Gossip Girl, PhD

I read an interesting first person over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. An assistant professor recounts a rumor that was spread about her in graduate school (that she was having an affair with an administrator, and that's why she got a plum teaching assignment), and how it was perceived from many different angles.

It was a good reminder of the painful downsides to academic gossiping. It's juicy to know -- and retell -- which scientists are hooking up with one another. We've all passed on gossip that later turned out to be untrue or was outdated... and we should hold our tongues more often for fear of hurting both the innocent and guilty.

But a case can be made that a certain amount of "gossiping" is necessary for social interactions in science... for instance, knowing two scientists are romantically involved can prevent awkward conversations/situations at conferences. Having heard through the grapevine that a professor is on the job market would prevent you from approaching her for a postdoc just because her lab is geographically convenient. I think that many forms of gossip serve as the way we pass on essential knowledge of the social aspects of academia more than we might like to admit.

The author of the Chronicle article wasn't sleeping with her superior, but there are many pairs of romantic partners we encounter in science, and it's not uncommon for one of the pair to be the boss of the other. Usually this is out in the open, for instance, one person is the PI of the lab and the partner is the lab manager. A non-trivial number of grad students marry their advisors... and the first part of the relationship is clandestine, if just for the fact that most universities consider such a relationship unethical. It's good politics to know that you can't behave the same way with that lab manager, that grad student, as you can with someone who isn't relating their whole day's events to a member of the faculty over dinner. And if the superior is giving advantages and plum assignments to their romantic partner underling... it's good to have advance knowledge so you might not get as upset, and to know the minefield you'd be negotiating if you complained about the unfair treatment.

Couples, if they share a lab, open their relationship up to some level of scrutiny as their relationship impacts lab interactions. I have known several people who got along great with their PIs, but not with the PI's wives, who were the lab managers. In all of these cases, the PIs slowly became converted to their wives' perspective, and a few of these students were outright asked to leave those labs. This could mean that the lab managers had more detailed knowledge of the students and were faster at seeing that the students weren't up to snuff... but that certainly isn't how the students perceive their situations. In the case of partner PIs who jointly head a lab, the same dynamics can occur. And as dual hires have become a regular occurrence, scientific divorces are also becoming more common, and these splits can have devastating effects on the career of their trainees. Even if a trainee stays with the same major advisor, they lose the benefits of the joint lab, which might have been one of the more attractive parts of taking their position, and they often lose time to switching institutions -- one, if not both, of the divorcees usually moves to a new position.

It's prudent for any prospective graduate student to try and discern lab dynamics. We hope that we get honest information from the existing lab members and, hopefully, all parties exercise discretion and not pass anything on further. When romantic partners work together, a prospective student really does have to guess at the nature and health of the partnership in order to determine how stable their six-year educational experience might be... and trying to find out information on the romantic relationships of people in a department is something that's hard not to call "gossip."

Beyond workplace romances, one person's gossip is another person's cautionary tale of unethical behavior, or how a university/professional society/journal really works. One of the most memorable things from my graduate career was the hair-raising tales of breaches of ethics that the oldest member of the department had personally witnessed in his 50 years at the university. One of the stories ended up with an unfairly blackballed postdoc killing herself, another ended up with a person graduating with a PhD even though s/he had acknowledged, in writing, that they had faked their data. All of his anecdotes were anonymized... is that the difference between gossip and sage stories passed on to younger scientists? That would certainly cover all the science bloggers who change names, create untraceable abbreviations for locations and remove details so they can relate what's been happening without as much fallout in their professional lives. I find this sharing very useful -- it's good to know I'm not alone, it's good to know what other indignities others are suffering (and if I can preemptively protect myself from them), it's good to have a place to vent about the confusing and unfair aspects of academia. Such posts may very well qualify as gossip but they also are a key aspect of professional development in 21st century academic science.

