ants in the sugar-bowl

In her brave, honest and funny book, The Wisdom of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani kicks a lot of asses and sacrifices quite a few sacred cows “on the untidy altar of Reality”. First-hand facts and elementary maths are there to expose myths such as that AIDS is necessarily “a development problem”. Or that “more premarital sex translates into more HIV”. The myths that cost billions of dollars. And human lives.

more weasel words

From the Weasel Words Website by Don Watson:

networking

To exchange business cards, glances etc. Have a drink, take tea, dine with. Do what’s necessary. (More if it’s agreeable.)

‘2.50pm. Coffee and Networking.’ — Governance seminar brochure.

‘I networked my arse off.’ — Participant in governance seminar.

(Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Clichés, Cant & Management Jargon, page 222)

the fate of gurus

From The Ape and the Sushi Master by Frans de Waal:

Instead of marching onward with perfect vision, science stumbles along behind leaders who occasionally take the wrong alley, after which it turns to other leaders who seem to know the way, then corrects itself again, until sufficient progress is made for the next generation to either thrust aside or build upon. In hindsight, the path taken may look straight, running from ignorance to profound insight, but only because our memory for dead ends is so much worse than that of a rat in the maze.

Feynman looks at the blueprints

The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out is a collection of Richard Feynman’s short works. Perhaps the most famous of these is his 1974 Caltech Commencement Address on Cargo Cult Science. My personal favourite there is Los Alamos from Below (slightly different version of this lecture appears here).

How do you look at a plant that ain’t built yet? I don’t know. So I go into this room with these fellows. There was always a Lieutenant Zumwalt that was always coming around with me, taking care of me, you know; I had to have an escort everywhere. So he goes with me, he takes me into this room and there are these two engineers and a loooooooong table, great big long table, tremendous table, covered with a blueprint that’s as big as the table; not one blueprint, but a stack of blueprints. I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I wasn’t too good at reading blueprints. So they start to explain it to me because they thought I was a genius.

say what you mean

Earlier this month, Sue Keogh gave a seminar entitled “Seven Steps to Great Web Copy” at the EBI. Good thing that EBI Interfaces published a round-up including the presentation and some useful notes. Most of it is just plain common sense (“it’s actually harder to be concise than to write a load of waffle”), but how many science-related websites actually use the common sense?

not just drug design

Drug Design: Cutting Edge Approaches, published in 2002, is a collection of highly enlightening reviews, even if some of the approaches may be not so cutting-edgey any longer. (Really, one should never name a book like that.) The two chapters authored by Darren Flower (who is also an editor of the book) are a pleasure to read, not least because they put the drug design into fascinating historical and philosophical context.

twenty years after

Just finished watching the BBC broadcast from Berlin, with giant dominoes falling and all that. I remember the euphoria at the time. Nowadays it is difficult to imagine anyone in right mind who’d say that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a bad thing. (Margaret Thatcher was famously opposed to it, but I am not sure she was in right mind.)

Still, I didn’t expect yesterday’s article in Guardian by Bruni de la Motte to cause such a torrent of (mostly right-wing) comments.

As a result of the purging of academia, research and scientific establishments in a process of political vetting, more than a million individuals with degrees lost their jobs. This constituted about 50% of that group, creating in east Germany the highest percentage of professional unemployment in the world; all university chancellors and directors of state enterprises as well as 75,000 teachers lost their jobs and many were blacklisted.

I don’t know how correct are the figures, but the article rings the right bells to me. Some of my colleagues from former GDR have lost their jobs as a result of Abwicklung (restructuring, or rather liquidation, of East German institutions). I think the biggest loser here was German science as a whole: East German scientists, educated to a high standard, had no problem finding jobs in the USA. But then, social revolutions, even velvet ones, are rarely good news for science.

Brigitte Young wrote in her 1993 paper:

Women are not only the first to lose their positions in the process of Abwicklung, they are also the last to be considered in the new stage of rebuilding the university system. Thus the politics of Abwicklung has to be understood as a microcosm of the gendered nature of German unification as a whole. Unification has provided German conservatives the opportunity to roll back not only the social policies of the east, but also the feminist achievements in the west.

But that was 16 years ago, right? Surely by now things should have got better. Yet the East-West divide still exists in German science. (In words of Fritz Stern, “the physical wall has been internalized”.) In last week’s Science, Gretchen Vogel wonders why the Max Planck Society, out of its 267 directors, has only one former East German who started a career before 1989. Not that it has many women directors either. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Director at the Max-Planck-Institute of Developmental Biology, wrote that

in 1995, the society was able to boast that 25% of their female directors had received a Nobel prize.

science and photo doctoring

We all know that photo manipulation (aka photo doctoring, aka photoshopping) for the purposes of news reporting is, at best, controversial. We tend to forget though that the photographs were manipulated long before invention of computers.

