This Week in Evolution

I'm not doing a paper-of-the week (although I'm expecting a guest post) because I'm too busy reading a bunch of proposals for a grant panel. I can't give any details, of course, but here are some general observations that may be of interest to people who apply for or fund grants.

So far, every proposal I've read has seemed worth funding. This was not true the last time I served on a similar panel. Maybe the word has gotten out that grant funding is highly competitive, so few people bother sending weak proposals? This makes it easier to understand why some of my own recent proposals were rejected, often for what seemed like minor problems.

Unfortunately, we can only fund a small fraction of the proposals submitted. Of course, we could fund more proposals if we gave each group less money. There might be some merit in that approach, but I'll leave that topic for another time.

For those who are writing or thinking about proposals, here are some generic tips:

Continue reading "How to maybe possibly get a grant" »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 6:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just agreed to give a talk in January at the Applied Evolution Summit: a small group of experts meeting at an island research station near the Great Barrier Reef to apply evolutionary biology to critical problems in human health, agriculture, fisheries, etc. It might surprise some evolution denialists to learn that pornography, abortion, atheism and "death panels" are not on the agenda, just science. Of course, when we talk about how global warming is affecting the coral reefs critical to some fish, we may need to go look!

I'm going to try really hard to finish my book before the meeting, which will keep me quite busy until then. I don't teach regular classes -- as an adjunct professor, I'm paid only from our grants -- but reading proposals for a grant panel, writing a paper on "spiteful solar tracking" in alfalfa for Evolutionary Applications, and helping my hard-working and brilliant grad students with methods and manuscripts can't wait until my book is done. So I may be posting only sporadically for a while.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 7:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This talk by Cary Fowler, on the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard, is worth watching both for the content and as a model for effective public speaking. For that reason, I've categorized it under "careers in science" as well as "agriculture." Note the lack of bullet-point slides!

[Note added 9/11: text slides can make presentations boring, but handouts of text slides help students focus on understanding rather than scribbling notes. So I'm going to cut down on text slides in talks at meetings, but not necessarily in guest lectures to undergraduate classes.]

It's worth noting that even dry, frozen seeds may lose viability in storage. (You could probably still recover DNA, but that's only of practical value for the few traits, if any, whose value can be identified from DNA sequence alone.) So it's good to take seeds out of storage and grow fresh seed periodically. Usually, you want to do this in a way that minimizes natural selection in the seed-increase environment, to avoid losing traits that were useful where the crop was grown originally. For example, you want plants far apart enough that tall plants don't shade shorter neighbors enough to keep them from producing seed. And you don't want plants that were particularly prolific in the seed-increase environment to be over-represented in your next stored sample. Preserving crop diversity is a vastly under-funded activity, although that is true of most areas of agricultural research without immediate links to short-term profit.

Although even a few stored seeds can be multiplied enough in a few years to deal with slowly developing problems, such as climate change, if there's a global wheat epidemic you need at least enough disease-resistant seed on hand that one cycle of seed multiplication will meet farmer needs for the next growing season.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Just as I was starting to dip into retirement savings to keep my lab going, we got word that both of the grant proposals we sent to the NSF in the latest round were funded, one of them with money from Obama's stimulus funding. We won't be paying ourselves any billion-dollar bonuses, but I may be able to get two months salary this year after all. Both proposals are resubmissions, significantly improved based on suggestions and criticisms from past reviewers. Both projects will use rhizobia, bacteria best known for providing legume plants with nitrogen, but the second project may have eventual applications in medicine (e.g., curing persistent infections) rather than agriculture. The summaries below are intended for a nonscientific audience, such as members of Congress.

"Suppression of rhizobial reproduction by legumes:
implications for mutualism"
(with Prof. Michael Sadowsky, largely based on ideas and preliminary results from grad student Ryoko Oono -- see this recent review article we wrote with Toby Kiers)

Rhizobia are bacteria that can live in soil, but also symbiotically, inside root nodules on plants like soybean or alfalfa. Although many rhizobia provide their host plants with nitrogen, saving farmers billions in fertilizer costs, less beneficial strains cause problems in some areas. Some hosts, including alfalfa and pea, make rhizobia swell up as they start to provide nitrogen. Unlike the nonswollen rhizobia from soybean or cowpea nodules, swollen rhizobia apparently lose the ability to reproduce, but does rhizobial swelling somehow benefit the plant?

