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.
Wednesday, 15 July 2015
Wednesday, 8 July 2015
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.
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?)
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 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?)
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
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.
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.
Monday, 1 June 2015
Other skills
I grew up in a large apartment in the center of London. We had no outdoor space, and no spaces that weren't used as everyday rooms (no sheds, garages, basements, attics). In fact, the only non essential room we had was my mother's study and library, which is probably relevant to the content of this post. My mother was a high school teacher, my father a civil servant. As a result, I never had much occasion to dabble in practical, manual skills like gardening, or DIY, or car maintenance. There was neither the space, nor the people to teach me.
I should add that I wasn't raised to be contemptuous of manual work. My mother's father was a master craftsman, specialized in tin roofing, and everyone in her family were the kind of people who could build a house from scratch, or plant a vegetable garden the size of a field. The kind of people who did, in fact, because they could never find a contractor who would meet their standards. (One of my mother's aunts, in her late 80s when I knew her, still hoed her vegetable garden by hand because she felt the hoeing machine her son rented for her left too big clods of dirt in the soil). My mother had learnt all these skills, as well as all the other skills of needlework that women in the family were taught. But, through a combination of moving to the city and lack of aptitude, she never developed them like her siblings did. What she kept, however, was an appreciation of good craftsmanship, which she used when guiding the remodeling of our house in London.
I've often felt, as I've become older and more independent, that my lack of practical skills was a mild hindrance. Abstractly, I worry about having no skills to help in a zombie apocalypse. Concretely, day to day, I feel vulnerable to things going wrong (plumbing leaks, car troubles), and I feel that I pay for tasks I ought not to (trouser alterations). It would be easy to run with the idea that I am "intellectual" and not practically minded. But such dichotomies are dangerous and patronizing. And besides, I have spent the past year developing into a rather good surgeon. Surely that suggests I am more practical, and better with my hands, than I might think.
It was the process of buying a car for the first time about a year ago that really reminded me of my lack of practical DIY skills. For financial reasons, I decided to buy a car from a private seller rather than a dealership, and the cars I was looking at were old. I quickly realized that I felt completely out of my depth as I opened bonnets to stare at engines I knew nothing about, and took cars on test drives without really understanding what I was looking for. In the end, I picked the wrong car of two that I saw, because I couldn't tell the difference between cosmetic rust, and a concerning engine.
Last weekend, I took my truck on my first solo roadtrip from Ohio to Virginia and back. On the last day, I was about to leave my friend's house in southern Maryland when he noticed a leak that I had been ignoring (on the basis it was an old car). He pointed out to me that my rear differential was leaking a lot of fluid, and that there was a fair chance I wouldn't make it back to Ohio if I didn't get it looked at. I managed to find a garage to patch my differential cover, and made it back to Ohio, but the experience unsettled me. Without my friend, I would likely have been, best case scenario, stranded on a highway roadside with a totaled truck. My lack of knowledge had nearly cost me dearly.
So this weekend, I got another friend, who's been rebuilding cars since he was teenager, to come and look at my truck and walk me through the basics of car maintenance. We drove it and listened to the engine, and discussed various ideas of what might be wrong (the gears were shifting oddly and I was losing power going up hill). We checked fluid levels, and he crawled under and looked at the other leak (water from the AC, he thinks). We changed the sparkplugs, which improved things, suggesting that a cylinder malfunction was the major reason for my engine issues.
I spent the rest of the weekend gardening, planting flowers on our deck for the second year running. There's a clematis and a rose bush out there that I protected through the harsh winter. They've bounced back well. I feel like I've learnt something.
I will never, like my uncle and grandfather, be able to do everything around a house. I will probably never be able to plaster or tile, or take apart and rebuild an engine. But my lack of practical knowledge and skills is not a destiny. It is a choice, and something I can change, until I reach a level of knowledge that removes the anxiety of being at the mercy of things I don't understand and cannot help.
My stitching is terrible though, so I may still have to pay to get my pants hemmed.
I should add that I wasn't raised to be contemptuous of manual work. My mother's father was a master craftsman, specialized in tin roofing, and everyone in her family were the kind of people who could build a house from scratch, or plant a vegetable garden the size of a field. The kind of people who did, in fact, because they could never find a contractor who would meet their standards. (One of my mother's aunts, in her late 80s when I knew her, still hoed her vegetable garden by hand because she felt the hoeing machine her son rented for her left too big clods of dirt in the soil). My mother had learnt all these skills, as well as all the other skills of needlework that women in the family were taught. But, through a combination of moving to the city and lack of aptitude, she never developed them like her siblings did. What she kept, however, was an appreciation of good craftsmanship, which she used when guiding the remodeling of our house in London.
