Good bye

I started this blog in my own words "to blog primarily about thoughts about my work and life out here". Well, both work and here are changing. Today is my last day at my small northeast ohio medical school, and my last day as a trainee. As of next week I will be fully fledged tenure track junior faculty, and back on the east coast. And so I feel this is a good time to end this blog.
I have enjoyed writing it immensely. It has helped me think my way through the past five and a half years. But it was written for a time, a place, and a version of me. And all those things have changed.
I do not use the internet as I once did as a trainee scientist, as a place to learn more about my chosen field and my career path through it. And indeed, the world has changed, especially online, since the heady days when I joined twitter and later started blogging. As the great unpleasantness of 2016 wore on, I began to become exhausted by the endless hot takes and rapid fire opinions of the internet. And so I began to question my own role in it. Is what I have to write so essential?
When I retreated from the internet, a friend of mine commented that that was loss of a young queer academic voice on the internet. Perhaps. But quitting the internet meant recommitting to where I was physically. To become a young queer academic voice in rural northeast ohio. Which is no less valuable.
The tension here is one I have always felt. I call it the Bolkonsky Bezhoukov dichotomy, after two of the main characters from Tolstoi's war and peace. Prince Bolkonsky, a sceptical materialist, gives up the opportnity to be a camp aid, convinced that he can do more good, indeed only do good, as a sergeant to his unit. Peter Bezhoukov in contrast, believes in the paths of providence, the possibility of great change, and moves from secret society to secret society to be part of that great change. These days, I am a Bolkonsky, but unlike Tolstoi, I think a Bolkonsky can indeed do thing.
So I am ending this blog. Thank you for reading. And watch where else I will speak, in new ways, about new challenges.
Good luck to you all.
Paleogould

A scientist in four dimensions

The past five years have been a wild ride intellectually and professionally. When I started this postdoc I was a year out of completing a PhD in paleontology. Specifically, I'd been looking at the relationship between bone morphology and mammal ecology in the fossil record of the North American Paleocene-Eocene (roughly the first 20 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs) to see if it could tell us anything about the role of locomotor specialization in the success of certain groups of mammals. I came to this lab to learn the techniques necessary to do biomechanical work necessary for testing the functional aspects of the correlations between morphology and ecology I based my paleontological work on. I thought, if I thought anything (I wasn't seeing particularly far into the future at that time, for a number of reasons) that I would spend a couple of years learning the techniques in a different system, then go back to my comparative functional morphology work with a little bit of biomechanics thrown in.
Fast forward five years later, and I'm leaving this lab with a completely different research focus. I'm off to start my own lab studying swallowing in the context of neurological disorders. I'm a Co-I on an NIH funded R01 I helped write. I'm increasingly interested in incorporating more explicit neuroscience into my work. I'm still interested in comparative question, but completely different ones based on the ontogeny of musculoskeletal systems and behaviors in mammal feeding. I haven't worked on anything paleontological in 4 years. I haven't touched a fossil since I finished my PhD.
This transition, or, more accurately, this complete change of track, is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about and coming to terms with. I had wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine. How was it that after having come close to that goal, I was willing to move away from it all of a sudden? Did I really want to give up evolutionary biology and comparative zoology? Was I selling out?
Initially, my worries about this problem were acute, until I began to realise they were based on a false story I had been telling myself about myself. Yes, I'd wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine, but that wasn't all I'd wanted to be. I'd also wanted to be a librarian, a policeman, and a doctor. More relevantly, I remembered that in my last year at Cambridge the three subjects that had really gripped me were paleontology, physiology, and neural mechanisms of behavior. I had even considered continuing with neuroscience, until I balked at the amount of animal work required (another change I've gone through since that time). So in some ways, the things that were drawing me into my new research direction, the problems and questions, were things that had always interested me as much as paleontology. One of my frustrations as a mammal paleontologist in fact had always been how little we discussed in any detail the unique physiological adaptations of mammals. I am first and foremost a mammal biologist, and that means that their physiology and behavior are interesting to me.
Yet my thinking has now matured even past that recognition into the realisation that what I do now doesn't erase what I have done. My five years working in paleontology, the fossils I collected, the museum collections I measured, the methods I used, the papers I published, the conversations I had, haven't been erased by my years working in mammal feeding physiology. Collapse the time dimension, and I am still a paleontologist, and a physiologist, and a neuroethologist, and a comparative zoologist.
I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was nine, and I am one. That doesn't mean I cannot be anything else as well.

Why your society should have an LBGT+ science event

I don't normally blog in direct response to twitter, but this thread from the wonderful Alex Bond invites a response from personal experience.

I am Sick. And. Tired. Of writing letters to call out professional orgs who treat their LGBTQ+ members like nothing.

— Alex Bond (@TheLabAndField) August 22, 2017

Please read this thread to learn what not to do when approached by LBGT+ scientists asking for greater representation in the societies they are members of. Specifically, I want to address this point with a personal story to illustrate how wrong headed an attitude this is.

This tirade brought to you by an org who wrote “I don't think any of [our members] are LGBT so I don't see why we should put time into this”

— Alex Bond (@TheLabAndField) August 22, 2017

As I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I had only recently come out when I started graduate school. From the beginning, navigating outness in my career and navigating the world of science were intertwined. When I came to Johns Hopkins, the LBGT association at the school of medicine was more or less moribund (a good friend of mine who came along a few years later has since kickstarted it and then some). And my department, while I had an out colleague, did not really discuss these things. For my first year in graduate school, I was out to my fellow graduate students, and that was it.
So, when in the fall of my second year I went to my first meeting of my society, I associated being professional in science with being in the closet. But I was uncomfortable with this. Such feelings put a distance between you and fellow attendees, particularly at a conference where out of hours socialising is important (and enjoyable). Being professionally closeted involves eliding a lot of questions.
On the second night of the conference, I noticed a little sign on the noticeboard: "LBGT members dinner will be tomorrow evening at this location, at this time". And suddenly I knew I was not alone. I knew there were others like me in this place, in this society, and that they were welcome.
Ironically, I didn't go to the LBGT dinner that year. I wasn't ready for it. Wasn't ready to be identified as a gay scientist. But even without going, it mattered. And when I went back two years later, I definitely went, and have gone every year since. Each time, a new grad student, or indeed someone more senior, turns up slightly sheepishly, and they are welcome, and they are made a little more comfortable.
But even then, the LBGT dinner (which has been running for years) has always been held at a distance. It was the initiative of one or two people, who have organised it for over a decade, and maintain the mailing list. Getting it listed on the website as an official society event has been a struggle. And every so often you hear someone grumble when they notice the sign "why do they need one?". Which is really the answer to that question.
There is, among a certain generation of scientists, a belief that things were better when we didn't discuss these things. And they'll often say: "well everyone knew X was gay, he (it is invariably a he) just didn't make a fuss about it". If you believe this, I urge to ask X how they felt. You will probably hear a different story, of getting invited to considerably fewer social events, and never with a partner. Of being passed up for promotions and committees, of advisors suddenly becoming frosty and distant. Not talking about it was not about decorum, it was about protection, and being resigned to lesser treatment.
Every time an LBGT person enters a new space, they look for clues as to how out they can be. The older and more establishment a crowd (so most scientific conferences), the more they will assume they have to be reserved. This is difficult, isolating, and honestly just damned unpleasant. And all it takes to start to make it better is a sign on a noticeboard. Is that really so much?*

*No, it isn't and you should do more, but start with that.

