The League of Extraordinary Biologists

I came across this article in Boston Magazine, and was so flabbergasted by the adoration therein, I needed to share it as broadly as I knew how.

Some of my favorite lines -

"at the epicenter of a movement that proponents believe will be no less transformative than the Renaissance."

"Konrad Hochedlinger, 33 and arguably even more handsome—high cheekbones, gray-blue eyes, and an olive complexion that belies his Austrian roots—skis the Alps when he's home."

Also the article goes on to say that while the iPS stuff was coming to a head in December of last year, Hochedlinger told his students to stay around the clock, and one student even brought their sleeping bag into lab.

Wow. Just wow. I will grant you that the potential of these three new labs is pretty remarkable. I'm not sure if this level of hero-worship is exactly healthy, however.. it does go further than the GQ spread about Rockstars of Science in making science sound sexy & exciting. Maybe I'm being a cynical stick-in-the-mud about this? Maybe somebody's gonna read this article & think that science sounds awesome - except maybe that sleeping bag part.

The transformation

We all get older, & with this comes change. I was flipping through some old pictures taken at a party from the first year of graduate school, and marveling at the changes in my friends & in myself as well. I like to think we're wiser now, and know more about the nuts and bolts of biomedical research (& everything else!). At the same time, I feel like I've forgotten so many things - there's pictures where people are happily chatting who have since fostered a profound dislike for one another. I had forgotten that they were great friends once upon a time. People who are now married with kids are newly-minted couples in these photographs, still grinning stupidly at each other in the way that only newly-minted couples can. I had forgotten the drama and excitement that comes with a new relationship.

These are are personal examples, but I wonder if this same process of getting older and forgetting affects people at the professor level. Once you run a lab with a handful of postdocs, several graduate students, a technician and perhaps a lab manager, do you remember what it's like to be opening all the boxes with your new equipment? Do you remember waiting desperately for your one and only graduate student's film to develop, hoping that this one will be the missing piece of that first paper with you as the PI? What about digging on all corners of the internet, trying to find all the "young investigator" grants you can apply for to cobble together the money to run the lab?

This is a common thread among the young professor blogs that I read, where their grants come back with the "not enough preliminary data" stock critique. Do the professors doing the reviews remember what it's like to be new faculty? Perhaps they should be reminded of the heart-sinking terror of being the new prof, sick with worry that their grants are never going to get funded and their lab of one person won't ever make it off the ground. Didn't all professors start at that same point? Have a heart, grant reviewers. Think back - way back for some, waaaaay back for others - and remember what you put into these grants.

A new badge

I propose a new badge for the Science Scouts collection:

"I Spent The Better Part of a Beautiful Saturday in Lab"

+1 for each hour spent beyond four
+5 for the Saturday in question being a national holiday
-1 for each experiment done that day that doesn't work
-eleventy for not knowing it's a Saturday

The Dividing Line

There are iconic images of scientists in the media - the "scientist looking at the beaker of colored liquid":
...or the "scientists looking at vials of mysterious substances":

... but my personal favorite is the scientist (or pair of scientists, both in matching perfectly white lab coats) holding up a film, gazing intently into the dark & light spaces, divining meaning from their pattern.


Of course this is largely a farce. Sequencing (and I swear it's always a sequencing gel, never a Western or Southern blot) is nearly never done by autoradiography anymore. This is not to say it was never done this way - indeed, an entire generation of scientists learned how to do sequencing with paper-thin gels and giant films.

I wonder: what will be the next technology that draws a line between scientific generations? I remember hearing older profs sternly insist that they "used to purify their own restriction enzymes", and now I hear from those who have fond memories of running their own sequencing gels. What will *I* be saying in a decade? Remember when we used to do minipreps? "Gee, Grandma DGT, what's a miniprep?" say the little baby grad students I'll be mentoring, "Don't you just put your sequence into the DNA Machine and get the plasmid out the other side?"

And I'll sigh, and think about these sequencing gels.

It's OK to not get a PhD!

There's an interesting discussion chez Dr Jekyll & Mrs Hyde, about a tech in her lab and his intention to go to grad school. Or business school. He's not sure. While he's improved a bit in his technical shortcomings, DJMH has reservations about his potential for his future success in grad school & beyond. She's trying to decide if she should more vociferously dissuade this tech from his ill-formed plan to attend grad school.

I think she should tell him to reconsider. Perhaps not directly, but instead through their PI, or through another person in the lab that the tech might be more receptive to. I certainly don't think grad school is for everyone and it doesn't sound like it's for him.

I'm pretty sure anyone reading my blog knows that I don't have a PhD. Despite this, I am rather familiar with the PhD environment - I worked for several years as a tech in an academic lab at a top-ten university, and watched dozens of my grad student friends (not to mention my grad student husband) go through the ups and downs of grad school. A lot of people who begin grad school.. well, they really shouldn't have. I don't need to have been a grad student to come to that conclusion. Many of these people probably enjoyed their college science classes, and were probably even quite good at them, but made the jump in logic that because they had succeeded in studying science that they would enjoy doing science. To a one, these people hated being grad students. They never managed to really own their projects, and largely dinked around in lab, waiting for.. their advisor to step in and tell them what to do? Inspiration to strike? Frankly, I don't know.

I've also noticed a tendency among many technicians (at least in my little corner of the world) to feel inadequate with their lowly bachelor's degrees, being completely surrounded by people who are in graduate school or who have already earned their PhDs. It seems that a lot of techs are somehow compelled to get at least a Masters degree, or try for a PhD, since not having one seemed to make them the odd scientist out. (And fwiw, I personally think that a Master's means diddly-squat for being a tech, but maybe I'm missing something.) It's not so much about wanting to further their education and go down that particular path, but keeping up with the Joneses in the lab by getting some extra letters after their name.

DJMH has pretty concisely summed up her reservations about this tech going to grad school, and based on her description of the whole situation, I'd say she's trying to save him from walking headlong into a big pit of mistake. By the time someone gets part way through their postdoc, they've spent nearly a decade in the day-to-day of doing science, and as such have plenty enough experience and analytical ability to make an educated opinion of someone's chances in grad school. Will this person like to hear that their odds are shitty? Of course not. Could the postdoc be wrong about this potential grad student? Sure - but my money's on the postdoc's opinion. If I were equally interested in business school or graduate school, and a PI/postdoc/someone with an educated point of view told me that I probably ought to reconsider grad school.. well.. I'd certainly put a bit more thought into business school.

Accepted

We received the awesome fantastic news that our paper was accepted at Subspecialty Journal of Choiceness! This is my third and, for the foreseeable future, final first-author paper.

Hence: drinkification for DGT! Yippeee!

DGT is wicked smaht

Here are the thorough, intellectual notes I made during a seminar earlier this week. I have annotated them so that you can see the deep, deep thoughts I was having.