In the last couple of years, my subfield of bio has seen the arrival of a new generation of tools for studying stuff. These CoolTools have been developed by a few different labs and address a major lacuna in currently available techniques.
Because the CoolTools are revolutionary, every job talk in my field now ends with these future plans:
--I will continue the stuff I published on during my postdoc.
--And I'll use CoolTools too!
I'm not mocking the job candidates. If I were on the market, I'd sure be talking about CoolTools as well.
I just sort of miss the days when the "future plans" section of a job talk actually stood a chance of surprising me, rather than being about the Cool Bandwagon. Once upon a time, when a job candidate came to speak, what distinguished the Really Exciting from the others is that the future plans portion of the talk would set out the start of a research program that no one else was doing: a new niche, a new approach.
But now everyone's got a new approach--it's CoolTools! End of talk! And I think it's gotten more difficult to evaluate the candidate's creativity and originality as a result.
That said, CoolTools are really physioproffing cool.
15 years ago
7 comments:
I'm pretty sure I know what CoolTools you are talking about. My personal opinion is that the reality of what these CoolTools are going to deliver is going to be much more modest than the sales job would have you think. We have interviewed junior faculty candidates basing their research programs on these CoolTools, and have decided that we are not interested in hiring followers of a bandwagon.
You know, I think the Tools will eventually deliver on their promises, but I think there are going to be a lot of stupid and ultimately uninterpretable experiments first....because everyone's jumping on them, but not everyone's thinking. But (at least during the job talk) it's hard to tell them apart....ideally that occurs during the later chalk talks and faculty interviews.
So true! Future Plans were always my favorite part of job talks, but they do get boring when they're all the same...
There is another side of the story, The candidate don't know what faculty search committee want, will they appreciate if candidate puts original research idea without cool tools? In the hard job market, they also don't want to take unnecessary risk. sometime its easy to go with the wind...
I have no idea what your CoolTool is, but I have extensively used a previous cooltool - the confocal microscope. The problem I foresee for your CoolTools is the one that exists with confocal, which is training of users on CoolTools - correct usage, limitations and experimental design when using the cooltools. I was trained in confocal microscopy and was fortunate enough to be trained by individuals who had very high scientific standards, knew how the machine worked, and what was required to collect quantitative images that could withstand critical evaluations and upon which conclusions could be made without hand waving. Now that I have moved institutions I find that PI's, postdocs and grad students will make adjustments to the machine to collect 'pretty images' but do not accurately reflect the specimans, they will collect images using settings that are incorrect to be quantitative and then declare colocalization without any analysis other than color overlap. I can only assume journal editors don't know enough about the this tool either, due to the number of confocal images published without information on how the image was collected in the methods section. If you are declaring proteins to be interacting based on images but no disclosing the parameters used to collect those images how is a reader supposed to analyze the validity of the conclusions being made that are based on said image. It is akin to showing a western blot without disclosing your antibodies.
The CoolTools of today have a way of becoming JustATools of tomorrow. CoolTools are good but what gets us there over time is the innovative application and old fashioned good science.
Just so long as you aren't worried about the Glamour races you'll be ...well, Cool.
Scientistmother, I could substitute 'microarrays' or several other CoolBioTools in that place. Correct use of CoolTools is great, but te bandwagon should be carefully jumped on, or one could end up with piles of uncertainty and an unpublished paper (not that I'm bitter or anything).
*keeping fingers crossed and trying to work out the problems*
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