I've often felt, as I've become older and more independent, that my lack of practical skills was a mild hindrance. Abstractly, I worry about having no skills to help in a zombie apocalypse. Concretely, day to day, I feel vulnerable to things going wrong (plumbing leaks, car troubles), and I feel that I pay for tasks I ought not to (trouser alterations). It would be easy to run with the idea that I am "intellectual" and not practically minded. But such dichotomies are dangerous and patronizing. And besides, I have spent the past year developing into a rather good surgeon. Surely that suggests I am more practical, and better with my hands, than I might think.
It was the process of buying a car for the first time about a year ago that really reminded me of my lack of practical DIY skills. For financial reasons, I decided to buy a car from a private seller rather than a dealership, and the cars I was looking at were old. I quickly realized that I felt completely out of my depth as I opened bonnets to stare at engines I knew nothing about, and took cars on test drives without really understanding what I was looking for. In the end, I picked the wrong car of two that I saw, because I couldn't tell the difference between cosmetic rust, and a concerning engine.
Last weekend, I took my truck on my first solo roadtrip from Ohio to Virginia and back. On the last day, I was about to leave my friend's house in southern Maryland when he noticed a leak that I had been ignoring (on the basis it was an old car). He pointed out to me that my rear differential was leaking a lot of fluid, and that there was a fair chance I wouldn't make it back to Ohio if I didn't get it looked at. I managed to find a garage to patch my differential cover, and made it back to Ohio, but the experience unsettled me. Without my friend, I would likely have been, best case scenario, stranded on a highway roadside with a totaled truck. My lack of knowledge had nearly cost me dearly.
So this weekend, I got another friend, who's been rebuilding cars since he was teenager, to come and look at my truck and walk me through the basics of car maintenance. We drove it and listened to the engine, and discussed various ideas of what might be wrong (the gears were shifting oddly and I was losing power going up hill). We checked fluid levels, and he crawled under and looked at the other leak (water from the AC, he thinks). We changed the sparkplugs, which improved things, suggesting that a cylinder malfunction was the major reason for my engine issues.
I spent the rest of the weekend gardening, planting flowers on our deck for the second year running. There's a clematis and a rose bush out there that I protected through the harsh winter. They've bounced back well. I feel like I've learnt something.
I will never, like my uncle and grandfather, be able to do everything around a house. I will probably never be able to plaster or tile, or take apart and rebuild an engine. But my lack of practical knowledge and skills is not a destiny. It is a choice, and something I can change, until I reach a level of knowledge that removes the anxiety of being at the mercy of things I don't understand and cannot help.
My stitching is terrible though, so I may still have to pay to get my pants hemmed.
Tuesday, 19 May 2015
Why I'm excited about the opah
Last week, a new paper in Science (Wegner et al. 2015) announced that they had discovered whole body endothermy (that is, the ability to generate metabolic heat to keep the temperature of the internal organs above ambient temperature) in a pelagic bony fish. This fact is intrinsically cool, but as a mammalian paleontologist who is interested in the evolution of mammalian physiology, I was immediately intrigued and excited to know more.
Everyone knows that mammals and birds are "warm blooded", that is that they maintain a stable body temperature that is above that of the environment. Usually, they are described this way to distinguish them from lizards, snakes, crocodiles, amphibians and fish, collectively referred to as "cold blooded". But the details of heat physiology are much more complex than this simplistic dichotomy. At the most fundamental level, there are two different, and related axes of variation along which animals can be placed to describe their body temperature physiology.
One axis separates animals that maintain a constant body temperature (known as homeotherms) from animals that do not (known as poikilotherms, a personal favorite word of mine). The other axis separates endotherms, that is animals that use the heat generated by internal metabolic processes (such as muscle contraction) to warm their internal organs, versus ectotherms, that use environmental sources (most often the sun, but sometimes other sources such as hot springs) to heat themselves.
Now here's what's really fascinating. If you imagine a plot with these two axis, you will find organisms all over it. You will find ectotherms that are excellent homeotherms, and endotherms that are highly poikilothermic (many tropical marsupials fall in this category). What is more, most animals can occupy, depending on the environment they're in and the specifics of their physiology, multiple positions in this space.
