Deep Thoughts and Sage Advice

There are lies, damned lies, and work-life balance in the hard sciences.

In which I act full of myself

I'm speaking at another conference, which means at all the conferences I've attended where I've submitted an abstract, I've been asked to speak.  It's getting to the point where I'm worried about what my reaction will be when I am inevitably not chosen as a speaker.

But the much more important point is, what the hell shall I wear?  I think this is an excellent occasion for my new patent pumps.  This is an inaugural meeting so I'm not sure if it's suit appropriate.  This is the problem with working with both scientists and MD's  :/

I pass! I pass! I pass! I don't fail!

Yeah that's right.  I defended my thesis yesterday.  I kicked its ass.  They were throwing tough questions at me right and left (ohai, I work on brain cancer and development, yeah throw those primary cilium basic biology questions my way), and I slammed 'em right into the outfield.  There was laughing and joking during the exam.  My corrections are very minimal; the department chair didn't even have any corrections for me.  I should be able to finish them in less than a week, which means 3 weeks of vacation time for me!  Booyah!

You can now call me Dr. Queenrandom.  Oh yeah.

How you know you're a transfection guru

I am here on a lonely Saturday making some (GFP-expressing) adenovirus so I can get revisions done in time for my committee to let me graduate so I can walk this year.  I was worried because some of my transfections this week have been shit, but I did trash the reagent and get a new tube for this experiment.  Behold my reward when I pelleted my cells:

That thar be some GFP.

Methinks this batch will have a very high titer.

Where I have been -or- Learning to love your reviewers

So yeah.  Submitted manuscript in late July.  1 day under 6 weeks later, we get reviewer comments (I think you can guess the review deadline for this journal).  Good news: they didn't reject it and there are improvements to be made.  Bad news: I immediately wanted to stab reviewer #2.

Reviewer #1 asked for, by far, the most time-consuming experiment (in addition to several other things that could be addressed entirely in writing).  But, Reviewer #1 was very positive about the findings, the experiments and the impact.  Even though s/he asked for the big guns, I was happy to address them because A) the reviewer likes my science and that's always a nice ego stroke and B) they are, logically, the next step of my project.  It was an insightful review, and I appreciated both the comments and the professionality.


Reviewer #2 sounded like s/he just returned from a colonoscopy.  Said some pretty unflattering things about the novelty of my work that, frankly, sounded as if they came from someone completely unfamiliar with the field.  Asked for some nit-picky redos.  Asked some questions that made me wonder if s/he even read the text or attended a science class, like, ever.  Asked for a particular pet method that is less accurate than the one I used for a particular experiment (yeah, you bet we argued that one).  Didn't like my controls and asked for ones that I personally think are less informative.  So, of course, I immediately decided the person was an idiot.  But now, in my wisened 2.5 months out from receiving the decision and having resubmitted earlier today, my attitude has changed slightly.  I still disagree about the usefulness of the particular control, but I did it, and I am glad I did it.  Because the experiment should have been straightforward, but it hit some kinks.  These kinks were unrelated to the validity of my conclusions, however they did relate to the efficiency of my method.  This forced me to re-evaluate a few early steps of my protocol and when I got the final readout, it was obvious that this new and improved method made my data much cleaner than they had been before, so I went back and redid all the experiments done on this particular protocol and got prettier results.  So even if I don't think the particular control I performed to please the reviewer improved my paper in an appreciable way, the comment still did improve my paper immensely.

And about those questions I deemed dumb?  When I sat down to answer them, it forced me to really, really think about my field as a whole.  About the validity of using cancer cell lines and mouse models to study human cancers; I thought this had been pretty damn obvious since the cancer I study happens in the brains of toddlers.  But being forced to put it down in writing in a way that both was supported by published evidence and not snarky made me a better scientist, if only in a small way.  It challenged me to question my assumptions and to be able to defend what is generally unquestioned.

So now, looking back, even though I still think Reviewer #2 is a cranky jerk, I am now starting to think that rather than being stupid, s/he was stupid like a fox.  In a way, at this point, I appreciate Reviewer #2 more than the nice Reviewer #1 (not that I am asking future reviewers to be mean to me!).   While I need the enthusiasm of people like Reviewer #1 if I ever hope to be published, ultimately, the comments from Reviewer #2 improved my science more, both in the short term and the long term.  That's really what it's all about, isn't it?

Improving Your Scientific Communication: Presentations

I believe firmly in the philosophy that one is an eternal student, always learning, and one should therefore always be open to improvement.  This is particularly true of presenting your data to the scientific community.  After all, your data may be awesome, but if it's presented shittily, it will be less well received, or maybe even looked over.  Some of my student colleagues may disagree - they think that their presentations are "good enough" and the data will stand for itself.  Bollux!  I, for one, am not going to stand at a poster for 20 minutes trying to puzzle out which band is which and wonder what the hypothesis even is, if the poster is not clear.  Furthermore, a good presentation will jump out and grab viewers by the gonads, exciting them in your work and further engaging them in your science.  A poster that is boring or hard to follow won't get stopped at as much, and a presentation that is bland or overly complex won't elicit the types of engaging questions the presenter might want - after all, who wants to spend their 5 alloted minutes for questioning rehashing their presentation?

