What I did before my summer vacation (one hectic month in the life of an academic researcher)

Academia is an unpredictable profession at best; for the most part, one never knows from year to year how much funding one will have to design and implement research projects, how many students one will have responsibility for, how many grant proposals one will write, or even how many papers one will write and send for publication. The unpredictability of the profession stems from the unpredictability associated with grant funding: is a researcher’s proposal good enough; will it get into the top ten percent; will it get funded, and if so, how much will the researcher get; will he or she get support for students and lab consumables or just consumables; and what happens if he or she doesn’t get funding. The list of worries is potentially a long one.

December and June are always busy and hectic months in academia, mostly because researchers rush to finish experiments and to send out their articles before the Christmas holidays and summer vacation, respectively. They are stressful months that have to be confronted and tackled before one can take vacation in good conscience. The odd thing is that the pace of academia is so erratic; during the other months, there are often lulls when one wishes one was busier. Personally, I would prefer if the pace was more even and thus less stressful during the entire academic year, such that the amount of work was spread out more evenly.

So what did I do from mid-May until now, before my summer vacation? I am co-adviser for a PhD student who has to deliver her thesis by the end of July, plus send her last article for publication so that she can write in her thesis that it has been submitted for publication. I am senior author on that paper, so I have read through and edited the paper several times during the month of June. Additionally, I have read through and edited her thesis for both scientific and grammatical accuracy several times. Most Norwegian students write their theses in English. I believe it is now a requirement, whereas their defense can be in Norwegian, although many choose to defend in English. Most Norwegians speak English well, especially the younger ones who have grown up watching American TV programs and movies, surfing the internet/social media, and listening to music. So it is not a major problem to edit a thesis for correct English usage; it just takes time. But this is what a senior scientist does—it’s part of the job. 

I also wrote a grant proposal that I submitted to the Cancer Society in early June. I spent more than a month reading background articles and writing the proposal, which had to do with treating gastrointestinal cancers with drugs that drive them into a senescent (non-proliferating) state. I was a peer reviewer for an article about treating colorectal cancer with a combination of natural compounds that led to effective tumor kill without killing normal cells, a win-win situation for patients. I was also an external grant reviewer for another country; this is often done—that granting agencies send out grant proposals for external review outside their own country. In this case, I learned a lot about treatment of colorectal cancer with adoptive cell transfer using tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes. This is a field I knew only a bit about, but about which I know quite a lot more at this point after having read the proposal and a number of review articles that helped me to understand it so that I could review it properly. I also read and edited an article written by two of my colleagues who asked me to check their review article for correct English usage and grammar. I also read some background articles about ionizing radiation and how it is used in cancer treatment; this was information I found on the American Cancer Society website. I am impressed with the information that is available there to patients and their families, and impressed with the writers who create these articles and brochures. Finally, I printed out a number of review articles about mass spectrometry imaging of tissue samples; this is a cutting-edge technology that has a bright future not only in cancer research, but in pathology generally, as well as in disease treatment, pharmacology and toxicology. I need to learn as much about it as possible in case I travel to visit a medical center in the States that uses this technology successfully in their research projects.

It occurred to me today that I could work as an editor of a scientific journal, as a senior adviser for any number of scientific/political organizations, and as a scientific writer. I do all these things in my job as an academic research scientist, in addition to planning research projects and figuring out how to implement them. One must also figure out how to do all these things on a limited budget if such is the case. Academia is really a creative profession, in more ways than one. 

Considering the pursuit of an academic career

A new school year is upon us. For some students, it means starting the last year of high school or college, with all of the decisions the last year entails—what will I do after high school, will I go on to college, or if finished with college, what will I do after that, will I go on to graduate school, medical school, law school, or will I try to find a job instead? None of these decisions is trivial; in fact, what you choose to do with your life in your late teens/twenties often determines the type of field you remain in for the rest of your work life. It’s not impossible to move out of that field in an attempt to change career path, and it’s entirely possible to shift to a new type of job within one field. I just want to point out that it’s worth considering what is available to you in terms of careers if you choose to, for example, pursue a doctorate in the natural or life sciences.

