I has a frustrated

We got reviews back on the paper we submitted last month, and it was a "soft" reject--a rejection with an invitation to submit anew if we radically expand the paper and do about 7 more experiments.

Two of the reviewers were perfectly reasonable. They want to see some functional relevance of our finding, plus one or two other quite small additions. The third reviewer, on the other hand...took the liberty of listing several major experiments we needed to do, and announcing that not only would we need to do all of them for publication in the current journal--but we would need to do all but one for publication in a different journal!

In other words, "Don't think that you can just publish this one level lower, because I'll be on your ass about these experiments anyhow." Gee, way to use the anonymity of peer review to threaten that similarly bad reviews will follow us wherever we go.

In addition, this reviewer made some fairly outrageous requests--the most mind-boggling being that we should replicate our main finding in a different, "higher" species. You know, because who the heck studies our stupid organism? (DrdrA, didn't you get a similar weird critique once?)

I'm frustrated for many reasons. First, that this nutjob reviewer may have made the difference between "revise and resubmit" and "reject." This is the first time I've had an outright obstreperous reviewer, and boy does it burn.

Second, that the functional experiment everyone wants to see is going to be technically rather difficult. I understand its importance, but I'm less sanguine than GradAdvisor that we can do it.

Third, that I had thought the worst outcome for this paper would be rejection, after which we'd do a couple little experiments, and resubmit it at the next tier down. It's probably the last first-author paper of my grad lab, and I want desperately for it to be off my plate. But since GradAdvisor wants us to try the revise-and-expand route, it will be on my plate for many, many more months--and I'll be spending some serious time on difficult experiments. All the while I'm trying to get my postdoc experiments done.

I sort of wish that GradAdvisor would call the editor for a chat, just to get more information (did the normal reviewers vote for revise/resubmit? were there other comments we should be aware of? does the editor realize how insane a few of Crazy Reviewer's comments were?) but that doesn't seem to be the plan. I don't really understand how PIs decide whether to bug editors about decisions or not.

I am tired and feel trapped into doing a bunch more experiments that I'm not sure will be workable...but because all the reviewers wanted to see functional results, I don't think we can just submit the paper one tier down and get it published as is. And two tiers down would seem a bit silly for what we think is a major, textbook-changing finding. But I think if I refuse to do all these experiments, GradAdvisor will find someone else to do them, and I will probably lose first authorship, which is not acceptable to me at this point.

So, back to the bench it is.

Is asking about budgets as rude as asking about salaries?

Although Dr Hyde and I have both had fairly forthcoming advisors on topics large and small, the one topic that we find we know nothing about is:

How much money do our advisors receive each year in the form of grants or other funds, and how is it budgeted?

It's not as though we never discuss grants. I know how many grants my current advisor has and I also know what outside funding sources are paying a few trainees' salaries.

But I have literally no idea how much money these grants add up to per year, nor do I have even a hazy grasp on what fraction of the budget goes to salaries, equipment, or mousekeeping. The same is true for Dr Hyde, and again he has a quite outspoken PI who shares plenty of other pieces of information.

Obviously, we both need to get better informed if we are ever to put together our own proposal packages. I would also like to know more just to have a sense of what the impact is for the lab if I want to spend, say, $5000 on a piece of useful but not totally necessary equipment. I know we happen to be flush right now, but how flush?

So this is an etiquette question. Is it ok to approach my advisor and say, "I'd like to learn a lot more about lab budgeting and management so that I'm better prepared for an academic future--can you give me the approximate annual budget for this lab and tell me what percent of it is spent on various costs?" Is this rude, like asking about his salary? Is it just awkward, like asking about his dental work? Obviously I would try to time the question well, but I just don't know if it's something I should ask at all.

And it's still just odd to me, that with all the perspective and advice I've gotten from my mentors on how I would eventually want to run my own lab, none of them has ever told me how much money I would need to do it.

