Journal of I've Never Heard of It

One of the exciting things that begins to happen during the postdoc, if you're lucky, is that you yourself will be asked to serve as a reviewer for some journals. This is great news because it means your name is, however tentatively, respected. Furthermore, you have the opportunity to demonstrate yourself a thoughtful scientist and referee to some editors. And finally, you learn a lot about the review process by being on the other side.

So it was with excitement that I opened up an email today asking me to review a manuscript. Here's the tricky thing, though: I've never read a single article in the journal that sent me this request. This is a not uncommon scenario for a junior person doing reviews--you're low on the food chain, and the journal that asks your opinion may be correspondingly low. On the other hand, it may be that this journal is respected but that it publishes very few papers from my subfield, which is why I've never read anything in it.

I asked a mentor how I should approach the review, given that I don't have any idea how to grade the "novelty and significance" of a manuscript if I don't know the reputation of the journal. His advice was interesting: "You should always apply the same standard of accuracy to all manuscripts you review, regardless of whether they are for Nature or Journal of I've Never Heard of It. Let the editor worry about whether the paper is novel or exciting enough. Your job is to make sure that the authors have done the proper controls to come to the conclusion they state in the abstract." So, after I have a chance to look over the table of contents for the past few issues of this journal, this is what I will do.

Well, that and looking up some however-irrelevant-and-useless impact factors.

To our dearest beloved SfN

Abstracts for the unmissable* Society for Neuroscience annual meeting are due today.

So we're getting excited for the upcoming meeting, right? Should we get our plane tickets? Reserve a room? Oh wait, the meeting starts November 13th.

Today is May 13th. I did a quick count, using toes for the extra two months, and this means that the meeting is six months away.

Because the number of attendees at SfN is in the tens of thousands, I thought that the delay between abstract submission and meeting actually occurring was somewhat forgivable back in the days of 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives. Back when 64 MB was the size of a fancy new hard drive. Someone's got to program all those abstracts into thematically organized sessions, and make sure that the Big Shots in my subfield are scheduled to give their symposium talks at the exact same time as my poster so that I can never ever go to a symposium talk I actually care about. That doesn't just happen by itself, people.

But now? When Google can predict, before I finish typing, the rest of the last name of the ex-boyfriend I'm thinking about? When we can crowd-source an encyclopedia with useful entries on "Factors affecting the crack spread"? [I clicked on the "random" button, I swear.] Does it honest to God still take six months to sort 20,000 abstracts with preselected keywords into one of 8 themes and some number of subthemes/sessions?

Do they have a small staff of medieval scribes rewriting everything in calligraphy, or what?

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* Because it's the only place you can see every single neuroscientist, living or dead, you have ever known. As a meeting, it makes you want to drink hemlock by Day Two.

Dear Science*

You write a nice magazine. Sure, it's no Nature, but we still read it.

However, each time I download a pdf of your work, it comes with a totally useless front page. This cover page says something stupid about the citation and copyrights of the work (I don't know, I never read it) and then lists other articles I might be interested in**.

News flash, I'M NOT. I'm interested in reading THE ARTICLE I DOWNLOADED, thanks anyhow. And now when I go to print, I have to type in the "pages" field "2-5" or whatever, so that I don't have this useless piece of junk in front of everything else.

Maybe no one ever explained this to you, but pdfs are designed for printing. Yes, they're also nice to collate in your Papers or whatever, but the entire reason Acrobat was invented was so that one could transmit complex pieces without messing up the layout....for ease of printing at the other end. Yet here you have taken this beautiful, simple idea and inexplicably screwed it up by taping on a cover page, like you're a goddamn seventh-grader turning in a class report. Why, why?

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* You too, J Neurophys
** J Neurophys, hilariously/irritatingly, lists Medline search terms on the front page. I recently noticed a pdf where the front page listed "HIV--AIDS" as a relevant topic. The authors were talking about lobule HIV (H-IV) in the cerebellum.

The good news is, we're not alone

A recent article in Newsweek tackles the issue of gender discrimination in journalism--even at Newsweek itself (though perhaps a bit soft-pedaled, that part). The authors tell an all-too-familiar storyline:

1) Sexism was really, really awful when women first started making major inroads in the workplace (the women at Newsweek were called "dollies;" they were told outright that women didn't write).
2) Now things are much much better!
3) Except.

