The question got me thinking (again) about some of the fuzzier types of COI. Although funding agencies and journals may have detailed definitions of what constitutes a COI, there are some situations that may not be *official* conflicts, but maybe sort of are, depending on the situation/people. What are these, and what to do about them?

If you have an official, unambiguous COI, you should not do a review/edit the manuscript, review the proposal etc., but if you have a sort-of-maybe (fuzzy) COI, you can reveal it to the program directors (for example, NSF provides a little box for this very thing in its review forms) or in a confidential message to an editor. What are some examples of these?

For discussion purposes, here is a partial list of situations in which I had a 'connection' of some sort to an author or proposal PI -- perhaps not a strict COI but still a connection that in some cases maybe may need to be revealed (or not, as the case may be).

- Some of the undergrads in the classes/labs I taught as a grad student teaching assistant are now professors. I have encountered a few of them professionally over the years. I don't consider this a conflict of interest, although there are some ways in which the TA-student interaction has affected my opinion of these people. In one case, I declined to review a manuscript because the primary author had been a very obnoxious and high-maintenance undergraduate. I thought my personal dislike might interfere with my review, so I declined the review. I didn't give a reason, so in this case I managed my own COI.

- Some of the undergrads I have taught as a professor are now professors. If they just took a class from me and I didn't advise them in research or have any particular professional interaction other than as teacher and student in a class I might reveal the connection if it seemed relevant, but it wouldn't stop me from doing reviewing/editing unless (as in the case above) I had some particular unobjective opinion. That opinion isn't necessarily negative. For example, if an undergrad dove into a raging river to rescue drowning kittens, I would have a very high opinion of that person and might be unable to be objective about their scientific work.

- Some of the undergrads I advised in research are now professors. I have been sent their papers and proposals to review etc. In one case, the NSF program director, whom I consulted, said that I should do the review if I felt I could be objective and not do it if I felt I couldn't. S/he said that I should mention the possible COI in the confidential box for revealing such things, if I felt so inclined.

- Some of my husband's collaborators, former students, and postdocs show up in my particular corner of the Science universe from time to time, although we are in different subfields. For example, not long ago I was sent a proposal to review by someone with whom I had no known COI, and only once I got deep into the proposal did I realize that I did in fact have a major COI with this proposal. If the proposal was funded, my husband would benefit financially, even if indirectly. Having a Significant Other in the same field opens up COI possibilities all over the place. When one of us has served on an NSF panel, the other one has to provide a list of COIs so that the panel-spouse will not deal with his/her COI-in-laws. Some of those COIs might seem fuzzy (for example, if I have no idea my husband is working with a particular person), but in fact these can be quite unfuzzy.

- and then there are these miscellaneous ones that plot at various locations on the COI fuzziness spectrum: I have been sent manuscripts/proposals by members of my PhD committee (revenge opportunity?!!), former grad students I have helped advise (formally or informally) at other universities, someone who married a friend of mine from college (I introduced them!), former summer interns, and close science friends with whom I have never collaborated. I have declined to review/edit in each of those cases except one: that involving my former committee members, and in those cases I tried to decline but the powers-that-be were quite insistent that they wanted my reviews and would take into account my sort-of COI.

As we get older and our networks of collaborators and science friends and former students expand, opportunities for COI can increase dramatically with time. Eventually it may get so that we can only review or edit things by the 12 people we have never even heard of, in which case we might then have to fight against the unfair and unobjective thought that "If I haven't heard of them, they can't be any good." Well, I know people who think that way, but I am not there yet and hope I don't go anywhere near there.

Meanwhile, in terms of managing the plethora of COIs that I encounter in my career, I will continue to do what most of us do: make it up as I go along. OK, I will do a bit more than that: I will attend the required by useless 'ethics' training sessions, get advice from respected colleagues, and try to do the right thing, or at least what seems to be the most right thing, or the less worse thing. (And no, I don't think turning down any and all review requests and quitting as a journal editor is a reasonable option.)

source

Me: Hi.

pd: Hi.

Me: What's up?

pd: Soooo...I am trying to do an experiment that is tangentially related to things that people in your lab do. With a reagent that you have used.

Me: OK. I used the reagent basically the same way that was published by Other Lab.

pd: I used it in a totally different way, and I'm confused about why it didn't work.

Me: But...that reagent won't even work for the experiment you want to do. That reagent detects process A, but you are trying to look at process B.

pd: Huh. what reagent should i use?