Independence and maturity

I didn't get the job.

It wasn't quite the Dream Job, but it had many attributes of it. I thought I did well in the interview. In fact, based on feedback, I'm pretty sure I did do well in the interview. But someone else did better, or had funding, or was a better fit. I'm a postdoc for another year.

I was disappointed not to get the job, but not crushed. Even getting a drink to drown my sorrows felt perfunctory, unnecessary. I was OK. And I realised, that, more and more, when it comes to my career, that equanimity about where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going has come to dominate.

When I finished my PhD, then spent a year unemployed, and then started my postdoc, I was all Sturm und Drang about my career. I oscillated between being terrified I'd never make it, angry I hadn't published more, frustrated at people's failure to recognise my amazing capabilities, irritated at advice that seemed cruel, glib and out of touch. And while I still think there are problems for graduate students and postdocs, that internalization of the problems is gone. The clear, tangible work I have done over the past three and a half years in the wonderful lab I've had the good fortune to do my postdoc in has eliminated much of the bad feelings from the end of my PhD. What has replaced them is a certain degree of confidence I didn't have before, one that is rooted in a certain equanimity about my career and my future. I'm good at what I do, and I've had a blast doing it. I hope I'll get to do it for longer, but if I don't... Well it was a good innings.

Associated with this disappearance of the violent emotions with which I started this postdoc has been a quiet maturation of other skills. We recently had a change of staff in the lab which means I am now the second most senior person here. And, somewhat to my surprise, I found I've stepped up to the plate of managing people with more confidence and willingness then I thought I would. I don't have to remind myself to check in with the new trainees and discuss plans for data collection, I'm just ... doing it.

With my PI, we've reached a stage that is intellectually exciting. She's no longer primarily in the business of training me, we're now collaborators, bouncing ideas off each other about new analyses and projects. The projects are in some ways more collaborative, and yet in others I am more independent then ever: if we decide a certain paper is mine, then she trusts me to carry the project. I'm currently in charge of helping our graduate student write his first paper for publication. It's been a great learning experience, in part because I've discovered how much I now know about the arcana of publication and manuscript preparation.Of course, the independence isn't there in my own grants yet (but maybe, NIH gods permitting, by years end?), but I can feel a shift in how I approach my work, and in how other people in the lab and the university respond to me.  The trick here, one that she and I both acknowledge, is to recognize this dangerously fun dynamic is a sign I should plan to leave, not that I should stay.

Perhaps the word that best describes my mindset about what I do and why I do it now is maturity (yes, you can laugh. I'm 33, i have a lot more maturing to do I'm sure). Part of that is also the recognition that unlike my 20s, I cannot make my career the entire center of my being quite like I did in graduate school (even as I take on more responsibility). I have a husband who is making his own major career decisions. I have a mother who will not be young forever. I will not be young forever.

There will always be choices, there will always be jobs I do not get. But wherever I go from here, there are almost no regrets to be had about what I've done on the way here, either professionally, or personally. And that knowledge is I think the source of my current mindset. And it is a good place to be.

And with that, I am signing off for two weeks. My husband and I are taking our long delayed honeymoon to Spain. Some things should not be put off forever.

On not falling over

Once, when I was on a skiing holiday with a friend, we got to talking about our week so far. I said that I was glad I hadn't fallen over yet. My friend responded "If you haven't fallen over, it means you're not trying hard enough". I was surprised by this. I'd just done the hardest run in the resort that day. To my mind, not falling over meant, simply, that I was good at skiing.
I have a feeling similar to this every time people discuss grades at school and university, and, more specifically, the importance of failure as a learning tool. I don't doubt that recovering from failure shows determination (though when we praise those who overcome failure, we should be careful of survivor bias). And I don't doubt that evaluating someone solely based on grades, without looking at grade progression, background, research experience and so on is foolish. But the description of straight A students, therefore of me, that tends to accompany these debates, sticks in my craw somewhat. Because, like my friend's assessment of my skiing ability, the fact that I'm good at what I do is taken as prima facie evidence that it's all effortless and, somehow, a scam.
Being a straight A student is not effortless. It takes work. In my case, it took discipline, a lot of it. Furthermore, the idea that just because the grades don't show a progression, there is no wrestling with concepts, ideas, no struggles, is erroneous. Those things happen. It's just that, for some reason, with the straight A student, the breakthrough happens before the test, so there is never any evidence of it. The illusion of effortlessness is just that: the straight A student is the swan, gliding gracefully across the mirror like lake, legs paddling furiously underneath.
The other idea that attaches to straight A students, which characterizes me even less, is that somehow, we do not learn the material, we merely learn to take tests. I won't deny that good grades can act as a motivator (and, more tellingly, that bad grades act as a discouragement). But the relationship is more subtle. For me in particular, the good grades worked in combination with my genuine interest in the subjects to create a virtuous circle, one where the external rewards of effort combined with the internal drive of interest to make working for school fun. Yes, fun. As much as exams stressed me, there were times when being given 3 hours to write essays on topics I loved (looking at you general paper from part II zoology) was actually almost a pleasure. 
There are limitations to being a straight A student. Most obviously with me, the fact that I started out good and became excellent in most academic subjects meant that it took me a long time to learn how to deal with those things I wasn't good at from the start (sports comes to mind, but also the violin).  But that doesn't mean that I wasn't good at the things I was good at. It just means that I didn't devote much energy to things I wasn't good at. Then again, many not straight A students do this too (we all do, in fact). The other issue is that straight A students have trouble differentiating adequate performance from actually bad performance. It also took me a long time to recognise that, when hard work yields a reward (a good grade), it is easier to do then when it doesn't. I have immense respect for the C and B students of this world who work their arses off consistently, despite never seeing a consistent A.
As for the question of failure, I have mixed feelings on this. I never failed academically by any measure. Perhaps my first true failure was failing to secure employment straight after my PhD. I overcame that failure, but I'm not sure what I learnt from it. That I was tenacious? I think I learnt that from teaching myself linear algebra in grad school just as much. And besides, my failure would have been impossible to overcome without the successes that came before it. When we focus on failure, we deny people the joy of success that comes from practiced skill.
When we overly lionise the educational importance of failure, and fail to recognise the effort that goes into sustained success, we undermine a lot of hard work. And when we suggest that all straight A students are intellectual frauds, we deny them the joy of their achievement, and the value of their work. These messages reach straight A students early: I think I was nine or ten when my teachers first started telling me to expect to start failing at some point, some as a warning, others, somewhat more gleefully. No one likes a tall poppy. I can understand teachers not focusing on straight A students. I have more trouble with teachers undermining them. It happens more often than you might think.
It is possible to critique the narrowness of our systems of evaluation, and the flaws inherent in our educational systems, without casting aspersions on the efforts and joys of those individuals who do well in them. There is pleasure in racing down skillfully from mountaintop to village, carving into the snow with practiced ease knowing that this, you are good at.

