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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.”
4 comments:
oh, you speak so true. The slow science is living a life of its own on the side lines... some funding sources are specifically directed to these slow studies, although I do think these sources are shrinking. Maybe partly since it is that bias and not being able to publish as much in GlamMag if you are working on something slower and not seen as "cool/fast"?!
then again, imho, most funding today seems to be directed to "applied" functions; medical stuff, technology or energy maybe?
It'll be interesting to see what we have in a few thirty years or so.... what areas are "over researched" compared to "under researched"...
Hi,
I'm new to your blog, but I like what I see.
I agree with your take here, but I think it is largely a case of us scientists reaping what we sow. Or rather, for our generation (I am an Assistant Prof in my first year, teaching / researching, but mainly administrating, in Japan), reaping what our progenitors sowed.
To some extent, this funding mode is somewhat Darwinian - in a competitive world, where the number of scientists is far higher than the funding available to support them (that 7 - 12 % success rate coming back to bite - which also means most profs spend all their time writing research grants to be rejected, rather than actually doing science), with the inherent need to support the 'best' scientists - well, how do you quantify that unless you rely on number of papers published and impact factors of where they were published (H-indexes may be better, but still tend to favour the experienced over the young newcomers, and the gene jockeys over the field ecologists) - then it is inevitable that the "low-hanging fruit" will be the first picked.
Indeed, it is this competitive model which creates the problem in the first place - the constant need for results, and the bums-on-seats funding which so many countries use, provides all the impetus any researcher requires to accept and churn out PhD students / Post-docs. In such a scheme, the quality of the student is valued less than the fact that they can be snared as naive undergraduates with promises (or at least strong suggestions) than a PhD is a route to a good job, then enslaved to stand at a bench churning out data for those higher in the food chain (although a better investment than PhD students is post-docs, and the best of all a mix of post-docs and PhD students). The students are spat out of the system as newly-minted post-docs (with most unable to tell their Gluteus maximus from their ginglymus) with not a hope in hell of getting tenure. A few (like me) are lucky, but I see good young scientists fighting and losing the battle for funding - and therein their careers - all the time. It happens the world over.
I blame a lot of the problems in science with the administrators getting their grubby little hands on the system. Scientists, even (most of) those whiter than white, scrubbed shiny gene jockeys know the value of long term studies, and taxonomy departments / herbariums / museums. As a scientist, I feel Universities and Governments have given up the really important freedoms we had, in order to try and implement a better way. Thirty years ago they undoubtedly thought that by giving work to administrators they could do more science, but by doing that they seem to simply have allowed the administrators enough control to create more administration! When the funding axe comes, it's NEVER administrators which get sacked. Professors are no longer the free-ranging teachers and researchers they used to be; now they are shackled by administrator imposed loads of paperwork.
On a recent business trip, I had to account for every day of my business trip (I took a couple of days to visit my parents), but also along with providing my airline tickets (bought by me, in advance on my credit card), I had to provide the boarding passes too. Well, of course, I lost one, and since then have had to spend literally hours justifying this. I really feel like going across to the administration office and thundering at someone "It's MY money - not yours, NOW GIVE IT BACK (and do what you're told, and quit the willfulness)!!", but I know that too would be futile.....
[sigh]
[/vent]
YMO
Hi,
I'm new to your blog, but I like what I see.
I agree with your take here, but I think it is largely a case of us scientists reaping what we sow. Or rather, for our generation (I am an Assistant Prof in my first year, teaching / researching, but mainly administrating, in Japan), reaping what our progenitors sowed.
To some extent, this funding mode is somewhat Darwinian - in a competitive world, where the number of scientists is far higher than the funding available to support them (that 7 - 12 % success rate coming back to bite - which also means most profs spend all their time writing research grants to be rejected, rather than actually doing science), with the inherent need to support the 'best' scientists - well, how do you quantify that unless you rely on number of papers published and impact factors of where they were published (H-indexes may be better, but still tend to favour the experienced over the young newcomers, and the gene jockeys over the field ecologists) - then it is inevitable that the "low-hanging fruit" will be the first picked.
Indeed, it is this competitive model which creates the problem in the first place - the constant need for results, and the bums-on-seats funding which so many countries use, provides all the impetus any researcher requires to accept and churn out PhD students / Post-docs. In such a scheme, the quality of the student is valued less than the fact that they can be snared as naive undergraduates with promises (or at least strong suggestions) than a PhD is a route to a good job, then enslaved to stand at a bench churning out data for those higher in the food chain (although a better investment than PhD students is post-docs, and the best of all a mix of post-docs and PhD students). The students are spat out of the system as newly-minted post-docs (with most unable to tell their Gluteus maximus from their ginglymus) with not a hope in hell of getting tenure. A few (like me) are lucky, but I see good young scientists fighting and losing the battle for funding - and therein their careers - all the time. It happens the world over.
I blame a lot of the problems in science with the administrators getting their grubby little hands on the system. Scientists, even (most of) those whiter than white, scrubbed shiny gene jockeys know the value of long term studies, and taxonomy departments / herbariums / museums. As a scientist, I feel Universities and Governments have given up the really important freedoms we had, in order to try and implement a better way. Thirty years ago they undoubtedly thought that by giving work to administrators they could do more science, but by doing that they seem to simply have allowed the administrators enough control to create more administration! When the funding axe comes, it's NEVER administrators which get sacked. Professors are no longer the free-ranging teachers and researchers they used to be; now they are shackled by administrator imposed loads of paperwork.
On a recent business trip, I had to account for every day of my business trip (I took a couple of days to visit my parents), but also along with providing my airline tickets (bought by me, in advance on my credit card), I had to provide the boarding passes too. Well, of course, I lost one, and since then have had to spend literally hours justifying this. I really feel like going across to the administration office and thundering at someone "It's MY money - not yours, NOW GIVE IT BACK (and do what you're told, and quit the willfulness)!!", but I know that too would be futile.....
[sigh]
[/vent]
YMO
@YMO
Thanks. And Wow! I've been thinking that the underlying competitive model has made universities more like business, corporations. Which came first though? Just a hunch.
Feel free to vent here anytime!
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