Quality vs. quantity in science: a view from the North and the South

I recently came across a letter sent to Trends in Ecology and Evolution by a prominent scientist (Fisher 2012). It is yet another voice criticising the focus on quantity over quality of modern science. All around the world, publications, labs, scientists and even study systems are being graded and ranked.

In the same issue, there is a response by a group of brazilian scientists (Loyola et al. 2012) which points out that it would be dangerous to apply the same policies in countries with less developed scientific structures. As a scientist coming from Mexico, a country that is just behind Brazil in scientific development, I understand this point of view. The argument between quality or quantity of publications is futile if the problem of science in developing countries is that there are few or no publications at all.  But the later problem is related to the first and as everything in life, it is more complicated than it seems.

When I started as a hopeful and naive graduate student in Mexico, I just wanted to work on what I found interesting. I gave little though on the relevance, appeal to wider audience or sex-appeal of the topic. Most of the people around me were like me, so I did not think I had to.  The problem came when I tried to publish. Because, yes, I had to publish my PhD research in order get my degree. There was no way around it. To make the story short, it was a nightmare. It took me over a year from the first submission to finally get the paper accepted. In the mean time, I had to write several letters to editors trying to convince them that I wasn’t making things up. You see, I made the big mistake in science these days of studying a non-model organism, and to propose something that as everyone knows only happens North of the border (as if biology knew of such things). I had to first, convince people that there are pines in Mexico; second, that they are very diverse (50% of all species); and third, that the Pleistocene climate changes had an impact in vegetation outside of the glaciated regions. All of those things seem pretty obvious to everyone and, given that I had abundant references to back my statements, I thought that maybe the referees would focus on the actual research and not in my introduction. That experience put me off writing papers on the same subject for a while, and I think I am not the only one that felt like that.

The thing is, that as science is a global “industry”, it is difficult to compete in unequal circumstances. It is demoralising. So, what Loyola et al. point out it is fine, if we lived in a world without prejudice, and the amount of publications a research group has would only depend on the willingness of doing good research and writing and submitting the papers. The problem is that what Fisher points out also affects us down South.  Let me elaborate.

The need to publish more and fast, has led to an overabundance of publications of a few trendy subjects. It also makes people, especially grad students and postdocs to do projects that are as safe as possible, something they can do in a couple of years. Those projects could be the scientific equivalency of making a cake from the box.  This, in my opinion causes many reviewers to see research on systems that they never heard of, to be untrustworthy. This situation is hard to avoid, since biodiversity is the highest in the tropics, in the very same countries that are struggling to have their own space in the scientific world. At the same time, journals do not want to publish papers on odd, incredibly interesting, but widely unknown tropical species (Fig. 1), because most of their subscribers work with Arabidopsis. In two words: less citations.

Fig. 1- Lacandonia schismatica, an odd, interesting
and widely unknown tropical species

So, to rescue what Fisher said, there is no room now for creativity and wisdom. And without creativity, science will get stuck very soon. So I think it is time for us scientists to do something about it. Those in developed countries can make a big change by changing their ranking systems, and “tropicals” like me have to keep studying those odd, unknown and incredibly interesting species that happen to be in abundance in our countries. As biologists we cannot expect to have a better understanding of life if we keep ignoring most of biodiversity, just because it is not trendy. It is also the duty  to break the trend of scientific colonialism, where the only tropical species being studied are those studied by research groups from developed countries. Science, overall, will profit of an increased biodiversity of scientists out there.

Women in science: where does the prejudice come from?

Something that is a pattern in my blog entries is the role of women in science. This is obvious, since I am a woman in science. But only a few years ago it became apparent to me that we are in trouble. As any biologist can testify, our discipline is female dominated in during our undergrad years. Those of us that were educated in a Latin American university also had a number of great female professors that became our early role models. Up until I was about to finish my PhD I didn't feel discriminated or had the impression I had worse chances of continuing in the field of science. But was this true or was I just too naive to notice? My paranoid mind now sees things very differently. The thing is, that while we are studying, budding female scientists are seen in a different way by established scientists. They are also seen in a different way by their peers, they are seen in a non-threatening way. But once you have that piece of paper that says you hold a PhD things change a lot and you are basically thrown to the lions, with not much to defend yourself with. I don't say that males aren't thrown to the lions, they are too, but they are perhaps better equipped to fight those lions that we are. 

 Some recent studies have shown that both males and females have strong prejudices against women who try to get scientific positions (here in PNAS). This could be a product of the way we are all trained to see women since an early age, and what qualities are considered desirable in women and men. Basically, a good scientist should be driven, confident, independent, and even sometimes a little cocky. Also, driven, confident, independent and slightly cocky men are highly attractive to people. They are popular. What happens if those same qualities are seen in a girl or young woman? Well, she's not going to be very popular at all, with anybody. Driven, confident, independent women are seen as bossy, intimidating and arrogant. If on top of that you add a reasonable amount of talent, and a self-awareness of that talent, then things get really difficult for the girl/woman in question. 