Professor Hany Farid, the leader of the Image Science Group at Dartmouth College, compiled an entertaining guide to photo tampering throughout history, including the early composite photograph of Abraham Lincoln.

What about science? The recent Nature editorial says:

At a meeting on plagiarism in London last week, Virginia Barbour, chief editor of PLoS Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which is headquartered in San Francisco, California, said that the problem of image manipulation has “crept up” on journal editors since the advent of software such as Photoshop.

Yeah, blame Photoshop. I am all for open access but the editing in open-access journals (including PLoS family) is already minimal. All the work is made by the (paying) authors and the (unpaid) reviewers. I don’t see why the authors would want to doctor their digital images, it looks to me like more work, even with Photoshop (which is not a cheap software), and they still have to pay. On the other hand, there always will be people who falsify their results, irrespectively of tools.

Emma Hill, Executive Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, commented today:

At the JCB, we have screened all images of all editorially accepted papers since 2002. Over that time, we have consistently seen manipulations that affected the interpretation of the data in ~1% of accepted manuscripts. We have revoked the acceptance of those manuscripts. We find manipulations that violate our guidelines but do not affect the interpretation of the data in over 25% of accepted manuscripts. In those cases, the authors have to remake the figure(s) in question with a more accurate representation of the original data.

I say, 25% is a lot. How one can be sure that manipulations “do not affect the interpretation of the data”? Why the authors should bother with image manipulation otherwise? And then again, what is “more accurate representation of the original data”? (Back in my university days, we were taught that the artist’s impression of a microscopic view is often superior to a photomicrograph, because it is closer to what a human eye sees through the microscope.) Shouldn’t the editors just request the original data? Am I asking too many questions?

women Nobel prize winners 2009

I have mentioned earlier that women scientists are not featured prominently among the Nobel Prize winners. Now, within a week (from 5 to 12 October 2009), five women won Nobel Prizes.

So, a little correction to the statistics: now there are altogether 40 female Nobel Prize winners out of 802 individual laureates, i.e. 4.9%. Still, only 15 women got Nobels in science — unless you count Economic Sciences, in which case it will be 16.

However small the number of women Nobel Laureates remains, this year’s prizes make a bit of difference. Ada Yonath is only fourth (!) female Nobel laureate in Chemistry, the previous one was Dorothy Hodgkin in 1964. Elinor Ostrom is the first woman ever to receive The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”, whatever that means. For the first time, two women biologists, Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider, share the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In the latter case, there is a sort of explanation. In the telephone interview, Elizabeth Blackburn said that in her research field (molecular biology of telomere and telomerase) the ratio of men and women is “fairly close to the biological”, while all the other research fields are “aberrant” in this sense. Overgeneralisation? Maybe. Maybe not all the other fields. Simply vast majority of them.

There’s nothing particularly about the science per se which has any, sort of gender-like quality to it.

You want women to have access to science because it’s such a wonderful thing to do. Anything that makes it more feasible for women to be in science and do the science they like, that’s good.

(From the interview with Elizabeth H. Blackburn)

I think that it doesn’t help to be a woman in science. Maybe now, but not when I was progressing.

(From the interview with Ada E. Yonath)

the art of scientific writing

I got The Art of Scientific Writing (first edition) in the early 1990s and it has been my trusty companion ever since. Although some parts of the books are a bit out of date (check out the section 5.2 Typewriter or Word Processor? and you’ll see what I mean), it remains an excellent read.

Appendix A, Oral Presentations, gives a no-nonsense advice how to deliver a good lecture, while Appendix B, Aspects of Scientific English, is a must read (I mean it: must read) for anyone who ever think of submitting a written communication in English. I can’t recommend it enough.

Much scientific writing is littered with idle words, awkward constructions, and inaccurate phrasing simply because few scientists take seriously the importance of good writing.

Readers of scientific prose are altogether too tolerant and too willing to shoulder an inappropriate amount of the burden. Perhaps this is a reflection of the scientist’s love of puzzle-solving, but it is certainly not conductive to effective communication.

We have frequently condemned the tendency to indulge in meaningless verbosity. The most obvious target is the pompous phrase hiding a simple idea:

• a number of (many)
• a majority of (most)
• at this point in time (now)
• despite the fact that (although)
• due to the fact that (because)
• for the purpose of (for, to)

just say no to multitasking

I recall a conversation between A, the director of the institute where I used to work many years ago, and D, a senior scientist in the same institute who was talking about his research. It was going like this:

D: “We did this and this.”
A: “Excellent.”
D: “We also did this and that.”
A: “Very good.”
D: “And last month we started the experiment on...”
A: “Good, but don’t you think you spread too thinly?”
D: “Well, no, I have a very talented PhD student, who also...”
A: “Wait, wait, let’s concentrate on the first thing for now. What was it, again?”
D: “It was this. While I was looking at the results of this compared with results of that, I thought I also should...”
A: “Oh, shut up. You can’t do everything at once.”