Me: [blink]

pd: [stares]

Me: I don't know. I have never tried to study process B. Maybe you should ask the other people in your own lab that study B.

scene

Please explain to me the following: Why? What have I done wrong? Am I too nice? Is that why it should be my job to help postdocs from other fucking labs? AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHH.

Please, students and postdocs of the world. Try to think about what you are saying when you interact with faculty members, especially those that are not actually your mentor. I actually like chatting about your project. But throw me a bone here. It is not my job to do your work for you. I know that perhaps most folks don't know that the next NIH deadline is June 5. That will not stop me from being even more cranky about this interaction because I'm in the midst of grant writing.

Get off my lawn.

that is all

The threshold of $1.5 million total costs. How's that break down? Well if you are in a consensus ~50% overhead state university, let's see...Thats FOUR full-modular awards. But let's be clear, odds are you got cut by at least a module per award so that's only $900K direct..you get to be in a University with about 70% overhead and you are still clear. What bout the much-rumored 100% overhead small institutions? well, you get three R01s before you go under strict scrutiny.

I do wonder if this will satisfy all the "kill the rich" voices? Will they see this as the NIH taking them seriously or as a meaningless sop?

Next question, this is just identifying special Council level review...No guarantee that any grant will ever be blocked because the PI has too much $$. No guarantee that negotiations wouldn't be made either. "Say, PI Jones, would you please put some more junior colleague on as titular head to one of your other awards so we can give you this one"?

new MultiPI awards won't trigger the scrutiny unless all PIs trigger the threshold. Hello courtesy "multi"PIship!!!

It may possibly change some people's strategy so that they work harder to distribute effort around to other people's awards in small percentages. Like junior PI is going to screw BigCheeze over on the agreed upon part of the direct costs? No worries there.

How are study sections going to respond to this. Will they take this as the NIH saying "This is our threshold for being worried about too much money. Now shut up about this for anything below this amount."? Or will they take this as encouragement to think about lab size even more when they are reviewing the grant in front of them?

The threshold of $1.5 million total costs. How's that break down? Well if you are in a consensus ~50% overhead state university, let's see...Thats FOUR full-modular awards. But let's be clear, odds are you got cut by at least a module per award so that's only $900K direct..you get to be in a University with about 70% overhead and you are still clear. What bout the much-rumored 100% overhead small institutions? well, you get three R01s before you go under strict scrutiny.

I do wonder if this will satisfy all the "kill the rich" voices? Will they see this as the NIH taking them seriously or as a meaningless sop?

Next question, this is just identifying special Council level review...No guarantee that any grant will ever be blocked because the PI has too much $$. No guarantee that negotiations wouldn't be made either. "Say, PI Jones, would you please put some more junior colleague on as titular head to one of your other awards so we can give you this one"?

new MultiPI awards won't trigger the scrutiny unless all PIs trigger the threshold. Hello courtesy "multi"PIship!!!

It may possibly change some people's strategy so that they work harder to distribute effort around to other people's awards in small percentages. Like junior PI is going to screw BigCheeze over on the agreed upon part of the direct costs? No worries there.

How are study sections going to respond to this. Will they take this as the NIH saying "This is our threshold for being worried about too much money. Now shut up about this for anything below this amount."? Or will they take this as encouragement to think about lab size even more when they are reviewing the grant in front of them?

Sally J. Rockey, deputy director for extramural research at NIH, said that some changes in grants management already have been proposed as part of the president’s budget submission for the 2013 fiscal year.

and those solutions will be familiar to those following along at the RockTalk blog. It boils down to "kill the rich!!!". If you already have it, or have too much of it, they are gunning for you.

These include an across-the-board funding cut of 1% for continuing grants; negotiating the budgets for new competitive grants to avoid growth in the average size of award; eliminating increases for inflation in multi-year grants; giving additional scrutiny to researchers who already receive in excess of $1.5 million a year; and continuing to fund early-stage investigators at the same rate as established investigators for new grant applications.

The alternative posed by Rockey is "Darwinian".

“Many people thought we should keep the current system,” Rockey said. “Just keep the Darwinian approach. Don’t try to go in there and socially engineer anything.” Others weighed in on the merits of the various options for change, including some approaches beyond those discussed by Rockey. These could include limiting payment for indirect costs associated with grants, limiting large project grants, and providing more support to small labs and individuals by limiting grants to large labs.

