Reflections on careers--my husband's and my own

I remember the first time I traveled abroad; it was in August 1987. I attended a flow cytometry conference in Cambridge, England, and had planned my trip such that I had a few days to myself in London before I made my way north to Cambridge by train. I've written about this trip before, so I won't retell the story. Suffice it to say that I met some really wonderful people who made me feel right at home in England, and I'll never forget them. 

The Society for Analytical Cytology (SAC)--that was the organization responsible for the conference. It is now known as the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC), even though it was always an international conference from day one. When I started working in the Investigative Cytology lab at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 1982, I had the privilege of working with some of the founding fathers of flow cytometry/flow cytometric techniques--Myron Melamed, Zbigniew Darzynkiewicz, Frank Traganos, and Don Evenson. I knew already then that I was in the presence of scientific visionaries; men who were ambitious and generous with their expertise and time. Their lab was a dynamic place; inspiring and progressive. There was room to grow, and I did, under their tutelage. Their generosity extended to allowing all lab members to travel to relevant conferences, and that's how I ended up in Cambridge, England. 

After I arrived in Cambridge and settled in (a simple dorm room with a bed, desk, closet and chair), I found my way to the conference hall for the introductory lecture and presentation of the conference schedule. I sat alone in the auditorium, but after some time a woman entered and went to the podium area to check on the microphones. I have never forgotten her because she had dark hair with a large gray streak; her name was Donna Arndt-Jovin. From what I heard at a later time point, she was an American who had married a German scientist, Tom Jovin, and they lived in Germany. When I heard more about her life, I thought it was so interesting that she had married a fellow scientist and that they shared a passion for flow cytometry. This was before I met my husband, so I had no idea of what was to transpire in the coming years. The only thing I knew was that I liked the fact that they were professional equals. It appealed to me, to be able to share your work life with your spouse. 

My husband retired yesterday, and his department (Radiation Biology) gave him a very nice sendoff--an afternoon gathering with cakes, coffee, and speeches about his 44-year long career and what he has meant to his department. He is one of a rare breed of employees that remained at the same workplace for his entire career, of course in different positions. He started as a Master student, got his PhD in biophysics, did a postdoc, and then was hired as a full-time cancer researcher. He eventually became a research group leader but also leader of the flow cytometry core facility. I met him in 1987 in Cambridge, when he came over to and sat down at our table in one of the pubs my lab colleagues and I frequented. I believe it was the pub where Watson and Crick (of DNA helix structure fame) met and discussed their findings. He and I hit it off, and the rest as they say is history. 

I reflected on all of this yesterday when I listened to the talks and saw the slides that rotated continually throughout the afternoon. Some of them were of him and me, together at conferences. We looked so young in some of them; so strange to think that we are now at retirement age. We attended nearly every flow cytometry conference that SAC and ISAC arranged, which meant that we got to travel to some interesting places, among them: Hilton Head Island, SC; Cambridge, England; Breckenridge, CO; Asheville, NC; Bergen, Norway; Colorado Springs, CO; Lake Placid, NY; Montpellier, France (twice); Budapest, Hungary; Leipzig, Germany. The Norwegian Cancer Society was always generous enough to pay for these conferences; the professional and social (networking) gains were worth the money. Even though I moved to Norway after I met my husband, I kept in touch with my former colleagues via these meetings, and of course via Christmas cards and eventually emails. It always felt like a small world--this network of cytometrists. We all knew each other, and it was always enjoyable to meet again at conferences. 

I retired in August 2021, and now my husband is retired. We were both cancer researchers (my PhD is in tumor cell biology) and flow cytometrists. I realized yesterday that my first thought at my first conference in Cambridge--that it would be nice to have a spouse who shared my work interests--in fact became a reality. I hadn't really reflected fully on that until yesterday when I saw the photos of us together. During the past thirty years, we've collaborated on a number of research projects, and I must say that those times were fun times; not only enjoyable in terms of both our research teams working together and getting to know each other, but also the professional enjoyment connected to a job well-done (published papers and presentations at meetings). I'm thankful for the past thirty years, that we made that happen. We chose that path, despite the occasional difficulties and differences of opinion. It was worth it. 