Of particular interest to this debate are the many ocean going, highly active predatory fish that have evolved varying degrees of facultative endothermy. These are animals (such as tuna and sharks), that use a specific arrangement of blood vessels called a counter current exchanger to trap the heat generate by muscle activity in their swimming muscles, thus allowing them to keep those muscles at the best temperature for efficient function in cold water. The limitation of this strategy, however, is that eventually the heart cools down, slowing down its pumping rate and starving the muscles of oxygen.
Which is where the opah comes in. It flips the script on what other facultative endotherms do, and places the counter current exchanger in the gills (I urge to go and look at the paper now; the pictures of those gill counter current exchangers are breathtaking). As the gills are in direct contact with water, they are a major site of heat loss. Mammals and birds have similar problem in the respiratory system, and have independently evolved highly vascularised nasal turbinates which also use vascular counter current exchange to trap heat inside the body cavity during exhalation. By placing the counter current exchangers in its gills, the opah (if physicists will forgive me this inaccurate metaphor) traps the cold outside its body (thus brilliantly illustrating Claude Bernard's definition of homeostasis). Furthermore, evidence suggests that the opah may use its pectoral fin muscles purely to generate heat, rather than to aid in locomotion, thus fulfilling the strictest definition of endothermy (that is, the use of metabolic energy purely for the generation of heat). Finally, the opah has developed significant insulation the form of fat, so as to prevent heat loss through the skin. The upshot of all this is that the opah's internal organs, including its heart, remain considerably warmer than the surrounding water.
So it seems pretty clear the opah is probably a homeothermic endotherm, and probably a pretty good one. It is always exciting to see a completely unexpected organism have converged on an evolutionary solution that we thought only another organism had achieved. But what really got me excited was the discussion of why the opah might have evolved this form of life. Namely, facultative endotherms like tuna must eventually leave cold deep waters (which are rich in fish) for sun-warmed surface waters when their hearts cool down. The opah, through its metabolically expensive endothermy, can remain in those waters permanently. Why is this exciting? Because the exploitation of a cold environment is exactly the scenario that has been advanced for the evolution of endothermy in mammals. Namely, it has been suggested that mammalian endothermy allowed triassic mammals to hunt at night, when other, ectothermic amniotes would be sluggish. In the opah, we have validation of the hypothesis that endothermy can evolve so that a thermally constrained niche can be exploited.
Biology training is becoming increasingly narrow, yet also increasingly broad. We study systems in limited model organisms, and then expand the mechanisms across groups without consideration of the ecological, and evolutionary specificities that have made these organisms what they are. But if our evolutionary scenarios make sense, then we should expect them to be repeated: the biological equivalent of the old maxim that the same causes produce the same effects. In the opah, we find, unexpectedly, confirmation of our hypotheses on the ecological situations that underpin the evolution of endothermy. In the study of the opah's evolution, we may gain insight into the variety of thermoregulatory solutions that accompany such trends. Comparative physiology, broadly studied and understood, is full of unsuspected explanatory power.
Everyone knows that mammals and birds are "warm blooded", that is that they maintain a stable body temperature that is above that of the environment. Usually, they are described this way to distinguish them from lizards, snakes, crocodiles, amphibians and fish, collectively referred to as "cold blooded". But the details of heat physiology are much more complex than this simplistic dichotomy. At the most fundamental level, there are two different, and related axes of variation along which animals can be placed to describe their body temperature physiology.
One axis separates animals that maintain a constant body temperature (known as homeotherms) from animals that do not (known as poikilotherms, a personal favorite word of mine). The other axis separates endotherms, that is animals that use the heat generated by internal metabolic processes (such as muscle contraction) to warm their internal organs, versus ectotherms, that use environmental sources (most often the sun, but sometimes other sources such as hot springs) to heat themselves.
Now here's what's really fascinating. If you imagine a plot with these two axis, you will find organisms all over it. You will find ectotherms that are excellent homeotherms, and endotherms that are highly poikilothermic (many tropical marsupials fall in this category). What is more, most animals can occupy, depending on the environment they're in and the specifics of their physiology, multiple positions in this space.
