On reproduction

You know how in science there's this fine line between needing to reproduce previous results and not wanting to do something that someone else already did? I recently reproduced part of this work from Prof-like Substance and all I can say is:"WHY DIDN'T I BELIEVE HIM IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?" Because OMG 2 children is definitely more than twice as much work as one. And I am in the luxury position that when I'm home by myself with Little Brother, BlueEyes is usually at daycare and when both of them are home Dr. BrownEyes is also home. Because I honestly don't understand how people do this by themselves or have more than 2 children… And I don't think I want to reproduce the rest of that graph from Prof-like Substance, because it seems that has already been done by others.

Changing science, one lengthy PDF at a time

This weekend, I read an article entitled: ”Rebels rise against science gone crazy” (my translation) in one of my homecountry’s newspapers. A short version can be found here, the whole article is behind a paywall. The article was about a group of Dutch scientists, who believe that certain things in science need to change. These scientists by the way are all white males in their fifties (from looking at their pictures). Apparently increasing diversity, which is not one of their goals anyway, is not something the group strives for themselves. But exactly what do they think needs to change? I first clicked on their website, called “Science in Transition”, that is unfortunately completely in Dutch. There are a couple English articles on there, if you know that for that you have to click on “meer lezen”. (No wonder Nature Magazine recently found that there is very little mobility between European countries.) The scientists have written a manifest stating their ideas and solutions. However, this manifest is a 31 page PDF with no bullet points, highlighted sentences or a summary. It’s harder to read than the classic Fatt and Katz paper about electrophysiology, but I read it anyway (as opposed to Fatt and Katz I must admit to my shame).

In this PDF the writers define what the problem is: one part of the problem is that scientists are judged too much on basis of impact factors, and H-index, which can be influenced according to these authors by scientists promising each other authorships and citations. Another (perhaps related) problem is that the public has the wrong ideas about how science works and how scientists come to certain conclusions. The third problem is scientific fraud.

Now I wanted to summarize their ideas and solutions to change science, but the need to do science got in the way of getting through these pretty horribly written 31 pages of the manifest. In very short (copied from the newspaper article), they state:

•         Society should be more involved with the identification of scientific problems that scientists need to work on.
•         The value of science (and scientists?) needs to be measured not with impact factors and h-indexes but with societal relevance.
•         The number of PhD students should decrease, and PhD students should learn better how the science world works.
•         Scientists should be honest about insecurities about their data, conflicting results and conflicts between scientists.
•         More research should be done on the sociology and economy of science itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great that people are thinking about how to change science and that scientists are trying to be open about the flaws in the current scientific system, but PLEASE write a manifest that is readable because throwing this manifest down from the ivory tower may not be the best way to change science. Also, please discuss their ideas and solutions.

The suckiest part of being a scientist and a mom...

... to me right now is the unpredictability of sleep. In order to function at a decent level I need a certain amount of sleep. And being pregnant I need a little more too I think. Pre-baby I knew that if I had important stuff to write (like the pile of grants and fellowships that I'm writing now), I would go to bed early and make sure I'm rested so that I can be focused the next day. Now, I can go to bed however early I want, but if BlueEyes is having a crappy night, then so am I.

I haven't written a lot about baby sleep recently, but it's still not awesome. A great night is when BlueEyes wakes up for the first time around 2 pm and an awesome night is when he doesn't wake up at all, but these awesome nights can be counted on the fingers of half a hand. Most of the time I'm okay with that. I know that after a crappy night, a better night will follow. But in these pre-deadline days when I'm slightly stressed about funding and what that means for my career (slightly is really a huge understatement) I find myself having a hard time to keep my cool about this. And it has been proven now that me panicking about lack of sleep in the middle of the night does not increase sleep for anyone in this family. So there's that. Back to grant writing (1 down, 3 to go).

On finding mentors

I just read this post on TenureSheWrote (great blog by the way!) titled “It takes a village to mentor an academic”. I think that is very true and I think the biggest lesson I have learned during my post-doc is to go out and find your own team of mentors. During my PhD I didn’t realize that yet, and I thought that you had to work with what you were given, which in my case was someone I sometimes hated and sometimes liked. During my post-doc, the first time I gave my PI a grant to read and he said:”Looks great, I think you’ll get it” I thought that was a really nice comment and very helpful of hir. However, when I didn’t get said grant, I realized that next time I may want to ask more people to look at it, which is what I did.