When I retired, I was happy to leave my workplace behind. I had been ready to do so for several years prior. I too was given a nice sendoff by my department, and I left knowing that I had done the best job I could do under the circumstances (very little research support and reduced staff). However, I do feel that he was valued in a more concrete way by his department than I was by mine; he had firmer support from research leadership than I did. I stay in touch with former colleagues; we meet for dinner a few times a year, and in the summertime, I invite them to a garden party. I hope for my husband that he stays in touch with some of his colleagues, who became friends over the years. They will miss him, that I know, because he, like my former bosses at Memorial, was very knowledgeable and generous with his expertise and time. 

Is our brain a quantum field?

I found this article very interesting: Your Brain Isn't a Computer — It's a Quantum Field. It's from 2015, but quite relevant today as well. 

Your Brain Isn't a Computer — It's a Quantum Field - Big Think

The by-line under the title states: 

"By examining our minds at a quantum level, we change them, and by changing them, we change the reality that shapes them".

Think about how extraordinary that is. It is intellectual evolution in action. Very fluid. We continually create our reality because the brain is behaves like a quantum universe. One of the paragraphs toward the end of the article explains this very well:

"The mind then, according to quantum cognition, "gambles" with our "uncertain" reason, feelings, and biases to produce competing thoughts, ideas, and opinions. Then we synthesize those competing options to relate to our relatively "certain" realities. By examining our minds at a quantum level, we change them, and by changing them, we change the reality that shapes them".

It is said that the brain is the last unexplored frontier, and that the 21st century will focus on exploring the brain. I can't wait to read more about how our brains create our reality and how that fits in with the idea of a quantum universe.  

Back to the grind

And so it’s back to the grind after five weeks of summer vacation. Back to work after the wonderful freedom of not working. When I was a child in grammar school, I couldn’t wait for summer vacation to be over so that I could go back to school. It’s not that I didn’t like having the time off, it’s just that at some point it felt good to think about preparing for school again. When we were children, our job was to go to school and that was fine with me. I never experienced school as prison, like many of my fellow students. I felt pretty much the same way about high school and college; I enjoyed school and learning and felt privileged to be able to go to school. By the time I got to graduate school however, I was tired of rote education and felt the need to get out and work, to apply what I’d learned. I’ve been in the workforce for nearly forty years now, and most of those years have been interesting, motivating and productive. Motivation has dwindled however in the last five years or so, not because I lost interest in my research work, but because the research system changed into something I no longer recognized, with its emphasis on selling yourself, hyping your ideas, hiring and promoting extroverts, and networking ad nauseam. Since I am not an extrovert, and since I don’t feel comfortable around braggarts or bragging about my own work, I’ve pulled back and become an observer of what goes on around me. It’s been interesting to observe the rise and fall of the show-boaters. I suppose the pendulum will eventually swing back toward the middle, where it will be ok again to do your research work quietly, efficiently and well. I long for those days to return, but I doubt that they will before I retire. And that’s quite ok too. I’ve had a good run and it’s time for the younger scientists to take over. I have accepted this, but it’s actually interesting and somewhat humorous to see that others haven’t accepted this—I am still mentoring students, still running into the lab to answer questions, find something in the refrigerator, check out a lab procedure, and so forth. I no longer have funding for lab consumables, so I make do by utilizing antibodies and tissue sections that were bought and prepared several years ago. Who knew that I would be able to see into the future then and prepare for the drought? I was smart enough to prepare and it has paid off somewhat in the sense that I am not completely bereft of lab consumables. I just cannot purchase new ones, and the likelihood of getting funded at this point in time is slim. But as people say to me, ‘never say never’, even though deep down I hold out little hope of further funding.

So I look forward to retiring and only wish I could do so now instead of having to wait another three years. Three more years of grant application rejections, three more years of research article rejections, three more years of remaining patient in the face of a stupid uncaring system. Three more years of futile salary discussions in a system that has no budget to give its employees a lift (because most of the money is being used to pay the exorbitant salaries of the leaders who abound about us like rabbits). They multiply three-fold each year. We’re up to six levels of leadership now and I don’t have a clue as to what any of them do each day. Three more years of braggarts, of researchers with huge amounts of funding who don’t have a clue as to how the other half lives. I tell people the truth—I have no funding, zero, zip, nada. That’s how it goes, and I’m fine with it. I only wish I could exit stage left now.  

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. 