Well it sure looks like this depiction to me.
Just about the only person who is not under potential attack under this scenario is the small town grocer. Otherwise known as Noonan. I have been reluctant*, I will admit, to even think very much about something that has been raised (identified?) by PhysioProf on numerous blog posts. It boils down to the suggestion that it is the Small Town Grocer scientists that are precisely who the NIH should be dropping from the system. Actually, PP tends to phrase this as a suspicion that this is just what the NIH is up to, rather than a suggestion that they should do so.

Since he's been making this comment I've gradually noticed that this option is never raised. Rockey maybe touched on it a teensy bit in the AAAS piece.

Institutions also could help manage the demand for grant money by reducing the number of applications submitted by their faculty, Rockey said. And NIH can examine its research priorities, seeking to reduce support for less innovative ideas and eliminating some of the duplication of effort.

Oh yeah. You do it for us, University of State. Right. Like that is in their interest. Sorry but we're in tragedy of the commons territory Dr. Rockey and you are going to have to do this yourself if you want it to happen. Take a hard run at the smaller, lesser and slower producing laboratories. Stop saving them with bridge funding, stop taking pity on your "long term funded investigators" and the like.

It is indubitably the case that we have too many investigators seeking too few grant dollars. All of the main solutions on the table are going to squeeze the most productive, best funded laboratories (not to mention the noobs who finally managed to land their first grant to find a cut that oblates a warm body). Just so that more awards can be made. To, presumably, the small timers.

And those more productive labs are going to fight back as best they can. Submit even MORE grant to make up for the cut funds. Work deals with their friends and junior colleagues to be collaborating investigators so to hide the amount of direct funds going into the laboratory. Pursue training grants, beg for supplements....whatever it takes. They are not going to go "hum, well, I'm just going to be happy with less".

And, sad but true, these are likely going to be the people on study section stepping down hard on, guess who? Investigators who are not like them.

You want Darwinian, Deputy Director Rockey?

If a better-funded, more-active reviewer is really thinking, s/he is best off bashing the crap out of one-trick-pony PI's grants. Why? Because you might just put them out of the game permanently! If you can do that, you've reduced the competition in a real way. Conversely if you stamp on a reasonably well funded and reasonably active PI, you haven't put them out of business at all. Just ensured they will put in yet more grants.

Look, I'm still not sure I know the best path. I love the democratic nature of the ideal of the NIH pure Investigator Initiated system. Anyone with a good idea should be able to get funding.

But I also believe that little gets done on one full modular, cut to $200/yr, maybe reduced to 4 yr grant anymore**. Research programs may not be efficient after 5 grants but they sure as heck aren't in the sweet spot with one either.

And I know for damn sure the insecurity and grant churning of the past 5-8 years has been hugely detrimental to the conduct of science.

Sadly, I don't see that any of the proposals of the NIH do anything to decrease churning.

UPDATE: see NOT-OD-12-110, just published today:

This Notice announces NIH’s intent to pilot procedures for investigator-initiated grants and cooperative agreements in consideration of managing resources during austere times. During May 2012 NIH Institute and Center (IC) Advisory Council meetings, Councils will discuss and pilot-test procedures for the additional review of grant and cooperative agreement applications from Program Director(s)/Principal Investigator(s) [PD(s)/PI(s)] who already receive in excess of $1.5 million per year in total costs to determine if additional funds should be provided to already well-supported investigators. The feedback from this pilot will help NIH further refine policies for managing limited grant resources.

__
The cartoon, btw, is stolen with apologies from Dent. I, uh, altered it.

*anyone who thinks their relative position in the NIH world is predictable or static needs their head examined. I could be calling for an option that will end my lab's viability here.

**Read this. It is short.

The answer, of course, is practice. No one ever likes that answer, but it's true. You need to read and write a lot to be proficient at it and some of it can be picked up in grad school and some can't without a shit ton of work.

One of the ways I try and get people to think about what they are writing is by avoiding track changes in the early stages. Don't get me wrong, I think track changes is great. But the ability to breeze through and accept everything without thinking about why, is waaaaaay too easy. So I mark up a hard copy and send it back. This may happen again, depending on where the piece is at, but eventually we switch to track changes.