I have mentored a number of PhD students through the years, as both primary and secondary advisor; I can tell you that for each year that passes, it becomes harder for me to encourage college graduates to pursue doctoral studies. There are many reasons for this; none of them have to do with money. Stipends for PhD students are in fact quite good now, at least in Scandinavia, ditto for postdocs and scientists, in contrast to the meager salaries for all of these positions some fifteen to twenty years ago. The problems have more to do with why you might want to pursue a PhD, and where you see yourself with that PhD in ten years. It is a topic for serious consideration before you start a PhD program, not during or after you finish. You would think this would be the normal common-sense approach; I can tell you that the opposite is often true. Students start PhD studies without a real understanding of what they’re choosing or what it will lead to. They may have a friend who has started on his or her doctorate; they may see it as a way to ‘postpone’ having to think about what it is they want to do with their lives. The fact remains--it is much harder now to get a postdoctoral position after you finish your PhD than it was fifteen years ago; if you are lucky to get a postdoctoral position, it becomes that much harder to obtain grant funding to become a research scientist, and so on. With each step, the eye of the needle narrows. Academia is elitist; the higher up the ladder you come, the more elitist it gets. There is no guarantee that you will be able to have a research career in academia, if you define that as being an independent principal investigator with a small research group. You will find that the doors close once you finish the doctorate, doors that once were open to you. Where you were once encouraged, you are now discouraged. It can happen very directly, when you are told that you are not good enough to pursue a postdoc, or more commonly, you are simply denied the opportunity to go forward because you will not get funding to go forward. There is a long list of potential postdoc candidates each year that wait to hear if they have gotten funding or not. And then let’s say for argument’s sake that you get postdoctoral funding for some years; after you finish that work, you start the real work—of trying to become an independent principal investigator and scientist, one who has his or her own grant funding for specific projects, technical support, lab space, and other such necessities. You need these things, otherwise you get nowhere. So back to my own consideration at the beginning of this paragraph--how can I encourage college graduates to go down the PhD path when I know that doing so will most likely not lead to career opportunities for them within academia or even outside of academia? Many scientific and biotech companies consider job applicants with PhDs to be overqualified. They would prefer that their salespeople are well-educated, but not necessarily at the doctoral level.

So perhaps it makes sense to just focus on and encourage the very few top students at all academic levels. It would mean fewer PhD students overall, but perhaps that is best for all concerned. In this way, academia can remain elitist—for the very few who have made it through the eye of the needle. However, the focus nowadays in the academic circles I wander through is that ‘the more PhD students, the better’. This of course is from the standpoints of the mentors and group leaders, who eye potential students as means to their ends—more publications and thus more money, more hands for the inevitable and time-consuming lab work, and so on. Research groups with many PhD students are looked favorably upon. Those who manage to accumulate a number of such students are considered successful in academia, because a large group generates grant funding, whereas a small group does not. The trend nowadays is to merge small groups into larger ones; doing so increases the chances of getting funding and getting more students. This is all well and good for the large research group; I’m just not sure it’s in the best interests of the PhD students who are looking at a different sort of future when it comes to the job market. It may just be me, but it seems rather pointless to invest a large amount of time and energy in mentoring students who will not be staying in academia. Most of the PhD students I have had the privilege of knowing finished their degrees and left academia for jobs in industry; they are salespeople, application specialists, clinical research associates, and the like. These jobs are all very good jobs, but they do not necessarily require a PhD. Many of these men and women are glad they took their PhDs in terms of having fulfilled a personal goal; some are not. The latter are those who originally wanted (or thought they did) an academic career, and were tossed around in the system by mentors who did not really care about their professional advancement. Or they experienced the nightmare of being one of many doctoral students in a research group, all of whom required their own research projects, all of whom struggled with their group leader over how their projects were defined and who had the primary responsibility for these projects. These few students were exceptionally bright and talented, and in my estimation, were forced out by group leaders who made it impossible for them to stay, because their intelligence and directness challenged the group leader. Or because the group leader knew that there was nothing to offer them in the way of an actual career. So wouldn’t it have made more sense to have discouraged them at a much earlier time point?