Good advice I received

It's been a tough couple of weeks for me of late work wise, mostly of my own doing. I don't deal well with screwing up, or disappointing people. But amidst it all, I received some very good advice from my sister, who is a very wise woman:

"Don't be ashamed. Embarrassed maybe, but not ashamed. It is noble but unnecessary. You have broken some regulations, no ones limbs. Or hearts."

Learning to respond reasonably and proportionally to your own mistakes is also a skill, and for those of us who pride ourselves on our rectitude, not an easy one.

She also recommended good chocolate and a run. She was right on both counts.

On hard choices

A propos of nothing in particular.

My mother keeps her accounts in hand written double entry tables that would make medieval Venetian auditors weep. Her financial discipline is legendary (only a portion has come down to me). My mother's planner is similarly detailed, with colored blocks delimiting her time into discrete clusters. My mother is disciplined, strong willed, organised, and has been since she left her parent's house at 14 to go to a boarding school she was only able to attend because of her excellent grades.

At least five times in my mother's life, someone (her mother, her employer, her ex husband, her employer again, her landlords) has tried to take her livelihood away. Each time, my mother has doubled down on her organization and discipline. She has built a successful small business as a private tutor, and when necessary has expanded it to fill all available time so she could get money. She saves, she scrimps. She budgets her money and her time to the last penny and the last second. She doesn't give up, and so far, she has won every time.

I have learnt a lot from my mother's handling of tough choices, both from what she told me, and from being around for three of them. I have learnt to calculate compound interest, to track every penny, to scour sales. I have learnt patience. I have learnt to read the fine print, to check for myself, to ask questions. I have learnt the importance of rigor and discipline in getting anything done, and to never assume that things will sort themselves out.

I have also learnt other things. I have learnt never to trust what is not in writing. I have learnt never to put too much faith in the future. I have learnt that you should show up in court calm and collected in a sensible, freshly pressed suit you can barely afford to listen as your husband's lawyer explains that the house you both lived in and the education you both gave your children is too extravagant. I have learnt that you should not, under any circumstances, betray any emotion at this, though you may spend the next night raging into your pillow. I have learnt that when your employer looses track of ten years of your retirement contributions, they will tell you there is nothing to be done. I learnt that when you then spend two years tracking down pay slips from forty years ago, the lady handling the file that you have reconstructed will congratulate herself, and suggest that she really should come on a trip to London. I have learnt that you should say you would be glad to be her guide should she ever choose to do it.

I have learnt that knuckling down takes a toll. That going into crisis mode can become a habit. I have learnt your sleep can go to pot, and then your health. I have learnt that repeatedly getting screwed by people who are supposed to be looking out for you leaves deep wounds that stay fresh a very long time.

My mother never made us work as teenagers, and is always generous with her money. I have asked her why, and her reason is simple: no one was there to help her, and doing it on her own was hard. As she once observed to me when discussing her discipline and rigour "it might have been nice to know who I could have been if I hadn't had to be so disciplined and rigorous".

Mostly, what I have learnt from my mother is this. Tenacity, rigor, discipline, financial nous will help you in times of crisis, or when other people try to screw you over. But those efforts come at a cost, and one should not mistake the ability to endure adversity, with the adversity being a good thing. My mother is an amazing woman, but she would be the first to say that parts of her would have been better off without having to fight all these fights.

Pragmaticism is a necessity, but it is neither itself a virtue, nor a begetter of virtue. And tough choices, unavoidable as they may be, remain tough, and may leave us hard and hurt.

Return on investment, limited ressources and impossible hedges: the postdoc job search

I submitted my first job application for a faculty position last week. It's the first of around 30 opening I currently have listed. The application package (the American Standard: CV, cover letter, research statement, statement of teaching philosophy), took about a week or two to craft. I looked back over old letters I had written three years ago (for which I had already studied the internet intensely), judged them poor, rewrote them. I solicited, and got very good, feedback from my PI and two other professors in the department who know me. One is an associate professor, mid career, established in his field. The other is a pre-tenure, but very successful, assistant professor. The job itself was a neurophysiology position at a research school with a significant budget. And so all the materials will have to be recrafted for the more teaching focused schools, or the anatomy departments, or the more evolutionary and paleontological positions.
While I am working on these job packets, I am hard at work keeping the analysis and writing momentum we have developed in the group. I submitted my second first author paper from my postdoc for review last week, and next week I will take three days to finally revise and resubmit my third dissertation paper (which has been sitting on my hard drive for a year at this point). We have just finished a run of animal experiments, and there are at least two more first author papers (and several middle authors where I will be called upon for analysis) sketched out that could be ready by january.
My PI came and talked to me a couple of days ago. The R01 I'm on is in its final year, and we have not yet had a renewal. She informed me that my position is funded for certain until January 2017. If she gets refunded, the pressure is off. If not, I think that a few favours can be called in to complete that year, but no guarantees. To all intents and purposes, it is in my best interests to get a job this year, after two years in the postdoc.
Academic job applications are laborious, more so than private sector ones. More information is requested, the process is more drawn out, a greater research investment is expected at every stage of the process. And yet all that work is ancillary. Or, more specifically, it is icing. Grant, publications, research: those are the hard substrate you need for the crafting of the job documents to be even worth the effort. All these things take time, huge amounts of time. As a graduate student, or a postdoc, especially in a one grant lab like mine, time can suddenly become an exceptionally rare commodity. Like at the end of graduate school, I am on a timer if I don't want to face a serious gap in income. I have to maximize the ROI on the time I have. And knowing where to maximize that ROI is... non trivial. Obviously, more papers is better. But at this point, most papers I submit now will not be in press by the time applications close on most of the jobs I have lined up. Is a big list of in reviews worth it? How much is it worth relative to getting half a dozen more jobs applications out? After all, publication from the lab will help my PI's grant efforts, which also are of concern to me at this point.
I was in a similar bind at the end of grad school: I had no publications, my dissertation was unfinished, and I had no job lined up, a year away from cessation of funding and the end of my F1 visa. How to maximise my time? In the end, I wasted a few months on job applications: I got the very firm message that an ABD grad student with no pubs was not a hirable commodity. So I finished the dissertation, and headed back to the UK to live with my mother. I spent a year unemployed, applying for jobs and getting my first two papers out. It was not ideal, and owing to life circumstances not a scenario I can afford to repeat.
Which brings me to my next point in this rambling post. I have to prepare for the eventuality that I won't get a faculty position. With the current data on postdoc placement rates, all graduate students and postdocs need to hedge against not making it in academia. Yet what constitutes a good hedge? From my experience outside academia (which was before the recession), I know that field moves without experience are difficult. Again, you need to invest either capital (ie a nest egg to tide you over, difficult on a postdoc salary) or time to build useful contacts and experience. Time, which as I have mentioned, is a limited commodity when on a fixed term appointment.
I maintain that the challenges faced by people like me are not unique in kind to academia. Fixed term gigs, low starting salaries, competition for permanent positions, the open ended nature of projects that can expand to fill all available time, the constant need to re-invent yourself,  even the need to be highly mobile, can be found in so many other industries where young graduates now end up (law, medicine, consulting, finance, tech, game development). But the degree, and specific combinations of these factors, combined with an idiosyncratic job application process that is mostly useless for getting jobs outside of academia, do present unique challenges that can hamstring young people in academic science trying to keep their lives together. And the combination of lack of capital and lack of time means that efficiently hedging for the high likelihood of having to operate a career move is a unique challenge. On this, young academics are in need of mentoring.