In the hard copy phase I try and focus on big things. Does the flow need to be changed? Are there major gaps? Do the figures make sense in relation to the text? Once we transition to track changes, the sleeves get rolled up. After a couple rounds of that, things should be in order. If I can, I like to circulate it through another member of the lab at a point when it is getting close to acceptable.

As a final check I like to send it out to someone outside the lab. If we have collaborators on the project then this is an obvious and critical step. If not, I may tap one of my senior colleagues to do a once over. We all have people around who delight in the opportunity to edit, use them. At each step of the way, the trainee makes the changes, not me.

There are many other ways to get people to write for practice, some of which I employ across the board and others for just certain people. It takes a lot of work on their part and a decent amount on mine. But when they get to the point where they can get something finished in just a few drafts back and forth (and act as editors on the writing of others), then it is worth the initial investment.

And what about this one?

Yes, shocking as it might be to some, a lot of songs, classical, pop, or of any other genre...talk a lot about sex. But not just sex, there are a lot of reproductive messages in music. We might notice a lot of these lyrics, from Baby Got Back to Gilbert and Sullivan, but what do they mean? Why are they there? And do they make a song more popular?

SCIENCE is here to find out!

Hobbes and Gallup. "Songs as a Medium for Embedded Reproductive Messages" Evolutionary Psychology, 2011.

Note 1: Today's post comes courtesy of the Digital Cuttlefish, who turned me on to this truly awesome piece of the scientific literature.

Note 2: I would like to dedicate this post as a whole to the fantastic Danielle Lee, who I hope will remix it.

Believe it or not, it was DARWIN who suggested that human music might have evolved as part of a courtship display, suggesting that there is sexual selection for better music makers (though this does not explain the persistence of tone deafness...good drummers?). But there's no denying that everyone does it:

And there's no denying that modern music has a lot of sexy lyrics. But it's not just sex we're talking about. No, in this case the authors wanted to look at reproductive messages in song lyrics. And reproduction is WAY more than sex.

When you want to look at reproductive messages in modern music, where do you turn? To the Billboard top 100 charts, of course! The authors took the top ten hits from Country, Pop, R&B every month for the year of 2009. They analyzed the resulting pile of songs (only 174, much smaller than you'd think due to the high number of repeats), and analyzed them for the following categories exemplifying courtship, sex, pair-bonding, parenting, fidelity, mate guarding, and provisioning (complete with examples, and I included some of theirs because many of them are genius, and some of mine):

• Genitalia: "my anaconda don't want none unless you got buns hon"
• Other body parts: "Put your pretty little arms around me"
• Courtship/long term mating strategies: "Oh pleeease, say to meeee, you'll let me hold your haaaaaand"
• Hook up/short term mating strategies: "Let's have some fun, this beat is sick, I wanna take a ride on your disco stick"
• Foreplay/arousal/sex act precursors (this included references to kissing and fondling): "When I kissed you girl, I know how sweet a kiss could be"
• Sex Act: “Seeing your black dress hit the floor/Honey there sure ain’t nothing like you loving me all night long”
• Sexual Prowess (references to sex drive or other sex skills): "My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard"
• Promiscuity/reputation: "Rooooooooooxannnne, you don't have to put on the red light"
• Sequestering/mate guarding (I admit, every time I think of mate guarding I think of gammarids...): "Every breath you take..."
• Fidelity assurance/abandonment prevention: “say my name say my name"
• Commitment and fidelity: “He knelt down and pulled out a ring/And said ‘Marry Me Juliette’”
• Resources (references to luxury items or money): "We're beautiful and dirty rich"
• Status: Like a boss.
• Mate provisioning (use of status or resources to protect a mate): “My chick could have what she want/… I know she ain’t never had a man like that/to buy her anything she desires”
• Appearance Enhancement/sex appeal (grooming and sexual appearance): "I see you girls, checking out my rump"
• Rejection: “She just looked me in the eye/Said it's over”
• Infidelity/Cheater detection/mate poaching: Womanizer
• Parenting: “He’d been up all night/Lying there in bed and listening to his newborn baby cry

They looked at the number of songs containing phrases on these themes...and computed the averages.

Overall, 92% of the billboard top 100 songs for 2009 had reproductive phrases. You can see that the reproductive phrases themselves varied by genre (R&B was more explicit, Country made more references to parenting and commitment, and Pop hovered in the middle for almost all categories).  Country was the overall lowest, at 5.96 reproductive references per song, and R&B the highest at 16.77 per song.