Should you pursue a doctorate and an academic research career? No one can answer that question for you. Think long and hard about what you want out of life. If you choose the academic route, know that you have chosen a career where you will always have homework or the feeling of not having finished your homework, where you will work long hours in the lab or in the office analyzing data and writing articles. Unless you are extremely bright, talented and creative, you will not rise in the system. And even if you are all of these, there is no guarantee that you will rise in the system—due to other factors such as political jockeying, pissing contests, and the like. You’ve got to know and understand, really understand, what it is you are choosing. If you don’t, you can end up like many middle-aged and close-to-retirement academic researchers in the current system who find themselves with little funding and no students. The system changed and they were displaced. The small groups they ran are not interesting anymore. They hang on ‘in quiet desperation’. They are small-fish small-pond scientists who suddenly found themselves in larger ponds, at the mercy of the larger and more predatory fish. That is the current reality of many research academics. There are less stressful ways to make a living.  

Exploitation of good scientists and the perpetuation of lies

Yesterday was one of those days that tested my patience big-time and I don’t think I passed the test. The day started out with a seminar (sponsored by Forskerforbundet) dealing with the problem of the lack of permanent positions for research scientists in Norway. Some of the lectures were good, others were not. I left the seminar during the early afternoon feeling a bit provoked by several of the lectures. One of the speakers (who belongs to an elite group of MD scientists that are well-funded with big research groups) was trying to defend his (and the new hospital conglomerate’s) position concerning keeping non-MD scientists working in temporary positions in biomedical research. His line of defense was that the lack of permanent (‘tenured’) positions keeps scientists competitive and on the cutting-edge and that to ‘reward’ them with a permanent stable job would take that edge away and lead to mediocrity. He also said that there was no fate worse than being a poor to mediocre scientist—that this was a fate worse than death in his estimation. I am sure he managed to alienate a good number of scientists sitting in the audience who perhaps have had problems recently producing enough articles to qualify for the status of good scientist. Because that is how this speaker defines a good scientist—as a researcher who produces a good number of articles per year. How lucky for him—he has a huge group while the majority of the scientists sitting in the audience do not. It was easy for him to reveal his arrogance and it was infuriating to listen to because he displayed no understanding whatsoever for the current situation that many non-MD scientists find themselves in these days.

I realize that when I talk about academic biomedical science in Norway, there is no possible way for those outside of the system and the country to understand how unbelievably elitist the system has been for so many years. It is not possible to understand it without knowledge of the history that underlies the elitism. Biomedical research science has mostly been done by MDs for years, and the system is set up so as to prioritize, promote and to reward MDs who want to do research. Years ago this meant that MDs who had hospital jobs could do research on the side; it perhaps would be better to say that they were provided with technicians who did the lab work for them and provided the doctors with data so that they could write articles. If they accumulated enough articles they could submit a thesis with these articles and defend it, obtaining the degree of doctor of medicine (corresponding to a PhD degree in other countries). Doctors could go into the lab and do some of the research work if they wanted, but they did not have to—it was not a requirement for the degree. They could take as long as they wanted to finish the degree and they were often in their forties when they finished. This was the way it was done when I started working at my hospital’s research institute twenty years ago. The PhD system has changed over the years, but doctors are still prioritized when they start PhD programs from the standpoint that they are often offered technical help while non-MD PhD students are not. This has never sat well with me because as far as I am concerned, if both groups start a PhD program and are doing it full-time, as is the case with the new system, I don’t understand why the MD-PhD students should get preferential treatment. But they still do, at least at my hospital. At one point they also got a slightly higher salary than non-MD PhD students, although this is not the case anymore. All of this was and is done to encourage MDs to get interested in research and to take PhD degrees. That looks good for a hospital trying to present itself as a research hospital. The sad thing is that my hospital has never been particularly interested in promoting its non-MD PhD students or scientists. I find it sad because implicit in this philosophy is the idea that MDs have a better grip on biomedical research problems than non-MDs. I simply don’t buy into this philosophy. It has gotten better in the past five or so years, such that non-MDs who are doing biomedical research have better chances at making it in the system than they used to. But there is still a long way to go. It is strange that already during the 1980s in New York City at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Institute it was not a problem for non-MDs to lead major biomedical research programs. The same was and is true of the University of California at San Francisco during the early 1990s. There were a number of non-MD staff scientists at both places working on biomedical/cancer research projects and/or leading those programs. MDs and non-MDs also worked together in teams and it worked just fine. That’s how it should be—teamwork—a team of equals. I could continue on down the list of institutions where this worked. In Norway, I just don’t get it. I’ve been told that non-MD researchers cannot teach in medical school—again I don’t understand why they couldn’t teach histology or pathology or cell biology, if they’ve specialized in these fields and taken their PhDs in them. I know non-MD scientists in the USA who taught medical school courses and who were appointed to professorships in clinical specialties without having an MD. But that’s the USA. No matter how many times I’ve been told that the USA is elitist, capitalistic, competitive (ad nauseum) in its approach to most things, I can tell you that I have never experienced as much elitism in biomedical research science as I have in Norway. The discrimination is against non-MD biomedical research scientists.

