The Futile Cycle

Lately, authors lists have been becoming incredibly long. Just a few days ago, when Nature Genetics put online their advanced publications (i.e. papers accepted, but not yet cleaned up and formatted for mass consumption), the shortest authors list was for ten authors. The longest, of course, had 68, and the average was 33 authors.

Admittedly, the problem is probably worse in genetics than other fields, because these days a lot of genetics requires massive amounts of work, from computational to experimental. Genetics used to require lots of work in the past, too, but publications back then tended to be on more tractable organisms, like bacteria or flies, where maybe one would have two or three authors. Nowadays, it’s not unusual to see massive experiments in mice, or even huge population studies in humans.

Still, I gotta wonder. These authors lists, even the super-long ones, weren’t organized alphabetically or anything. The order was definitely something someone thought about; so how do they get organized? What’s the difference in credit between the 20th and 21st author?

Here are even more extraordinarily amusing videos, the first courtesy of Harvard grad students and the second two from Princeton’s grad students:

For context in the next video, Trudi Schupbach is an extraordinarily nice lady, head of the Princeton Molecular Biology department’s admissions committee:

I spent part of winter break at home helping my brother edit and submit his college apps, and it got me thinking about all the things I wish people had told me before I went to college. Here’s a list of what I think, as a recent college graduate, are the top non-obvious things that students should know before they go:

1. Get to know your professors

Yeah yeah, everyone says that, but really, this, along with the friends you make, is probably the most important thing you can do college, and it will have a lasting impact on your life. A good college professor can not only help you choose your classes, but he or she can also be a good mentor and advisor, expand your mind, and even help you find a job or help you get into medical/law/graduate school. These people will write your letters of recommendation.

In high school, it was easy to get to know teachers, even if you didn’t make much of an effort. Colleges are bigger, though, and professors are really busy. Most don’t seem to make much of an effort to get to know students beyond the classes they teach, but that’s not because they don’t like students; it’s because they’re busy teaching other classes, doing research, giving talks, or writing grants. Be proactive, seek them out! Go to their office hours (which are often surprisingly empty), ask them for possible research projects, ask them for interesting reading from their field. Professors are geeks; many of them love to talk about what they study.

Don’t stop talking to professors after the class is over. You need to build a better relationship than just the student-teacher one, especially if you plan on asking them for a letter of recommendation. The worst letters are the “this person got an A in my class” ones. They are pretty meaningless; most employers and schools will see your grades and/or transcripts anyway.

2. Go for scholarships and awards

Whether you sailed through high school with top honors and awards or barely made it through intact, you need to find a way to get good scholarships and awards in college. Employers and graduate schools love awards; when they hire and accept students with lots of awards, it makes them feel like they’re choosing a good candidate, because all these other people thought the student was good, too.

Besides, why would you say no to some extra cash or prestige?

But these things won’t just come to you. You need to go out and actively seek them, because most of the time, people don’t even know about them. Some of them are pretty obscure and unknown. Try looking at your college’s awards webpage (if they have one), or google for college scholarships and awards. It’ll be worth the effort, trust me.

3. Your grades don’t matter much…but they still matter some

You don’t need a 4.0 GPA; not even close. No one cares about the difference between 3.7 and 3.8. As long as you get a solid B+ average (3.5) or so, you should be fine, unless you’re absolutely sure you’re going to medical school or law school. Other stuff, like making friends, meeting professors, joining clubs, and going for scholarships and awards, is much better, and more fun besides. If your grades do turn out to be a little low, go work for a while before you go back to graduate school; by then, you’ll have had other experiences that are more important, and which will overshadow your grades on your applications.

Don’t fail your classes, though. It does look bad to have a 2.x GPA, and people will grill you about it, especially employers and graduate schools.

Still, try not to take all the easy ones, or all the hard ones. Challenge yourself in order to learn stuff and expand your mind, but don’t kill yourself over your classes. Find the balance. College isn’t a contest about grades. It’s about building relationships and a foundation for the rest of your life, and a few years out, no one will care what your GPA was in college.

That leads to…

4. Make friends

That’s a joke, right? Of course you make friends.