We pass on informal critiques on the quality of fellow scientists and their work to colleagues all the time. I have sometimes considered that a professional responsibility -- if you know that the conclusions of a paper are incorrect because of subsequent work the group conducted, but they neither published the new work nor retracted the paper, shouldn't you tell people how to correctly interpret that paper when it comes up in conversation? It doesn't seem like gossip to offer inside knowledge on one of the many papers that received less than perfect peer review... but is it gossip if you preface it with "well, you know they'll never correct this, but..." and roll your eyes?

I think the style of delivery is part of what we consider gossip. For instance, it's a dry and unembellished fact about some labs that they are slow to publish -- sometimes they are years behind on publications. However, that same information can be more dramatically related in a story about a frustrated student who didn't get any papers out until they were done with their first postdoc and the choice words he had for the PI... It's more entertaining to tell a fable than a fact.

I'd say some gossip is a necessary part of a researcher's apprenticeship. I imagine that discerning social relationships and passing on information about past events is part of the training for every kind of career (except for a reclusive novelist?). We need to learn what the informal hierarchies are, what's the best way to approach that dean, the de facto way things work. The problem seems to lie more in the propagation of lies than in gossip per se, and maybe in what areas of a scientist's life are up for public consumption. But we probably can't create any blocks that prevent false rumors from being spread around, not while personal candor bordering on gossip is such an important part of the social fabric of science. However, I'm not in any way suggesting we start gossiping more...

being okay with being #2...

DrJ&H has a recent post titled "It turns out I'm ok with being 2nd", but just like my last post, the title isn't what I thought it would be. DrJ&H was talking about the difficulty accepting she's THE expert in a sub-sub-field, and how she's okay being the second most expert person...

Whereas I want to post about what it's like to actually know you're the #2 young professor in my sub-sub-(sub-)field. I'm not sure how that sets me up for tenure -- is #2 good enough? -- and I'm having trouble navigating how much I should help the seeming #1 in my area when he asks for my opinions.

We are both young PIs and interested in ridiculously similar questions. Now, there isn't 100% overlap in our interests and expertise, but it's substantial, and we both have multiyear research plans that will keep bumping up against each other. We know that collaboration is one way out of this, but this has begun without great communication of what areas we're going to share, what we'll both conduct parallel work in, etc. And we have no joint funding.

While the thought of giving any competitor/colleague the ammunition with which they could scoop you would drives one to extensive email editing, it's worse with this particular frival. He's *much* faster at publishing than I am, he publishes in higher impact journals than I do (those two facts are not independent), and, for the last five years, I've had the concrete sense he's smarter than I am. This opinion isn't just based on having been blown away by him since the first time we met, it's based on the fact that several of my mentors have used the word "genius" to describe him. My postdoctoral advisor, for example, decided to decline an invitation to write a book chapter and recommended my frival -- someone who had never been associated with my mentor's lab -- instead of one of his own postdocs.

I should mention somewhere in here that my frival is also an amazingly nice and kind person. This isn't a personal, or personality conflict, in the slightest.

But having regular email contact with the frival is helping me see some cracks in the pedestal that I have put him on. We are having some intellectual disagreements, and I don't just think I'm right: his data support my side... leading to conclusions he didn't see on his own. In another instance, I was able to come up with the critical literature citations that radically changed the conclusions of another paper of his... I still don't know how much to reveal/hold back in any given conversation (the frival is a man of fewer words than I, and he never volunteers what his next steps will be), but having a peek under the hood of his gleaming, cherry red corvette of a research program has humanized him, and made me confront another iteration of impostor syndrome. He may be #1, but I'm not all that far behind at #2.

I have been trying to imagine whether there are things about me that might intimidate my frival. But of course, my frival is so perfect that he might just be the one young scientist without impostor syndrome himself...

the economic downturn hits my department

I have not yet been part of the very public, very unfortunate budget problems that have affected public institutions of higher learning... but just now, the rumors and worrying crystallized in my inbox: a proposal to hold an anonymous vote on whether to forgo the negotiated raises in our contract to help close our widening budget gap.

I'm very (very) glad to have a job, and that my university isn't laying off TT faculty. Not getting my raise, in this economic climate, isn't something I am upset about. I remember my father's salary being frozen in some years, without any cost of living increases...and those were in more flush times. So many workers in and outside of academia will make the same choice to forgo raises/have it foisted upon them. As the new fiscal year approaches... how many other academics have already decided/been told that salaries will be frozen this year? I think the universality of the problems makes losing our raises more palatable.

technically that title's true...

