Slow Science gets the Shaft - Part I

This blog post will be the first of a three-part series on my ideas of slow science.

“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.” Charles Darwin

Today, we had a seminar presentation by an "old school" scientist who told us some amazing stories about a group of organisms that he had worked on since the 1950s. It wasn't a slick powerpoint talk with fancy slides, a simple one with pictures of the different representative species. With each picture he told us about key innovations in the group, what these things eat, their ecology, morphological differences, predatory behaviour - in other words basic biology.

OldSchool is a naturalist. He doesn't make fancy models, nor do sophisticated statistics on his data. But he knows everything about the group that he works on because he has been accumulating data slowly and over the long-term. Fifty years is a heck of a long time! Instead of chasing the "sexy" and "cutting edge" questions that happen to be the hot items that year, he's a "sit and wait" scientist that lets the interesting questions arise from what he observes and experiences with these organisms in their own habitats.

OldSchool does slow science and I think that this breed of scientist is going extinct to be replace by Fast'nFurious scientists; all of whom clamber over each other to get papers in Science and Nature. Crabs in a bucket. Frankly, given the rewards, ie a scientific career that is seen as set for life, why wouldn't they?

Often to get those high impact papers, I think many choose to work on model organisms because of the cost-benefit ratio. Given the nature of the academic treadmill, we don't have the luxury of spending time with a system to acquire basic natural history questions because that takes too long. And if you choose that road in my field, it can often mean fewer publications and papers with "less impact." Ultimately leading to fewer job opportunities and less funding. And universities value scientists directly in proportion to how much money they bring in, i.e. $$$=good little scientist.

And really I am as much a party to this game as anyone. Although, I worked on an organism during my PhD, whose first name was Large and whose last name was Slow, when given the choice to work on a similar sort of organism or switch and work with a small fast one, I opted to work on a small and fast one for my postdoc. (The humour in how the size of my study species mirrors the school I'm at, is not lost on me. LargeandSlow at LargeUniversityInCanada and SmallandFast at SmallUniversity in SmallTown America.)

Well, honestly I thought - a fast and small organism will result in more publications.

I think if OldSchool were to apply for a job now (with the same qualifications he had when he started), I don't think his application would even see the light of day. And, in my opinion, that would be a huge loss to science.

The seminar today made me wonder if our focus on fast science will impact our understanding of the natural world. By fast science, I mean a few different things: what we study, how we set up experiments and for how long we run them. The focus of this blogpost will be on what we study.

Much of the work in my field has been conducted on species that are small and fast: Drosophila, annual plants, viruses, etc. These species are easily amenable to field, greenhouse and/or laboratory research. And because they have short generation times, experiments can be conducted in a timely manner (i.e., completed within the timeframe of a Masters or Ph.D). This is not to say that people don't attempt to work on LargeandSlow species, but there is a lag in the payback.

Okay so before I go all postal on the fast organism I need to demonstrate if there really a bias in what we know. Do we have equal information on organisms with vastly different generation times?

I did a quick little survey, nothing I would ever stake my scientific career on, but it yielded some interesting things. In the Wiley InterScience Life Science Search page, I did three types of word searches. The first was simply finding the total number of articles published in Wiley journals for a given organism (eg "bacteria", "Drosophila").

The graph below shows what I think we all know is obvious. Of the total number of articles written, most of our knowledge is on the following organisms: mouse, fish, and bacteria. Not surprising really that we have a strong bias toward biomedical and applied research.

But in my second search instead of just typing in the name of the organism, I used the following keywords: “bacteria and ecology”, “bacteria and evolution. ” The results were much the same. The rank order was different (fish, mouse, bacteriophage, bacteria), but the shape of the curve suggests that even in ecology and evolution, research is focused on model organisms with a short generation times. There are 136X more articles on virus ecology and evolution, than there are about a deciduous tree.

As part of the MTV generation, I understand the desire for immediate gratification. This need for immediate results and productivity is heightened under our current climate of publish or perish without any money in an unmarked grave.

But I think something is lost when what we know of the natural world is observed using a lens that is made up of organisms with “easy” life cycles.

As Charles Darwin said, “...it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.”