You know I could publish something and be legally barred from sharing it

The world of academic publishing is weird, and while I could try to explain it, I don't think I would do a good job. But to me, it often seems like a scam.

Basically, a bunch of companies who run academic journals receive articles from scientists like myself based on work we have performed, paid for and written up. Then the journals take the research article and send it out to other scientists, who read and review it for now cost, and then send it the journal. Then the journal publishes the work, copyrights the article and attached figures and charges money for people to access it.

There has actually been a large push for open-source publication - which I think is a fabulous idea - and many journals have begun to make their articles available on line for free. As I said, this is great.

But apparently there are companies who are actively fighting against this ... which I feel is kind of evil ... take a look at this article and see what you think.

I went to DC and Dan & Karla got hitched

So 2 weeks ago, I put Aviva and Soren on a plane to California, and then during the week I headed down to DC for the 12th annual International Symposium on Neurovirology. The impetus for this trip was Dan & Karla's wedding in Sacramento - we had all been waiting for this wedding for a while, and we weren't going to miss it. So we figured, get Soren another week with Bubbie and Zayde, get Aviva some help and avoid a 2 day trip to California with the baby.


After dropping Aviva off at the airport on Saturday afternoon - TSA was very nice to give me a gate pass so I could take Aviva and Soren up to the gate - I drove into to Brooklyn and went out for Koffmans birthday at a beer garden. I cannot drink beer like I used to. A single one liter stein gave me an almost instant hangover and a wicked headache.

Anyway, on Monday I headed down to DC with Cheo and Paul, one of his graduate students, and spent the night just across the river in the Crystal City area of Arlington. After a run near the monuments and dinner at McCormick & Schmidts, we got a good nights sleep and got up early to go for a ride around the monuments.

Nice ride, and DC really has a great bike share program and a beautiful set of bike paths. And the people there really seem to take advantage, there were lots and lots of people commuting to work by bike. The conference itself was great, got to meet a lot of new people, hear about some good science and had a pretty good poster session.

I also got to spend the evening with my friends Scott and Michele and their beautiful kids ... and I got to meet their newborn son Ridge for the first time.

 

And finally, I left the conference a bit early and flew out to California to meet up with Aviva and Soren for the wedding. Not seeing them for a week was really, really rough ... a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be, so I was really happy to see them. We stayed at the Sheraton Grand in Sacramento, and due to Sorens early rising coupled with daylight savings time resulted in Soren and I taking long walking tours around town each morning. 

And Saturday night was the main event, a fantastic wedding. Great food from Magpie (the pork shoulder and pork sandwiches were delicious), excellent wine and of course there were the fabulous Golden Lion dancers. Overall, a great night and a great, if not incredibly fast weekend.

And more not good ...

At this point, I may as well just create a permanent link to the reporting by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, who has published another excellent account of the effects of sequestration on the American scientific community, this time an interview and discussion with NIH Director Francis Collins.

Continuing with the not good theme

Another story from the Huffington Posts' Sam Stein about the impact of Sequestration on scientists across America - it details a number of different perspectives and if anything, is more depressing than the first story.

Fantastic Post about getting tenure

I am not sure how realistic, or applicable, this post is to my career ... but I have read a ton of different things about how to succeed as a young academic and I have to tell you this is one of the most up-beat and pleasant pieces of advice I have read in that vein.

Take a look, the 7 year post-doc ...

Nothing new to report

So nothing has really happened recently. I have been wanting to blog about something, but the last few weeks have just been, well, blissfully dull and incredibly busy, but with dull things. Have some exciting stuff coming up though, superbowl party (don't care about football, care about ribs), one of my best friends is coming to visit, spending a weekend snowshoing in Vermont with friends and their dog ... and then in April, big stuff, passover, with a spitted pascal lamb and then a trip to Hawaii for a conference and a vacation .. so I will hopefully have a lot of interesting stuff to talk about soon.

But for now I leave you with these thoughts about the 10 worst things about working in a lab (excerpted from Adam Rubens article on the AAAS website, here.

10. Your non-scientist friends don’t understand what you do. Even when talking about their jobs to outsiders, your friends in other professions can summarize their recent accomplishments in understandable ways. For example, they can say, “I built an object,” or “I pleased a client,” or, if your friend works on Wall Street, “I ate a peasant.” But what can you say? “I cured … um, well, I didn’t really cure it, but I discovered … well, ‘discovered’ is too strong a word, so let’s just say I tested … well, the tests are ongoing and are causing new questions to arise, so … yeah. Stop looking at me.” At least you’re doing better than your friends with Ph.D.s in the humanities, who would answer, “I put sheets on my mom’s basement couch.”

So true.