A bit too direct, perhaps, but that’s why A was a director. He did understand that multitasking is not always good for research; or maybe, never good for research. On the contrary, D thought that the more things you do simultaneously, the better. According to the excellent article by Christine Rosen,

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets — particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices — celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word multitasking began appearing in the “skills” sections of résumés, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players.

Are multitaskers any better than, er, monotaskers? The recent study conducted by Stanford scientists shows that no, not really.

“We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it.”

What a relief for people like me, low-throughput monotaskers. But is this “skill” as valuable now as it was ten years ago? You bet. Check it out: today’s search for multitask in Nature brings 23 hits, while New Scientist has 82 jobs featuring this keyword! (Charmingly, this latter resource adds that “the most relevant jobs are listed first”.)

A high level of multitasking ability over several projects is expected.

Must be adaptable to changing work requirements, and be willing to multitask.

Self-motivated, ability to multitask, and willingness to work in a start-up environment.

Strong communication (verbal and written), organizational and multitasking skills are essential.

And this is not just directors and managers, the people who you’d expect to be no good at anything. These “competencies” are expected from post-docs too. I can’t help thinking that it is nothing but greedy employers trying to get many for the price of one. Good luck to them.

Smilla meets professor

From Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg (translated by Tiina Nunnally):

Even though he omits his title, it’s still understood. Along with the fact that we must not forget that the rest of the world’s population is at least a head shorter than him, and here, under his feet, he has legion of other doctors who have not succeeded in becoming professors, and above him is only the white ceiling, the blue sky, and Our Lord — and maybe not even that.

stroke of insight

Take 20 minutes off your busy schedule, pay no attention to anything else and watch Dr Jill Bolte Taylor telling an amazing story of a neuroscientist observing behaviour of her own brain. You will be impressed and moved with the courage and sense of humour of this lady. This video comes with a selection of subtitles in 23 languages, so really there is no excuse not to watch it.

...And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, “Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!” And the next thing my brain says to me is, “Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?” And then it crosses my mind: “But I’m a very busy woman. I don’t have time for a stroke!” So I’m like, “OK, I can’t stop the stroke from happening so I’ll do this for a week or two, and then I’ll get back to my routine, OK.”

карта звезды

When I was about four years old, I was drawing all the time. Once, in kindergarten, I was creating another masterpiece of an illustrated sci-fi book, which included the map of a star.

science is cool

Science is not all about the books. It can be cool, filled new and creative, fun ideas.

This blurb for Mitochondria video by Michelle Bell can be applied to all of ChloroFilms, a collection of “videos illustrating the remarkable aspects of plant life”. Don’t dismiss it as stuff for (or by) undergraduates: for example, The Science of Cool by Sharon Robinson is an overview of her original research in Antarctic mosses. My favourites are La Bloomba by Kris Holmes and The Fastest Flights in Nature by Hayley Kilroy.

i felt like internet

From Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith. How painfully familiar.

They all looked the same, the bosses with their slightly Anglified accents and their trendily close-shaved heads. They all looked far too old for haircuts like that. They all looked nearly bald. They all looked like they were maybe called Keith.

the summer is almost over

With all these warm sunny days, you wouldn’t say that the Summer is almost over. But it is. Academics are returning from vacations and clean their messy desks. Only this could explain the fact that within a week I have received three responses (all negative ones) re. my long-forgotten job applications. (One of the applications was submitted last December, another one this January, and the most recent one in March.) Interestingly, or maybe not, one of the letters contains a copy of the evaluation committee’s report (which looks like, well, a concise version of my CV, but at least it’s an evidence that somebody actually did read it) and a note that I am welcome to comment on this report not later than some day last month.

Needless to say, it doesn’t do much good to my ego. Even if I take the view that it is their loss. Which it is, but it is not my gain either. In any case, I am not getting paid for them losing me. (Hey, I’d like to develop this line of thought one step further. It seems that in some institutions people spend lot of time evaluating my applications. By not applying, I could save their time, effort, and valuable desk/disk space, so it’s only fair to get remunerated for that.)

Oh well. With these three off my Christmas card list, my potential employers are not exactly queuing outside. Which means I can go away again and not miss anything.

cool badges

The Science Scouts develop some seriously cool badges. For all humankind.

Anyone is welcome to use these badges, although a link to this site (or the specific badge entry) is much appreciated. Even better is if you provide an anecdote in the comments section to explain your reasons for awarding yourself the badge.

Excellent. I allow myself to award myself a few.

she’s such a geek

You will be wanting to read my excellent essay, ‘Suzy the Computer’ vs. ‘Dr. Sexy’: What’s a Geek Girl to Do When She Wants to Get Laid? in She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff.

