Bashir

NIH is bringing out the big guns to address the often discussed issue of the under representation of minorities in science. Which I'm sure is tough given the general grant crunch and sequester issue. You can read all about it here and here. If you don't care to wade into a thicket of admin-speak here are some highlights.

"six-month planning grants to enable under-resourced institutions to form partnerships and position themselves to prepare applications for the multi-year BUILD implementation funding opportunity, anticipated to be announced in 2014"

Basically grant to help you plan to apply for a grant. But what is BUILD exactly?

"This program aims to provide innovative training environments through the Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) initiative, a strong national mentoring network through the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) initiative, and robust coordination to disseminate lessons learned from the most effective programs through the Coordination and Evaluation Center (CEC) initiative...."

"BUILD will allow the development and testing of novel models for underrepresented student recruitment and training within the biomedical sciences."

A mentoring network and some long term tests about what they might-could do about the issue. That's it. The due dates for this "planning to think about maybe considering at some future time doing some mentoring of minorities" grant has just past. The NIH diversity page just looks like this:

Makes sense.

Psychology & Neuroscience have some great stories that combine human interest and scientific mysteries. Oliver Sacks uses this to great effect in his books (I highly recommend The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat). One of the more interesting stories is getting a book treatment. H.M. the amnesiac patient. To make a long story short & simple, H.M. to treat a problem with seizures, had brain surgery way back in the 1950s. That involved having a lot of his hippocampus removed. Turns out it's kinda important for memory formation. So H.M. just stopped forming memories and became 'stuck' in the 1950s. For some time he participated in memory research as perhaps the most important single participant in human brain research.  Memory researcher Suzanne Corkin, who worked with him for some time, has penned a book aptly titled Permanent Present Tense. This is another one of those, unique person contributes to science stories, similar to Henrietta Lacks (without the ethical issues).

"He is considered the most important patient in the study of the human brain, known worldwide only by his initials, HM. In death, we learned his name. He was Henry Gustav Molaison. He died at a nursing home on December 2, 2008, at the age of 82, after living for most of his life in a state of permanent amnesia. Over 55 years, Mr. Molaison was the subject of intense scientific study, and he's credited with helping scientists unlock secrets of how we form memories. When he was 27, Mr. Molaison underwent brain surgery to cure a seizure disorder, and that surgery left him unable to form new memories of his own." (source)

I haven't read it, I don't have an advance copy or anything, but it will probably be interesting. Especially if you are not familiar with H.M.'s story, or what we know (and don't know) about how memory works. I will probably end up getting this one for some beach vacation reading.

Go read this bit of news published in Nature recently (especially the comments). The quick recap is that a social psychologist, Ap Dijksterhuis has an effect, published over a decade ago, that others have yet to replicate. Researcher’s are skeptical, some replication attempts have failed, he stands by the effect. There's been a lot of back and forth.

The article leaves me feeling a little uneasy. Not just the looming issue of unreplicability, but how we scientists are going to deal with it.

“[Dijksterhuis] adds that social psychology needs to get more rigorous, but that the rigour should be applied to future, not historical, experiments.”

He seems to be doing his best Mark McGwire impression: I’m not here to talk about the past (McGwire was a baseball player accused of cheating whose response was basically to suggest we all forget it and move on).

The article ends with this stinger, a quote from an email sent by one of the skeptics of the effect.

“refusal to engage in a legitimate scientific conversation … invites the interpretation that the believers are afraid of the outcome”

I don’t want to give the impression that I don't think fraud and false positives are issues.  This article in Nature, which is whether you like it or not, a flagship journal of science research. Maybe I'm reading between the lines too much here but the article seems to end with:

They’re not sayin’, they’re just sayin’.

Not to long ago baseball was in a similar situation regarding cheating with steroids.  There is clearly some bad behavior going on. We're not totally sure what to do. Ideas range from testing everyone all the time to doing nothing. Baseball went through a phase where everyone was suspect if there performance was a bit too ... unexpected. Perhaps that is where we are now?

A few years ago I had the pleasure of being a judge for the regional round of a science fair.

As cliche as it sounds, it really was a fun event. All of the students were very nice and had interesting ideas. As I walked around the poster session once thing stuck in my mind. There seemed to be a huge variation in the amount of resources each student had. At one point I talked back to back a student who was working in a university lab, "collaborating with a postdoc" , and another student who lived on a farm far from university only got help from his dad to lift heavy things. The contrast couldn't have been sharper. One was polished and screamed (not literally) future grad student. The other just seemed like a 17 year old kid with some nice ideas.

To me the impression was less about them, because I really only talked with each for about 10 mintues. And more about the gaping differences in what resources they had on the table. Of course the the university lab student's project is going to be more sophisticated, more polished.

I don't think that ever it occurred to me as a possibility to work in a university lab. When I was in high school I thought I was a badass because I sometimes worked in the university library (parent was an alum so I could check things out).

I was just reading over the recent NY times article on the Intel Science Talent Contest. I always wonder with those things how much a student from less rescourced background could do.  Some of the finalist have things like access to university super computers. How many high school students, no matter how talented can get that?

There's a good discussion of this sort of thing over at PLoS blogs.

