Since it’s my first post I want to start with honesty: I feel like an idiot for starting a blog. Of all the things in the world that I know, I am most certain that I do not have the answers. I make mistakes constantly, I commit to things before I know what I want and then I regret my decisions, I try to change and fall off the wagon immediately…so why should anyone read this?
Honestly, maybe you shouldn’t. Alternatively, maybe it will make you feel less alone. Maybe it will empower you to be honest too, to demystify the whole “surviving as an adult” thing.
To give you a little context it’s probably an OK idea to tell you about me. I am currently (as I type this, in the summer of 2019) a doctoral candidate at the University of California (campus withheld for privacy reasons). Supposedly I am here to get a PhD in Neuroscience, and supposedly I am doing well so far.
But here’s the not-so-secret secret: I do NOT like my life right now. To qualify that a bit, it’s important I tell you I am also very very grateful for where I am. I am subject to a whole truckload of privilege. I am healthy, I live comfortably, I am paid to go to “school” (we’ll get into why the quotations in a later post), I have a partner and others who care about me…but I am fundamentally unhappy. Why? Well, in part because of the dissonance between my expectations and reality.
PhD programs are onerous for reasons that are difficult to explain. My experience is not the same as everyone else’s, but most would agree there are unexpected and deeply unsettling challenges inherent in getting a doctorate. In some ways that’s what we signed on for, and most don’t go into this degree thinking it will be easy. But, especially in STEM, the difficulties are sometimes surprising.
I came to this degree with a naive view of science. I didn’t have particularly lofty goals, meaning I didn’t think I would discover something monumental and be heralded for eternity as a genius, but I did think that the integrity of the process was intact. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. More often than not the system is set up in a way that supports unethical behavior. Now before you go screaming into the night that all science is fraud and alternative facts are real, let me explain.
Currently, academic science is funded by grants. Grants are given to Primary Investigators (PIs) based on a variety of factors, the most important of which is their publication history. There are many other things that go into their eligibility (it’s insane actually), but “publish or perish” is the researcher’s mantra for a reason. So how do you get publications? Well, you discover something! But for the most part, one can only publish what’s known as a “positive result.” That means, your experiment has to work.
This is harder said than done.
As scientists we go into an experiment with a hypothesis. Generically, that usually means something along the lines of “_____ impacts _____.” Sometimes you’ll have an idea of what that impact will be, sometimes you don’t. If you’re lucky, you come up with a hypothesis where “_____ does impact _____” and “_____ does not impact _____” are equally interesting results. More often than not, however, only one of those two will be interesting and publishable. The other is a “negative result,” and this is the result you will get most often. And here’s the worst part, negative results are almost invariably unpublishable.
So with your limited resources, you’ll run experiments hoping to get something you can publish, so that you can then get more resources. Given the odds, there is a very real and very scary chance that you will lose that bet even if you are extremely well prepared. So…you go into experiments collecting as much data as possible so that somehow you can find something of statistical significance that can be published. Something interesting and novel.
The system this sets up is one where you can’t tell people what doesn’t work, only what does work. Failed experiments then get repeated over and over and over…wasting more and more resources and putting labs, and the people that work in them, in precarious financial situations. The system also then rewards science that gets certain kinds of results…do you see a problem there? We are supposed to be impartial, but we are rewarded for specific kinds of results. That means the system can end up rewarding spurious science because it looks sexy.
Without ranting about this further I want to get to my point here. I came in naively hopeful about being a scientist, but what I’ve realized is I won’t practically be allowed to study anything without producing positive results. There is no real ability to do science for science’s sake, in many ways that is a facade presented to young scientists to get them hooked. So, now, I’m looking to find a different path. One that is fulfilling and honest.
And that’s why I’m here. Hopefully I figure it out.
Stay tuned.
Selfish Science 