To find out, the investigators will map this trait on the family tree for crops and wild plants that host rhizobia, to see if causing swelling evolved more than once, suggesting a positive benefit to the plants. Three dual-host rhizobia (plus mutants that differ in their ability to hoard resources) will be used to measure effects of rhizobial swelling on costs and benefits to the plants. Plant defenses against rhizobia that provide little or no nitrogen, already demonstrated in soybean, will be tested in species that impose bacterial swelling.

This research will increase understanding of a symbiosis that supplies nitrogen to agricultural and natural ecosystems, with implications for other important symbioses. Results could guide the development of crops that selectively enrich soils with the best rhizobia, decreasing future fertilizer requirements. Educational opportunities will be provided for undergraduates, at least one graduate student, and a postdoctoral researcher. Two female high school students have already won trips to the International Science Fair for research done in the principal investigator's laboratory, where such mentoring will continue to be a priority.

Evolution of persistence in the model bacterium, Sinorhizobium
(with Prof. Michael Travisano, largely based on ideas, preliminary data, and writing by grad student Will Ratcliff, with some ideas from Andy Gardner and colleagues -- see the second paper discussed in this post -- and possible relevance to our work on evolution of aging.)

Some bacteria can enter a nongrowing "persister" state that allows them to survive antibiotics and other treatments that normally kill them. By suspending growth, they may also free resources for their genetically identical clonemates.

Most species form only a few persisters. This makes persisters hard to study, despite their importance in long-term infections. However, certain harmless bacteria from plant roots can form up to 40% persisters. These will be used to determine whether persisters benefit mainly from enhanced stress resistance or by increasing the growth of their clonemates.

Successful completion of this research will provide two main benefits: First, this research will determine the conditions that favor the spread of persister-forming bacterial strains over nonpersister strains, and the genetic basis of persistence. This can provide direct medical benefits by aiding the development of novel management strategies, drug targets, and eventually treatments for patients infected with persister-forming bacteria. Second, some conclusions may apply to other species that are difficult to eradicate because they, too, form dormant, stress-resistant stages. These include many agricultural weeds and some species of mosquito. One key advantage of the proposed approach is speed: experiments that would take decades with weeds or mosquitoes can be conducted in months with bacteria. This research will provide training opportunities and jobs for undergraduates, high school students, and a post doctoral researcher.

I am planning to accept another grad student for autumn 2010.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I hope to welcome one or possibly two new graduate students in autumn 2010. Here's the summary I wrote for the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior web page:

Research inspired by W.D. Hamilton's ideas, often using microcosms and noncharismatic microfauna: evolution of cooperation and conflict in legume-rhizobium symbiosis (New Phytologist 2009), longevity-vs.-reproduction tradeoff as a possible explanation for hormesis etc. (PLoS One 2009), and agricultural implications of past and ongoing natural selection (Q. Rev. Biol. 2003 and forthcoming book).

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I will be visiting in-laws in Hawaii and then at the International Congress on Nitrogen Fixation, so may not post again until late June.

Maybe by then I will be able to write something about our recently accepted paper on the evolution of aging.

Or maybe I'll have good news about an NSF grant. One grad student has a little money left in his own small grant, but the other two are also doing interesting and important work and need to pay for supplies, flow cytometer use, etc.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My wife bought me a Livescribe Smartpen for my birthday. It's an amazing device, but I can't recommend it at this point. First, the positive: as advertised, it records handwritten text (using special notebooks), displays the text on a computer, and recognizes hand-printed text well enough to search through stored pages for keywords. It can also record sound. It doesn't work with Windows 2000, so I switched to Windows XP, something I haven't had to do for any other program. But I thought my planned uses justified the switch:

1) lab notebooks. I often need to refer to something I wrote months or years ago. With Livescribe, it should be possible to find it quickly.
2) taking notes in seminars. The audio recording is good enough I can can just write keywords and make sketches of graphs, knowing that I can refer back to the audio for details I didn't get written down.

But, after only a few days of use, the program suddenly informed me that it was:

"Unable to access your database folders. Please contact customer support."

Apparently other people have had the same problem.

Update: I got a reasonably prompt generic ("what operating systems are you using?", etc.) response but no actual help so far. I was able to install on a different computer, but worry that the same problem could arise there at some random time in the future, meaning I would lose any files that weren't still on my pen.