Growth

I am currently writing a manuscript. It's the second first author manuscript to come from my postdoctoral work (a little under two years in), and hopefully it will be sent out for review in the next couple of weeks. Currently, my PI and I are sending it back and forth, querying the writing, clarifying the main points, realising (for me at least) some pretty large gaps in my knowledge of the litterature. But, at no point since I wrote the first draft have either my PI or I thought anything other than "this is a good manuscript, we just need to make it even better".
This is in many ways the paper I came here to write. It's the paper that shows that I understand how to do biological kinematics, that is how to study the movement of biological structures as organisms use them. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my background (which now seems quite far off) is in ecomorphology as applied to the fossil record. I correlated variation in mammalian bone morphology with known variation in broad categorical behavioral and ecological variables. But these broad classifications don't tell you about function, and so about the behavioral phenotype on which selection is acting. So I took this postdoc in part to learn how to ask those questions.
And here I am, writing a paper that does just that, yet also so much more than I had anticipated. The study we did was an experimental manipulation to see how a nerve lesion affected the movement of the tongue and oro-pharynx in our animal model. The work replicates a relatively frequent iatrogenic injury in premature human infants, and so it is clinically relevant. But the direction we have taken with this paper is so much more than that. We're using the changes we observe to make inference about the neurological control of these oro pharyngeal structures. My head has, for the past few weeks, been full of discussion of central pattern generators, afferent and efferent pathways.
With this paper, I feel like I have grown immensely as a scientist. I have become the integrative biologist I've always wanted to be. I'm not doing it in this paper yet, but I feel ready to connect my paleontological work and knowledge of mammalian evolution with my understanding of experimental organismal physiology.
I have an idea of the direction I want to head in as a paleontologist, as a evolutionary biologist, as a mammalian physiologist. And it's so much more than I thought it would be when I started this project hoping to learn about kinematics.
I'm heading out onto the job market this year. And my research statement will be nothing like the one I wrote three years ago when I was finishing my PhD. I think it will be so much more interesting. And I hope others will too.

An apology, and understanding

I was an ass on twitter last night. PIs and postdocs were shouting about the overtime threshold change, and I jumped in, riled up and angry and not paying enough attention to what was being said, so sure I was of what I was saying. I apologize.
I was made to realize (by someone with great patience) that much of the PI ambivalence to this announcement boils down to it adding yet another financial burden on labs whose margin of operation is already so thin as to be invisible. And so, once again, all our great science problems come back to the question of funding.
PI are, everywhere, trying to square an impossible circle, that keeps getting more complicated. And as much as we may think we understand, we postdocs are not squaring that circle. That burden is the PIs.
I still think this rule change is a rare victory for American workers' rights, after decades of seeing them eroded. I still think that the segue through the discussion of a postdoc's worth this weekend was unecessary, beside the point, and vicious. I still think that in the aggregate, this reform will be for the best. The key word there is aggregate.
But I am also reminded that any new law put forward without adequate funding may quickly become little more than window dressing. And that when it comes to its impact on workers paid by the public dollar, that may be what this law becomes.
In the immediate term, if the reform goes through as intended, I suspect HR memos will be sent, and PIs will watch their postdocs comings and goings a little closer. Maybe fewer marathon experiments will be scheduled back to back. Maybe fewer hours will be worked. Maybe this will actually be good for the long hours culture in academia (though I hear the overtime exempt PIs laugh darkly at this).
But what this ugky episode reminds us most, is that no matter how you cut, no matter what you reform, there isn't enough money for all the people in science right now. And until that's addressed, all reforms like these will have similar responses I fear.

This isn't about you

I've been trying of late not to blog based on twitter interactions so much, because I think I talk enough on twitter that I don't need to repeat myself on here. But the past few days discussion about the overtime directive has me feeling the need to expand on my thoughts slightly.
To recap, the Obama administration is directing the department of labor to raise the threshold for overtime exemption from $23,660 dollars a year to $50,000 dollars a year, on the basis that that threshold no longer reflects the intent of the law as was written.
Justin Kiggins over at the Spectroscope blogged about whether this would apply to postdocs, who are currently paid $42,000 and $56,000 on the NRSA pay scale set by NIH (I believe that the level are slightly less for NSF postdocs, but I have been unable to find clear figures). Thus, postdocs with less than 4 years postdoctoral experience may be concerned by this change (after 4 years NRSA pay scale reaches the new threshold). This was a reasonable point to make. And then all hell broke loose on twitter.
Initially, most postdocs were incredulous that such a thing as "overtime" could even apply to them. Even today, scientists on twitter are arguing that scientists are overtime exempt, pointing to the very directive that is subject to change. Others argued that fellows are already exempt from many of these labor laws. Which is true, but many postdocs are not fellows in a employment sense: if you are paid our of a PI grant such as a R01 and receive a W-2 with witholdings, you are, to all intents and purposes, an employee of the institutions at which you work (this is also why you are illegible for employee benefits, 403bs and such). Most postdocs were convinced that universities and NIH would do everything they could to find ways around this. Which is probably true, that is how labor reform goes. More disturbing to me was how many were convinced that it shouldn't apply to them. Arguments raged that our work could not be quantified (yes it can), that what we did didn't count as work anyway (yes it does), that we didin't fill time cards (indeed, because the current law does not require it). Anything but the status quo seemed unimaginable, and the very idea that may be a limitation of working hours inconceivable.