I was recently browsing the table of contents for the latest Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal that covers a very wide swath of microbiological subfields. I love reading the abstracts for interesting-sounding titles that don't necessarily pertain to my work. But I don't like it when a title lets me down. Such as:

"Interactions between Coexisting Intracellular Genomes: Mitochondrial Density and Wolbachia Infection"

Very cool idea -- both mitochondria and Wolbachia are maternally-inherited... it would make a lot of sense that they might influence one another. However, the abstract's conclusion is that they do not interact with one another. Technically, being independent of one another, not interacting, is an interaction... but it would be nice if scientists would tolerate more accurate titles reflecting negative results. But then again, I wouldn't have clicked on "Coexisting Intracellular Genomes: Mitochondria and Wolbachia do not influence each others density"... so maybe I'm part of the problem causing scientists to spin their titles in the most intriguing ways possible.

It is much more disappointing to come across a perfect-sounding title while doing a literature search, only to find out that the title, even abstract, bear little to no resemblance to what was actually done in the paper. At least we don't have to wait weeks for ILLed paper copies to get that disappointment anymore.

hot for teaching

Sometimes you just have a good lecture... the audience is listening, you're well-slept, you are getting the feedback you need to know that the class is following you. You even get questions from beyond the first row! Today, I gave a guest lecture on bacterial horizontal gene transfer, we were all collectively on, and it was an energizing experience.

It helps that I love this material -- nothing like covering conjugation, transduction and transformation for tossing in historical anecdotes, like how we first measured bacterial genomes in minutes. If that doesn't help them remember that the most commonly transferred bacterial genes due to an integrated conjugative plasmid are the ones closest to the site of integration... My asides weren't just historical, since I know a number of active researchers in the field. Amid all the talk of what good is it for large state schools to be centers of cutting-edge research, this is an example of the trickling down of research into the classroom. I was able to mention Rosie Redfield's papers, and their memorable titles (for instance, "is sex with dead cells ever better than no sex at all?"), and I was able to talk about the debate over why antibiotic resistance genes tend to be plasmid-borne, but mammalian toxin genes are usually phage-borne.

Of course, part of my excitement is because I haven't been teaching this semester, so these guest lectures are reminding me of the best aspects of lecturing -- without all the grading, emails about dead grandmothers, etc. But I'm spending the day smiling about the undergraduate student body (which doesn't always happen), and remembering that this is one of the reasons I decided against pursuing a career in industry. That, and I tried working in industry, and it was a soul-sucking experience (my PI agreed and he quit shortly after I left). But the teaching, that was part of the decision too.

anti-antibiotics

My inspirations for posts often come from what I manage to read in between deadlines and my social life, and as often as not, that means the New York Times. I don't read all the op-ed columnists... I'm in agreement with CPP about Ms. Maureen Dowd, though clearly CPP is more dedicated to reminding us that she takes up valuable column inches with her insubstantial, ill-informed populism. Which might be excusable if she were funnier, but... I read Kristof every couple of weeks, which is generally enough to keep up with his various crusades. While he's usually right, and is an articulate voice for his cause du jour, his anecdote-to-preachiness format can become stale. But lately Kristof is beating a dead horse (well, pig) that I cannot tire of: the overuse of antibiotics in livestock feed and what that means for global public health.

Here are his March 12th and March 15th columns on the topic. As a microbiologist, I tend to focus on the implications for infectious disease (the prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes in all microbes, including human pathogens), but the organ damage that comes from repeated bacterial infection that we're unable to shorten with antibiotics... another scary consequence.

I also have to give Kristof credit for the PLoS One study he cites, which comes from the lab of science blogger and awesome female microbiologist Tara Smith!