I am finalizing a gaggle of manuscripts right now. That also means finalizing decisions about where to submit the manuscripts. The day may come when we all self publish to The Journal of WordPress. But not this day. The question is which journal? Glamour magazine for maximum impact? A specialized journal? A "society" journal?

In a fit of procrastination the other postdocs and I developed this:

Every publishing option has some relative amount of benefit and hassle. Benefit being some combination of how shiny it looks on your CV and maybe open access considerations. Hassle being time in review, likelihood of reviewers demanding additional experiments, or complaining that the paper, though fine,  isn't "impactful" enough.

This lead to a lab person saying perhaps the most efficient strategy is that all manuscripts are either going to a Glamor Magazine, because a pub there would be worth the hassle. Or a quick turn around journal, because it will be not worse than one of the "regular" journals that take ~9 months to decide.

So basically, Science, Nature or Frontiers.

An excerpt from an NIH faq on fellowship awards for grad students and postdocs.

I am planning on having a child during my fellowship. What are the NIH policies on family leave?

NRSA fellowship recipients are entitled to 15 days of sick leave per year, and up to 60 calendar days of parental leave if the institution provides that benefit to other fellows. The NRSA stipend will continue during those periods. Hence, the fellow would, in fact, be trading some research training time for the opportunity to stay at home with the child.

[a repost from the old blog.]

Being a scientist is not a particularly positive experience. By design, most of the interactions are negative. Or I should say critical. That’s just how it works both on a large scale and for each individual study. If scientists didn’t persist in providing negative critical feedback to each other, the grand enterprise would be much less efficient. That’s good for science. But for the individual scientist it’s kind of a downer.

I’m coming off a conference visit that included some good moments for me. People I’d never met had read my papers. Thought that the research I presented was interesting. Even cool. It was a very positive experience. So I thought, what can I do to facilitate that for other scientists? How can I help?

Here’s how. For the next conference I’m going to order up some Zazzle stickers with some positive feedback included. Hand them out at poster sessions or something.

Though I've wanted to be a scientist since I can remember I never really leaned towards one area or another. Physics? Marine Biology? Whatever, they were all good when I was a kid. There have been moments that  pushed me towards or away different areas. Here's one of them, slightly misremembered for humor's sake.

10th grade Chemistry. I am doing pretty well. I like chemistry. Perhaps those two are related. It makes more sense than last year's biology had. We're having a long day with a lab at the end of lecture. The goal of lab is some simple titration or something. At the end the liquid should suddenly change color. I sit at my lab bench and slowly go through the steps. Step 1..Step 2..Step 3..Step 4. Nothing. Not a big deal, things often don't work on the first try. I go over it again but slower. Step 1...Step2...Step3....Step 4. Again, nothing.

*rases hand*
"It won't work Dr.Oct"
"ok start again at the beginning. What's first?"
"Meausure out 50ml."
"ok go ahead"
*measures*
"Ok got it"
"Wait. Is that 50 ml?"
"Yes"
"Is it?"
"Yes"
*looks closer. thinks about the meniscus*
"It's about 50"
"about 50?"
"well, I mean, maybe it's 50.1"
"..."
"The reaction won't work if it's 50.1?"
"Nope."

That's when I knew I was done with chemistry.

"you make him sound like L. Ron Hubbard"
(paraphrased from here)

If you'll excuse me being a bit pedantic. I'm sure many are familiar with this. Even though scientists often work in large teams, even though breakthroughs are often made after years of foundational work. Even though all of that, individual scientists are at times put up as kind of heroes. Perhaps because they win some spectacular prize, like the recently announced Breakthrough prize. Or perhaps because they name becomes synonymous with some famous theory.

This is to some degree understandable. Who are you going to give awards to if not individual scientists? There are plenty reasons a theory might primarily associated with a specific researcher. There's no reason to pretend there aren't individuals who spearhead important work. Or that there may be some scientist whose work you admire. It's it's most slight form, this occasional tendency to focus on the individual, and less so on the data, hypothesis or theory, isn't a huge deal. For example, I was just having a discussion with a research assistant about the right way to talk about prior work in a paper. Some study finds X and is authored by Dr. Jones. Do we write out something like "Dr. Jones found X" or "research shows X (Jones, 2012)". I'm a strong proponent of the latter style, and I'm certainly not the only one. Though I've seen it both ways.

On the other hand a paper that recently found it's way to my desk is a great example of going way in the other direction. The paper presents some evidence for a certain perspective or theory, closely associated with a particular scientist. The paper is all Dr. Smith thinks this, Dr. Smith says that, isn't Dr. Smith great. The authors essentially describe themselves as "followers of Dr. Smith". That's very much not my style and I think it's a bit counterproductive for scientists to veer too far into this sort of hero worship.

"people think physicists are really bright ...but most of what we do is absolutely wrong, that's just the nature of innovation"

DNLee posted a blurb in The Root about Sylvester Gates. He's the african-american scientist who was just awarded the National Medal of Science. I remember him from my childhood. I didn't know him personally, but a family member of mine knew him way back when. Whenever there was a write up or PBS appearance by Dr. Gates it would find it's way to my desk.

My html-foo fails me, so no embed, but here is a link to one of his PBS videos on String Theory. And another mini-interview. I had a good one of him talking about race in his science career that I saw (on VHS!). If I ever find it I'll post it.