Now remember, these are top 10 hits. Do reproductive phrases make it more likely for a song to become top 10? To find this out the authors compared numbers of reproductive phrases and song popularity, with a bunch of songs that did vs didn't make the top 10.

The verdict is clear, Weezer. Weezer always wanted to know how to make the most popular song.

And now we know. More reproductive messages: tell 'em you love 'em, tell 'em you want 'em, and don't forget the mate guarding!

Of course, that's NOW. What about in the past? Have we always been so very into lyrics with status and mate guarding? The authors looked at reproductive messages from 1959 to 2009, and references were pretty stable (except R&B, which underwent a huge rise in the 1990's).

But again, this is still pretty modern. It's not older, more high minded music. You know, like classical. Like opera, so pure! So nice! So high-minded!

Yeah, right.

It turns out that operas and art songs are just as bad (or good, it could be good). A little higher on the arousal, commitment, and rejection phrases, but loads of reproductive signals. Sex appeal was a HOT lyric in the 1790s.

And what does it all mean? Well it's hard to tell, there's a lot of marketing that goes into modern music (and less modern music), and plenty of other things. But there's no doubt that when it comes to music, sex (and reproductive themes) does sell. Take note, Weezer, less songs about sweaters, and more about T&A.

 
Dawn R. Hobbs, Gordon G. Gallup (2011). Songs as a Medium for Embedded Reproductive Messages Evolutionary Psychology, 9 (3), 390-416

Sadly, just as lots of things like to kill honey bees, there is also an extensive list of predators, parasitoids, and parasites that specialize on just this one type of bee.

Solitary bees pose a unique challenge for a parasite. How are you supposed to build up a population when your host doesn't live in a group or a herd?  Somehow you have to spread and move between both individuals and generations.

One time when even solitary animals have to hook up is.... when they hook up.  Parasitic mites on bees hop off one host and onto another just like changing taxis. The bees are too otherwise occupied with gettin' it on to notice.

I posted some footage of varroa mites on honeybees yesterday, but that pales in comparison to the horror I'm about to show you.   Indeed, I hope it will shock you, make you quite itchy, and put you off sex for a while.  (I'm not getting any, so might as well make it a universal condition.)

From the video author:

"These Red Mason Bees are heavily (probably fatally) infested with mites. Mites will often move from the male bee (who picks them up whilst visiting flowers), to the female during copulation. The female will then carry them to her nest where they will feed on the provisions and breed. Mites often will suck the blood of bees, sometimes leading to death. Heavily infested bees are unable to fly."

The mites are probably Chaetodactylus, but that's a guess.

You should be ready for Friday Weird Science now.

As with the most dangerous idiots**, EMJ starts out just fine:

One thing I’ve learned in my research on human evolution is that people are quick to assume that what they do is “natural” simply because they don’t know of other examples where things are done differently. The primate brain is a pattern recognition machine and is adapted to quickly identify regularities in our environment. But when we are presented with the same pattern over and over again it is easy to fall victim to what is known as confirmation bias, or coming to false conclusions because the evidence we use does not come from a broad enough sample.

Okay, fine. Also to cherry pick some particular historical examples*** as evidence that "this is how it has always been" whilst ignoring other examples that are either contemporaneous or removed in time that totally contradict the "natural" fallacy.

Then EMJ runs straight into the wall:

In order to avoid falling for this bias on the question of extended breastfeeding the best way forward would be to draw from the largest sample possible: the entire primate lineage.

And that's it. That's his entire thesis, dressed up with a little bit of data and one graph. It's false. It's false because of one simple fact.

We, the humans, are about as unusual as it comes for a primate. In oh so many ways. Ways that are closely related to a categorical distinction when it comes to breastfeeding.

Humans have used their incredible brains to create options to breastfeeding!

The children fed on something other than breastmilk quite obviously survive and, indeed, thrive.

What we are discussing is the rarefied air of "better" or "worse" outcome in the context of variance in IQ, immune resistance, "bonding", etc that really is not readily attributable to any one source of input.

Take away breastfeeding for all of those other primates and you are not going to be talking about marginal improvements in smarts. You are going to be talking about massive changes in mortality rate.

This is why EMJ's argument**** is stupid.

__
*honestly.

**George Will

***A marriage has always been between one man and one woman, right Mitt?

****He may be right about the awesomeness of breastfeeding until the human child is three but this is sure as hell not an argument that demonstrates that.