It was this charming announcement on Zuska’s blog that prompted me to get hold of the said book. And what a book it is!

a threat to scientific communication

Once again, I am getting spammed by Nature — this time it is an email with a modest subject “Impact Factor confirms Nature is top research journal”. It informs me that its Impact Factor is 31.434 now. The reason they bother to send me this?

To celebrate we are offering you an exclusive 30% discount if you subscribe to Nature this week.

No thank you.

can accent damage your career?

We all know about racism, sexism and ageism, in the workplace or otherwise. But what about accentism? From A Plum in Your Mouth: Why the Way We Talk Speaks Volumes About Us by Andrew Taylor:

The BBC poll that so damned the Welsh accent was one of many over recent decades which have arranged regional accents in order how pleasant, prestigious, or socially desirable they are. A similar survey, carried out a few months later, reached much the same conclusions, with the added twist that Welsh found itself languishing around the bottom of a list of accents which supposedly gave the impression of hard work and diligence. It is significant that of the ten accents at the bottom of the poll, seven were those of big industrial cities or conurbations, namely Bristol, Swansea, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Black Country and Birmingham. There are other fairly clear prejudices against the other three, South African, German and Asian — but overall, the poll was simply a vote against urban working-class speech. It is probably not unduly cynical to point out that the second survey was carried out on behalf of the Aziz Corporation, a company which specializes in ‘executive communications’, and includes ‘voice development’ among the services it offers. It’s also noticeable that surveys such as these tend to tke place either in Summer or around Christmas, when news is in short supply.

what to tell my younger self

“If I knew then what I know now” is a regular column in The Big Issue magazine, in which celebrities tell us what they would tell their younger selves if they had a chance. It is, of course, impossible, that’s why I enjoy reading it.

What would I say — or rather, write in a column like this?

academic matters

Idly browsing the web (as usual), I came across Academic Matters, the open access Canadian magazine. The latest (May 2009) issue is devoted to Ethics in the Academy. Incidentally, this enjoyable article by Sergio Sismondo deals with issue of ghosts in some detail.

Academic authors are well versed in the art of multiplying papers and, also, with complaining about it. However, in the pharmaceutical industry each publication is part of a marketing campaign and has an expected return. The professionalization and commercialization of publishing makes a science out of the multiplication of papers.

guests, ghosts, gofers

Thanks to this paper by Peter R. Mason from Zimbabwe, I got acquainted with an interesting classification of the authorship of (scientific) papers.

Guest authors are those “important” persons who insist that their names appear on the papers of their juniors, even when they have made minimum contribution to the research. Ghost authors are those who make a significant contribution to the writing of a paper, but their names do not appear as an author on the publication. This is often a situation found in clinical trials sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. A “gofer” is a name given to someone who is regarded as very junior and so is sent to “go for” something and bring it back to the more important members of a team.

how many scientists fabricate and falsify research?

Well, this illuminating study by Daniele Fanelli suggests that quite a few (without giving us any exact numbers of course). It all depends on how you formulate your question. For instance,

scientists were less likely to reply affirmatively to questions using the words “fabrication” and “falsification” rather than “alteration” or “modification”. Moreover, three surveys found that scientists admitted more frequently to have “modified” or “altered” research to “improve the outcome” than to have reported results they “knew to be untrue”.

That does not surprise me at all, but it’s good to have something like that published in peer-reviewed journal. Speaking of peers,

The grey area between licit, questionable, and fraudulent practices is fertile ground for the “Mohammed Ali effect”, in which people perceive themselves as more honest than their peers.

The decrease in admission rates observed over the years in self-reports but not in non-self-reports could be explained by a combination of the Mohammed Ali effect and social expectations. The level and quality of research and training in scientific integrity has expanded in the last decades, raising awareness among scientists and the public. However, there is little evidence that researchers trained in recognizing and dealing with scientific misconduct have a lower propensity to commit it. Therefore, these trends might suggest that scientists are no less likely to commit misconduct or to report what they see their colleagues doing, but have become less likely to admit it for themselves.

And now, from the past to the future (misconduct):

There seems to be a large discrepancy between what researchers are willing to do and what they admit in a survey. In a sample of postdoctoral fellows at the University of California San Francisco, USA, only 3.4% said they had modified data in the past, but 17% said they were “willing to select or omit data to improve their results”. Among research trainees in biomedical sciences at the University of California San Diego, 4.9% said they had modified research results in the past, but 81% were “willing to select, omit or fabricate data to win a grant or publish a paper”.

Now, really difficult question. Are San Diego guys more fraudulent than their San Francisco colleagues? Or more honest because thay admit being more dishonest?

we are all Iranians

Sometimes (and quite often) I wonder whether the “international scientific community” can do anything useful at all. Useful and noble. The recent editorial in Nature suggest that it can, actually that it has to.

The international scientific community has been laggard and passive in responding to the current situation <in Iran>. But Iranian scientists say that the solidarity of the international academic and scientific community is needed now more than ever.