Why forgetful Advisors are a good thing

Many people I know complain that they will propose an exciting experiment to their advisor, only to have it shot down summarily. Then a few days later, the advisor comes by and says, "Hey, I had this great idea for an experiment...." and proceeds to detail their own proposal.

I've never had this happen. In fact, both of my advisors have been generous with intellectual credit almost to a fault. And yesterday my Advisor managed to provide almost the reverse scenario as what others complain about:

One month ago
Advisor: Yes, these will be tricky experiments. Let's see, here are a few possible ways you might get around the problem....X, Y, Z, Q, R, S.

Jekyll: Yeah, I'll see what I can do.

Yesterday
Jekyll: Hey, Advisor, you know I've been having trouble with X, Y, Z, and Q, so today I figured I would try R, and you know what? I think it might work for us.

Advisor: Wait, so you mean you could use R to get around this experimental problem? Why that's completely brilliant! That is a wonderful idea indeed!

[pause]

Jekyll: Uh, Advisor, I think you actually suggested it a while ago.

Advisor: Really? I had totally forgotten.


I suppose I could have kept my mouth shut and improved the next rec letter Advisor writes for me, but it hardly seemed worth it. Advisor was clearly happy, if embarrassed to have forgotten his own suggestion, and pleased that it might work.

Besides, I think his rec letter is pretty damn nice anyhow.

Clearing the decks

I've been busy this week preparing for the presentation I told you about and getting a significant piece of writing out the door. Both are finished now, and I am left with the strangest sensation:

There is nothing I need to write right now.

For the last ~2 yrs I've spent most Saturdays (and not a few Sundays and evenings) attached to my laptop, writing and rewriting one thing or another. The past month was one piece of writing; the 3 months before that were a paper that we sent out in December; the 9 months before that were the paper we published last fall; the 3 months before that were my dissertation--etc.

Of course, some Saturdays were taken up with experiments to sort out details of these papers and so forth, but the gist of it is--this is the first weekend in a very long time that I have woken up and thought, "Hey, I don't have any writing goals this weekend."

It was disorienting. We went into lab and I puttered around doing basic lab catch-up things that I've had to cram into the work-week (or haven't done at all--e.g. certain types of equipment maintenance....). When I'd accomplished what I wanted, we went home and I didn't even turn on my computer, let alone try to rework an abstract or find an appropriate reference or tweak a figure or check some statistics or.....It's not even that I dislike writing (the sensation of pushing a final product out the door is deeply satisfying, and I learn so much in the process) but there's just always something to do.

We should be getting reviews back on the most recent paper within the next couple of weeks, and no matter the result there will be work to do. And when that's over, there are some lingering things in GradLab I should still deal with, and so on. This is just a brief respite, the eye of the hurricane.

But oh my, it feels rather nice.

Today's pet peeve--special bird edition

Some headlines from the Times:

"Plane was hit by birds"

"Bird hazard is persistent for planes"

"Geese pose big risk at airports in the region"

Yes, it is surely cruel and unfair that the plane was peacefully gliding along at 10 mi/hr before it was horrifically bombed and shredded by the dangerous 150 mi/hr birds.

Did not a single editor wonder if these headlines could have been rearranged? That one might reasonably consider that the birds were hit by the plane, rather than the other way around?

Or there's this article tidbit:

The proximity of the plane to Rikers Island, home to a large colony of noisy, prolific and seemingly indefatigable Canada geese, suggests that the birds could have been involved.

This is undeniable truth. Geese are noisy, prolific, and seemingly indefatigable. Thank God we have quiet, mousy, easily-tired airplanes at LaGuardia and JFK.

I just wish it weren't right before a major deadline

I have the opportunity to give an unusual type of talk to my fellow postdocs and graduate students. The invitation is explicitly to discuss both our recently published scientific findings and the process by which we developed them. How did we decide to pursue this line of inquiry? What problems did I encounter, and how did I solve them? What was the biggest challenge of this project, and how did I get around it?