I also wonder how many scientists have any sort of formal training in oral or poster presentations.  I am willing to bet the large majority does not, and instead relies on apprenticeship to gain presenting skills.  This is great if your mentors are good presenters, but this is terrible if your mentors are horseshit presenters.  I'd argue that even if your mentors were good presenters, there are still improvements that can be made.  First, your mentor's style, while it can inform yours, can't be your style; you need to find your own voice, early and often. Second, I have noticed many faculty present in the style that was popular when they were in school or doing their postdocs, leading to an overwhelming amount of comic sans, complexly arrowed diagrams, too much text, and design that is incredibly red-green colorblindess unfriendly.  Hell, I first learned to do my presentations in the late 90's-early 00's and am guilty of many of these mistakes.  Relying on outdated methods/styles should be avoided at all costs, as it reflects complacency and a lack of refinement of personal skills.

In my quest for presentation skill knowledge, I recently came across two incredibly helpful blogs: Better Posters and PowerPoint Ninja, both of which have gads of presentation style pointers as well as technical advice.  Aside from my #1 rule of thumb - never say in text what you can say with graphics* - there isn't really much more advice I can add to the subject than has been covered there, so my advice is to get your ass over to those blogs and play around for a few hours.  They're pure awesomeness.

Discovered via Ambivalent Academic.

*Let's be real: NO ONE reads the text after the section/slide title. You can test this by inserting jokes into your poster figure legends (or, as a student colleague did, into the footnotes of your thesis - only her student reviewers noticed).

The Queen Random Cancer Institute

If I were Queen of the Universe and not just Queen of my house, I would create the ultimate cancer institute, hereby dubbed the Queen Random Cancer Institute (QRCI).  The QRCI's mission would focus broadly on cancer research (basic, translational and clinical - maybe a little more basic because it is dear to my heart) with an emphasis on training and education, and would be located, hmm, just outside a major city so there's somewhere fun to go, clinics and institutions for collaborations, but housing costs don't bleed trainees dry.  Maybe outside Seattle?  I do love Seattle.  The QRCI would be well funded (I think maybe suddenly becoming the richest person on the planet so I can fund this cool place) and would feature the following scientific resources:

• Core facilities: DNA synthesis, Microscopy (and I'd hire people whose only job is making sure the confocals are CLEAN), Spectrometry, Mouse Husbandry and Genetics, Flow Cytommetry,  Tissue Processing, Model Organisms (pick your favorite - we'll have a core!) I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting at the moment.
• PIs, trainees and students would have free access to and be encouraged to use consultants for grant writing, manuscript writing, scientific librarians and statistical analysis.
• Collaboration would be encouraged across basic, translational and clinical research through interdepartmental funding initiatives, in-house conferences and interdepartmental seminars.
• A tissue bank of patient samples, obtained with express consent. 

Not forgetting the most important resource in research - the people! - the QRCI would have the following employee benefits:

• Employees would enjoy free lunches at the cafeteria - and they'd be GOOD.  Healthy options would not be limited to salad.
• Free on-site gym for employees.
• Grad student stipends and benefits would be fully paid for by the institution, and would be set at NIH+25%.
• Students would get the same benefits as employees. 
• 50% of postdoc stipends and benefits would be paid for by the institution and would be set at NIH+25%.
• Career development training would be available and encouraged throughout the scientific career from just out of undergrad tech to established PI, including scientific skills, help identifying how to obtain jobs and career goals, leadership, lab management, and scientific communication.
• Comprehensive health care including vision and dental.
• 6 months paid parental leave for the birth or adoption of a child.
• On-site subsidized daycare for ALL employees, trainees and students including private nursing suites.
• Help for spouses of employees/trainees/students to find jobs.
• Help for employees/trainees/students to find housing if they have to relocate to join the QRCI.

Finally, the QRCI would also be focused on outreach:

• Realistically prorated healthcare for clinic patients including free clinics.
• Employees, trainees and students will be expected to volunteer in the community for a minimum 2 weeks a year (this can be spread out for a total of 80 hours/year).  Their normal salary/stipend will persist during this 2 weeks, with an option to volunteer more for a total of 120 hours of salary for volunteering.  The institute will help arrange volunteer opportunities with the local community.
• Public education - I'm not sure how to go about this, but I'd like a public education campaign focused on promoting science education for all ages with a focus on life sciences and cancer treatment.

This post is a part of Scientiae's July installation: Fantasy Institute.