 I remember, that I learned early on at school not to answer any questions made by the teachers, even if I knew the answers. I also remember feeling a bit embarrassed, and apologetic even when getting top marks in exams, even in my university years. During all my time as a student, I tried not to get too much attention paid to my abilities, it made my social life a bit easier. If other women out there have done the same, then no wonder there is a perceived lack of confidence in most female scientists. Maybe this deeply ingrained social attitude towards driven, independent women is causing this bias, both in men and women. Those characteristics look good in men, but not in women, even to referees. This does create a vicious circle, because to avoid being rejected and not liked, women in science are not as forward, and less likely to take pride in their own accomplishments. This in turn, will be seen as a negative thing by referees, who will doubt the true ability of a female candidate because she is not as confident as any other equally qualified male scientist. 

Now, the tricky question: how to fight that prejudice? This isn't easy to answer, since it is deeply ingrained in all of us, and even I am not free from it. I cannot control how people feel about a confident woman who nows her stuff, and is not ashamed to speak up. But I can control how I behave, and how I react to people's attitudes towards me and my work. I guess that putting myself out there and marketing my skills with more confidence will lower my popularity score for a while, but I am not willing to accept getting less than I deserve. Nobody should. I will start by building up the courage of asking questions in seminars. Baby steps.

Squash science

One of the peculiarities of the campus where I work at the moment, is that it is in the middle of nowhere. Beautiful grounds, nice people, surrounded by tiny villages, or as a friend called them, groups of houses of very wealthy and most of the time elderly people. So, not much goes on here outside our comfy offices. This has one good thing, our productivity is super high, specially mine since I'm prone to daydreaming and staring at walls or anything else stareble. But there is a point when just enjoying nature, the rabbits hopping around, and wondering if we will die if we eat the mushrooms that sprouted next to the building door is not enough.
Doing science is a creative process that is quite temperamental, very much like doing any form of art. I am convinced that there must be a muse for the sciences as there is one for music, poetry or astronomy. As a matter of fact my other blog (Confesiones de Narcissus) came into being because I was fighting off writers block. So I needed to write something, anything. This is when distractions become necessary, and living in the middle of nowhere becomes a liability.
I don´t know what motivated it, I suppose certain boredom with a specific research topic from one of my office-mates, but a intra-lab squash tournament was organised. A few of us did play squash regularly, others, like me, have never even been in a squash court, but we entered nonetheless. The outcome was completely unexpected. Everyone got squash head from day one and we all are really committed to it. We are even thinking of carrying on with playing squash every week and even having a campus tournament. It was like we were injected with some new found enthusiasm, that not only got us very active physically, but socially and at least in my case, intellectually.
This squash revolution only proves what has been suggested previously by some people, that happy workers are better workers. And fights the notion of having to be warming up the chair for 8 hours straight to get your job done. Sadly, I know some cases in the scientific community where grad students and postdocs are still expected to do chair-hours and can only leave after the boss, as if they were bureaucrats. Maybe it's just me and my overly active, curious and borderline ADD mind, but art or good science cannot be forced, and playing squash is a good way to help things flow naturally.

The PCR* god, or when science meets magical thinking

I believe that a lot of us will feel identified with the title of this entry, even though some will not admit it in the open. The general stereotype of scientists, which is mostly true by the way, is that we are atheist, materialists, and highly critical. That's how we approach our work and man things in our everyday life. But despite what TV shows want to portray, we are also human, an thus, subject to despair, confusion and panic.
It is widely accepted, that religions arose as part of a psychological and social need to explain the unknown, and provide comfort for the collective. So, in the field of science, where we deal with unknowns on a day to day basis, how do we deal with an experiment that fails over and over when everything seems to be working just fine?
How do we explain the existence of a stubborn bacteria that refuses to die no matter how many times we put it in the autoclave? How about the typical case of pens, reagents or even paper towels disappearing and reappearing in a seemingly random pattern?
When we reach these levels of desperation, we scientists only have one refuge: the supernatural.

Several supernatural entities have been described so far populating labs around the world:

The lab midget: A trickster, like aluxes and pixies.

The PCR god: to whom we all pray to get clear bands and specific PCR products.

Saint Charles Darwin: the patron of all evolutionary analyses
Saint Gregor Mendel: patron of geneticists. Protects against PCR contamination.

I believe there must be many more. Maybe we should make a worldwide survey and write a grant proposal...





His holiness the PCR god inspired this representation on the person of E. Scheinvar.



* PCR (Polymerase chain reaction): It is a technique that serves to make many copies of an specific fragment of DNA. Like what they do in CSI to catch the killer.