Of particular interest to this debate are the many ocean going, highly active predatory fish that have evolved varying degrees of facultative endothermy. These are animals (such as tuna and sharks), that use a specific arrangement of blood vessels called a counter current exchanger to trap the heat generate by muscle activity in their swimming muscles, thus allowing them to keep those muscles at the best temperature for efficient function in cold water. The limitation of this strategy, however, is that eventually the heart cools down, slowing down its pumping rate and starving the muscles of oxygen.
Which is where the opah comes in. It flips the script on what other facultative endotherms do, and places the counter current exchanger in the gills (I urge to go and look at the paper now; the pictures of those gill counter current exchangers are breathtaking). As the gills are in direct contact with water, they are a major site of heat loss. Mammals and birds have similar problem in the respiratory system, and have independently evolved highly vascularised nasal turbinates which also use vascular counter current exchange to trap heat inside the body cavity during exhalation. By placing the counter current exchangers in its gills, the opah (if physicists will forgive me this inaccurate metaphor) traps the cold outside its body (thus brilliantly illustrating Claude Bernard's definition of homeostasis). Furthermore, evidence suggests that the opah may use its pectoral fin muscles purely to generate heat, rather than to aid in locomotion, thus fulfilling the strictest definition of endothermy (that is, the use of metabolic energy purely for the generation of heat). Finally, the opah has developed significant insulation the form of fat, so as to prevent heat loss through the skin. The upshot of all this is that the opah's internal organs, including its heart, remain considerably warmer than the surrounding water.
So it seems pretty clear the opah is probably a homeothermic endotherm, and probably a pretty good one. It is always exciting to see a completely unexpected organism have converged on an evolutionary solution that we thought only another organism had achieved. But what really got me excited was the discussion of why the opah might have evolved this form of life. Namely, facultative endotherms like tuna must eventually leave cold deep waters (which are rich in fish) for sun-warmed surface waters when their hearts cool down. The opah, through its metabolically expensive endothermy, can remain in those waters permanently. Why is this exciting? Because the exploitation of a cold environment is exactly the scenario that has been advanced for the evolution of endothermy in mammals. Namely, it has been suggested that mammalian endothermy allowed triassic mammals to hunt at night, when other, ectothermic amniotes would be sluggish. In the opah, we have validation of the hypothesis that endothermy can evolve so that a thermally constrained niche can be exploited.
Biology training is becoming increasingly narrow, yet also increasingly broad. We study systems in limited model organisms, and then expand the mechanisms across groups without consideration of the ecological, and evolutionary specificities that have made these organisms what they are. But if our evolutionary scenarios make sense, then we should expect them to be repeated: the biological equivalent of the old maxim that the same causes produce the same effects. In the opah, we find, unexpectedly, confirmation of our hypotheses on the ecological situations that underpin the evolution of endothermy. In the study of the opah's evolution, we may gain insight into the variety of thermoregulatory solutions that accompany such trends. Comparative physiology, broadly studied and understood, is full of unsuspected explanatory power.
Monday, 4 May 2015
Lines: on the experience of Baltimore
This is not a post about current events. I am not the voice you should be listening to for that. There are many excellent authors and social media activists of color (I suggest Sean Reed, Shaun King and DNLee as excellent places to start) who can provide a better view on the struggles that urban people of color face in the US and in academia.
This is a post about experiencing Baltimore the way most white academics will experience it: as an outsider dropping into one of the city's elite universities. It is a post about understanding how the social and geographic spaces of the city are structured to make you see only a tiny part of it, and to make you believe that part is most of the city. It is a post about how the stories about the rest of the city are controlled. It is a post about complicity in a system that wants to maintain the narrative that the salvation of Baltimore has to come in spite of the people that live there, not because of them. It is a post about the difficult feelings that those of us who came to love this most unloved of cities carry with us about that place, and about our place in it.
It is a post that does not always present me in the best light. It is a post that does not present Baltimore's elite universities in the best light. But if this week's events have shown anything, it is that we cannot, should not, accept narratives about Baltimore's institutions that paint them in a good light. Because what is left out of those paintings is odious.
I moved to Baltimore to do my PhD at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 2007. Before I have even left the UK, I was being warned about the city. "Have you seen the Wire?" was to become a refrain I would hear continuously over the next five years. When flat hunting, (as I wouldn't have a car), I limited my search to place within walking distance of the Hopkins shuttle route. But even then, there were caveats: "not North Avenue", "Don't live near the medical school". I was being taught the rudiments of the geography of Hopkins Baltimore.