Update2: After a few days, "customer service" sent me another generic request for information. Maybe they figure repeatedly asking for more information and just hoping users will solve the problem themselves can be outsourced, whereas they would have to hire someone competent to actually figure out what was wrong. The reason I suspect this is that they didn't seem to do anything with the information they asked for the first time, and they didn't answer a very specific question I asked when I sent them the first bunch of information they asked for, namely, whether it might help to copy the (hidden) MyLivescribe directory from another computer where I'd gotten it to work. Anyway, I went ahead and tried it and that seems to have fixed the problem. So I guess backing up the MyLivescribe directory periodically would be a good idea. There's apparently some way to back stuff up on the company web site, but what happens to the data when the company goes out of business?

I agree with comments on their website: until there's a way to send Livescribe files to colleagues without going through the Livescribe website, they will lose millions of potential customers. For example, this system would be great for notebooks used to document patentable inventions, but nobody working on a patentable invention is going to trust their notes to an outside company.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Mark Taylor, a professor of religion, has observed (in the New York Times) that

"graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist)…[with] sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans."

But programs in the sciences do collectively graduate more PhD's than they hire, so a PhD is no guarantee of a faculty position. I have discussed this before.

Taylor's proposed solutions? Several ideas whose effects on the stated problem are hard to predict but probably small (restructuring curriculum, abolishing departments, accepting video games and such as substitutes for traditional written dissertations), one that would make the job shortage worse but might have other benefits (eliminating programs and substituting internet courses), and two that might help new PhD's find jobs (preparing students for nonacademic careers and abolishing tenure). Preparing students for nonacademic careers is something that has been discussed for years and Taylor doesn't offer any new ideas on how to do this. But what about abolishing tenure?

Continue reading "Abolish tenure?" »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 6:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

This is what I sent our Senator:

Please support the higher NSF research grant funding in the House stimulus bill. Scientific research has long-term benefits, but it may also have a higher multiplier effect than generic tax rebates for rapid stimulation of the US economy. Most grant money goes to pay poor graduate students, who will spend it all locally on food and rent. The remainder goes for scientific equipment and supplies which, unlike consumer products, are mostly made in the US.

Even if we get this burst of funding, it won't solve the long-term problem: the supply of well-qualified researchers with good ideas is increasing faster than research funding, and this trend seems likely to continue. I'm not sure this scientist surplus is a problem for society as a whole, though, unless it's causing people with great research potential to waste their lives as doctors (helping only a few people rather than the millions that benefit from each scientific advance) or Wall Street crooks.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 6:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like most US scientists, I have been distressed by how the Bush administration twisted or ignored scientific evidence on global warming, abstinence-only education, etc. and I am optimistic that things will improve with President Obama. But some problems will be difficult to solve. Today's NYT has an article on under-representation of women in science. Relative to their fraction of the population, my impression is that African-Americans are even more under-represented, but that doesn't seem to get as much attention. Or maybe it's just that the perceived or actual reasons for under-representation are different, calling for different remedies.

One problem that may deter some women from pursuing research-university faculty positions is that these jobs are so demanding they make it difficult to also raise children. Many of my female colleagues are doing both well, but it's got to be hard. A proposed solution from the article:

Continue reading "Making scientific careers family-friendly" »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 6:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In today's NYT, Stanley Fish laments the demise of liberal education, which, he says

"is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world..."

Continue reading "Liberal education, basic research, and Neal Stephenson's "Anathem"" »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My NSF grant will run out soon, so I get to spend the year in which we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species as an amateur scientist, like Darwin himself. I'm not as smart or as rich as he was, but I do have imaginative and hard-working students and much better equipment.

I'm working on two grant proposals and several papers while dreaming of getting back to writing my book, so no detailed paper analysis this week. But Nature is highlighting 15 major papers on evolution they have published in the last few years.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some comments attached to the previous post discuss cases where scientists made statements or drew conclusions that turned out to be wrong. When should we suspect bias, as opposed to honest errors? Some scientists, of course, may have financial conflicts of interest, such as stock in tobacco or biotech companies. But strong opinions can be a source of bias even without a direct conflict of interest.