Research bodies and universities — and perhaps a few Nobel laureates — need to speak out louder. They should encourage, rather than discourage, collaboration, and replace past discrimination by welcoming Iranian researchers and students.

Iran is not the only country in the region where human rights and democracy are violated; and the West has hypocritically been relatively silent on similar abuses by several of its allies in the Middle East. But in Iran at least, the country’s long traditions of democracy, education and free thinking — suppressed for decades by the regime, and in particular the current hard-line leadership — are now out in the open.

seven deadly sins

Unfortunately, I was not around last year when Carole Goble delivered her lecture “The Seven Deadly Sins of Bioinformatics” at the EBI. So, what are they?

1. Parochialism and Insularity
2. Exceptionalism
3. Autonomy or death!
4. Vanity: Pride and Narcissism
   
5. Monolith Megalomania
   
6. Scientific Method Sloth
   
7. Instant Gratification

I think Carole is a bit harsh on bioinformatics, which, remember, is not even a science. Are these applicable to “Real Science™” though? Absolutely.

studying is not about what’s worth it

This is one of my favourite scenes from My Neighbors the Yamadas.

Noboru: “Dad, do you think all this studying is really worth my time?”
Takashi: “Listen up! Studying is not about what’s worth it. Classes that seem worth it may turn out to be not worth it and therefore not worthwhile. But, sometimes things that are worthless may actually be worthwhile, worthless or not. So, it’s not about whether or not something is worthless or not!”
Matsuko: “What in the world are you talking about?”
Noboru: “That was so not worth it.”

driven by a curiosity about nature

Here’s a portrait of a scientist I like — and envy. From H₂O: A Biography of Water by Philip Ball:

Born in 1731, Henry Cavendish was an eccentric millionaire and a grandson of a duke, a self-financed natural philosopher whose social peculiarities did not prevent him from becoming a distinguished member of the Royal Society in London. He seems to have been driven by a curiosity about nature, which he pursued methodically to the exclusion of any curiosity about his fellow people. Cavendish seemed to care very little for the high esteem in which he came to be held; indeed, he seems to have been positively embarrassed by it.

Can you imagine anyone doing as much as him, without a need to write grants or publish? According to Wikipedia,

At age 18 (in 1749) he entered the University of Cambridge in St Peter’s College, now known as Peterhouse, but left four years later without graduating.

Nice. Probably got bored or something.

science on Earth

About 15 years ago, I read the short sci-fi story entitled Mr. Tompkins and Candide Meet Their Ancestors. (It was written by Horace Drew, not by George Gamow.) I tried to find the full text on the web but without any success.

The arrogance of the human-Neanderthal hybrid was, to the Captain, its most amazing trait, after the sexual luster. Could the two be related? All of these big “science laboratories” were run by aggressive male primates in the same way that a gorilla kept his harem.

Visiting Caltech:

“Excuse me, is this place one of the great scientific labs, where Delbruck, Feynmann and Gell-Mann once worked?”
“Yes,” said the Professor, “but they are all gone now. Today we study astrophysics and cosmology, and string theory, and quantum chromodynamics, and many forms of mathematics.”
“But how do you know such studies are real,” asked the Captain, “if you can only look through a telescope and not go there, or if you do not really understand 4-D spacetime or the underlying structure of matter and energy, which are just two of your words for the same thing?”
“We are sure because we are sure, and certain because we are certain, even if there are no data. All of us agree, or we cut off the funding for the ones who don’t, because it would just be a waste of money if they have other views.” The Professor had written 100 papers in the most respected physics journals, on black holes, superluminal expansion, and cosmic strings, and now he was sure these were real things, and had convinced many others.

Learning about transcription:

He <Professor Dr. H.Q. Rotcaf> looked just like a male gorilla, as the Captain hoped. “Please ask my least-busy secretary to give you copies of my last 100 papers, from Science or Cell. I am a Leader in Transcription. I found many new factors, and factors upon factors. My grants total $10 million dollars a year. I write two papers a week. I lead the citation-indices in my field. I chaired six meetings and gave 22 lectures last year, in March alone. If a few in my group kill one another, that will just be Evolution of the Fittest, to make a stronger group. Now I must go to the airport, unless you are a newspaper reporter.”
Here the Captain had found what he wanted on Earth. What a classic example of the perversions that would result, from applying sexual-dominance principles to even an austere field such as science, which in all probability was the lowest of all Earth primate achievements, when measured against the existing knowledge and technologies on other civilized planets.
“Have you made any important medical advance or invention recently?”, asked Candide.
“I told you I published 123 papers last year in major journals, and led the nation in the Citation Index, and got the highest ratings in my Study Section. What more could you want?” said the great Professor Rotcaf. “Even the Boston transcription workers cannot match that, such as Professor Pool Ledom. I rule my group with an iron hand, when I see them between trips. I review 3 papers a day, and say what can and cannot be published about transcription. Here, look at how well I do that:”

“This paper presents important results, but is just not a Cell paper. I suggest the authors try some specialist journal such as Mol. Cell Biology which is really where they belong.”