Except men wrote 88% of the cover stories for Newsweek last year ("and two of those used the headline 'The Thinking Man.'"). Except women still earn less than men. Except women are still underrepresented on the masthead. Except, except, except...the equality isn't so very equal.

What I find interesting is that the type of metrics and stories that women tell about discrimination at today's magazines are so similar to what I hear in the sciences. Replace "cover stories" with "speaking invitations at conferences." Replace "underrepresented on the masthead" with "underrepresented on the faculty." Replace "earn less" with, uhh, "earn less."

In the biological sciences, women who join with confidence in graduate school are still disappearing, particularly at the postdoc-to-professor transition. Men still represent ~80% of the faculty.

(My department recently held a faculty job search. When I complained that an overwhelming percentage of the invited candidates were male, one faculty member told me that the department had recently hired several women, so I shouldn't worry. Well phew--thank goodness we've filled that quota! Now we don't have to concern ourselves with inviting the ladies for a while.)

The article made me think that efforts to address women's stymied progress in the sciences cannot be confined to financial solutions, like providing better campus childcare, but need to confront the systemic cultural attack on women.

Though, campus childcare would be a nice start.

Power: a wee quiz

Jonah Lehrer blogged about a finding also reported in The Economist: that powerful people tend to exhibit less empathy for others than the powerless do.

The UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner has found that, in many social situations, people with power act just like patients with severe brain damage. "The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior," he writes. "You become very impulsive and insensitive, which is a bad combination."

Let us consider how these traits of the powerful may translate to the scientific community. Check all that apply to your PI:

Lack of empathy for others/Impulsivity indicators
___ Lets manuscripts languish untouched for months
___ ...or years
___ Brings Famous Visiting PI around the lab, showing her the equipment but failing to introduce any of the trainees
___ Or introduces her to other trainees, but not to you
___ Doesn't send in recommendation letters on time
___ Doesn't respond to emails asking whether recommendation letters have been submitted
___ Doesn't answer emails regarding conference abstracts, despite urgent deadline
___ Shows up 10 minutes late for lab meeting
___ Shows up 30+ minutes late for lab meeting
___ Cancels lab meeting by virtue of being out of town, without telling anyone about plans
___ Suggests you help write a review....two days before it's due
___ Then turns it in late anyhow, after letting it sit on his desk for two weeks
___ Expects you to interpret cryptic cuneiform handwritten comments on drafts
___ "Oh, yeah, everyone, this is our new postdoc. I forgot he was coming."

Of course, I'm sure that PIs can make their own impulsivity/lack of empathy checklist for deans.

And let's not get started on the Glamour editors...

Social parenting 101

Small and I were at the playground recently when a woman who was there with her daughter and granddaughter struck up conversation, as playground adults are wont to do.

She assumed Small was a girl, which many people do (on account of his ridiculous cuteness, I think). Normally I just respond, "Oh, actually he's a boy" or similar, but I wasn't in that chatty a mood and just let it go. Besides, who cares?

When Small and I were leaving the playground, the woman smiled and waved. "Bye," she called. "What's your daughter's name?"

I panicked. Correcting her this late in the game would be an admission that I had let her prattle on about how cute my "little girl" was without having the decency to let her know it was a little boy. But the other option was....

"Smallette," I called back.

"Bye, Smallette!" she called out. "Bye!"

I now live in dread of seeing her at the playground again.

Dear Mrs. Google

You know how I can google the whole everlivin' web, or just, say, one domain name?

I want to be able to google with the search restricted to all sites in my search history.

A week or two ago I read a post, or something like that, on PI handwriting. But where? If I could just aim my google-box to "Sites I've frequented lately" we would be all set. Hop to it.

Yours,
Dr. Jekyll

ps) Found it at doubledoc's! But jeez, I had to work. What's the fun in that?

The least unique

My department is in the middle of a faculty search right now, with the result that we’ve had several job candidates deliver talks in the last couple of months. The talks have been uniformly clear, well-delivered, and polished. Based on the research and future directions, most of the candidates seem to be well-positioned to start up research programs and land a couple of grants. This is all very impressive.

But in one respect I have found the talks slightly disappointing. By and large, the candidates have not described future directions that were surprising. By that I mean that no one has carved out a scientific niche for him or herself that seems distinct from the territory occupied by other people in the field.