 
However, not just for reading-purposes was it useful to sometimes be bold and ask people for advice, also for things like career advice, advice on where to go next with experiments and advice on how to deal with other people in the lab. At first I felt awkward asking people to help me out with no obvious benefit to them, but in the past couple of years I have become more confident in asking others for their input and advice. And I try to pay back by helping out others who come to me asking for advice or whether I want to proofread something. Where papers are the currency of science, mentoring seems the karma of science.

Did you find your own team of mentors and how do you feel about asking other people for advice and guidance?

Poor timing

This morning I got the dreaded email telling me that I'm not invited for an interview for the important home country grant I applied to. You know, the one that would guarantee me a job and all that. However, there is no time to sit around, cry, shop online and do all that, because I have to give a talk at our annual retreat in about two hours and on top of that I have to rewrite the entire discussion for a manuscript TODAY (because it's an invited paper that needs to be submitted early next week and the collaborator who always gives me great feedback only has time tomorrow). So my day of being sad about this will have to happen some other day, because today I will have to pretend that science is great and lovely and awesome.
Thank God for waterproof mascara.

The part-time paradise

My home country is the country in Europe where most people work part-time. Nearly half of the workforce (both male and female) work part-time (meaning less than 38 hours a week). And if that is broken down for gender you can see that 75% of women work part-time.

Source. I couldn't find this figure in English, but the X-axis shows the percentage of working people, and my homecountry is the longest blue line all the way at the bottom.

You might say: ‘Oh nice, there are so many jobs that people can do part-time and they get to spend more time with their family’. True, but the downside of this is that daycare providers often also work part-time. This means that if you are one of those few mothers that want to work full-time, you will almost certainly put your child in a daycare where it does not have one steady care provider, but different ones for almost every day, making it much harder for your child to form a bond with their care provider. 

And that is not even the worst part of it. Because the reality is that because so many women work part-time, it is almost seen as a crime when you have children and decide to work full-time. Almost no child goes to a daycare 5 days a week, and if you ask if that’s a possibility, the answer we got was:”I guess, if you insist”. I won’t even get started about the judgmental looks and comments from other mothers. It is just not done. 

So can you science part-time? I think you can, because as a matter of fact a couple of my mentors from grad school (both men and women) worked four days a week. Some of them worked 4 times 9 hours (technically full-time but with one day to be home with their kids), others worked 4 ‘regular’ days. I’m not saying that these people did not work at nights and on the weekend, because I’m pretty sure most of them did. And I guess in about a year from now (if all goes well, we get some kind of grant, etc etc) we will try for ourselves. Both Dr. BrownEyes and I are considering working 4 days a week, so that BlueEyes and prospective baby can go to daycare 3 days a week, just like their fellow homecountry kids.

What’s in it for me?

My PI got me involved in a collaboration with people who want to do something that I know how to do (and my PI doesn’t really). So I’m helping them as much as I can. Not only do I give them advice, I also help them with practical work because that lab currently consists of only the PI and a technician who works hir ass off for the PI. The PI is pretty pushy and often only asks things at the last minute, so this collaboration has been a good exercise in trying to protect my personal boundaries (read: I’ve been annoyed to no end by all the last-minute requests). 

What I’m not really sure about in these kinds of situations is when you ask what’s in it for you? I asked my PI and he was like:” Yeah of course you’ll be a co-author on their paper.” But so far, we’re gathering preliminary data for a grant, and with the current size of this PI’s lab it might take a while before this turns into a paper.

So how does one go about this? Do you trust that this PI will remember that I helped hir when ze writes the paper years from now? Or do you just ask (or even email so that you have it in writing):”What’s in it for me?”

When talking to students and post-docs

Dear senior investigators,

When you are invited to give a talk somewhere, and are thus scheduled to have lunch with students and post-docs, PLEASE don’t talk about the following topics:

•          The bad state of the economy

•           The recent sequester

•           How those two things lead to a sad state of funding

•           How that leads to very little job opportunities for students and post-docs that want to stay in academia

•           Oh wait, industry is not much better at the moment

Because really, we have heard that before and to talk about this a couple times a month with different people really doesn’t add to our morale. Please just talk about other stuff, like science, or your hobbies.