9. The scientist who is already the most successful gets credit for everything anyone does. If you discover something, your principal investigator (PI) gets credit. If you write a paper, your PI gets credit. If you submit a successful grant proposal, your PI gets credit (and money). And what do you get? If you’re lucky, you get to write more papers and grant proposals to bolster your PI’s curriculum vitae.

8. Lab equipment is expensive and delicate. And you, you’re not so coordinated. Nope. Not so much. Oops! You could pay to replace this one broken piece, or you could hire another postdoc.

7. Sometimes experiments fail for a reason. Sometimes experiments fail for no reason. As anyone who works in a lab knows, things that work perfectly for months or years can suddenly stop working, offering no explanation for the change. (In this way, lab experiments are like Internet Explorer^®.) This abrupt and inexplicable failure changes your work to meta-work, as you stop asking questions about science and start asking questions about the consistency of your technique. You can waste years saying things like, “When I created the sample that worked, I flared my nostril in a weird way. So this week, I’ll try to repeat what I did last week but with more nostrils flarin’!”

Honestly, I cannot believe this one only came in at number 7 ... this is one of the toughest things about science.

6. Your schedule is dictated by intangible things. Freaking cell lines, needing to be tended on a regular basis regardless of your dinner plans. Freaking galaxies visible only in the middle of the night. If it weren’t for your lab work you’d have such a vivacious social life! Sure. That’s why you have no social life. It’s the lab work.

Uh-huh. I try to explain this to Aviva all the time.

5. Science on television has conditioned you to expect daily or weekly breakthroughs. Have you ever had a breakthrough in the lab? Yeah, me neither. Sure, I’ve had successful experiments, which usually means that the controls worked and no one was injured. But a real, eureka, run-down-the-hallway-carrying-a-printout, burst-into-a-room-full-of-military-personnel-and-call-the-President-even-though-it’s-three-in-the-morning breakthrough? Not yet. Unless you count the programmable coffee maker that, after much cajoling, made decent coffee at the appropriate time. Maybe I should publish that.

4. Your work is dangerous. People say their jobs are killing them, but you work with things that could actually kill you -- things like caustic chemicals, infectious agents, highly electrified instruments, and angry PIs.

3. Labs are not conducive to sex. Unless you work in a sex lab, which may or may not be a real thing, it’s unlikely you can convince anyone to crawl under your lab bench with you (“Just ignore the discarded pipette tips, baby”) and, as protein biophysicists say, put their zinc fingers in your leucine zipper. But hey, prove me wrong, people.

2. You have to dress like a scientist. When I worked at an amusement park, I had to wear a purple polo shirt tucked into khaki shorts with giant white sneakers, so I suppose things could be worse. But some of our (scientists’) uniform choices are pretty unflattering. Disposable shoe covers look like you stepped in two shower caps. Safety goggles trap humidity as though you’re cultivating a rainforest on your face. And white lab coats with collars and lapels make men look like nerds and women look like men who look like nerds.

Yeah, I don't have much of a problem with this as my fashion sense is pretty poor anyway.

1. You can feel time creeping inexorably toward your own death. If you think I’m being melodramatic, you were obviously never a grad student or postdoc. As a grad student or postdoc, you spend longer than you’ve planned working on something less interesting than you’d believed, all while earning less money than you assumed reasonable with an endpoint that’s less tangible and less probable than you thought possible.

Welcome back

So its been a long while since I last wrote, around three months or so since I posted what I thought was a fascinating discussion about the effectiveness of Prozac ... but that is so July. A lot has happened in my life since then, and that very busy-ness has been what has kept me from writing here more often.

I went to a wonderful conference in DC about the kind of grant I have from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which was both inspiring (because of the wonderful people I met and the view of where my career could go) and terrifying (because it was very clear about the amount of work and time I will have to put in just to have a chance at getting there).

I spent a wonderful weekend with my Dad in southern Vermont, near Grafton and Saxtons River, hiking in Jamaica state park.

I went to the Jersey shore (for the first and likely last time) with the Buchmans to celebrate Bucky and Tanya's 40th wedding anniversary. Awesome.

Went back to Vermont to for Amy and Max's wedding and got trapped in the wonderful Inn at the Round Barn when Hurricane Irene turned the state into a pool.

Attended Christines beautiful wedding in New York.

Spent two weeks in London, Paris and Scotland before attending Alex and Kathys highland wooding on Loch Tay in central Scotland.

Went back to Cherry Hill for a wonderful (as always) Rosh Hashanah.

Went back to DC to give a seminar at NIDA. It went really well :)

Joined a synagogue (Sha'rei Tikvah) in time for the Jewish holidays and spent Yom Kippur and Sukkot with our wonderful new congregation. They are all a tad incredulous that we joined before we had kids.

And, all of a sudden it was mid-October and I had not spoken to any of you in forever. I can't promise anything, but lets try not to do that again.