For example, one speaker alluded to papers that had come out from competing groups around the same time as his most recent paper. These competing groups had been studying marginally different types of cells, so nobody was technically scooped, but it struck me that if this candidate were to have a piano land on his head tomorrow, there would still be plenty of people pursuing the types of questions that he plans to pursue.

I voiced this concern to some lab colleagues who told me that I was being too critical, and that nobody occupies unique scientific space and therefore this was an impossible standard. And of course a PI can compete with others in the field and still excel--and it’s even a mark of the importance of the field, in some respects, that there's so much interest in it.

Yet when I think about faculty whose work I consider singularly exciting, many of them have either developed techniques that let them answer questions no one else in their field has been able to attack, or they have devised a research program that addresses questions--frequently at the intersection of two separate fields--that nobody else is pursuing.

There’s still time for these junior candidates to grow into those shoes, but I’m left wondering if their feet are going to get any larger.

Bespoke labs

A graduate student complained to me about his advisor. "He treats me and another graduate student totally differently! With her he's hands off, but with me he micromanages!"

A faculty member commented to me, "One of the hardest things I had to learn as a PI was how to recognize that everyone in my lab needs different things from me because of their own strengths and weaknesses, so I need to tailor my style to their needs."

Who's right?

I'm sympathetic to the faculty member, because it's quite true that different trainees have differing strengths. Some are good at experiments but bad at writing; others are good at thinking about science but bad at benchwork; others can't give a presentation worth a damn, regardless how good their data are. So the various lab members really do need different kinds of guidance from their mentor.

However, what I think I hear in the graduate student's complaint is not, in fact, that he is angry about differential treatment. He is angry that he perceives the differential treatment to reveal something about his advisor's opinion: namely, that the advisor respects the other graduate student more (leading to hands-off mentorship), and doesn't trust the male graduate student enough to let him conduct his own experiments without significant input from the PI.

(Of course, it's possible that the female grad student in this example is peeved that the male grad student gets so much attention, while she is neglected. Grass is always greener etc.)

The point is, not only should the PI ideally tailor his or her mentoring strategies to meet the different needs of the trainees, it must be clear that this tailoring is not favoritism, which is the tailoring to the benefit of one trainee over the others.

This is one of the many reasons that management looks hard to me.

They are carbon-based

Our mouse colony has expanded so rapidly that we've hit a space crunch despite getting one increase from the space committee already. Each person in lab "owns" a certain set of cages, and so we sat down to come up with a system to keep cage usage under certain limits.

The result? We each have a fixed maximum number of cages for our mice, but we can loan those spaces to others if we're not using them.

What do we call this system? Cap and trade.

Best practices

Dr Hyde's PI attended grad school ~40 years ago. He was taught a list of ten or so "fundamental concepts" in neuroscience. It ran something like:

1. Dale's Law--each neuron releases only one type of neurotransmitter.
2. No new neurons are born in the adult brain.
3. Inputs to the neuron occur only on the dendrites and soma.
4. Outputs from the neuron occur only from axonal boutons.
5. Action potentials are always initiated in the soma or axon.
6. Synapses are unidirectional; there is no retrograde signaling.
7. The brain is immune privileged.

Those of you who are neuroscientists are laughing, because none of these things are true. They were all reasonable approximations to the truth, based on the best available evidence at the time--but they've all been convincingly overturned.

With this context, how to think about the move towards more evidence-based medicine? The Obama administration is making an effort to decide upon "best practices" in medicine as evidenced by research, and then to nudge doctors towards using those "best practices" by a series of governmental carrots or sticks.

Dr. Jerome Groopman discusses the potential pitfalls to this idea in this month's New York Review of Books. Not only is the literature often (usually?) wrong, it is also inadequate. Clinical studies are frequently restricted to patients with only one condition, or to selected subsets of patients (most glaringly, men); whereas in reality, many people have multiple ailments at a given time, and women, or poor people, or underrepresented minorities, have an irritating propensity to respond differently to treatments than do the more homogeneous clinical populations.

I'm not a doctor, but as a researcher I know how much literature is going to be disproven a few years down the road. Furthermore, basic science research is usually far superior in quality to clinical trials, in large part due to the laboratory setting where one can actually hold all variables constant except for the one under study--far from true in a clinical setting.

But at the same time, why do we even bother trying to figure out the best way to treat a disease if we're not going to use that information? I support Groopman's plea that doctors should have significant leniency to pursue the course of treatment that seems best to them, even if it deviates from "best practices" as currently evaluated.