The future of scientific publishing

Open Access (OA) is in the wind these days, especially if you work in academia and publish articles as part of your research work. If you work at a university or are a student there, you will come across the term Open Access. What is Open Access? Wikipedia provides a very good definition; I urge you to read their page about Open Access—it will give you a good background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access. Open Access is ‘the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles’. Simply put, it means that if you as a potential reader (whether you work at a university or not) find a scientific or medical article of interest online that you’d like to read, that you can click on the link to that article and read it online or download it for future reading from the website of the journal that published it. You may think this is common practice and not problematic; neither are true. You may not have considered what underlies your being allowed to access an article online if you are a student or researcher at a university. Your access to those articles is not necessarily ‘open’, or traditionally has not been open. That is because most published articles are closed access publications in non-OA subscription-based journals; they have been published in a specific journal, and that journal restricts access to a published article by making individual readers pay for the privilege of accessing it, if you are not working at a university. Or they make university libraries pay exorbitant subscription fees in order to provide online access to those articles and/or print copies containing those articles to students and academics at all levels.

Many people know little to nothing about OA, or if they’ve heard about it, it’s not something to which they’ve paid much attention. That’s understandable, since unless you have a career in academic research science where your research work can be published in a journal of some sort, you’re not likely to care too much about the scientific publishing process or about how much it costs to publish an article these days or about how much it can cost to access that published article afterwards. There are even academics who know very little about it, taking for granted that their published articles are accessible to all who are interested, or that they will have access to published articles that they are interested in. What some of them haven’t understood is that the university libraries have ensured that they have had access to innumerable journals in their fields of interest—chemistry, biology, physics, medicine, geology, etc. up to this point. This is because the libraries have paid costly subscription fees to gain online access and/or to receive print copies of the journals. These subscriptions are part of their annual budgets. This system has been in place for many years.

As a scientist, I am interested in promoting Open Access publishing, for a number of reasons.  First and foremost, I believe it is the future of scientific publishing, and I’d like the future to be here now. (I also believe that self-publishing is the future if you want to publish your own books; it allows you to bypass traditional publishing houses that mostly reject first-time authors. I wrote a post about that in 2010: http://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.no/2010/08/publish-your-book-using-createspace.html). We academics already do most of the prep work before we submit our scientific articles, prep work that was previously done by the journals; we format the text and prepare figures and tables according to guidelines provided by the journal, we upload those formatted files to the journal website, and we edit the compiled version of the article that the journal provides to us after receiving the uploaded files. In other words, we now do much of the work that the journals used to do for us before; they are not doing us any favors. If you’ve ever submitted an article online for publication, you will know what I’m talking about; the process is not for sissies. In addition, we often pay just to submit our articles to a journal, even to a journal that the university library already subscribes to (e.g. Cancer Research) although not all journals have this requirement. We also must pay page charges if we want color figures, or if our article goes over the page limit. We must pay to get reprints of an article or pay to receive a pdf version of our article created by the journal that represents the final published version. If you choose to receive a pdf file of the published article, you are not allowed by the journal to distribute free copies of your published article to those who might want to read it. For that privilege, you are expected to pay for journal reprints. It’s a costly business for many scientists, whose budgets continue to dwindle with each year that passes.  

I chose to publish one of my scientific articles in the OA journal Molecular Cancer already back in 2004; that’s how strongly I believed in the future of OA publishing then, and still do now. Gold OA journals provide immediate access to your published article on their websites; Molecular Cancer is one of the journals offered by BioMed Central, which is the first OA science publisher (started up in 2000) and one of the largest in the world. You as a potential reader do not have to pay them to access my article; I do not have to pay them for permission to distribute my article freely to whomever I choose. In fact, I am including the link to my 2004 article here, if you’d like to read it: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1476-4598-3-11.pdf.

I chose to publish in Molecular Cancer again in 2006 because I had had such a good experience with them in 2004; here is the link to that article: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/content/pdf/1476-4598-5-20.pdf. This article, by the way, is a highly-accessed article (yes, you get to know the statistics for your article—how many times it’s been accessed/downloaded, and when—quite useful). That makes me feel pretty good, because I know that the work is solid and that the data are quite interesting.