I think it's great that my postdoc association is encouraging talks in this format. Discussion of career issues, as I think you'd all agree, is critically important for scientists at all stages, and this talk provides a forum for "what best serves to advance your science" sorts of questions. So I was happy to agree to give the talk.

But because the talk is non-standard format (and because a reasonable portion of the audience is expected not to be in my particular subfield), I can't just recycle the powerpoint from previous talks.

What do you think the best set-up for such a talk is? My tentative plan is to spend the first half (~15 min) or so giving more or less my regular scientific talk, albeit with more explanation and less detail to accommodate the non-MyFieldists in the audience. Then I want to give the talk again, but in the order of how it happened, and what actually motivated our steps from one experiment to another, rather than the standard scientific Well Thought Out Post Hoc Justifications that I use in the first half.

That is, in contrast to the first half of the talk which will begin, "This system we study is of vital importance and we wanted to understand the mechanisms underlying one of its most salient characteristics," the second half should start something like, "I had finished up one project and was just messing around with ideas for another project, and really had no idea what I wanted to do...." etc.

For the second half, I'll put the figures in the order they were actually done, and I'll highlight the point at which the project turned the corner from Random Observations in Our Corner of Science to Hey We Have a Cool Paper Here (brilliant feedback from a member of my thesis committee, as it happens.)

What do you think? What would you most want to hear about in a "how it really went down" sort of talk?

A depressingly modest definition of utopia

Many (most?) journals have an explicit reviewer policy which says something like, "If you have a real or perceived conflict with the paper you're signing up to review--for example if your lab is planning to publish a paper on the same topic--then you should decline to review, or at a minimum tell your editor about the conflict so s/he can decide."

It will be a terrific day when all PIs see fit to abide by these principles. Or at a minimum, when those who don't at least refrain from teaching their trainees that of course as a PI you can decide for yourself if you can be "fair" in a given situation, regardless of this "perceived conflict" stuff.

It will also be a terrific day when the schools have all the money they need and the Defense department has to hold a bake sale...oh hell, why do I bother.

Cranky with collaborators

Happy New Year to you all! I thought I'd start this year's blogging off on the right foot, by complaining.

My current lab project is very exciting. We have a significant amount of data obtained via one technique, and the resulting data suggest something that will be of broad interest to the community. When Advisor lays out his vision of the eventual paper, he does so by listing four figures.

However, the findings will be immensely strengthened if we can back them up using a completely different technique. We have a good idea how to do it, too! But--we need a specific experimental material to accomplish this goal. This Material is not something we can whip up on our own.

Another lab has recently produced and published on a few variations of this Material. One of them could be ideal for us. The problem is, in neither the publication nor the supplementary info did this lab provide enough information for us to decide if any of their Materials would work for our particular question.

Advisor emailed his counterpart in this lab, who promptly said that a postdoc would send us the relevant information so that we can decide if we should order any of the (extremely expensive!) Materials.

This postdoc and I have now been emailing for six weeks. Repeated promises to produce and send the information have gone unfulfilled.

I am desperate to see this information. I have sent all the clues that could be useful so that the postdoc can select the appropriate information to send me. However, I can't think of anything I can do to speed the process up. We are the ones importuning another lab for something. I have no leverage, since the postdoc is certainly not going to get publication credit out of sharing this information with us.

If any of the Materials will be useful to us, there is a significant delay--perhaps three months--between our ordering them and the key experiment being feasible.

I am going to a conference in the spring for which these data would be incredibly useful, and I am theoretically having a child in August. Delay is not on my agenda right now. If the Materials will not be useful to us, I likewise need to know right away so that I can start a workaround experiment (which will be much harder and more time-consuming, if it's possible at all).

I understand that I am low on the postdoc's priority list. I'm sure there are many other people emailing this lab for information on the Materials.

Meanwhile, I am impatient and helpless. 2009 is not winning my heart just yet.