“I have results in my lab which disagree with those proposed here, so their results cannot be correct, and I cannot recommend publication.”

“I have results in my lab which already precede those presented here, so they are not novel, and should in no way be published. Regrettably, my secretary mislaid this paper for several months, so the review is late.”

“These authors have never presented their results before in an American journal.”

“There are two kinds of paper from that group: results which have been done by others before and are not novel, and new results which have not yet been reproduced by others. I worry about both of them, and cannot recommend publication.”

you can’t push and write at the same time

In All the Great Writers, Charles Bukowski describes a conversation between a writer, James Burkett, and publisher, Henry Mason.

“look, Burkett, you’re a pusher. as a pusher, you’re great. why don’t you sell mops or insurance or something?”
“what’s wrong with my writing?”
“you can’t push and write at the same time. only Hemingway was able to do that, and then even he forgot how to write.”

(From The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories)

harmless, harmless

A couple of anecdotes from George Feher’s essay “The Development of ENDOR and other Reminiscences of 1950’s” (in Foundations of Modern EPR, pp. 548—556).

On visit of Wolfgang Pauli to Bell Labs in 1957:

The management of Bell Labs was always very proud and a bit self congratulatory on their fame and accomplishments. At the end of the day everybody connected with Pauli’s visit gathered in the conference room and formally said good bye to Pauli who, as usual, was nodding his head with closed eyes. “Professor Pauli, what do you think of our research?” asked the director, fully expecting a pat on the shoulder. The frequency of Pauli’s nods increased and after what seemed an interminably long time, he simply said: “Harmless, harmless”.

About Ernest Lawrence:

He considered labs and offices as sacred places in which strict standards (his) of behavior had to be followed. One day he entered an office and saw a young man with his feet on his desk munching a sandwich. Lawrence discretely closed the door to give the man a chance to shape up. Alas, when he reopened the door, the man had neither changed his position nor his activity. Lawrence became very irate, started shouting, and that’s when we students gathered in the corridor to witness the scene. During all this, the young man calmly continued to munch his sandwich with his feet on the desk. Finally, when Lawrence was close to apoplexy, the department chairman R.T. Birge arrived and quieted Lawrence. Upon which the young man calmly said: “I don’t know who you are, Sir, but I work for the telephone company”.

systems vs system

‘Systems biology’ is an annoyingly waguely-defined area. Its recent history illustrates the self-perpetuating nature of organised science really well. According to Wikipedia,

systems biology refers to a cluster of peripherally overlapping concepts rather than a single well-delineated field. However the term has widespread currency and popularity as of 2007, with chairs and institutes of systems biology proliferating worldwide.

And then:

As of summer 2006, due to a shortage of people in systems biology, several doctoral training centres in systems biology have been established in many parts of the world.

Isn’t it brilliant? We don’t know what it is exactly but we have a shortage of experts in it already. Why, we don’t even know how to spell it. For instance, this publication from ESF uses both ‘system biology’ and ‘systems biology’. For once, I can’t blame the ‘systems biologists’ (whoever they are) for the confusion: there is a long tradition of using plural, rather than singular, in variety of ‘systems sciences’. J. P. Van Gigch wrote in System Design Modeling and Metamodeling (p. 32):

The reader will note that, in this text, we use the term “system” in singular when it applies to only one theory, one paradigm, one approach, one theory of design as in system theory, system paradigm, system approach, or system design, respectively. By contrast, we still use “systems” in plural, when the term “system” applies to more than one system, as in the expression “hard systems domains”, “soft systems domains”, or in “various systems assumptions”. This notation agrees with that recommended by the so-called father of this discipline, L. von Bertalanffy.

Convinced? I am not, really. The construction (plural qualifier followed by a singular noun) seems ungrammatical. We say “star formation” and “pest control”, even though it is understood that we mean more than one star or pest. What is so special about systems?

Why do we even have to mention the systems? What is a system anyway? In thermodynamics, a system is the region of the universe under study. Thus, by definition, thermodynamics studies systems. I like that definition because it is perfectly applicable to every natural science. Therefore, every natural science studies systems.

Ross Ashby, English pioneer of cybernetics, gave another definition:

A system is a set of variables sufficiently isolated to stay constant long enough for us to discuss it.

curiosity as the driving force of science

Lev Landau once defined science as “the means to satisfy one’s personal curiosity at the state’s expense”. In my student days, we were made to understand this was a joke, but I think that Landau was dead serious. In Soviet Union, the state was the only source of money. Luckily, in Western society, scientists can satisfy their curiosity at the expense of state, academia, charities, private companies or mad financiers. (People skilled in grant writing are doing a good job of exploiting as many of these resources as possible, although the ‘curiosity satisfaction’ is not, as a rule, listed among the goals of the proposed research.)