I use the word ‘chose’; the fact is that my articles went through rigorous peer review before they were accepted for publication. There is NO guarantee that your article will automatically be accepted for publication in an OA journal; there is still editorial and peer review to go through. I have had a total of three articles to date published in OA journals (the third one a collaborative effort with Italian colleagues in 2009: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/content/pdf/1476-4598-8-55.pdf). But I have also had two articles that were not accepted for publication in this journal. That has not discouraged me. It merely reinforces my opinion that the OA system works just as well as traditional non-OA publishing; it is not ‘easier’ to get published in OA journals than in non-OA journals. There are good OA journals and poor quality OA journals, just as there are good and bad non-OA journals. The impact factor for Molecular Cancer is 3.99, pretty good—around the middle of the scale. But I don’t worry too much about impact factor, even though most of my peers do and even though we are encouraged to do so by our workplaces; I am more concerned with reaching potential readers and making my work accessible to a larger public. Because of course the potential reach is global. I probably should care more about impact factor, because it gets your research ‘noticed’ and funded by granting agencies—the more publications you have in high impact-factor non-OA subscription-based journals (like Nature and Science), the better your chances of getting your research projects funded. These are the ‘eye of the needle’ journals—only an elite few ever get to publish here. And the reasons for that could fill another blog post. To give an example of how non-OA journals make it difficult to get access to articles, check out this article in Science magazine; if you want to access and/or to download it, you have to pay for that privilege: 
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/303, unless you work or study at a university that subscribes to this journal. As far as I'm concerned, this is an incredibly old-fashioned and elitist way of doing things. 

Is OA publishing free for authors? Not necessarily, but it can be if the university or institution you work for is a member institution. I refer you to the ‘article-processing charges FAQ’ page on the BioMed Central website; it explains this aspect better than I can: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/about/apcfaq. The major and most important point for pushing for open access journals is that once research articles are published in them, they are immediately and freely-accessible to anyone in the world who wants to access them. That is not the case for non-OA subscription-based journals.  

If you would like to read more about Open Access, I recommend the following websites:

·         Open Access http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

·         Directory of Open Access journals http://www.doaj.org/

·         Open Access Directory http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Main_Page

·         The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020961

·         Video describing Open Access http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#015

From pimp my ride to pimp my research

I attended another interesting event sponsored by the UiO Science library this morning, a lecture about how to ‘pimp’ your research, followed by a really interesting discussion about pimping of research in general—should it be pimped, how it should be done, and who should be responsible for pimping. The scientist who held the lecture and who guided the discussion afterwards was Gro Amdam, whom I’ve mentioned before in a previous post. Professor Amdam is a Norwegian scientist who runs two research labs, one at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Aas Norway, the other at Arizona State University in the USA. She is a honeybee researcher and a top scientist, with many publications in top international journals; you can read more about her labs, work, publications and view her journal covers here: http://amdamlab.asu.edu/. Some of the scientists I talked to about this event when I was promoting it a few weeks ago were a bit skeptical; perhaps mostly skeptical to the terminology—pimping. They weren’t sure what was meant by pimping research, and instead of being curious enough to find out more about it, they didn’t attend. They should have, because they missed a really good and professional presentation about the subject and an interesting discussion afterwards. Pimping is defined as ‘giving something a smarter or more interesting appearance’; some excellent examples in my opinion are Amdam's journal covers—beautiful photos of bees and flowers that add an important visual aspect to the research work that was published inside the specific issue. She emphasized that it was pimping the (high-quality) work that was important; this was not a talk about how to pimp the scientist. But the scientist can become well-known because of the quality of the work via good pimping—and that’s a good thing. It helps get research grants, funding, and international recognition.

There was a good deal of discussion about the cultural differences and approaches to pimping between the USA and Norway. In the USA, research pimping is an accepted and encouraged activity at universities; the idea is relatively new in Norway. Most of the Norwegian attendees were very positive to the idea, some were skeptical. But that’s the point of a good discussion—to get the ideas out there and to get people started talking about them.

What struck me afterwards was that the Science library (Realfagsbiblioteket) has done a fair amount of pimping in its own right. The beautiful and professionally-done trailers about the invited scientists who come to the library to hold lectures and workshops are a good example of the library (KBH and AC) pimping the work and careers of these scientists; these trailers have been uploaded to SlideShare if you are interested in seeing them: http://www.slideshare.net/Realfagsbiblioteket/presentations. 