So that leads me to the current problem with lack of job stability for non-MD biomedical research scientists. It’s a complicated situation. Over the past twenty years, common practice was that non-MD PhD students finished their PhDs and started their post-doctoral positions, often in the same lab or in the same institute because mobility was not encouraged and there were too few corporate/industry jobs available anyway (unless they wanted to work in marketing or sales). They were encouraged to continue on an academic track because the MDs leading the research programs saw an opportunity to utilize their competence to help new PhD students and MDs who wanted to do some research but did not want to commit full-time at the outset. The non-MD post-docs wanted to please their group leaders and they wanted some sort of job because they liked biomedical research, so they stayed put and did what they were told and did not react when they realized they were being misused. The group leaders could extend their post-doc positions (via external funding) so that many of them ended up working three post-doc periods in a row (a total of 9 to 12 years). This is not done in the USA. Some of them were told they could work as scientists (also up to 9 years split over three periods). For many non-MD scientists this could mean up to 21 years in untenured positions. This is what happened to many of the non-MD scientists in my generation. When they reached middle age they were out of a job because external funding for their positions ran out. It was ‘expected’ that the hospitals would employ them permanently full-time. When they appealed to their hospitals for help, they were told that there was not enough money to employ them all in permanent positions (which was the case from the start point but they were not told this). Or they were told that they were ‘good but not good enough’, in other words, mediocre--the ‘fate worse than death’ according to the elitist lecturer—whose suggestion would then be to ‘run along’ and find something else to do and let the ‘best’ scientists run the show.  Along the way some of the non-MD scientists figured this crap out and started new jobs elsewhere, perhaps working as salespeople in industry (there were very few possibilities outside of academic research science to do research if you had a PhD during the 1990s). This led to the current situation in some hospital research institutes—at one institute alone there are almost fifty scientists ‘waiting’ for a job, all of whom have done very good work. It’s not that they cannot leave and find another job elsewhere. But perhaps they don’t want to because they’ve invested twenty years in one field—or they have students for whom they are mentors, or a number of reasons, all of which make sense in one way or another except to hospital leadership who now want to be rid of them. I think the system as it has been in Norway is a brutal one, much more brutal  than in the USA, where you are often finished with your PhD in your mid-twenties and your post-doc period by the time you are thirty years old. By that time, your mentor has essentially given you an indication of whether or not you should continue in academia or not, or maybe you’ve figured it out for yourself. If you don’t want to continue in academia, you have many jobs to move into in the corporate and R&D world. Or you can work in civil service, or in pharmaceutical firms. It is not a problem to find a job outside of academia. That has not been the case in Norway. Norway did not plan on having so many non-MDs take PhD degrees and then want to actually use those degrees afterwards.

So what are non-MD scientists who want to do academic biomedical research facing these days? Budget cuts, very few jobs, defensive hospital leadership who know they have a real problem on their hands, a cutthroat competitive environment that in and of itself competes with a socialist undercurrent telling the scientists that they can make it because everyone is equal (such crap—everyone cannot be the best). But do they hear this from the (MD) group leaders they work for? No, because these leaders don’t want to lose their gravy trains—a pool of slave labor that is afraid to open its mouth because if it does, the individual scientists will be labeled as difficult and not team players and they will lose their ‘chance’ at any permanent position that arises. It is an unfair system and it needs to be ripped wide open and exposed for what it is—exploitation of good scientists and the perpetuation of the major lie—that there is a permanent position for each of them—‘just wait around long enough and it will happen’. But it doesn’t and the longer one waits the harder it gets to find something else—because when you are in your fifties, you are considered old in terms of being hired for a new job. My advice to the younger students—know what you are choosing if you choose to remain in academic biomedical research science—you are choosing a dearth of jobs, an uncertain future, a cutthroat environment, competition with MDs for program leaderships and an essentially anonymous identity and existence to hospital leadership.