When I got to my little apartment in Mount Vernon, next to a hip sushi restaurant and on the same block as the city's two main gay bars, I found I could see the medical school from my apartment. The first day I headed to work, I couldn't figure out where to get the shuttle. So I walked to campus. Down monument street. Under I 83 (through a fenced in parking lot, as there was no path). Past what I would later learn was the infamous Downtown Baltimore Supermax. Past abandoned buildings, school playing fields, housing projects, emergency clinics and bailbondsmen. Towards Hopkins medical school. I was uncomfortable. My years of living in London told me this wasn't an entirely safe neighborhood. And, to be honest, I had never encountered that level of dilapidation and poverty in London. But I made it to work. I found my department. And I was instantly told not to tell anyone I had walked to work, or they would freak out. And certainly never to do it again. You'd have thought I had walked through a mine field.
As the semester wore on, I began to notice other lines. Such as that no one at Hopkins knew how the city buses worked. We all used the Hopkins shuttles and went only were they went. Or we drove. I began to notice that the people behind the reception desks, or the people cleaning the office, pushing the carts, doing security, were black. And the people in the offices white. I began to wonder about riding a shuttle emblazoned with the Hopkins logo through deprived East Baltimore towards the Campus. I noticed that the words Kennedy and Krieger were lit up at night on the tallest building on campus, in the middle of the poorly lit streets of east Baltimore. I noticed, when I finally took a city bus to the party district of Fells Point, that everyone on the streets was black until you got to three blocks from the waterfront. Then suddenly, lily white.
The narratives that students and faculty told about Baltimore were stories of fear. There is almost a hazing of new arrivals. You're told where not to walk, where not to go. You're told where is not safe after dark. You're told of all the muggings and the murders (even if, when you finally look up the statistics, you realise that affluent whites are not at all the victims of Baltimore's crime problem). And it seeps into your skin.
When my mother came to visit, I got her a map. I drew lines on it, delineating a small area from Mount Vernon to the inner harbor. "Don't go north of here (north avenue), South of here (Federal hill), West of here (Lexington market), East of here (I 83)". I had learnt the geography of Baltimore quite well. Better, in fact, than I knew
A few months after I arrived, I missed the bus again. I tried once more to walk to work. Nothing had happened to me in all my time in the city. But as I reached I 83, my anxiety reached epic levels. I began to have difficulty putting one foot in front of the other. Every inch of my being screamed for me to turn back, and head to the safety of the shuttle. I did.
That moment was a turning point. I realized that if I was going to live in the city, I had to fight the narrative I was being given. I moved closer to campus, and got to know the nice bits of East Baltimore better. But there were still lines. I never went North of Campus. I never went West of MLK.
A few years into my graduate program, I stood on the roof of one of the Hopkins parking lots and looked north. When I had gotten to Baltimore, the abandoned housing had reached up to that building. Now there were two blocks of bare ground in every direction. New lines being drawn in the cities divided geography.
I grew to love Baltimore. I met my husband and some of my best friends there. But in five years living in that city, three of which were within a bock of the Caroline Street projects, and two local schools, I never made friends with any of the city's African American residents. The bars and restaurants and cultural institutions that I love so much catered to that semi transient, mostly white, population that moved there for school or work, and left when they had kids.
And here's the thing: the city that people like us lived in is nothing like the city that most of Baltimore's population live in. Yet ours is deemed "economically important". And I know full well that that economic importance is used to justify the police activities in Baltimore. After all, how will Hopkins and UMD attract top talent to a city without a couple of craft cocktail bars?
And we can't accept that. My lifestyle in Baltimore ought not, must not be used to justify the violent oppression of those whom the city has ignored and mistreated. Fixing Baltimore must primarily fix the city for the majority of its population. Those of us who've lived there must recognise that, and put our experience of Baltimore aside. When we tell people about how hip and cool Fells Point and Canton are, when we talk about all the festivals, when we discuss the city as though the tiny portion of it we know is all the city, we are complicit in a narrative that wants to erase the reality of the city for most of its population. And that erasure, as we have seen, is more than rhetorical.