Well, this is more important than your grades. College is a school, yes, but if you want a job afterwards, your connections are more important, especially later on in your life. Join clubs. Make friends with smart people and outgoing people (outgoing smart people, of course, are even better). Maybe together, you can…

5. Start something

Something, anything. A club, a newsletter, a blog, a business, anything. Ok, maybe not another literary magazine; usually, colleges have 80 of those already, and don’t need one more. Starting something will show employers and graduate schools that you have initiative and creativity, that you don’t just follow the same old routine like everyone else.

It also feels good to start something and watch it succeed. Really work at it, and don’t just let it die. If it flops, hey, you got experience, and you can start something else!

Don’t worry that it’s not the most original idea, either. Google was yet another search engine when it came out, and Facebook was just another social networking site. Their success came from how they delivered it, how well they understood what the world wanted, and how hard they worked at it.

There’s something I’d like to point out to people, which is the absolute stupidity of mammalian gene and protein naming. Everyone wants their particular name, and names change over time in little petty feuds fought over the years, so now we have situations like this:

interferon- promotor stimulator protein-1 (IPS-1, also known as MAVS, VISA and Cardif)

Can’t we all be friends and agree to some sort of naming convention? Chemistry’s not perfect, but it certainly gets more orderly than we do…

There are two classes of scientists that always amaze me in a “how the hell do they do that?” way.

The first are scientists that do fifty different things in ten different fields, excelling in all of them and contributing fundamental new discoveries in each of them. George Whitesides is a classic example of this. He’s been studying physical organic chemistry, microfluidics, surface chemistry, biochemistry, materials chemistry, nanotechnology, and even dabbling in a little origins-of-life speculation. The guy knows his stuff, that’s for sure.

The other side of the coin are those scientists that pick one topic and stick with it for their entire career, often for decades; the only thing that changes is their technique. Paul Schimmel is one guy like that; he has been studying tRNAs and tRNA synthetases for over 30 years, from before the advent of DNA sequencing through the modern genomic era. It’s incredible; I can’t imagine doing this. First, how do you find so many questions to ask about one topic? Second, don’t you ever get tired of this? And yet, even now, he’s still churning out Nature and Science papers on his obsession — there’s really no other way to put it.

Via Marginal Revolution, apparently Harvard has a policy for Ph.D. students, which is that for every 5 graduate students in their eighth or higher years of a Ph.D. program, the department will lose a slot for new admits. This is a great idea! No Ph.D. student needs to take longer than 8 years, and this policy makes sure that professors are motivated to keep the pipeline flowing instead of simply accumulating students.

One things that still astounds me is how fast the field of biology changes. If one looks back even just ten years, the human genome was yet to be sequenced (as was the genome of a vast number of organisms), and microarrays were just being invented. Lester wrote recently about how medical knowledge gets obsolete every 5 years, but individual fields in biology and medicine move much faster than that, and the pace is only growing faster.

Even in the past year, the number of things that I’ve learned that have gone out of date is pretty amazing, especially on the fundamental ways in which life works. For example, my knowledge of RNA export, the basic redundancy of duplicate ribosome genes, and the “fact” that miRNA downregulates translation, have all become obsolete, even though just last year, I took a class on the regulation of gene expression that incorporated all the latest research in the field. Actually, this isn’t the advancement of the field in the last year; it’s the advancement of biology in the last month!

I have no idea how professors manage to keep up with the changing face of biology year after year after year! Just think about all the scientists around who lived before the days of BLAST, PCR, and PubMed, to list three tools indispensable to any working molecular biologist.

The fast pace is exciting, though! Research science is like white-water rafting through through a river of knowledge; the challenge here is to keep from drowning!

Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles and Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science are both having a go at describing the difference between chemistry and physics. Chad thinks it’s a matter of scales and subject (i.e. what’s being studied), while Janet thinks it’s more of a difference of methodology.

At some point, though, there’s not going to be a clear distinction between chemistry and physics. The difference between “chemical physics” and “physical chemistry” is largely a matter of the speaker’s biases and personal identification. People who think they’re physicists will talk about “chemical physics”, while people who want to be chemists will talk about “physical chemistry”; in the end, they’re all talking about the same thing.