Here's an example from my own past research. For ten years, I directed the Long-Term Research on Agricultural Systems project at UC Davis. This huge field experiment included comparisons of organic and conventional farming methods. (LTRAS also compared irrigated and nonirrigated systems, which you might think would generate more interest, given how much of California's limited water supply is used by agriculture. But these comparisons never generated as much controversy, for some reason.)

The simplest way to compare conventional and organic systems would be to have the organic system exactly like the conventional one, only without the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. But no serious organic farmer would farm that way.

So, for example, we substituted compost and nitrogen-fixing cover crops for fertilizers in the organic system (and in several alternative systems that were not strictly organic). OK, but which cover crops? A scientist biased against organic methods could tilt the balance in favor of the conventional system just be choosing a bad cover crop. A lazy scientist, or one pressed for time or money, could choose a cover crop based on published data (trying to match local conditions) or by asking a nearby organic farmer for a recommendation. Ideally, one would start with such sources but then test various alternatives before making a final decision. At LTRAS, Martha Jimenez tested four cover crop species, each at two seeding rates, and two combinations. Woollypod vetch or a mixture of vetch and peas did best in her one-year experiment, so Dennis Bryant and his crew tested these options over three years before deciding. (Vetch+peas proved to be the least risky, even though vetch-only did slightly better under ideal conditions.) Similarly, we tested Farm Advisor Tom Kearney's suggestion that we should use a different corn cultivar in systems without nitrogen fertilizer. (These tests and other results for the first nine years of this 100-year experiment have been published: see Field Crops Research 86:267; email me if you want a PDF). Without this "tuning", the organic system would have done worse than it did. Similarly, we tried to optimize each of the nine other systems at LTRAS within its particular system-specific constraints. For example, irrigating the nonirrigated system was not an option, but we did choose a wheat cultivar suited to nonirrigated conditions.

Here's where concerns about bias come in. For each system, someone who suspected us of bias could claim that we should have done more to optimize their favorite system. For example, if timing of cultivation is important in all systems, but especially in organic ones, should we always have given the organic systems priority when scheduling, even if that meant neglecting conventional ones in ways no conventional farmer would do? I know that we were committed to finding out which methods are best, rather than trying to prove preconceived ideas. But that doesn't mean we always made perfect decisions. And why should you believe me? After all, my brother Tom Denison is an organic farmer; I could be biased by that or by a graduate education and postdoctoral work in Crop Science that those not familiar with my advisers Tom Sinclair and Bob Loomis might assume was "brainwashing." (It would be more accurate to call their efforts "brain-building.")

If individual scientists or groups of scientists have conscious or unconscious biases, that may influence their conclusions and even their results. Fortunately, two solutions to this problem are built right into the fabric of science today. The first is peer review. Before a paper is published in any reputable scientific journal, it is reviewed by at least two experts with no direct connection to the authors of the paper. (We may know each other, however.) These reviewers look for problems such as unreliable methods, inconsistency between results and conclusions, and inconsistency with previously published results. The latter should not lead to rejection, but reviewers should insist the discrepancy be discussed. Note that most books, web sites, pamphlets, popular magazines, television program, and even certain "junk journals" (low citation impact is a clue) have little or no peer review. As I result, I have usually found reading such sources to be a waste of time. For example, critical details needed to assess the reliability of results are often left out.

Second, and more important, any really important conclusions need to be based on results confirmed by at least two independent groups. This is the best way to detect fraudulent or biased results: do other research groups, who may have different biases, nonetheless get the same results? This is one reason society would benefit from investing more in research. When research money is scarce, studies needed to confirm or refute important results may not get done.

With peer review and independent testing of important results, the biases and errors of individual scientists do not prevent the scientific community from reaching reliable conclusions, sooner or later.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm busy this week. Our last two grant proposals were rejected by NSF -- funding rates are down around 10% -- and my lab is almost out of money. (Some other time, I may address the question of whether there are too many good proposals, not enough money, or nonoptimum distribution of grants.) So I'm working on revised versions of those two proposals this week, with help from the grad students they would support. Then I have an overdue book chapter to revise before I can take time to blog, probably discussing more interesting talks at Evolution 2008. After that I have two interesting manuscripts sitting on my computer waiting for my input, one from a grad student in my lab and one from an Australian colleague I haven't met yet, before I can get into the lab and start some long-delayed experiments.

