Category Archives: Tribe of Science

Hey, where’d that gravy train go?

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From Inside Higer Ed, there are reports that the end of regular increases in NIH funding (such that there will soon be a double-digit decline in the purchasing power of the NIH budget) are stressing out university researchers and administrators:

At Case Western Reserve University, a decline in NIH funds contributed to a budget shortfall of $17 million below projections for the 2006 fiscal year. NIH funds are key at Case — and at many institutions the NIH is the largest outside source of research support.
While NIH officials have touted the fact that the number of new competitive grants will increase next year, they are slower to point out that a decline in the number of renewals for existing projects more than offsets the increases. Some projects that researchers thought were shoe-ins for refunding, such as the university Alzheimer’s Center that had been supported by NIH since 1988, are among those that lost NIH funding.

Why are officials always slower to point out the bad news?

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Practical advice: irreproducibility.

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I just got back from a 75 minute ethics seminar for summer researchers (mostly undergraduates) at a large local center of scientific research. While it was pretty hard to distill the important points on ethical research to just over an hour, I can’t tell you how happy I am that they’re even including ethics training in this program.
Anyway, one of the students asked a really good question, which I thought I’d share:
Let’s say you discover that a published result is irreproducible. Who do you tell?
My answer after the jump.

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Reason, tradition, and scripture … in science?

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Reader Paul Suliin points me at a post at Pharyngula about the election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Beyond the “Yay, Episcopalians!” it prompted from me (she was trained as an oceanographer!), the post has some interesting things going on in the comments, where commenters have been discussing whether the reason, tradition, and scripture that play a role in Protestant sects might have analogs in science. My answer?
Kind of.

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Buy-in and finger-wagging: another reason scientists may be tuning out ethics.

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I was thinking some more about the Paul Root Wolpe commentary on how scientists avoid thinking about ethics, partly because Benjamin Cohen at The World’s Fair wonders why ethics makes scientists more protective of their individuality than, say, the peer-review system or other bits of institutional scientific furniture do.
My sense is that at least part of what’s going on here is that scientists feel like ethics are being imposed on them from without. Worse, the people exhorting scientists to take ethics seriously often seem to take a finger-wagging approach. And this, I suspect, makes it harder to get what those business types call “buy-in” from the scientists.

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“Ethics, schmethics! Can’t I just think about science?”

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There’s a nice commentary in the most recent issue of Cell about scientists’ apparent aversion to thinking about ethics, and the reasons they give for thinking about other things instead. You may not be able to get to the full article via the link (unless, say, you’re hooked up to a library with an institutional subscription to Cell), but BrightSurf has a brief description of it.
And, of course, I’m going to say a bit about it here.

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Nerds and the dating game.

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Given that I’ve weighed in on “nerd culture” and some of the social pressures that influence women’s relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on:
The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It’s pretty much the dreck you’d expect. Of course, the nerds in question are all male (because, female nerds?!). Also, it’s not obvious to me that real nerd culture would embrace the nerd exemplars discussed in the story as bona fide nerds. Tiger Woods? Adam Brody? David Arquette? We’re not really talking the pocket-protector set (nor even the, “Quick, what’s the one true programming language?” set).
But, Amanda at Pandagon has fed the article to the Regender engine with delightful results. Some of my favorite regendered passages:

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Advice on protecting your intellectual property.

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Occasionally I get email asking for advice in matters around responsible conduct of research. Some readers have related horror stories of research supervisors who grabbed their ideas, protocols, and plans for future experiments, either to give them to another student or postdoc in the lab, or to take for themselves — with no acknowledgment whatever of the person who actually had the ideas, devised and refined the protocols, or developed the plans for future experiments.
Such behavior, dear reader, is not very ethical.
Sadly, however, much of this behavior seems to be happening in circumstances in which the person whose intellectual labor is being stolen doesn’t have as much power as the people stealing it (or at least complicit in its theft). What this means is that one sometimes has to choose between taking a stand to expose unethical behavior and having a future in science. (One’s supervisor, after all, can determine whether one’s current position continues or ends abruptly, and that supervisor writes the letters upon which one depends to find future positions.)
What’s a scientist to do when facing this kind of snake pit?

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