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.