For those considering a faculty position at a research university, you do know that you will spend summers writing papers and grant proposals and (if you're lucky) doing research, not vacationing, right? On the other hand, I am rarely bored.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

About 1500 scientists attended Evolution 2008 here last week. The four-day meeting was filled with 15-minute talks (usually ten at once, in different rooms), plus two evening poster sessions (like a science fair, for grownups, with discussions rather than judging), scenically located on a pedestrian bridge over the Mississippi. Reports that “scientists are abandoning evolution�? appear to be exaggerated.

Here are summaries of some of the talks I enjoyed.

Continue reading "Evolution 2008: sexy plants, battling bacteria, durable cooperation" »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 8:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A tiny little box labeled "correction" in the latest issue of Nature alerted me to a re-examination of data supposedly showing discrimination against female authors by manuscript reviewers. This claim, echoed in a Nature editorial (now retracted), was based on data showing that the fraction of papers with female first authors increased in one ecology journal when that journal started withholding the names of authors from reviewers, a procedure known as double-blind review. It turns out that other journals in the same field showed a statistically indistinguishable trend (more female authors over time), even though they still provide author names to reviewers. Thomas Webb and coauthors of this re-examination, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, note that a larger study published in American Economic Review reinforced their conclusions: double-blind review does not increase relative acceptance rates for papers with female authors.

Continue reading "There are none so blind..." »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I liked this essay comparing areas in evolutionary biology where there is genuine controversy -- i.e., where people who are actually collecting data and publishing on a topic disagree -- vs. the phony controversies imagined by creationists. Group selection may still almost qualify as a controversy, a question I may address in a later post, but age of the earth, common ancestry of all species (at least those studied so far!), and the power of natural selection to solve difficult problems are not at all controversial among those actively publishing on related topics.

The question of how much exposure high school students should have to genuine scientific controversies seems a bit more complex to me. I agree that helping students get enough of the basics to understand active controversies in any depth is a big challenge. On the other hand, I've been amazed how many high school students (and their parents) think that the only definition of "research" is looking up information in a library or on the web. If we want students to understand that scientific research is an exciting, ongoing activity, some kind of exposure to areas where scientists disagree seems essential. Areas of research that are easier to understand, like the mindless screening of drugs, don't convey the intellectual excitement of real science.

Here's a seminar class I've thought about for either high school seniors or first-year college students. First, let's set the minimum standard for a scientific controversy as: at least two conflicting points of view, each represented by data-containing papers from at least two nonoverlapping groups, in journals with an impact factor of at least 1.0. Each week we consider one question, such as:
1) What causes AIDS?
2) What is killing amphibians around the world?
3) How old is the earth (within 10%, say)?
4) What living species is the closest relative of chimpanzees?
Students get points for showing that each topic was controversial, at least at one time, with a big bonus for whoever shows controversy most recently. Then we could make a time-line, showing when each question was settled (pending new data, of course!).

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Most scientists also volunteer their time as "peer reviewers" for scientific journals, checking submitted papers for serious flaws, such as lack of appropriate controls. Reviewers also make good papers better by, for example, suggesting alternative interpretations of results. My own papers have been greatly improved by this process, which makes up for the few times I've thought a paper was rejected unfairly. (Fortunately, there are plenty of good journals, and the odds are against getting the same incompetent or biased reviewer twice.)

As a minimum, reviewers try to make sure that the paper describes what was done and what the results were, clearly and unambiguously. Which brings me to two recent sentences from the New York Times that probably wouldn't have made it through peer review:

And now add to the lengthening list Gov. Eliot Spitzer, husband, father of three teenage daughters, who authorities on Monday said had been involved with a ring of prostitutes.

Police found the soldier, who was still in the vicinity, shortly after 11 p.m., using a helicopter with a thermal camera.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you get a position where promotion (or even continued employment) depends on how much research you publish, how hard should you work? Morgan Giddings writes in PLoS Computational Biology that:

Enough work is exactly the amount at which one can maintain enjoyment of the process of work, without burning out (which is not enjoyable) or becoming socially isolated (which is not enjoyable). If that amount of work is not enough to maintain a scientific career, then a different career may need to be considered, where such enjoyment can be found.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

You know how, whenever you edit an MS Word document, your neatly positioned figures and captions fly off in opposite directions? Someday, MPen will solve these and other problems. Meanwhile, here's a work-around I just figured out:

Layout graphs and captions you want to stay together on a single Power Point "slide." Make slide width equal the width of your printed lines, so Word won't try to squeeze text on either side. Save individual slides as WMF files. Import each WMF file into Word about where you want the slide. Slides may still jump around when you edit the document, but at least slide(s) and caption(s) will stay together.