Musings about science and scientists, and the weather

I’ve been at a scientific conference (dealing with the cell cycle and regulators of cell proliferation) most of the week; it started on Monday night and ended this morning. I wasn’t able to attend all the sessions each day, but I managed to be present for some really top-notch lectures delivered by Nobel prize winners and international experts in their respective fields. That’s always an encouraging and inspiring experience; it reminds me of why I chose this profession—a scientific research career, when I hear top speakers talk about their work. Many of the top speakers were older men who more or less summed up their research careers in their lectures. I have more appreciation for that type of lecture now—maybe because I’ve been in research a long time myself. I know the ins and outs and ups and downs of this business, and I appreciate hearing the opinions advanced by these speakers, because they know what they’re talking about. So when a few of them talk about the importance of small research groups as opposed to large ones, I’m suddenly all ears. I agree with them. Small groups are the places where innovative ideas are born. We should not be getting rid of small research groups. We should not be discouraging younger people from pursuing academic careers. But the granting powers that be are doing so. By not funding scientists who lead small research groups, they ensure that younger scientists cannot continue because they will never get the chance to start their own small groups. By not encouraging younger scientists to fly free rather than clipping their wings which happens all the time now, we are eliminating the pool of future scientists that each society so absolutely requires. Younger scientists are leaving academia. There is no place for most of them. There are no jobs for them and there is no real future for them. This is confirmed for me at most conferences. Younger scientists in this country (post-doc level and above) are little more than slaves for their group leaders. They are doing two and three post-doc periods and finding themselves without any prospects after they finish. They are not being offered staff scientist positions or group leader status. They’re rather told that they’re too aggressive or too independent. And they are, of course. Who wouldn’t be after three post-doc periods? That’s the point of post-doc periods—to create independence and self-sufficiency in intelligent and enthusiastic scientists. But their wings are being clipped in huge numbers, and the granting situation for the future will ensure that there will eventually be no post-doc or staff scientist positions at all. But there will be a lot of PhD student positions. God knows what this country will do with all the new PhD recipients. There aren’t jobs for them. And little is being done to create new jobs for them. Many of them will end up as salespeople or will leave the profession for greener pastures. The only reason there are currently so many PhD positions is because the principal investigators who run research groups need slaves and lots of hands to do their work for them while they are busy writing grants and networking with their fellow group leaders. They know there is no real research future for the PhDs they’re turning out, either in academia or in industry. And industry is not really stepping up to the plate to meet the future needs either.  

The meeting was held at the Holmenkollen Park Rica Hotel at the top of the city of Oslo, literally. On a clear day, there is an amazing view of the fjord and of the city from this vantage point. But of course, the weather this past week was not cooperative, so the hilltop and hotel were mostly shrouded in fog, and when there wasn’t fog, it was raining. I cannot remember a summer like this one—it has rained steadily, if not daily, at least several times per week. The non-Norwegians at the meeting were asking me if the weather was always like this. It isn’t. Today was a perfect example. The last day of the meeting is of course when the sun chose to reappear and blue skies took over--just perfect for walking. So I walked to work from the top of the city to my hospital. It took me about an hour door to door. Relaxing and enjoyable to walk downhill for the most part, take in the nature around me, and just enjoy being outdoors in the sunshine. It was a sharp contrast to Tuesday night, when the entire meeting was treated to a boat trip on the fjord. It happened to take place on exactly the one night of the summer when a storm (remnants of Hurricane Irene in fact) blew into Oslo, causing flooding and all sorts of other problems. We did sail out on the fjord though—the trip was not cancelled. We stayed more or less on the inner fjord, so the waves were not very high. The boat was quite large so it was actually not a problem to be out on the water. But the wind whipped the sails about and the rain was unrelenting, so we were forced into the boat’s innards where dinner awaited, and that was cozy. People had a good time and that was the most important thing. I know that the foreigners at the meeting will remember this particular trip. It’s not often you get to sail on a boat during a fairly intense storm.

It was heartening to meet a lot of the scientists who were at this conference. For some reason, most of the top scientists who attended were actually quite down-to-earth people—friendly, interested in others, and interesting to talk to. It made me wonder about the correlation between real intelligence and humility. If you are really intelligent, perhaps you don’t need to flaunt it or to treat other people poorly. So perhaps this is one explanation for what I see in my workplace—several rude people who think they are intelligent (but who really are not), and who need to be arrogant and rude to others because they are insecure about their intelligence. They need to make others feel inferior in order for them to feel superior. Kind of makes sense to me now. This has been reinforced for me by some of the lecturers I have had the privilege of listening to at the Science library at the University of Oslo. They have been given by some really incredible human beings, people you’d be proud to know. This gives me hope for the future of science generally.

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.