blame the grants: biology link instead of a post

I prefer giant microbes, but this would make a very good valentine's day gift for that special scientist next year...

blame the grants: biology comic instead of a post

holy sh%t!

So I'm reading Blue Lab Coats on my lunch break today, and I'm smiling because DrDrA has been (very deservingly) selected as one of the top 50 must-read female science bloggers. I was perusing the list, recognizing most of the names (I'm not as plugged into the geology women as I could be)... and then I came upon my own blog's name and did a double take. And then I came upon DrugMonkey's name and did another double take! (He deserves an honorary second X chromosome...) I'm startled and flattered to be in such incredible company (FSP! Isis! Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist that I've met in real life!). I will use this as motivation to blog more interestingly and regularly...

There are many blogs that I would have put on such a list before mine... including Professor in Training and Young Female Scientist, two women who are very frank about their trials and tribulations in our chosen profession.

As an aside, I'm visiting a lab this week which has blue lab coats, and they do look fabulous on all of the women here (the men don't seem to wear their lab coats).

bashing Darwin day?

The hype over Darwin will not end soon -- the 150th anniversary of publishing the Origin of Species is in November and there's a major motion picture about Darwin planned for a fall release. If this hype increases scientific literacy and acceptance of evolution by the American public, whom am I to complain? I was part of an overflow crowd at the state museum last night for a Darwin Day lecture, and much of the audience was not academic -- older couples, fathers and sons, pairs of undergrads who were clearly not science majors (based on overheard conversations), even a guy in overalls who looked like he'd been on a tractor earlier in the day. Darwin Day seems to be working as extension, as a way of getting the average person to be more aware of biology and the process of science.

However, one day after Darwin's 200th birthday, we can stop some of the hero worship...

CPP posted over at Propter Doc that "if it hadn't been Darwin it would have been someone else." Yup, natural truths become evident over time and eventually someone would have articulated the theory of natural selection had it not been Darwin. But this subjunctive phrasing belies the fact that someone actually did independently come to the same conclusions before Darwin had published his theory. Darwin was scooped! Alfred Russel Wallace, a younger and bolder man, published some the same ideas based on different data without waiting for the results of 8 years of barnacle experiments for more evidence. Because of Darwin's work was known to members of the Royal Society -- some of whom had been trying to get Darwin to publish for years -- Darwin's precedence was recognized and the official paper on natural selection read to the Royal Society is authored by both Darwin and Wallace.

Some texts still refer to it as the "Darwin-Wallace" theory, and the Linnean Society gives out a Darwin-Wallace medal each year, but this is not the year to mention the shared credit to the general public. It's extremely similar to the history books lauding Newton for inventing calculus even though Liebniz published his independent derivation of calculus first. These days he who publishes first gets the credit, even if another scientist has been laboring on the problem longer, even presenting if s/he had presented the unpublished data at meetings. And as long as the publishing group did their work independently and without knowledge or malice... that's life in science, that's being scooped. Either Newton and Darwin had friends in much higher places, or the rules of science have changed.

Perhaps especially so in 2009, there are those dedicated to not forgetting that someone else did conceive of natural selection that wasn't Darwin. Almost everything discovered could have been found by someone else... could have been done years before we started working on it... it would be 10 times faster and easier for a scientist starting to work on it a decade from now. Linus Pauling's alpha helix discovered while he was sick in bed, Kekule's dream of a benzene ring, Darwin's amazement that all those Galapagos birds were still finches... could have been discovered by someone else. Perhaps with less poetry, less of a good anecdote. But it doesn't take away from these visionary scientists that they were the first to conceive of these major ideas and that they knew what to do with their inspiration from there.

Darwin Day is finally here!

At the very least, this will decrease the number of Darwin Day-planning emails in my inbox. I'll attend one lecture this evening in celebration and leave it at that. No Darwin-themed tshirts, no tortoise soup planned for dinner, but maybe I'll put on the next Netflixed disc of Planet Earth.