I'm still working on grant proposals, but thought those of you who don't use LaTeX might find this useful.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I thought this analogy between grad school and Lord of the Rings was pretty funny, but what about Monty Python and the Holy Grail? I'm really tempted to start my next oral exam with:

What is your name?
What is your quest?
What is the long-range dispersal mechanism of Cocos nucifera?

Continue reading "Grad school as an epic quest" »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Lots of discussion on Pharyngula today on a Nature story on the PhD glut. 7000 new biomedical PhDs per year and only 20,000 tenured positions. I remember looking at all the grad students and postdocs at the Ecology meetings and thinking "there aren't nearly enough job openings for this many ecologists", at least not at major research universities. Comstock commented

I see the universities as eager players, ready to get their share of the grant money, and not worrying that much of it relies on the labor of a servant class who will never be made master of the house.

Continue reading "Scientist glut as a tragedy of the commons" »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

According to a National Science Foundation survey, 30% of grant panel members say that they often recommended "transformative research" projects for funding, but only 10% of other panel members (who also, presumably, answered the same question) did. This seems like a mathematical impossibility, like men having had more girlfriends, on average, than women have had boyfriends. But, just as the definition of "girlfriend" (or "sex", for that matter) may vary, so may the definition of "transformative research."

Can we do better than "the projects I like are transformative; those you like aren't"?

Continue reading "Defining "transformative research" for NSF" »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rob Knop is leaving academia, essentially because it's so hard to get grants to support his research.

I'm all for increasing research funding, because I think benefits to society exceed the costs, on average. But increased funding might not help individual assistant professors as much as you would think. One problem, at least in the US, is that those who already have grants will usually have more publications and more preliminary data, so they (we) will also tend to be more competitive for any new money. So some professors have multiple postdocs working for them (not me!), generating yet more publications and preliminary data, while others can't get a grant.

Also, universities (which take half of each grant) would (and do) respond to increased research funding by hiring more professors than they need for teaching. This increased hiring would make it easier for new PhDs to get a job, at least in the short run, but it would then increase competition for grants, until the "tenure misery index" comes back into equilibrium.

My impression is that the Canadian system is more egalitarian and maybe less stressful. Anyone know if this is true? If so, how does this affect overall scientific productivity and quality (citations per dollar, say)?

Yes, I will be discussing an evolution paper this week.

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Rob Knop liked my previous post. The comments on his post are well worth reading. For example, someone pointed out that, even if you don't go into debt to finance grad school, there's still usually an economic opportunity cost. During the years you spent in grad school and as a postdoc, you might otherwise be paying down a home mortgage, saving for retirement, etc., not to mention nonfinancial opportunities, like starting a family.

Terence Tao also has some good career advice,. It's aimed mainly at mathematicians, but much of it is relevant to science in general.

Continue reading "Opportunity cost of grad school, etc." »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This entry is inspired by "Why I got out of research" at http://vwxynot.blogspot.com/ and Rob Knop's blog entry Get out; you're not good enough , and is addressed to readers considering grad school in science.

There are more people qualified for faculty positions at research universities than there are openings. By "qualified" I mean having earned a PhD, done a postdoc, and published at least one senior-authored peer-reviewed journal article from each. By this definition, one can be qualified without necessarily being competitive in today's academic job market.

Those of us lucky enough to get such a research university position find that (as vwxynot put it):

"Even if you do make it big and get your own lab, you’re suddenly responsible for your whole team’s job security as well as your own. Grants depend on the quality of the researcher and their work, yes, but also on trends, fads, luck, nepotism, reputation, political interference and geography."

The importance of nepotism, politics, and geography probably varies among countries, but there's no doubt that only a fraction of good proposals get funded. And yet, getting grants is often an expectation for tenure.

So, if most PhD's won't get a research university faculty position (RUFP), then who should consider going to grad school in science?

Continue reading "Who should consider grad school in science?" »

Posted by R. Ford Denison at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)