Sure, there could be other reasons to go to science, but only one decent reason to do it is to satisfy one’s curiosity. Here’s the proof. When the Nobel laureates or some other prestigious award winners — in other words, the folk who is said to achieve something in science — give their Nobel Lectures or interviews for media, they always mention their curiousity (as a driving force of scientific endeavour). They never say “I always wanted to get a Nobel Prize” or “I like to be invited to give talks in nice locations” or “That will show them” or “I was dodging the army draft” or “I had nothing better to do”. No: “Since I was a child, I’ve been curious about this and that”, etc.

Landau’s definition also can help to figure out what is science and what is not. Take, for example, bioinformatics and computational biology — some people think these are synonyms. No they are not. Computational biology is science. Bioinformatics is technology. Try to formulate a question which betrays a convincing degree of personal curiosity and you’ll see what I mean.

To finish for tonight, a couple of posts from Siris blog: Hume on Curiosity and the Value of Truth and Hume’s Philosophy of Mathematical Practice.

Curiosity, then, is the governing motive of mathematics, the one that shapes it into a pursuit and a passion. It is not, of course, the only motive; nor is it in every particular case the strongest motive. There is, for instance, vanity, the desire to make a name for oneself. And we should not pretend that academics are above such sordid desires; anyone who has ever had dealings with academics knows that they are often almost obsessed with the possibility of being well respected, and that this motivation in at least many cases overtops even curiosity as a driving force in their work. Academia is filled to the brim with vanity; on a Humean view, this is one of the reasons it works in the first place.

Q.E.D.?

You know what, yesterday, as soon as I have published my previous post, the ever-vigilant blogger.com locked my blog. Here’s the explanation.

This blog has been identified as a potential spam blog. Your readers will see a warning page until the blog is reviewed.

This blog will be deleted within 20 days unless you request a review.

Naturally, I’ve requested the review, so hopefully it will be unlocked “within two business days”. I believe the list of weasel words in the previous post has caused the problem. As much as I’d like to say “Q.E.D.”, I think it is the sheer number of the words (rather than their low information content) that has triggered the spam alert. Which is a shame. I’d say, every page containing more than five words from that table should be flagged. (Well, one has to experiment to learn the truth.) Personally, I delete any email which has ‘innovative’ or ‘solutions’ in the subject line.

business weasel words

An essential table from my desktop guide to the real world: Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel (pp. 129—132).

You can disguise almost any level of ignorance via the clever use of weasel vocabulary. Try memorizing the words on this list and using them in alphabetical order the way they are shown here.

Weingarten’ dilemma

As usual, I was looking for something else entirely when I came across the book entitled Theory of Technology. It contains a chapter written by Thomas E. Clarke. I allow myself a couple of quotes:

Protestations to the contrary, most organizations are not looking for creative output from their employees. They want employees that can follow instructions and operate within a very narrow band of decision-making authority.

In many cases, when scientists move to the managerial ladder just to get more financial compensation, the organization loses a productive, highly motivated scientist and gains an unfulfilled, mediocre manager.

Personally, I would correct the latter passage by removing “just to get more financial compensation”: whatever the motivation, more often than not the scientist is lost. For good. The author himself explains why the scientists do not make good managers:

Unlike many other professionals, scientists and engineers do not seek out promotion to the ranks of management as this would force them to interact with people to a greater degree and detract from their focus on their scientific profession.

In their sci-fi novel За миллиард лет до конца света (Definitely Maybe in English translation), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky describe a series of unexplained phenomena that occur around several scientists, who are all working on unrelated problems. A working hypothesis is that there is some sort of natural force preventing the humankind from discoveries which may threaten the “Homeostatic Universe”. Weingarten, a molecular biologist, is facing a tough choice: either to continue his groundbreaking experiments on reverse transcriptase (and incur the wrath of Homeostatic Universe) or to become a director of a brand new research institute, knowing that he will not be able to return to his potentially Nobel Prize-winning work. Naturally, Weingarten chooses the directorship (he is arguing that, as a director, he will be able to conduct research worth ten Nobel Prizes; somehow, his friend Malianov is not convinced.)

Of course, the Homeostatic Universe of Strugatsky brothers is just a metaphor for scientific bureaucracy. (Or maybe the scientific bureaucracy is just one of manifestations of the Homeostatic Universe. It does not matter.)

In science, one either does science, or makes a career.

women in science

Thanks to the recent post in Women in Science blog, I got acquainted with this Nature editorial and the actual EC report. (I had no time to read all 136 pages of it yet, but I am doing my best.) All interesting stuff, but, in the end, did they come with anything that we did not know before?

In conclusion, it appears clear that even the most gender-aware countries in Europe do not escape strong gender imbalance at the level of highly prestigious grants, positions or prizes.