Women in science, or a follow-up to the zombie Marie Curie cartoon

The role of women in science has been a recurring topic in my circle of friends lately. My circle of female friends that is, not all of them scientists but somehow related to the academic life.
It is widely believed that academia is an ivory tower, a place of virtue that is less subject to the prejudices that afflict the rest of the world. So many "outsiders" tend to think that sexism and misogyny are absent in the scientific community. However, here and there I've seen articles written (mostly by women, but not only) about the many struggles of women that want to make it in the scientific arena. We were inclined to think that only women like Rosalind Franklin in the 50s or the many other before her were the ones that had to endure the lack of recognition, that even Marie Curie had to go through once her husband died. But to our horror, it still happens. Is not so obvious, but is still there.
A friend of mine and fellow blogger just wrote about how in an important Ecology conference, all the plenary sessions were conducted by men. (Her blog, here).
The same I noticed here at my campus of the Imperial College, all professors or senior researchers are also men. Something unusual, given that in the biological sciences there is nearly a 50/50 proportion of males and females at the undergraduate levels, being women slightly more represented. However, as a french researcher pointed out to me also recently, most women drop out of science once they reached certain age. They complete their PhDs but few of them continue to pursue a scientific career. Is it because we are less capable, or something else?
Having met a lot of bright and driven women in science, most of them young PhD students, I refuse to believe that is the lack of talent. However, the academic life is quite incompatible with family life, a goal in a lot of women's lives, that is also considered to be our main goal and mainly our sole responsibility. First, being a postdoc is hard, the salaries are not high and the contracts are short. Then there is the moving around chasing jobs that can be anywhere in the world. Try to do that with a husband and a baby. Then, to get a tenure, one has to work very long hours. Without childcare and an understanding partner, it is virtually impossible. So, for women, it is a choice between a family and a career. A choice usually men do not have to make, because they have a wife to take care of the kids.
But what about women who have made it? They are scarce, many of them are either single or childless (in Europe is common), and in some countries they still do not hold high positions in their institutions. How many female deans are there? Also a few. I can´t help to think that this represents a terrible waste of talent and of money. A waste of money spent training these female scientists that later decided to drop out because they simply could not find a way to combine to have a job they love with also having any sort of personal life. But whose fault is it? Everyone's and nobody's at the same time.
As a woman trying to make it in science and with no intention in the near future to drop out, I think we need to be more flexible. Not to expect to have the house, the golden retriever, the car and the country club membership that was supposed to be the ideal of the middle class. We chose a career that is demanding and requires sacrifice, like any other creative career, so we have to be prepared to compromise, like artists seem to be able to do without thinking too much about it. We also need to put the guilt aside and realize that the world will not end if we leave the baby with daddy for an evening, or two, or three, while we work on a paper, or need to go to yoga class. Being a model housewife and future Nobel prize winner in one is kind of unattainable. For all of this to be possible we also have to find the right partner, but that's a another topic.
Then, there is the system. Simple things like daycare centers at universities or research institutes could do a great deal. Also more flexibility with schedules and the possibility to work at home more often. This happens in many places, but in some others, people are still expected to do chair hours.
Also, some prejudices have to be eliminated. Women do not get automatically stupid once they have a child. And in general, women who behave like women are not less intelligent. Nail polish and shoe shopping are not incompatible with being able to understand Coalescent theory or multivariate statistics. Nor being polite and speaking softly. Many areas of academia are still ruled by people who think that speaking louder will make you right, and that being an asshole is a requirement to be a professor (with many many many fortunate exceptions). So, no wonder why many women convince themselves that this is not what they want not to have to put up with those things.
Obviously, the issue of sexism in science (as any form of sexism elsewhere) has no easy solution. Many attitudes need to be changed, and the change will be easier and more natural if it comes form individuals, and not from the top in the form of positive discrimination schemes that only cause more resentment.
For the moment, I will follow the advice of zombie Marie Curie and I will keep working hard.

Cute vs. plain odd

I already wrote about how some things in science are just a matter of fashion. There are the latest hits, things everybody wants to do to get a piece of funds, fame or media exposure. Such topics, in biology at least could be: genetically modified organisms (as a threat), genomics (of course), extraterrestrial life (we saw a piece of that a few weeks ago), biomedicine (nothing to say here, except when they report things like "finding the gene of homosexuality"), and of course, the study and conservation of charismatic animals. This is all very well, however, focusing all efforts, money and publicity in campaigns to save the pandas, baby seals or cheetahs are taking away the focus (and the money) from preserving whole ecosystems and maybe not so cute creatures, but interesting anyway. This is important because most of life on Earth does not qualify (is not even close) as being cute. So, what will happen to ugly animals or lets say, plants or fungi, or even worse, moulds or smelly algae! Here is an example:

The first needs no introduction. And yes, it is adorable and it should be saved from extinction! But equally rare and even more threatened is the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), a species of salamander that retained characteristics of a juvenile stage (keeps the gills like a tadpole) in a process called neoteny. This species is a narrow endemic of the wetlands of Mexico City and is therefore almost extinct. It has been used as a model organism for studies of animal development, but that has not helped the conservation of this species, because well, is not cute and fluffy. So I propose a PR campaign for the axolotl, maybe turn it into some kind of super hero, like the Xochimilco Avenger, or something like that. Just a thought...

Pop vs. Indie

Escherichia coli

Pelagibacter ubique: so popular that has not been formally named yet.
But we owe part of our oxygen to them (more info here)

* I hope you all know who these ones are