The response to the possibility that labor laws might apply here

And then the PIs got involved, and it turned into a standard discussion of what postdocs are owed, what they worth, how we are entitled. We were called "giddy", despite having greeted this entire discussion with (in my view) excessive skepticism. We were warned darkly about what this might do to our employment prospects (by the very people who ordinarily would say that lowering the number of postdocs would be a good thing).
And here is where I lost it.
Because this reform is not about postdocs. As Kiggins pointed out, postdocs represent less than 1% of the people who may be affected. This reform is about bar, restaurant and store managers on $24,000 how work 60 hr weeks. This reform is about how nearly 9/10th of US earners are exempted under current legislation (back of an envelope calculations from here). This is about how, as the reaction of US postdoc shows, no one in this country actually believes in labor law anymore. No one believes that they can be protected from overwork, that pay should be proportional to hours worked as well as talent. No one even believes in the benefits their employer gives them. I have yet to meet a single person at my workplace who takes our (generous) 20 day vacation allowance. And trust me, it's not just because they love their work. I've spent enough time with Americans to know how they are socialized to view vacation as a professional liability.
And yes, laws like this have complex and difficult ramifications for small and medium enterprises. If PIs think finding an extra 6 grand for a postdoc will be hard, think of the restaurant manager trying to calculate whether or not to hire a second manager at 24K, pay the existing manager overtime, or bump her salary to the new threshold.
But when we argue about whether we should be exempt, we are not just doing ourselves a disfavour. We're making an argument that will be used by every boss in every sector against people paid far less and with worse career prospects. 
So, PIs, postdocs: this rule is not about you. It is about fair labor compensation for all workers in the US, of which you happen to be a part. A little less onanistic navel gazing would suit you well at this point.
In 2000, France passed a law mandating a 35h working week for all salaried workers, with further limits on annual amounts of overtime worked. It was cumbersome and stupid, difficult to implement and the subject of much ridicule. But I would much rather come from that tradition then one that is so willing to believe its only right is to work more for less. 
(As an aside, the current salary cap is low enough that most lab techs are also overtime exempt. Have you asked your tech how many hours she works lately?)

The value of capable

Today was a tough day in the lab. Supertech and I are flying solo (PI is away), and we are running two weeks of experiments using a rather expensive, and rather delicate, piece of custom built equipment. The experiments are supposed to be straightforward. As today showed, "supposed" is the operative word here.
It should be noted that supertech and I (well, mostly supertech. I just help) are pretty anal about planning experiments. We put a lot of thought into how the experiments are going to run, and we test as much as we can beforehand. The reason for this is that once experiments start, there is no time to think. Baby animals are screaming to be fed, multiple multi hour surgeries need to be done, and we need to make sure that people don't get irradiated by the high powered fluoroscopes (there are two). The simple act of getting through experiments drains brains and nerves.
But even with the best laid plans, things go wrong. Not everything can be anticipated. Which lead to today, when our expensive piece of machinery (basically, a series of precise electronically controlled pumps) stopped working. With four screaming hungry pigs in the room.
As in turned out, a crucial piece of information had been left out when discussing the design of the system (before I or Supertech joined the lab). Why? Who knows. The same reason that, with hindsight, really obvious things are missed from experimental planning. Essentially, the pumps got fouled up by the radio opaque particulates in the liquid we pump. Two weeks of experiments and four animals were at stake.
Supertech and I then went into super capable mode. We troubleshooted the system every way we knew. I called the manufacturer, and confirmed what the issue was. We found a way to clean the pumps, and then started to work on solving the problem that our fluid had particles that were too large. Within an hour we had three possible solutions. Within two hours we had started to put in place all three. By seven pm this evening, Supertech and her husband had built a high volume filtering system that would remove the large particles from our suspension (we'd already by this point checked that this kept the solution radio opaque). Tomorrow experiments will resume, and we will only be one day behind.
As a lab team, supertech and I are capable. We can deal on the fly with most crises. When something goes wrong, within half an hour we have a plan, within a hour we're putting it in place. We brainstorm, prioritize, call people and get things fixed. She's better than I am, but I pull my weight. I don't think we've lost much more than a week on any experimental schedule, and that was due to unforeseen animal death. We have stayed overnight in the lab to care for sickly animals. We've harassed suppliers to get things overnighted. We've become conversant in technical topics we knew nothing about. We get things done.
For the science, this is great. For the animals, this is essential. But for us... I worry. I worry that capability, the ability to creatively solve problems on the fly, and to put in the effort to do it, doesn't always reap the rewards equivalent to its cost in hours and stress. I don't mean to impugn our PI. She treats us exceptionally well, recognizes our efforts, and has rewarded us with substantial autonomy and authority on the running of the lab. I mean rather, that the labor market since Taylor and Ford has been structured so as not to rely on the capable worker. To a manufacturer, the added value of a capable line worker is marginal compared to a merely adequate one. And in science, techs and postdocs (and graduate students) are somewhat like manufacturing labor. Yes, a good postdoc adds value to the lab, but how much value relative to a merely adequate one?
Many of my smart, capable friends in other jobs hide their capability, revealing it only to those they trust not to exploit it. Capable people need to learn to say no, because they get asked to do more than most, and all of the difficult, non rote tasks. And problem solving is tiring work.
I like being capable. I like not being helpless in the face of problems. But I worry that capability is a liability, because it becomes assumed, and because its value to the beneficiaries is less than its cost to those who do the capable work.
 

Fallingwater: on excellence and mediocrity

Coming back from a weekend with friends two weeks ago I had the opportunity to fulfill a long time wish: I managed to visit Fallingwater. I've been in love with Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece of integrated design since I first found out about it. Finally, I was about to see it in person. It provoked the same response in me that the Taj Mahal did: no matter how many photographs of it I'd seen, the experience of being in its presence was overwhelming. Much like the Taj, Fallingwater is exquisite craft expressing conceptual genius at almost every level of analysis.

As we left Fallingwater, we drove through miles of countryside scattered with new builds. Within minutes of one of the most inspiring houses ever built, we were back in standard, prefabricated MacMansions that stuck out on hills, with terraces and balconies jutting out at odd angles. It was disappointing. So little of Lloyd Wright's careful thought about the integration of architecture and landscape, about the use of light and space, heck even about using cantilevered concrete rather than wooden post and plasterboard to deal with steep inclines, has made it into the bulk of modern architecture. 

Going further, if we look at the glass-and-steel monoliths that increasingly dot cities and university campuses, which of them really display anything like the intricate thought of Fallingwater, or the Guggenheim in New York? I remember in London, before I left, my first encounter with the base of the Shard. I was wondering how the architect has sought to integrate this glass and steel behemoth with the ramshackle brick buildings around it? The answer: not at all. The glass and steel cladding simply descended into a canopied atrium, as if the starship of a spectacularly aesthetically unsophisticated alien species had crash landed on south London. 