As the semester wore on, I began to notice other lines. Such as that no one at Hopkins knew how the city buses worked. We all used the Hopkins shuttles and went only were they went. Or we drove. I began to notice that the people behind the reception desks, or the people cleaning the office, pushing the carts, doing security, were black. And the people in the offices white. I began to wonder about riding a shuttle emblazoned with the Hopkins logo through deprived East Baltimore towards the Campus. I noticed that the words Kennedy and Krieger were lit up at night on the tallest building on campus, in the middle of the poorly lit streets of east Baltimore. I noticed, when I finally took a city bus to the party district of Fells Point, that everyone on the streets was black until you got to three blocks from the waterfront. Then suddenly, lily white.
The narratives that students and faculty told about Baltimore were stories of fear. There is almost a hazing of new arrivals. You're told where not to walk, where not to go. You're told where is not safe after dark. You're told of all the muggings and the murders (even if, when you finally look up the statistics, you realise that affluent whites are not at all the victims of Baltimore's crime problem). And it seeps into your skin.
When my mother came to visit, I got her a map. I drew lines on it, delineating a small area from Mount Vernon to the inner harbor. "Don't go north of here (north avenue), South of here (Federal hill), West of here (Lexington market), East of here (I 83)". I had learnt the geography of Baltimore quite well. Better, in fact, than I knew
A few months after I arrived, I missed the bus again. I tried once more to walk to work. Nothing had happened to me in all my time in the city. But as I reached I 83, my anxiety reached epic levels. I began to have difficulty putting one foot in front of the other. Every inch of my being screamed for me to turn back, and head to the safety of the shuttle. I did.
That moment was a turning point. I realized that if I was going to live in the city, I had to fight the narrative I was being given. I moved closer to campus, and got to know the nice bits of East Baltimore better. But there were still lines. I never went North of Campus. I never went West of MLK.
A few years into my graduate program, I stood on the roof of one of the Hopkins parking lots and looked north. When I had gotten to Baltimore, the abandoned housing had reached up to that building. Now there were two blocks of bare ground in every direction. New lines being drawn in the cities divided geography.
I grew to love Baltimore. I met my husband and some of my best friends there. But in five years living in that city, three of which were within a bock of the Caroline Street projects, and two local schools, I never made friends with any of the city's African American residents. The bars and restaurants and cultural institutions that I love so much catered to that semi transient, mostly white, population that moved there for school or work, and left when they had kids.
And here's the thing: the city that people like us lived in is nothing like the city that most of Baltimore's population live in. Yet ours is deemed "economically important". And I know full well that that economic importance is used to justify the police activities in Baltimore. After all, how will Hopkins and UMD attract top talent to a city without a couple of craft cocktail bars?
And we can't accept that. My lifestyle in Baltimore ought not, must not be used to justify the violent oppression of those whom the city has ignored and mistreated. Fixing Baltimore must primarily fix the city for the majority of its population. Those of us who've lived there must recognise that, and put our experience of Baltimore aside. When we tell people about how hip and cool Fells Point and Canton are, when we talk about all the festivals, when we discuss the city as though the tiny portion of it we know is all the city, we are complicit in a narrative that wants to erase the reality of the city for most of its population. And that erasure, as we have seen, is more than rhetorical.
Thursday, 16 April 2015
When having enough is not enough: the financial challenges of being a postdoc
My job just before I started my PhD paid 19,500 British Pounds per annum (that's about 39,000 USD in 2007 dollars, which inflation adjusted would be about 44,150 USD in 2015 dollars). My graduate student stipend was 27,000 USD a year. And yet, I probably lived more comfortably, and certainly more independently in graduate school than I did back in London on that nominally higher salary (cost of living in the most expensive city on earth and all). My current salary still has not quite reached the inflation adjusted dollar value of my previous salary. Yet, day to day, in a two income household with no dependents in an inexpensive part of the country, I live well enough. Certainly it would be disingenuous of me to claim poverty when you look at some of the things I have spent money on in the past few months. As I write this, I should also add that I am pretty much in the Rolls-Royce of postdoc scenarios financially. I'm funded out of my PI's R01, with full staff benefits. Also, as result of having done my undergrad in Europe, I have almost no student debt. And, as a result of my mother's generosity, I have no structural debt at all and never have had. It would not take much (a kid, a more expensive part of the country, a large amount of debt to service) to shift me into a position that would be financially much harder.
Which leads me to my main point: I could probably live quite comfortably for a long time on this salary. I could build up a retirement, maybe make some investments. All good. But that is not a scenario I can contemplate. Because my employment is of fixed term, and I am always facing the knowledge of the imminent cessation of income. It is this combination of limited, low-ish income and limited term contracts that is the particular financial difficulty of the pre-faculty (and let's be honest, pre tenure) phase of academia.