Americans' antibiotic use continues to be out of control. According to the American College of Physicians, 50% of antibiotic prescriptions each year are given to patients with viral infections, not bacterial infections. Antibiotics can help you prevent/clear up bacterial infections you have secondary to a viral infection, for instance, an ear infection that builds while one is congested with a common cold, but it cannot, will not directly clear the viral infection. Even when antibiotics are prescribed for actual bacterial infections, it irks me to no end that otherwise intelligent people do not follow the dosing instructions that come with their antibiotics. Some of my closest relatives stop their antibiotic treatments a few days early in order to have some pills to take the next time they feel an infection (possibly a viral one...) coming on. Grrrrrrr! This is wrong for so many reasons... so many reasons that I have to stop myself and maybe post about this topic another time.

But if you do have leftover antibiotics, don't flush your medicines into the water supply either... this is something I hadn't considered before finding links for this post, but flushing antibiotics also introduces those chemicals to the huge number of microbes in our wastewater and further selects for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

As much as I could go on about all the ways that treating human infections has led to increased antibiotic resistance, including outside of developed nations with strong health infrastructures, it's something of a moot point. And that's because most of the antibiotics we use in this country are not given to humans -- they are given to healthy livestock animals. Scientific American says 70%, the UN says 50%... I think it's safe to say it's a majority of the antibiotics administered in this country every year. These drugs are not going to sick animals -- not animals suffering with bacterial infections that can and should be treated. We give antibiotics to healthy livestock because of the way we raise most of our meat in this country -- at such dense conditions, with such high bacterial loads in their environment that outbreaks of bacterial infections are inevitable.

Giving animals antibiotics also speeds their development, so our meat gets larger faster. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I imagine that not having to spend as much energy on ones immune system would facilitate growth.

Some reading this post may know that we don't use the same antibiotics for humans and livestock. However, we effectively do. Stick a methyl group on a human antibiotic -- one that doesn't impact its antibacterial action, and it's now a livestock-ready antibiotic with the same mechanism of action... and resistances developed to livestock antibiotics show cross resistance to related human antibiotics.

I'm pretty terrified about the increased prevalence of these superbugs in communities outside of hospitals... it means the bacteria aren't at a competitive disadvantage relative to the more antibiotic-susceptible bacteria that are thought to be the majority of the bacteria in our environment. It means that humans, who carry the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium on our skins, have started carrying methicillin-resistant S. aureus as part of their normal flora. This in turn means that injuries as small as a paper cut will let those MRSA into your body...

One thing I do to reduce my antibiotic load on the environment is eating antibiotic-free meats, like the delicious local, free-range pork in a paprika sauce I ate tonight at a restaurant. I started being strict about this four or five years ago, and I definitely eat less meat than I did before. I also buy the more expensive no-hormone, no-antibiotic milk and yogurts (I can't give up my wide cheese selection though...). These small things make me feel like a more responsible microbiologist; the animal welfare improvements and the economic support of smaller farmers are secondary benefits to me. I know I'm lucky to have access to local farms that can provide these meats, and that I have the middle class income to afford them. But I think changing our agricultural policies, and what we chose to subsidize, could bring down the cost of farming that's better for public health.

challenges, indeed

I worked my way through the 52 page pdf of stimulus-package NIH challenge area grants that will be offered, and I don't think there are any calls suitable for my research. However, I did find several calls to send onto friends, and there was one hidden gem in the document:

06-RR-101* Virtual environments for multidisciplinary and translational research. Virtual networking environments like Science Commons, Facebook, and Second Life, create platforms that can eliminate many barriers in scientific collaborations. These environments integrate fragmented information sources, enable “one-click” access to research resources, and assist in re-use of scientific workflows. Funded projects would develop and implement virtual collaborative environments to facilitate biomedical and translational research, e.g. addressing issues of privacy, technology transfers, and sharing resources. Contact: Dr. Olga Brazhnik, 301-435-0758, brazhnik@mail.nih.gov

I'm not on Facebook, but I certainly understand how and why it could facilitate communication among collaborators. But Second Life??? Does it allow collaborators to work out their sexual tension virtually?? Or are there glass-and-steel biotech institutes where scientists come, wear form-fitting lab coats, prepare coffee in faux-wood alcoves near spacious conference tables and have virtual meetings?