed of publications, and more on quality and depth of work, including the ability of our future scientists to spread tacit knowledge. This raises an interesting final question: is it incumbent upon the research scientist to be a good teacher/communicator? If the researcher is the future tacit knowledge trainer, then I would argue that we need to place more emphasis on making sure research scientists can communicate the skills they have acquired to the next generation.

…………………………………………..

And a final quote from my discussion last week about scientific collectivism:

“No committee of scientists, however distinguished, could forecast the further progress of science except for the routine extension of the existing system. No important scientific advance could ever be foretold by such a committee. The problems allocated by it would, therefore, be of no real scientific value. (…) The pursuit of science can be organized, therefore, in no other manner than by granting complete independence to all mature scientists. They will then distribute themselves over the whole field of possible discoveries, each applying his own special ability to the task that appears most profitable to him.” -Michael Polanyi

I want to finish up my discussion of scientific collectivism by starting where I left off a few weeks ago before a needed break.

At the conclusion of my last post I wrote that the subtle institutional encouragement of collectivist science is sometimes (albeit rarely) good, but also has bad consequences. I suggested that one of the bad consequences is scientific groupthink, which leads to “trends in neuroscience” thinking-and causes a statistical convergence on what people say are “the important problems in neuroscience.” (Insert your field here). I also argued that this was responsible for the trends we see in science.

2. More formal types of scientific collectivism

We have no objective measure to tell us whether these so called trends are where our scientific and economic efforts should be focused, but trendy science is easily funded by grant reviewers and quickly published by high-level journals. Therefore, I would argue that trends in scientific thought are the currents upon which the boat of scientific progress rides. The problem is, maybe the currents are taking us farther from the shoreline. Without a map or compass, we have no idea, and thus all directions should be given equal weight. You can see clearly that scientific groupthink has direct economic consequences, and by leveling the field of scientific thinking (by removing outliers, people who do not follow the trends) we all hold back scientific innovation and paradigm shifting thought.

My question for you is: do you think a scientist such as Einstein would have been able to get funding in this environment? (You can give me a better example if you would like-I just can not think of names right now-how about Ramon y Cajal, for instance?).

Collectivist scientific groupthink also leads us directly to scientific idolatry. How many times have you been at a meeting where so-and-so’s paper was the “hot paper.” Then so-and-so publishes all the papers they write after that in the best journals even when they are not so good. This is controversial-the kind of things scientists grumble about in private, but rarely discuss in public. I would argue that there is a (sometimes subtle) idolatry in play here (idolatry in the case of both editors/reviewers in journals and by grand reviewers). By the time the ideas of Prof. X have been suggested to be misguided, Prof. X has a tenured position and has reaped the economic benefits of the idolatry encouraged by this type of groupthink.

I would also argue that this is as dangerous as it is productive. Prof. X gains status and is name-dropped at parties and journal clubs. This is not dangerous in itself-Prof. X does have some good ideas and they should be considered The danger comes when whatever Prof. X says (or more likely writes), is followed by a segment of the scientific population and are deemed “important” and any challengers to Prof. X have a hard time making their case because of the legions of incalcitrant followers. (No I am not picking some personal bone; I have mostly observed this with others I have known).

I see this more and more in my own field and it worries me, do you think about these things in your own field?

Thus, there is an inherent paradox in scientific collectivism. Science is a social activity, and as such it requires cooperation. This cooperation is only matured on the backs of individual actors. Scientific cooperation does not necessitate scientific collectivism, however. Unfortunately, in the modern American post-secondary educational system, I see this happening more and more.

This paradox is best summed up with a quote from the wonderful Michal Polanyi:

“Any attempt to organize the group … under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre. It would, in effect, paralyze their cooperation.”

In our scientific education, we need to bring these ideas (mostly discussed by grumbling scientists in bars and backrooms) to the forefront. We need to resist the temptations for scientific collectivist groupthink and idolatry the internet, wikis, cloud computing, and other electronic media provide us.

What do you think?

I am going to finish my discussion of scientific collectivism in my next post, but because my last post was so long and it is Friday, I want to break up the two by asking:

How many of you scientists play music? How serious are you about it? Do you think it enhances or harms your ability to do science?

I was delayed in the progress of my PhD (I calculated I lost about 6-8 months) because I chose to tour with my band and run my record label pretty seriously.

In the end I am glad it took longer, because I was much happier in my life and I did better science. I even was able to talk about my PhD program when I gave interviews for radio or magazines and it gave me some interesting stories about getting back from gigs at 2 AM and then working in the lab at night.

Anyone else do this kind of stuff? Tell me about it, share some links if you have them.

Happy Friday science-rockers!

(Editor’s note: My boss had a hard time with this in the beginning, like any boss would, but because he was so infinitely cool, we built up a trust that as long as the experiments were done on time that I was free to use my schedule to the best of my advantage-I know not all bosses are like this!)