I saved throughout graduate school, a fair amount. But those savings were devoured by the process of having to finish my dissertation after my funding ran out. Even had I secured a job, in all likelihood moving costs alone would have demolished my savings. And postdocs employers do not usually pay moving fees (for my current postdoc I was lucky: my PI paid for my flight from the UK, because she is wonderful). Further, had it not been for the opportunity to live back at home (which comes with its own personal costs), I'm not sure what I would have done financially. Certainly, I would have given up looking for a postdoc sooner than I did.
The problem is that grad school stipends and postdoc salaries are, quite simply, too low to put together a nest egg sufficiently large to insure against the periodic cessation of income, or to weather any prolonged period of unemployment. Thus, for most of us, when our graduate stipends or our postdoc grant salaries are coming to an end, there is significant pressure to simply secure a source of income as soon as possible.
Which brings me to my next point: there's a lot of discussion about people taking postdocs who aren't committed to science. Or talking about how you should only do a postdoc if you really want to. It's bollocks. The main reason, when you reach the end of your phd and are staring at your paltry savings to have a postdoc lined up is so you can get paid. It pays more than grad school, and it buys you time.
Yes, career transitioning would be better for many. But career transition is a hedge, especially in this job market. It requires that you invest either time, or money, both things that are in short supply at the end of your PhD.
So if you need a postdoc to keep paying the bills, take it, it's a honorable thing to do for you. And try to build a nest egg big enough so that you can get out of there if that's what you decide to do.
As a postcript: this problem, the problem of the financial costs of fixed term entry level jobs, is one that is well documented in one of my home countries, France, where all entry level jobs are fixed term CDD and people coast from CDD to CDD until they land a CDI. This has huge financial consequences on young people, from the impossibility of getting a mortgage, to financial dependency on parents as garantors of all loans, to requirements to move around France, to inability to build up savings or retirement benefits. The precarity of fixed term employment is real.
Which leads me to my main point: I could probably live quite comfortably for a long time on this salary. I could build up a retirement, maybe make some investments. All good. But that is not a scenario I can contemplate. Because my employment is of fixed term, and I am always facing the knowledge of the imminent cessation of income. It is this combination of limited, low-ish income and limited term contracts that is the particular financial difficulty of the pre-faculty (and let's be honest, pre tenure) phase of academia.
I saved throughout graduate school, a fair amount. But those savings were devoured by the process of having to finish my dissertation after my funding ran out. Even had I secured a job, in all likelihood moving costs alone would have demolished my savings. And postdocs employers do not usually pay moving fees (for my current postdoc I was lucky: my PI paid for my flight from the UK, because she is wonderful). Further, had it not been for the opportunity to live back at home (which comes with its own personal costs), I'm not sure what I would have done financially. Certainly, I would have given up looking for a postdoc sooner than I did.
The problem is that grad school stipends and postdoc salaries are, quite simply, too low to put together a nest egg sufficiently large to insure against the periodic cessation of income, or to weather any prolonged period of unemployment. Thus, for most of us, when our graduate stipends or our postdoc grant salaries are coming to an end, there is significant pressure to simply secure a source of income as soon as possible.
Which brings me to my next point: there's a lot of discussion about people taking postdocs who aren't committed to science. Or talking about how you should only do a postdoc if you really want to. It's bollocks. The main reason, when you reach the end of your phd and are staring at your paltry savings to have a postdoc lined up is so you can get paid. It pays more than grad school, and it buys you time.
Yes, career transitioning would be better for many. But career transition is a hedge, especially in this job market. It requires that you invest either time, or money, both things that are in short supply at the end of your PhD.
So if you need a postdoc to keep paying the bills, take it, it's a honorable thing to do for you. And try to build a nest egg big enough so that you can get out of there if that's what you decide to do.
As a postcript: this problem, the problem of the financial costs of fixed term entry level jobs, is one that is well documented in one of my home countries, France, where all entry level jobs are fixed term CDD and people coast from CDD to CDD until they land a CDI. This has huge financial consequences on young people, from the impossibility of getting a mortgage, to financial dependency on parents as garantors of all loans, to requirements to move around France, to inability to build up savings or retirement benefits. The precarity of fixed term employment is real.
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