But you can count on Carl Zimmer and his kin to have a unique take on Darwin Day -- the words that Darwin first used in the English language, including rodeo.

NYT op-ed on science funding

Stephen Quake took over for Olivia Judson this week and wrote about his lucky experiences with funding as an early career scientist and what's wrong with the 'free market' of grants. Among his litany of accomplishments, Quake has pioneered single-molecule sequencing. I am in awe of all scientists who stepped back and asked "how can DNA sequencing be better?" while I was still feeling blessed I became a scientist at a time we could do DNA sequencing at all.

There are some minuses to Quake's idea of every scientist getting guaranteed minimal research support... because of those funds going to faculty no longer doing research (even if they claim they are), or to scientists who are not particularly good at research, mentoring, and because it holds back research that requires expensive techniques. Grants with lower dollar values going to more scientists would move the US towards other countries' funding systems. We'd have to shift how we fund personnel as well, because one can run a lab and get some experiments done on a shoestring budget, but short of using an army of unpaid undergrads, the majority of the cost of even a minimal lab budget will be salaries and stipends. But these changes have notable upsides as well, including dampening the effects of boom-bust cycles on laboratories.

As for 11-month salaries being covered by our universities -- yes please! In the current economy, however, AFT/AAUP shouldn't rise up and demand such things. It would be nice if it were more publicly known that many (most?) professors are already on summer furlough, and some schools are already furloughing faculty during the year to save money. Academics often work for free, we're not all cushy and secure in recession-proof ivory tower tenured positions. Knowing that we are sharing the pain with workers all across America might make people feel more sanguine about supporting the federal granting agencies and continuing to fund their state universities through these budget crises.

8% of my love

In this season of grants, in my first big grant-pushing year, I'm facing problems I never conceived of. One is how much of my time to allocate (on paper) to each of these projects. The basic problem is that you can't have funding for more than 100% of your time... the funding agencies are not willing to break the definition of 100% even for sleep-deprived academics. You have to devote 'enough' time to a grant for the agency to feel you will be a competent supervisor of the research and steward of their dollars, and you have to pick a small enough number so that you can potentially obtain additional grants. You can change the allocation of time you have on a project if you need to after you are funded, but I can't comment on how that affects your program officer's opinion of you and your research, or how that affects your chance of non-competitive renewal.

For shorter grants this is less of a problem; if a grant is funded and I over-estimated my time allocation, the grant will expire before it's a problem that prevents me from applying for additional funding.

I know I'm living in a fantasy world to contemplate this ever being a problem for me. I'm not going to get enough grants to be anywhere near a 100% time allocation in the next few years. However, I have to list my projected time allocation for all pending grants when I submit additional applications... and it's starting to add up. This is also on my mind because I am going to be a co-PI on a grant where the only funding that would come to my lab would be summer salary and travel support for me (no money for equipment or trainees). I am contemplating what percent allocation of my time I have to put down for this project in order to ensure one month of summer salary wouldn't be cut from the budget, while preserving enough of my time for grants I'm submitting that can support students.

I also thought of this because of a recent discussion over at Drugmonkey, where it was brought up that percent allocation could be used as a proxy for "lab with too much money" as a rational reason to give lower marks to grants from very comfortable, established labs. I was an ad hoc reviewer on a grant recently that had two PIs -- one junior and not published at all in the proposed experimental system, and one senior who is the queen of the experimental system. But the Queen PI has so many grants she could only allocate 8% of her time to the proposed research. While I think this PI is very good at juggling her responsibilities, it certainly made me wonder whether she'd give the project the attention and expertise it would need. I have seen grants where subcontractors allocate very low (5%) amounts of their time, but this was the first single-digit allocation for one of the major PIs I'd seen. There were other weaknesses in the grant, it wasn't a perfect, incredible proposal with this being its sole potential flaw...

Percent time allocation to different research projects was something I'd never thought about before this year. I have thought about the amount of time I devote to preparing lectures (too much) and the amount of time I spend writing papers up (too little), but I have always just rotated around my research projects as deadlines demand and my interests dictated.