When confronted the reality of how little brilliance like Fallingwater affects day to day construction, how little careful ideas about the spaces we live in seems to have affected the practice of how and what we build, one is tempted to get depressed. And I would hazard that similar things happen in science. How often do we get frustrated that ideas that were soundly and brilliantly rejected years ago continue to have a zombie life in the literature? How often do we complain that the nuance and subtlety in the source materials of innovative ideas is lost in the work of those who pursue those ideas? My recent experience at the clinical meeting highlighted how little people were thinking about new ideas and new directions, and how much time was being devoted to flogging dead horses. And in my old field of paleontology, many of the scientist doing the most interesting and subtle work get ignored in favor of self promoters doing the same old thing, with newer analyses tacked on for flashiness (much like modern house building in fact). 

If in architecture, as in science, brilliant, thoughtful ideas and approaches get so diluted in the mass, how do we, as individuals, keep doing good work? The best I can come up with is to think critically about the bad stuff, regularly engage with the good, and shoot for an architect designed house. 

I am not Frank Lloyd Wright of experimental biology, evolutionary biology or paleontology. But I have had the good fortune to work with people who think about science like he thought about buildings: carefully, yet radically, questioning all the tools we use, how we use them, and our approaches. And ultimately, the reward of working like that is to assemble something complete, integrated, beautiful, inspiring, and good.  

Silent Ivories

My mother has always had a piano. Playing the piano is central to her idea of herself. The only thing other than a house she has ever taken a loan for is the upright Steinway in our living room. Having "time to play the piano" is a measure of how much control she has over her life. It is, to use modern parlance, her measure of self care. Yet, interestingly, the piano is not relaxing for her in the way that a movie or a book might be. She is always challenging herself to play harder pieces, to get better. It requires effort and energy: more of a discipline than a hobby. And when my mother does not have energy for the piano, then she knows that something else in her life is taking too much of her time.
My relationship to the piano is very different. Its presence and sound are comforting to me, yet I never really played. My instrument was the violin, and our relationship is estranged at best. I have dabbled in playing the piano (over the course of a decade I have taught myself the first two movements of the Moonlight sonata), and whenever I am back home I find time to refresh my memory.
During the year between ending my PhD and starting my postdoc, when I was unemployed and living back with my mother, I started playing the piano more seriously. At my mother's prompting, I took lessons with her piano teacher. I improved noticeably. I began to think of other pieces I would like to learn. And so, when I moved to Ohio, concerned I would be bored, I resolve to buy myself a piano.
I found a good electronic piano on Craigslist, one that was highly rated for its sound. In fact, it is based on sampling a Steinway concert grand. I set it up in our spare room, and got sheet music for the Moonlight (no point in losing the benefit of all that practice) and the next piece I'd resolved to learn, a piece of Tchaikovsky incidental music from his Seasons series. After almost a year, I can play 8 bars. I play the piano maybe a couple of times a month.
On occasion, I feel guilty about this. I enjoy the piano, and I want, on some level, to learn these pieces, and ultimately, one day, to master the third movement of the Moonlight sonata, which is currently far beyond my technical skill. And, of course, I compare myself with my mother, who throughout her always busy, sometimes hectic life has always been able to practice several hours a week. It would be easy to blame science, and its tendency to expand to fill all available space. It would be easy to argue that I could cut out more mindless pursuits (like twitter, or browsing the internet, or playing video games, or watching TV). Certainly, my upbringing was Protestant enough that I must always wonder if I am making the best use of the time allotted to me. And certainly the pressures of being an early career researcher don't help.
But I think also, part of the problem lies in being honest about what is important to us. As I was talking to colleagues over the weekend about the compatibility of science with time consuming hobbies, I came to a realisation. I have decided what matters to me: my work, my fiance, my friends and family, and exercising so that I can enjoy the outdoors in the summer. These are the things, when I look at how I spend my time, that I make time for. It is not worth feeling guilty that I do not play the piano enough. It is simply not important enough to me to make the cut. And conversely, it is clearly important enough to my mother that she will make time for it in the face of other pressures.
Life is difficult enough, and there are enough pressures and demands on our time as scientists, that we should not burden ourselves with feeling obligations towards activities that we do not in fact value that much. Embrace the things you care about, and make time for them. That choice is personal, and yours, and your choices are valid.
Maybe in ten years time I will have deciphered the Tchaikovsky piece. If that is the time it takes, then that is the time it takes. In the meantime, I will enjoy my fiance's company, invite my friends to dinner, and plan for a summer of camping trips in the Appalachian mountains.

A good start

The holiday season is finally coming to a close, and as always, I have not done as much work as I hoped I would. I long ago accepted that work does not get done over the Christmas break. Now that Christmas invariably involves travelling across an ocean to engage in back to back coffee, lunch, drinks, and dinner with all my friends and family back home, this is doubly true.
I have no regrets about this. I have not been home in over a year, and so for the ten days I was away, my friends and family (and my home town, that I miss deeply) had my undivided attention. I got to see everyone I could. I spent time with my siblings, my mother, my two nephews, and my niece. I saw my oldest friend, whom I've known since I was six. It was important work.
That being said, I had set myself one objective. About two years ago, a friend and colleague of mine and I had discussed a collaboration. It was a side project, but an interesting one, and potentially a new avenue in which to use the methods I focused on in my PhD. It isn't too much work on my part, and the potential returns are large. But life got in the way, and the project has stalled since those discussions. That friend and I will be meeting at the SICB meetings in West Palm Beach later this month, and we had more or less decided that, if we had made no progress by then, the project would be shelved.
It is one of those make or break moments, when you decide how important something is. Well, it appears this was important to me, because this morning I had the workflow breakthrough I was looking for: I've figured out the key data processing steps we need to make this project work. I'm excited again. And I'm taking this as a good sign for 2015: that on the 2nd of January, despite being ill, I got up, went to the local coffee shop (I'm still not home) and worked for a solid three hours until the things I wanted to achieve got done. I still enjoy this, I still want to do this, and there are parts of it I'm actually pretty good at.
So happy new year everybody. May 2015 be filled with little moments like this one.