Really? Well, I heard there was a bit of gender imbalance among the Nobel Laureates (there are altogether 35 female Nobel Prize winners out of 789 individual laureates, i.e. 4.4%; only 12 women got Nobels in science). But wait, read this:

What does clearly emerge is that application behaviour differs between men and women. Women apply or re-apply less, apply to less prestigious sources, requesting less funding, and for shorter duration.

So now we know who to blame: it is the women themselves. Instead of concentrating on important things like grant writing, they take career breaks or work part-time to raise their children etc.

Forget the EC report: this article by Philip Greenspun was written three years ago but is every bit as relevant now as in 2006. Don’t be deceived by the title: it is not only about women in science. It is about men in science too. (Granted, he talks about American science, but it is equaly applicable to the ‘Western’ science in general.) On the contrary, the section titles speak for themselves: ‘Why does anyone think science is a good job?’, ‘For whom does academic science as a career make sense?’, ‘What about the excitement and fun of science?’, and finally, ‘Why do American men (boys, actually) do it?’.

A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?

Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:

1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question “is this peer group worth impressing?”

It may be not always politically correct but a great read anyway.

amateur, pet, student

Most (maybe all) of what is now called ‘bioinformatics’ grew from amateur projects, pet projects or student projects. In any case, at the time (20—25 years ago), it was near impossible to get any funding to do it. Never mind that, the bioinformatics had a distinct advantage over experimental biology that it did not require much in terms of ‘materials’ (as in ‘Materials and Methods’) except access to a computer and, increasingly, Internet. That allowed people to do whatever they wanted to do without any need to go to the lab. The chemoinformatics could have been like that — except it was not. There were no chemical databases in public domain, period. When we just started to work on ChEBI in 2003, we were told that we shouldn’t really bother since “all useful chemical data is commercial”. Boy, the times have changed. For an instant reference on any topic, we look up Wikipedia, not Britannica.

In my view, ChemSpider was one of such amateur (in a best sense of this word) enterprises — that is, until it was acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry last month. (Good thing it was not acquired by CAS.) There was a lot of excitement in blogosphere; I found comments by John Wilbanks and Rich Apodaca most interesting. Undoubtedly, the chemical community as a whole should be a winner. And yet... According to Antony Williams,

“What originally started as a hobby project to give back something to the chemistry community has become one of the primary internet resources for Chemistry. And this from home built computers in a basement, with no funding and a team of volunteers. With the resources, reputation and vision of the RSC to support ChemSpider our long term goal is to deliver the primary online platform where chemists will resource information and collaborate with a worldwide community of scientists.”

Exactly: a hobby project became a leading chemoinformatics resource. Something that the RSC, in spite of its great “resources, reputation and vision”, has failed to deliver.

So, amid much congratulations and celebrations, I allow myself to privately mourn a loss of a brilliant amateur project.

question and hope

A couple of quotes from Knots: Mathematics with a Twist by Alexei Sossinsky.

So the arithmetic of knots has not helped us to classify them. But there is scant reason to talk of failure here: Schubert’s theorem <that every knot decomposes uniquely into prime knots> does not need any applications; it is mathematical art for art’s sake, and of the most exalted kind.

Research always begins with a question, and hope.

the anarchy and oligarchy of science

Part 3 of The new information ecosystem: cultures of anarchy and closure by Siva Vaidhyanathan was written some six years ago but remains as relevant now.

Science has always been global, cosmopolitan, messy, inefficient, and troublesome.

Yes, inefficient (or “low-throughput”, as in this blog’s name). All these aspects of science attract me.

Despite some elements of oligarchy, science as a practice succeeds because of, not despite, its ideology of relative openness. Credentialism is more an imperfection rather than a corruption of science.

Of course, credentialism is not a corruption of science: it is its inherent feature. The golden age of science free of credentialism never existed, thus nobody could corrupt it in that way. Still, the other possibilities of corruption are always abound.

As in so many other areas of life — from music to political action — just as communicative technology has allowed the flowering of a new scientific revolution, the oligarchic concerns of commerce and national security have crowded out these democratic values at their sources — the university and laboratory.

working full-time in science

For the last 20 years, I was working full-time in science. I mean, if molecular biology is a science, then I was working in science. It does not automatically mean I was doing science. Let me elaborate on this a little.

There are very few people out there actually doing Science. A lot of people are said to be “working in science” though. Maybe they are working in places which have scientificky-sounding names, for instance “Department of Molecular Biology”. Here, “working” means they are get paid for being there. (Check Wikipedia for many other meanings of work.) When one has a chance to leave this kind of employment for something less esoteric but never uses this chance, (s)he is said to choose “staying in science”. I like the expression “staying in science” more than “working in science” because it, obviously, does not imply any work.

I am not employed any longer full-time (or part-time for that matter) in science or otherwise. Therefore, I can write whatever I please, about science and other stuff one always wants to write while in full-time employment but never has any time.

I mean, they can’t kick me out.