But I'll go one step further (and this is a naive suggestion from someone who knows next to nothing about medicine, really): the number and type of clinical trials should be vastly expanded, by virtue of keeping tabs on the success of procedures at clinics and hospitals all over the country. We already do this with some types of procedures (close to my heart is sart.org, which tracks IVF success at different locations), but we aren't going far enough. We should be tagging all these outcomes with detailed patient information, ideally using a unique identifier for each patient that allows us to track patients wherever they go.

Then, put the army of supernumerary biomedical Ph.D.s to work. They can easily learn how to sift through these massive datasets to identify what treatments work for 35-year-old white men with elevated blood pressure but not for 60-year-old Asian women with fallen arches.

Effectively, clinical trials designed by one or a few doctors, occurring in a small number of patients, would be a thing of the past. The dreadful meta-analysis of twelve crappy published studies, which is what we currently rely on to devise most "best practices," would vanish.

There are probably a lot of reasons, including patient privacy, why this can't ever happen. But it would completely transform biomedical research. Basic scientists mostly look down their noses, and rightfully so, at the quality of clinical trials--but this approach would give clinical trials a sample size far beyond even the most ambitious basic science research. Rigorous researchers might actually want to be involved with medical science.

Especially now that we've come up with a whole new set of fundamental principles in neuroscience, and this time they're definitely right.

Open secret?

Several journals have Previews, or News and Views, or whatever they may choose to call an introductory short piece about an article in that journal. This introductory piece is typically written by another scientist in the field.

From my very limited dataset, the scientist writing the Preview was also a reviewer on the paper (presumably, one of the positive ones...) Is this generally true? If I see a Preview, can I usually assume that the author was a reviewer? Or do journals regularly contact still another scientist to read the pre-print and write about it?

Ring, ring

Except it's never "Ring, ring" these days, it's the theme from Super Mario Bros coupled with vibrate...

What do you as a speaker do when someone's cell phone goes off during a seminar? (The question also applies to other noisy distractions, like hallway noise or a jet overhead, but the cell phone is ever the standard-bearer of unwonted noise.)

For very loud interruptions, I favor the sip of water approach, which makes the speaker look unfazed and vaguely productive. But most of these noises are loud enough to distract but not loud enough to drown out the speaker.

In the early days of cell phones, it was a novelty and the speaker would often make a joke about it. But that diverts attention and gets old fast.

Some speakers will simply pause so as not to compete with the noise. Advantage: the audience's attention is undivided when you resume. Disadvantage: long pause in your talk, and it feels obscurely like the cell phone owner won.

Others will continue talking right over the sound, perhaps at higher volume to compensate. Advantage: no break in your stride, and the speaker sounds unflappable. Disadvantage: audience may not catch what the speaker says or are too distracted to parse it.

I think the best solution, unless the sound is very loud, is to continue talking over the interruption, but then to reiterate the point once the noise has ceased, ideally with a smooth, "In other words..." or "To recap..." or "That is,..."

Less good transitions include, "To repeat without the Lone Ranger soundtrack" or "As you would have heard had it not been for the jerk in the third row..."

Open Lab 2009

I am famous, for having blogged about my bodily fluids. Who would have thought the internet was the sort of place where people would like that? I am just shocked.

Go check out the other Open Lab winners for a sort of year-end carnival.

Sleeping on it

I like to think about science in the evening, after dinner. It's a good time for me to think structurally about upcoming experiments: what order to carry them out; reagents to order; protocol details; analytical aspects. If I'm on a roll, I'll write down a list of everything in my head and tuck it in my bag for the next day.

For me, this clears my mind--all the ideas buzzing around get written down so I don't need to carry them in my brain, and I can go to bed clear-headed. For Dr Hyde, though, evening is the worst possible time to think about experiments. He starts ruminating and brain-storming and fretting, and insomnia is the inevitable result. Writing things down just makes him think more about them.

So we live in a strange evening split, where I am often thinking about my upcoming week but I cannot mention any of it to Dr Hyde, who will grab his head and cry "No, no science now!"

Instead he thinks on the bus in the morning, which I can't do at all--too groggy and easily distracted. So if we ride the bus together, he wants to tell me his latest, and I only nod and smile because I really can't follow logic in the early morning.

It's good we eat dinner together or we might never find out what the other is up to.