Rekindling the fire

After I finished my master's degree, about nine years ago, I was at a loss as to what to do next. A Ph.D. seemed too much of a commitment at that age. I wanted to get a proper job, and see what the real world had to offer and if I could be content there. Problem was, I had no idea what one did in the real world.
I had almost no professional experience. I wrote amateurish, over eager cover letters and sent my woefully short CVs out to scientific publishing houses. I wrote clumsy mock articles for science journalist internships. I was basically directionless. I eventually took a job as a website content editor and translator for a half arsed start up animation and comic book company based in London county hall. I learnt a lot on that job, mostly that anything that looks too good to be true on paper probably is, and that throwing everything  at the wall to see what sticks can work great for management, but is a great way to fuck over enthusiastic young people.
The job offered no guidance. I had no idea what I was doing, how well I was doing, and what was expected of me. I felt out of my depth, frustrated, and unhappy. That's when I found the web forum fo a popular webcomic dedicated to graduate students. I leapt in. I checked threads at all hours of the day, and late into the night. Within a few months, my posting was through the roof. I have a lot to thank that forum for. It gave me a community when I felt isolated professionally, encouraged me to overcome my fear of graduate school, and taught me a lot about passionate and intelligent people. It was also an emotional minefield, that would at roughly three to six month interludes erupt into belligerent arguing. Those forum fights were emotionally exhausting to those involved, and seemed difficult to contextualise to those outside the forums. Sound familiar? The forum became a crutch to escape my dissatisfaction with my professional life. The six month I spent unemployed, and the nine months I spent in that job with no clear direction and no idea what was going to happen the next day, let alone in a month, destroyed what had up to then been a pretty solid work ethic and discipline that had successfully carried me through high school, college and my master's degree.
Eventually, I realised that the job was bad for me, so I didn't even wait to hear whether or not I got into graduate school. I found another job, one that was more focused and more serious, with a much better boss. I rediscovered some (though not all) my work ethic. And eventually, I was accepted into graduate school in the US and left. The forum faded and was eventually disbanded, though I found I had lost interest sometime shortly after starting my PhD. During my PhD, I was stressd, but overall happy. I almost never had trouble motivating myself to do what needed to be done. I was an independent adult for the first time, and it felt great. Seriously, balancing my own budget at the end of every month made me feel like a kid imagines being a grown up feels like.
Five years later, I was back where I had been after my masters. I had finished the PhD, and was looking into a gaping unknown. My visa had expired and in focusing on finishing my dissertation I found myself without publications and without a job. I had to move back to the UK, leaving behind a life I had spent five years building, including a four year relationship. My partner and I agreed to go long distance, but it was terrifying to do that with no set end date, and no idea under what circumstances we could be back together.
So, at 29, I moved back in to my mother's house in London. After five heavily goal directed years, in which I had grown as a person and a scientist, in which I had begun to achieve some degree of professional recognition, suddenly nothing. The result was a return to that feeling I had had in my first job of frustrated aimlessness, combined with a fair dose of humiliation. Amid that frustration and isolation, a good friend and fellow scientist introduced me to science twitter. It was great. I found colleagues and scientists I could chat to in almost real time. I kept abreast of developments in my field. I found out about job opportunities. I commiserated about the job market. And I got involved in many large twitter spats that were emotionally draining. I found a voice yes, but man I used it a lot.
That year of my life was not, in many ways, a good one for me. It contained many good things (the birth of my nephews and niece, time with my family, time to rediscover my home town), but professionally, despite submitting my first two papers (and getting one accepted), giving several invited seminars and getting four postdoc interviews, it felt like stagnation, if not regression. And, as before, my work ethic went to pot. I was listless and unmotivated. I drank too much. And I spent a lot of time on twitter. It was clear to me that I was angry, and burned out. Yet I couldn't muster the willpower to change my slew of bad behaviors. I was in licking my wounds mode. This scared me: I've always prided myself on my willpower. Yet suddenly, I couldn't stop myself from tweeting when I should be working, from not wasting my days playing Skyrim, and from not engaging in alarmingly regular drinking. Don't get me wrong, I love twitter, love video games and enjoy a good beer, but even I could tell this was no longer quite healthy.
Eventually, through networking, good luck and some people willing to go to bat for me in a big way, I landed my current postdoc. And as soon as I started, things started to change. The first three  months, I was in the office at 8 every day and staying til six. I probably achieved more in those first few months than I had in the entire previous year. In January, my now fiance came to join me out here. Suddenly we had our life back.
But my bad habits hadn't left. I had the energy for work again, but everything else was still off kilter. I'm one of those people who's always on top of his paper work (taxes filed a month before the deadline, paperwork submitted with weeks to spare), but things were still slipping through my fingers. I missed bills (something I NEVER do). I also had almost zero energy to do anything outside of work. I've always been a voracious reader, but I suspect this year I've read fewer books that at any other time in my life. And limiting my drinking has proved harder than I had wanted.
And then there's twitter. Its use as a crutch in that year in the wilderness made it difficult to shake the habit, but there's no denying that I tweet more than is sensible, given all the other things I need to do.
A year in I finally feel myself returning to a better version of me. As the winter is settling in, I'm looking forward to making my way through a backlog of books. I'm exercising regularly again. I'm making a concerted effort to be more disciplined about non work tasks, and the drinking is finally getting under control. And then last week, after the turmoil of shirstorm, and the wonderful response to my post, I realised I was also ready to reboot my relationship with twitter. So I'm taking a twitter break (I'm still lurking, so no saying mean things about me thinking I won't find out). I need to devote this new energy to tasks closer to hand: my research, my papers, my impending wedding.
A friend of mine told me, as I was entering my final year of graduate school, that six months to a year of unemployment was getting increasingly common between completing a PhD and starting a postdoc in palaeontology. Even if we disregard the economic lunacy and unsustainability of this arrangement, the psychological and emotional toll it takes on young researchers is huge. If you are in this situation, be honest with yourself about how exhausted you are, and be aware of any bad behaviors you may have accumulated as coping mechanism. Give yourself time, and be gentle, and you will find your way back to a version of you you prefer. It's taken me a year. And that means next year can only be better.