Take low-energy nuclear physics. I definitely covered some basic nuclear physics in my inorganic chemistry and physical chemistry classes, such as the ideas of nuclear orbitals, nuclear decay, and so on, and chemists use nuclear physics for lots of things, with NMR being one of the most common ones. As another example, there was a chemist in my undergrad department who studied Bose-Einstein condensates, which definitely overlaps with Chad’s atomic and molecular physics. Thermodynamics too, is in physics and chemistry, especially statistical mechanics. What about protein folding and protein structure determination — Linus Pauling won the Nobel prize in chemistry, but does that make him a chemist for sure? Can’t he also be a physicist?

The distinction between chemistry and physics isn’t just the toolbox people use, or what they study. Obviously, some things are chemistry (like organic synthesis) and some things are physics (like the Theory of Relativity), but people can be studying the same thing from radically different directions, and methodologies can be swapped back and forth between fields. Physicists often do programming, but they’re not doing computer science (usually). I think the difference is in what questions they’re trying to answer: chemists want to know how to manipulate and make things, and physicists want to know how things interact. There is a lot of overlap still, of course, and there all I can say is “physichemistry.”

As for me, I’d like to go into computational, quantitative chemical biophysics. How’s that for interdisciplinary research?

I recently read Paul Graham’s essay How Not to Die, which is about how to keep your startup company from dying. His focus is on internet and tech startups in Silicon Valley, but as I read, working at a startup started to sound a lot like doing research in graduate school.

Here are some sayings that seem to apply to both working at a startup and doing research:

For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don’t hear from you. When we haven’t heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that’s a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what’s up, and they don’t reply, that’s a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death…When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they’ve become demoralized.

This sounds a lot like how some projects go in graduate school. If the student doesn’t talk to the professor often enough, the project will probably die, the student will become despondent, and will probably not get his or her Ph.D. This quickly leads to the converse possibility:

Maybe if you can arrange that we keep hearing from you, you won’t die.

I find that I was especially productive in my rotation this time around, because my professor meets with everyone every week. Our lab is small enough that at our weekly lab meetings, each person gets up to talk about what he or she has done or tried this past week, to talk about possibilities, get advice, troubleshoot, or even draw greater conclusions. It’s a fantastic economic self-contract, where I pre-commit myself not to fail.

Running a startup can be demoralizing…I’ve been there, and that’s why I’ve never done another startup. The low points in a startup are just unbelievably low. I bet even Google had moments where things seemed hopeless….Another feeling that seems alarming but is in fact normal in a startup is the feeling that what you’re doing isn’t working. The reason you can expect to feel this is that what you do probably won’t work.

This is probably a familiar statement to all graduate students in science. There are times when things just get bad, and the point is that those who succeed are those who power through the times when it just doesn’t work. And frankly, if it was obvious that the research would work, then it probably isn’t worth doing.

The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble.

This is really interesting, and I don’t know how much it applies to graduate school. Perhaps the similarity diverges here. Or maybe this is actually sage-like advice for research. There is a certain amount of focus that’s necessary to complete some research topics, but one certainly spreads the risk out on at least two projects, so that if one fails the other can succeed. On the other hand, the spreading of risk and attention does lead to a lack of proper motivation to persevere on each project…

Founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.

I don’t know how much this applies, either, but in a sense, pre-committing to the professor on how well you’ll do is a good motivation to do work, as long as the professor understands if the project is very high risk.

All of you guys already have the first two. You’re all smart and working on promising ideas. Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up.

So I’ll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don’t get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don’t give up.

This is highly relevant. My professor and others keep telling me that the best predictor of graduate school success isn’t so much intelligence and whatnot as much as the ability to keep going when things fail. The ability to troubleshoot, manage errors as best as one can, and just get things done is the best predictor. So, in a sense, graduate students, throughout their Ph.D., are honing the same skills that startup founders are.

It’s an interesting parallelism. Maybe someday I can talk up a venture capitalist with this hypothesis!

One of the topics that came up at a “town hall” meeting between graduate students and the department faculty recently was how to increase attendance of the department seminars. There were some good insights, like “attendance at each seminar is inversely proportional to the frequency of seminars”, but really, was it that hard to miss the most compelling incentive to attend seminars? It seemed like 50 scientists just could not figure out!

Today’s Ph.D. comic summarizes:

One person spoke up and mentioned, in passing, “It always seems like more people come if you put out snacks.” The comment was mostly ignored, in favor of other speculation, like “what if you send out abstracts of the relevant papers beforehand?”

Hellooo! Feed them, they will come!