Frustation

Since July, our lab has been running experiments non stop. The way our protocol works, this is an all hands on deck, round the clock situation, as it involves bottle feeding very young mammals by. The data we need requires lengthy surgeries on USDA animals. The procedures are sterile, the animals are intubated and have IV lines. The surgeries themselves take four hours. The success of the surgery is only known afterwards, when the electrodes are connected up to the EMG system. Prior to surgery, our electrodes must be built by hand, and then be sent off for gas sterilization as they cannot go through a standard autoclave. Other parts of our system are also made in house, and require testing for electrical faults. Between surgeries, tools have to be washed, packed and sterilized. None of the materials we use are easy to come by, many of them have lengthy lead times on orders and all of them are expensive. Suffices to say, there are many, many, MANY things that can go wrong in our experiments. And, after six weeks of solidly being part farm, part electrical shop, and part hospital, I can say with some confidence that almost everything did.
Among the things that went wrong, the worst was losing an animal in surgery. In this case, the dominant emotion is not frustration. It's sadness, anger, disappointment. As we had three young summer students from the medical school in the lab, all of whom where involved in the surgeries to some degree, the priority was making sure that they were ok. Loosing an animal in surgery is too serious a matter to focus on your frustrations with the science. And, because my PI is awesome, she knows this. Those events exist in a separate space from the other things that went wrong this summer. They are matter for sober reflection, and no matter how much you want to get data that summer, you pause when that happens, and figure out what you can do better.
However, there were myriad other things that went wrong, of greater and lesser importance. Electrode placement in surgery failed to yield adequate results. Intermediate cables broke and had to be resoldered, sometimes as a surgery in which that cable would be needed was progressing. An inaccurate channel map of all the connections meant that two whole EMG channels were wasted (my fault). The lab was not finished, meaning our lab server could not be set up, resulting in all the data being fragmented across multiple 3TB external hard drives. Tools had to be autoclaved during surgery. IV lines were ripped out. Animals stopped breathing in the middle of surgery. Injectible aneasthetics everyone swore would make our surgery smoother had only bad effects on our animals. A vomiting and diarrhea bug tore through all our animals one by one. A cable came partially unplugged, resulting in us losing half our EMG channels. An xray c-arm we'd already had repaired twice failed again. Every day started at 8 and ended at six, if not seven. Most weekends involved data collection of some sort. As the summer wore on, everyone's reserves were ground down. Everyone's patience began to wear thin. As one of the chief surgeons, I began to be concerned about my ability to do the surgeries. I was, and am, exhausted.
In such a situation, frustration quickly comes to dominate your feelings. Every thing that hasn't been done, every logistical snafu that comes from something having slipped through the cracks, becomes an issue. Surely, someone was supposed to be on top of it. Surely this had been mentioned three weeks ago. Surely we had agreed it would be done (just not by me). The productive response in these situations is to figure out how the situation can be fixed here and now. The frustrated response is to huff, to use a sharp tone, to bitch. In reality, the best you can hope for is that both will happen, the frustrated response to let off steam, the productive response to keep things moving.
The worst aspect of frustration is how it blinds you to simple solutions. After a few weeks of experiments like these, it is most tempting, when faced with a glitch, to reach for the explanations that involve people, not things or simple stochasticity. Thus days are lost remaking cables, rather than checking that all the cables of the set up are still plugged in. The solution that involves people, work, effort, not accidents, is more appealing to the frustrated mind grappling with how little control it has over the situation.
Dealing with frustration is hard. It requires calm and perspective, in rare supply when surrounded by screaming animals and beeping machines. This is why we can't do our research year round. During experiments, the best that can be done, I think, is to take small breaks when it all gets to much. Send the med students home early if you can. Cancel a day's data recording, if you need to. Be kind to each other. Make sure that night shift burdens are spared.
I am thankful that the two people in charge of personnel planning (my PI, and SuperTech), have a good eye for how everyone else is doing. On one particular day, SuperTech noticed that after a long surgery, I was a mess. My hands were shaking, my motor control gone, my mood frazzled and incoherent. After I messed up a (not life threatening) routine procedure, I think she went to find the PI. The PI sent me home (in a nice way). Sometimes, that's the best thing you can do.
Frustration is friction: energy wasted as heat. At the end of long experimental bouts, or long field seasons, energy is at a premium. Managing an exhausted, frustrated team takes tact and sensitivity. That's not something you realise until you experience it. I hope that, when the time comes, I will be able to look past my own exhaustion and frustration and make the right decisions for the people and the science in my lab.

The Stakhanovite tendency

When the former Soviet Union was at the height of its productivity war with the West to demonstrate the superiority of Marxist-Leninist forms of production over capitalism, a myth emerged of the worker Stakhanov. Aleksei Stakhanov was a miner who allegedly dug up 102 tons of coal in 6 hours (14 times his quota) (source Wikipedia). Soon, Stakhanov was praised throughout the USSR. His example was one to be emulated, for the greater good of the people, the Soviet Union, and the cause of Marxism-Leninism. Medals were awarded by the Party to workers who lived up to stakhanovite ideals. Men and women worked hard and long in fields and factories to win honour for themselves, their collectives and the nation. The aim was always to do more, do better, to beat the previous record set by the workers in your collective. Like many of the impulses that drove the early Soviet Union, the Stakhanovite movement was both impressive in its achievements and appalling in its costs. Many people lost their health, even their lives in their pursuit of Stakhanovite goals. Many more simply cheated, adding a dark twist to the suffering of those striving to achieve impossible targets.
Especially today, the nature of scientific research means that sometimes we have a huge amount of repetitive work (data processing) to do in a short period of time. This is sometimes unavoidable. The Stakahnovite tendency haunts us at such times. When we brag about how long our experiments are. When we build overly ambitious schedules despite the voice in our head whispering "this is too much". When we power through the night editing data files on coffee and beer, convincing ourselves we have a strict deadline no one is imposing but ourselves. We come to pride ourselves on our ability to do these tasks. "I spent 14 hours yesterday writing my third chapter" (never mind that the last third of what I wrote is almost unintelligible stream on consciousness). "I was up until 3am editing these video data for analysis" (never mind that I have a nagging suspicion the last dozen or so are less than rigorous).
The Stakhanovite tendency is ingrained, and difficult to budge. It is at its most dangerous however, when dealing with members of the research group who have not bought in wholesale to the ideology of sacrifice for science. When we apply it to ourselves, we mostly have ourselves to blame for not checking our own destructive behaviour. When we expect it of others in our lab, especially those whose backgrounds and career directions are different from ours, we are being exploitative, and fostering unnecessary resentments in the group.
Our lab group for the summer has accumulated a significant amount of data throughout a series of exhausting and complicated experiments. Much of the work, in particular the grunt work of feeding animals, cleaning and wrapping tools for surgery, building electrodes and generally keeping track of things has been done by our three amazing summer students and my colleague SuperTech. Our daily experiments require out of hours commitment, long hours and a willingness to go above and beyond. This is understood and accepted by all parties, and all of us, regardless of position in the lab, chip in where we can.
As the experimental run reaches a close, however, we are faced with the need to begin to analyse the data from the summer, in part to answer broad questions from the grant, in part so that the summer students can complete their research projects. In a lab meeting last week to discuss how best to organise the analysis of a summer's worth of data in a few days, I went into full Stakhanov mode. I explained how all the data we needed could be prepared in a weekend, and I suggested task distributions by project, regardless of size discrepancies between projects. One of the summer students (as I mentioned above, these guys have already gone above and beyond), exhausted and anxious, eventually was coaxed by my PI into explaining that he felt the division of labor was unfair, the expectations too high. He was right. There was no need for me to put forward the grueling schedule I'd suggested. A day or two more would not hurt. I was channeling my graduate school experiences of processing all my data in a few days, and it was unnecessary, and insulting to the effort everyone had already put in.
The Stakhanovite tendency is destructive precisely because it undervalues the work already done. It demands endlessly more sacrifice from people, often when they've already given more than was required of them. For our own sanity, we should check it in ourselves. In order to be decent human beings, we must never let it govern our relationships to others.